McCain's Magic Carpet Ride to 2013

I like to dream yes, yes, right between my sound machine
On a cloud of sound I drift in the night
Any place it goes is right
Goes far, flies near, to the stars away from here

Well, you don't know what we can find
Why don't you come with me little girl
On a magic carpet ride
You don't know what we can see
Why don't you tell your dreams to me

McCain today gave his dream world speech, framed as what he "would hope to have achieved" by 2013. The vision is so absurdly rosy that a reporter told him to his face that it sounded like a "magic carpet ride."

The coverage I've seen thus far has focused on his preposterously sunny vision for Iraq, with American troops coming from an Iraq War that has been "won." But his imagined economic scenario is equally deluded and at points directly at odds with his own program.

For example, in McCain's Magic Carpet Ride 2013, "More small businesses offer their employees health plans." As I explained in an earlier post, however, the entire point of McCain's health proposals is to kill the existing system of employer-provided health care by making employees pay taxes on their health benefits. So McCain's fantasy is not just improbable--it's exactly contrary to what his proposal is designed to achieve.

McCain also fails to mention that the Tax Policy Center's analysis, reviewed by Jonah in a previous post, shows that enacting McCain's tax proposal would slash government revenues by $578 billion in 2013. How huge a figure is this? It's more than the entire domestic discretionary budget of $571 billion projected by the Congressional Budget Office for 2013!

Where would all that money to pay for our Magic Carpet Ride come from? Either from a radical downsizing of Medicare, Social Security, and the military (not, unsurprisingly, part of McCain's fantasy), or an explosion in government debt. If a President McCain tries to take on us on that Magic Carpet Ride, we better enjoy the trip, because our grandkids will be paying for it.