Like McCain himself once said: I’m not an economist. I understand the concepts, but it’s kind of like learning a foreign language to me. I can get a handle on the syntax, figure out how to translate things, but by and large it’s just difficult to comprehend. However, I’m capable of having coherent thoughts.
That seems to separate me from John McCain, who in his yammerings about how awesome he’d be for the economy, starts saying things that either don’t make sense or are just plain’ old wrong.
Asked about the fact that cutting taxes adds to the deficit, McCain said, “You can’t seem to get over the fact that it’s spending that is out of control, and you restrain spending.
“And also, you can’t get over the fact that historically, when you raise people’s taxes, guess what, revenue goes down.”
Exhibit A. See, what eludes Senator McCain is that you can only restrain spending so much, particularly when there’s that war to fund. You know, the one that’s basically a spending black hole; the one that McCain thinks can have a hundred year occupation. Unfortunately, we haven’t had much by way of restrained spending or sufficient income.
It’s a good idea to restrain spending in 2008, given our massive deficit, but to think that that, combined with further slashing taxes on the wealthy, will end the deficit is just insane unless he intends on dismantling half of federal spending. If you’re earning less money than you spend, it’s probably a bad idea to decide to cut down on your work hours unless you think you can trim THAT much spending.
The second part is also pretty dumb. Actually it’s more than dumb, it’s just misleading. “Revenue” is kind of a meaningless term since by any real measure, the “tax and spend” liberals have been great for the economy. Reagan, Bush, and Bush Jr were all disasters. Ike and Eisenhower weren’t too bad, but in terms of effect on the economy Democrats have always been a godsend.
Zfacts is sort of like the statistical OnTheIssues. Their page on the economy teaches us a lot of fun things:
- Reagan and the Bushes are the only presidents to add to the national debt.
- Reagan was great for payroll jobs, as was Clinton, both Bushes? Terrible.
- Poverty had a similar pattern, and Carter was pretty bad as well (surprised me!)
Among others. The end result is that anyone saying that historically the conservative agenda for the economy means prosperity is just plain wrong. And electing a guy who seems to believe otherwise is a bit of a bad idea.
The shit has juuuust about officially hit the fan on this one. That’s not even an exaggeration of the quote, the damn guy said explicitly that no deal will be reached unless it has specific dates of withdrawal. 
