After months and months of waiting, McCain has finally released a detailed economic plan. Unfortunately, it’s about as disappointing as Spiderman 3. The AngryBear’s post on this topic was really just a recommendation for the EconomistMom’s post. In fact, EconomistMom does such a good job explaining the topic, that we were hard pressed to find original insight.

With that in mind, the first thing we would like to point out is McCain’s diehard support of the gas tax holiday. Of course EconomistMom didn’t miss this:

First, there’s the gas tax holiday, proudly listed on page 2 with the validation of the press pointing out that they would have “immediate effect” and would “save motorists…taxes.” (This reminds me of how the Bush Administration has repeatedly bragged about their tax cuts in the Economic Report of the President in terms of how much they have cost the Treasury, rather than what positive economic effects they’ve produced.)

Next there’s his proposal to repeal the tax on imported sugar cane. Now, this may not be the worst idea ever, but in a proposal that’s supposed to “reduce dependence on foreign oil” it seems contradictory to introduce a policy that would increase dependence on a different foreign fuel.

But right after this we get a policy that we have been dying to see since day one: rolling back corn ethanol mandates. This post isn’t really about ethanol, so we’ll point you to Blatant Reality for that. This post on Blatant Reality has links to three other good posts about the problems with ethanol.

The next section addresses balancing the budget. Again, EconomistMom’s post has already become a scripture of sorts on the flaws of this section, so we aren’t going to try and improve on perfection.

What EconomistMom doesn’t really address in depth is the energy section, or as McCain calls it the Lexington Project. First off he supports domestic drilling. This is really neither a good nor a bad idea. On one hand it will propagate oil use and possibly hamper alternative energy development, but on the other it will likely create jobs and revenue in the US.

Immediately after that McCain uses oil speculators as a scapegoat for the current price of energy. We’ll leave it to Greg Mankiw to defend the scapegoat here.

McCain has his second good idea here when he mentions cellulosic ethanol holding great promise. We were incredibly relieved to see McCain realizing the problems with corn ethanol and moving on to more plausible forms of energy.

For the healthcare section we again turn to Mom:

There’s the health care reform section on pages 11-12 that points out that “[w]ithin a decade, health spending will comprise twenty percent of our economy”–and yet offers no specifics and lists only vague options that sound largely focused on “waste, fraud, and abuse”-type savings, particularly in talking about the big programs of Medicare and Medicaid.

Finally is McCain’s meager (not even half a page) trade section. It basically is a simple reenforcement of McCain’s belief in free trade and globalization, which in our opinion is not a bad thing. A comment on Mom’s post also points out that this is the only section that mentions education, and even then only very vaguely and briefly. This seems strange seeing as education is one of the most effective ways to increase job opportunities for Americans.

Overall, McCain’s plan is vague and inconclusive. It’s riddled with logical fallacies and straight up lies. However, his ethanol policies have finally stopped pandering to corn farmers and are starting to make sense. Hopefully McCain will be able to clean up this plan before the election, because frankly it’s a mess.

~Invest this!