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.)

Humdingers are easy when you just lie a lot

I imagine most people will say that Sarah Palin's speech went well, but it contained at least one cynically bald-faced lie.

Palin says:

I told the Congress "thanks, but no thanks," for that Bridge to Nowhere.

If our state wanted a bridge, we'd build it ourselves.

It turns out that Palin actually supported the construction of the $223 million bridge that would serve a population of a few dozen residents. According to Reuters, her support continued until the outrageous earmark became a national punchline, at which point she dropped her support for the project--but not really:

National fury over the bridge caused Congress to remove the earmark designation, but Alaska was still granted an equivalent amount of transportation money to be used at its own discretion.

Last year, Palin announced she was stopping state work on the controversial project, earning her admirers from earmark critics and budget hawks from around the nation. The move also thrust her into the spotlight as a reform-minded newcomer.

The state, however, never gave back any of the money that was originally earmarked for the Gravina Island bridge, said [Ketchikan Mayor Bob] Weinstein and [Mike] Elerding [a Republican who was Palin's campaign coordinator in the southeast Alaska city].

In fact, the Palin administration has spent "tens of millions of dollars" in federal funds to start building a road on Gravina Island that is supposed to link up to the yet-to-be-built bridge, Weinstein said.

Ah yes--she was so against the bridge in principle that she kept all of the earmarked money and began work on a road that would connect...to the bridge. Alaska state politics is awesome!

It's facsinating to me that Palin included her "opposition" to the Bridge to Nowhere right there in the middle of her big speech--an appluase line, no less--as if it weren't possible to expose the deception in literally one minute using an invention called "the Google". I wonder if whoever wrote her speech is hip to the internet thing. With the McCain campaign, I guess you never know.

Eschewing pork versus merely chewing it

Even Robert Novak seems to acknowledge that the GOP can no longer claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility, suggesting that the Democrats may well be the ones to clamp down on earmark spending:

The GOP may be falling behind the Democrats, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi moving toward a moratorium. In the Senate, courageous freshman Democrat Claire McCaskill of Missouri supports the DeMint amendment. She could be joined by her choice for president, Barack Obama. These developments encouraged Flake to say: "If Democrats actually move ahead with an earmark moratorium before Republicans, the Democrats will get the credit for eliminating earmarks, and, frankly, they'll deserve it."