Frankly, I don’t know whether or not even the average Democratic politician is stupid enough to buy into their party’s positions on various economic issues this year. Democrat economics have become a tangled mess of old fashioned demagoguery about the wealthy (being spit out by the wealthiest Presidential ticket in history), a bunch of wild socialistic schemes, and protectionist nonsense. If President Clinton is to be given any credit for the growth of the economy under his watch it has to be because, after a disastrous start (the tax hikes and Hillarycare), he had the good sense to leave well enough alone and not attempt the sort of grand and bizarre schemes now being advanced by the Democratic Party.

Democrats are up in arms about the deficit. Suddenly, after spending decades defending them against evil Republicans who wanted to balance the budget by stealing busfare from orphans and war widows, the Democratic Party has decided to make the “cutting the deficit” a top priority. The only problem is that they have no idea how they’re going to do it.

The “detailed” Kerry-Edwards plan for putting eliminating the deficit (or, rather, cutting it in half) contains the following proposals side by side: cutting the deficit in half, making health care “affordable and accessible” for all Americans, and “universally accessible college.” He also promises not to raise taxes on 98% of Americans (which is a nicer way of saying that he promises to raise taxes on 2% of Americans though, if he’s arrived at that number the same way he’s arrived at other numbers…). To put it mildly, even if Jesus Christ himself returned to the Earth and suspended all of the basic laws of economics, all of those things are not going to happen.

Think about it this way (and this is a very basic, back-of-the-envelope calculation). The deficit is roughly $422 billion a year at the present time. So, in order to close it, you’d need to raise that much in additional revenue. Now, the total cost of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts for the top 5% of taxpayers (I know that John Kerry says 2%, but you know how these things are) is about $131 billion. Even assuming that, if you raised taxes on the top 5% of income earners, you’d get all of the money that you’re expecting, that still means you need to find another $291 billion somewhere. Candidate Kerry’s own estimate is that he’ll save $30 billion a year from reductions in “corporate welfare.” So, in other words, even before he’s started spending again, he’s got a deficit of at least $261 billion.

Now, according to one estimate, John Kerry promises at least $1.7 trillion in additional Federal spending over the next ten years. So, now we’re up to $431 billion: higher than we began with. Even if you accept that Senator Kerry will allow for some reduction in spending on operations in Iraq you’re still going to have a massive deficit (if you eliminated all spending on the War, period, you’d still end up with a deficit north of $300 billion, and that’s only until the terrorists blow up New York City). And all of this, of course, is premised upon raising taxes upon the top 5% of American taxpayers (when Kerry’s promised to raise them only upon the top 2%) and upon the idea that he can cut $30 billion a year in corporate welfare and that, if you raise taxes upon the top 2%, they’ll pay exactly the amount budgeted for and not find creative ways to avoid paying them (as the Senator’s own wife has and will).

In short, the Kerry economic plan is a lot of nonsense and anyone person with a brain who has examined the figures must know that. You can’t spend $1.7 trillion in a decade and cut the deficit in half anymore than someone can eat three large pizzas a day and lose fifty pounds.

The thing that makes me angry is that the Democrats (or, at least, Democratic politicians) all fully understand this. All except for a tiny minority of hard-core socialists accept that plans that violate basic laws of economics cannot be put into action. They know this. Yet they propose such plans anyways. Why? Because they think that the people are stupid enough to buy into them.

This also fully applies to the entire absurd debate over “outsourcing.” The Democrats know that they can’t bring back the jobs that have gone overseas and most of them understand that it would be futile to try. Remember this: a century ago the overwhelming majority of people in the world worked in agriculture: this is no longer the case. What sort of world would we have if the small-minded people who opposed the industrial revolution had triumphed?

For every American job sent overseas there’s a job sent into the United States by some foreign nation. In 2001, there were some 6.4 million Americans employed by subsidiaries of foreign companies. In South Carolina, where the Democrats are rally laying on the protectionism via Senate candidate Inez Tenenbaum, BMW maintains a factory that employs some 4300 people. In the state of Ohio, often cited has hardest hit by the “outsourcing” devil, the Japanese automaker Honda employs more than 16,000 people.

What do you think would start happening to these jobs if a Kerry Administration began punishing US companies that hire overseas (read: throwing people out of work in foreign nations)? Does he really think that foreign governments will simply roll over and accept what he’s got planned for them? For that matter, how is a Kerry Administration going to follow through with its plan to repair America’s relations with its “allies” overseas if it’s throwing millions of our allies’ citizens out of work?

It’s been pretty much established that protectionism is a bad idea, especially for developed economies. Everyone does the best for themselves when goods, services and, yes, jobs can be moved freely across the world. John Kerry is smart enough to know that starting trade wars with the rest of the world is a good way to shed American jobs, not to create them. So what, then, would he do as President?

The obvious answer is that he’d do nothing about “outsourcing” because there’s pretty much nothing he can do that wouldn’t simply make the problem worse. In other words, he’s deliberately lying to the most vulnerable people in America: giving them false visions of a dawn that he knows shall never come. Their jobs aren’t coming back no matter who is elected President and so they’re going to have to move on. Manipulating them by playing their desperate hopes is simply wrong.

The best way to grow the economy is to ensure that people have the most money possible in their pockets and otherwise leave well-enough alone. That’s George W. Bush’s strategy and it’s one that’s clearly working and will grow the economy if it’s allowed to do so.