Well, John McCain has finally seen fit to share his "plan" for revitalizing the American economy. He laid out the details in a speech on Tuesday at Carnegie Mellon University.

Unsurprisingly, it's just more of the same old George Bush economics -- big giveaways to the rich, and a few crumbs tossed to the rest of us to distract us from the crumbling infrastructure, undersupported military and mounting national debt the policies result in.

Let's get the biggest part out of the way up front: most of the "McCain plan" consists of just extending George Bush's tax cuts into the future. Since it's already well-established that the Bush tax cuts massively favor the wealthiest 1% of Americans over the rest of us, I won't spend a lot of time on them here. I'll just note that the tax cuts advocated by John McCain in 2008 were fiercely opposed in 2001 by... John McCain:

I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle class Americans who most need tax relief.

2001 John McCain's position was echoed later by another "maverick" Republican, 2003 John McCain, who in a May 23, 2003 statement on the Senate floor decried the disproportionate impact the tax cuts would have on military families serving overseas, and stated that if the tax cuts passed

[t]he only thing growing will be the tax breaks for the wealthiest citizens of this country.

Sounds like 2008 John McCain hasn't been spending much time talking to 2001 John McCain or 2003 John McCain. I wonder what they call that kind of consistency on board the Straight Talk Express? Here's a guess:

Now we move on to the ideas McCain is bringing to the table on his own. For most working people, the McCain proposal that will touch them most directly is his call for gas taxes to be suspended over the summer:

Hard-working American families are suffering from higher gasoline prices. John McCain calls on Congress to suspend the 18.4 cent federal gas tax and 24.4 cent diesel tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

Nobody doubts that the price of gas is hitting working men and women where it hurts. But this is McCain's big solution? An eighteen-cents-off coupon that's only good for three months?

At one level, the proposal is absurd on its face. The reason gas is expensive today isn't because of the gas tax; the reason gas is expensive is because we're fighting a war in Iraq:

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If he were really serious about bringing gas prices down, McCain would offer a plan for ending the war and bringing our troops home; instead, he tells us that we could be there for a hundred years.

But even if you give McCain the benefit of the doubt and go along with the idea that the problem is the tax and not the war, removing the tax will have little to no impact on the prices most people are paying at the pump. To see just how inadequate McCain's proposal is, let's take a look at just how much gas prices have gone up for Pennsylvania's drivers under eight years of Republican economics. The Department of Energy keeps an archive of historical gas prices on its Web site. According to their records, on January 22, 2001 -- two days after George Bush was sworn in as President -- drivers in the central Atlantic states (of which Pennsylvania is one) were paying $1.49 for a gallon of regular-grade gas. Eight years of Bushonomics later, they are paying $3.42 per gallon. That's $1.93 more per gallon -- a 130% increase. Knocking eighteen cents off that figure would put the price of gas back to where it was one month ago.

So, in other words, if you were standing at the pump four weeks ago thinking "wow, gas is a heck of a bargain these days," John McCain is the candidate for you!

The other McCain proposal that he says will help the working class is the repeal of the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT):

John McCain will permanently repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax(AMT) – a tax that will be paid nearly exclusively by 25 million middle class families. Repealing this onerous tax will save middle class families nearly $60 billion in a single year. Under McCain's plan, a middle class family with children set to pay the AMT will save an average of over $2,700 – a real tax cut for working families.

Sounds great, huh? Sure -- until you realize what McCain's definition of "middle class" is.

The thing about the Alternative Minimum Tax is, not everybody pays it. And of course, if you don't pay it, repealing it isn't going to save you any money. So which taxpayers have to pay the AMT? The Tax Policy Center has the answer:

In 2007, about half of taxpayers with income between $200,000 and $1 million paid AMT while just 4% of taxpayers with incomes between $100,000 and $200,000 and less than 1% of those with income below $100,000 did so.

There is John McCain's "middle class" -- people making more than $200,000 per year.

So why is McCain touting repealing the AMT as a "middle class" tax cut? Because inflation is projected to make more people subject to the AMT over the next ten to fifteen years. But, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities points out, even when you factor that in, the AMT will still be a tax that disproportionately falls on the richest:

The Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center estimates that, under current law (that is, in the unlikely event that Congress takes no action to restrict the AMT’s reach and the AMT grows to affect tens of millions of additional taxpayers), more than half of AMT revenue in 2010 still will come from households with incomes over $200,000 (the highest income 4 percent of all households). About 90 percent of AMT revenue will come from households with incomes above $100,000 (the highest-income 16 percent of all households).

Got that? 90% of the money raised by the AMT will come from the richest 16% of the population. That sure doesn't sound like the "middle class" to me.

So there isn't much in McCain's plan for working people -- but plenty for the rich. And for corporations, who turn out to be the biggest beneficiaries of the McCain plan:

[M]uch of what he detailed was a corporate special pleader's dream: a cut in the corporate income tax rate, from 35 percent to 25 percent, a proposal to allow businesses to write off the cost of new equipment and technology from their taxes, a ban on Internet and new cellphone taxes, and a permanent tax credit for research and development.

He promised to remove the "myriad corporate tax loopholes that are costly, unfair and inconsistent with a free-market economy," but he offered no specifics.

The Center for American Progress details just how much of a giveaway to corporations that 10 percent corporate tax cut really is:

Cutting the corporate rate to 25 percent would cost approximately $995 billion between 2009 and 2018. [The Congressional Budget Office] projects that corporate tax revenue will total $3.48 trillion over that decade. Because virtually all corporate income is taxed at 34 percent or 35 percent, McCain’s tax cut will result in a nearly 30 percent loss of corporate tax revenue, or approximately $995 billion over 10 years. McCain’s advisors also estimate the cost of the rate reduction at approximately $100 billion a year.

$100 billion a year!

So there's McCainonomics in a nutshell -- more of what we've all come to know and love over the last eight years: massive tax cuts for the rich, empty words for the rest of us.