The NYT noted today, “Not since at least 1980, when the United States was reeling from the oil shocks, inflation and slow growth of the previous decade, has the economy been in worse shape heading into the heart of a presidential campaign. The crush of bad economic news — six consecutive months of job losses, rising rates of home foreclosures, gasoline prices seemingly headed toward $5 a gallon — is increasingly setting the contours of the race between Senators Barack Obama and John McCain.”
That sounds about right. It’s against this backdrop that both candidates are focusing almost exclusively this week on their economic agendas. For McCain, that’s daunting — he’s not only embraced the Bush economic model as his own, he’s also repeatedly acknowledged that he doesn’t know or understand economics “as well as I should.”
In a high-profile speech in Denver today, McCain will help prove just how confused he really is, and then take his incoherent show on the road, hitting Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) plans to promise on Monday that he will balance the federal budget by the end of his first term by curbing wasteful spending and overhauling entitlement programs, including Social Security, his advisers told Politico.
The vow to take on Social Security puts McCain in a political danger zone that thwarted President Bush after he named it the top domestic priority of his second term.
McCain is making the pledge at the beginning of a week when both presidential candidates plan to devote their events to the economy, the top issue in poll after poll as voters struggle to keep their jobs and fill their gas tanks.
“In the long-term, the only way to keep the budget balanced is successful reform of the large spending pressures in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” the McCain campaign says in a policy paper to be released Monday.
“The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.”
I sometimes get the sense someone dared John McCain to run for president while spouting nothing but nonsense, just to see what he could get away with. Today is just such an occasion.
First, it’s worth noting from the outset that McCain’s new vow to balance the budget — in other words, eliminate a $400 billion deficit in four years while cutting taxes — is itself a reversal. McCain initially promised to balance the budget by 2013, then he decided he didn’t like that promise anymore and withdrew it. Now, he’s changed his mind again, and brought the promise back.
Second, committing the “savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan” to deficit reduction is a new one. Before, McCain said he could eliminate a $400 billion deficit with $18 billion in earmark reductions. Applying some kind of “peace dividend” is yet another way to justify the unjustifiable.
This isn’t complicated. McCain can’t claim “savings from victory” in Iraq if he plans to keep U.S. forces in the country for another 100 years. He also can’t claim “savings from victory” in these conflicts when we haven’t actually won the wars (unless McCain is now prepared to set a deadline, which he’s said he’d never do). He also can’t claim “savings from victory” in Afghanistan when conditions on the ground there are getting worse, not better. He also can’t claim “savings from victory” when he wants to spend more money to expand the size of the military.
It’s hard to imagine even gullible conservatives falling for such a transparently ridiculous pitch. McCain thinks he can make permanent Bush’s tax cuts, and add some new tax cuts of his own, and eliminate the AMT, and keep the wars going indefinitely, and increase the Pentagon’s budget, and eliminate a $410 billion deficit in four years. It’s pure fantasy.
Meet John McCain, the candidate who bases his policies on magic ponies, and his rhetoric on the hopes that voters are idiots.