John McCain has an economic plan for this country that could only be thought up in the mind of a Republican: somehow balance the budget while cutting taxes and continuing the war. That McCain’s plan should strike any reasonable person as impossible is irrelevant: all McCain or any other Republican needs to do to brush those fears away is claim that cutting taxes generates money for the government in massive, fantastical ways.
But what’s particularly dangerous about McCain is that he doesn’t seem to understand his own voodoo economics.
When Senator John McCain was asked here this afternoon how he plans to balance the budget, he said that he hoped to do so by stimulating economic growth – and approvingly cited the example of President Ronald Reagan.
There was one thing he did not mention during his response: the deficit nearly tripled during the Reagan presidency, partly due to tax cuts and increases in military spending.
If you’re going to pretend like supply-side economics work miracles, don’t use the perfect counterexample as your example! You can read the full context of the episode, which happened at investment firm Bridgewater Associates, at the New York Times.
