Victory Bonds

John McCain let slip his economic plan today, and the big surprise is that oil companies and obscenely rich people are the winners. No, wait, that's not surprising at all, but the natural outcome of reductions in both the corporate tax rate and extensions of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. The losers? Anyone who needs Social Security to survive, because their benefits will be cut and their program privatized.

But the high comedy comes on page 4 of the plan, when he explains how he'd balance the budget, despiite massive tax cuts, in his first term:

• 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.

Victory is the answer! Never mind that McCain wants us to stay in Iraq for a hundred years, or anything. When you win a war, you get the $644 billion dollar prize behind door #2!

This is just a stupid document. McCain constantly talks about reducing spending but won't touch the military budget (actually, he'd increase it). Yet somehow thinks that "winning the wars" in Iraqi and Afghanistan, which have shown to cost increasing amounts of money every year, will save money. He wants to eliminate "wasteful spending" but every time you specify a piece of spending which anyone finds important he exempts it. And really the only spending that gets set for reductions is entitlement spending, which does horrible things like keep the poor out of poverty and allow the elderly to receive medical care. His health care plan is nonexistent, his energy plan consists of drilling for minute amounts of oil and building ridiculously costly nuclear power plants without a plan to store the radioactive waste, and his plan for the middle class and small businesses includes unrelated items like eliminating the estate tax. This is a conservative fantasy document.

This is going to be a brutal week for St. Maverick, especially considering he doesn't really know anything about this stuff.

UPDATE: What Atrios said.

McCain's joke budget is horseshit, but as we know Republicans cut taxes and cut spending and balance the budget, just like the most popular preznit EVAH Ronald Reagan did, even when they, you know, don't, and so their budgets don't actually have to make sense. Tax cuts are free and wars are free. Only Democrats need to "pay for" any of their proposals, it's just understood that Republicans are "fiscal conservatives."