crazy writes:

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But McCain does not know ANYTHING about the economy, it was sailing along wonderfully according to him. So now, rather than actually look at what works and what doesn't, he wants to slash across the board, without any idea of the actual results. This is governing from belief, not knowledge. He's essentially said this. His "plan" is to get the smartest people in the world, sit them all down, and have them come up with a plan. He said that during the 3rd debate.

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It was worse than that. McCain's idea of getting people to get together to solve problems is to have them talk and then for him to do what he wants anyway. (That's probably how he picked Sarah.) Remember regarding Social Security, "nothing's off the table" but "Senator Obama will raise your taxes but I won't":

http://crooksandliars.com/2008/07/29/john-mccain-flip-flops-on-taxes-on-social-security/

McCain's campaign has been incoherent. It's great news that it looks like there's no possible way that he can win on Tuesday.

On the unfunded federal liabilities, as one might expect, there's disagreement on how large it actually might be and how it should be calculated. To keep things in perspective, though, the US government debt as a fraction of GDP was 98% in 1946 and 28.4% in 2002. Even if one includes SS and Medicare's current deficits in the numbers, it's still a smaller fraction of GDP than in 1946 (at least as I read http://www.ncpa.org/pub/st/st263/st263c.html )

Big numbers are scary. But big numbers spread over 75 or 100 years aren't quite so scary. People need to be able to see the numbers in context to understand what they mean...

Cheers,
Scott.