McCain's HO scale solutions

McCain's big emphasis on energy policy has been opening up more coastlines for domestic offshore drilling; his big emphasis on taxes/fiscal policy is to eliminate earmark spending. Here is, respectively, the amount of extra oil that will be produced from drilling, and the proportion of federal spending that is allocated as earmarks:


The bottom line is that domestic drilling will not affect oil prices, and that reducing earmarks--even if you could eliminate all of them without reinserting them somewhere else into the budget--will have no significant impact on spending.

These components of McCain's solutions aren't serious, because they cannot plausibly help to solve anything. Personally, on energy policy I'd like to see a tax on carbon and massive investment in alternative energy and public transit, and on fiscal policy I'd like to see--gasp!--higher taxes. Obama's proposals are signifcantly to the center of those--but at least they deal seriously with the problems we face in reality, and have more than a snowball's chance in hell of getting through Congress.

A McCain presidency will mean a lot of good--or at least, semi-decent--Democratic legislation getting vetoed or amended beyond recognition. If we want to make serious progress in the next four years on energy and fiscal responsibility, we will need Democrats in control of the Congress and the White House.

(Oil chart via Ezra Klein; earmarks chart via Sullivan.)