John McCain has released his economic plan. Among other things, he promises to balance the budget by winning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and using the savings to pay down the deficit. No doubt the media will have tremendous difficulty seeing this fantasy for what it is. According to the McCain campaign:
“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.”
As a diarist at Kos points out, this statement is even stupider than it appears at first blush. She notes: “just because I stop charging on my credit card doesn’t mean I’m suddenly making income to pay off the debt I’ve run up, does it?”. Indeed it doesn’t.
If Obama said something one tenth this stupid we’d never hear the end of it. Here’s a non-risky prediction. It will never occur to the press to point out how ridiculous this is. As Paul Krugman has pointed out a number of times, during the 2000 campaign George Bush made demonstrably false statements about his economic plans, but the press couldn’t be bothered to check out the facts. Instead they pilloried Al Gore as a liar. Were that election rerun today, after everyone else recognizes Bush for the liar he is, they would do the same thing. This year we will have more of that type of coverage, made even more frustrating as we hear the term “straight talker” liberally utilized in describing McCain.
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