Like peas in a pod. Wait, weren’t the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers?

If you’ve been deluding yourself that having John McCain as our president couldn’t be all that bad since almost anything beats what we’ve got now…I have some bad news. McCain would be even worse.

…budget experts say his numbers do not add up.

McCain’s promises to reduce wasteful spending if elected president in November would not begin to cover the costs of his proposed tax cuts, analysts say.

He also has not yet explained how he would rein in the health-care and retirement costs expected to swamp the federal budget as some 77 million people retire from the U.S. work force in the coming decades.

On top of that, a President McCain would inherit a $400 billion budget deficit, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost nearly $200 billion per year and a similar bill for interest payments on the $10 trillion national debt.

Many experts said McCain’s proposals would make the fiscal picture worse.

It’s funny how different McCain the senator was from McCain the presidential candidate. Suddenly, being Bush all over again makes sense to the “maverick.”

He angered conservatives when he opposed President George. W. Bush’s income-tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 on the grounds that they favored the wealthy and were fiscally irresponsible. He now supports making them permanent, echoing Bush in saying that allowing them to expire would amount to a tax increase.

How can any responsible or intelligent person — anyone able to operate a toothbrush, say — look at the economic mess we’re in and decide that the answer is less revenue? This is madness.

But it’s good for Exxon/Mobil.

McCain also wants to slash corporate tax rates from 35 percent to 25 percent and allow businesses to immediately write off capital expenses. He has called for reforming the Alternative Minimum Tax, initially targeted at the wealthy but now snaring many middle-class taxpayers.

These tax cuts would shrink annual federal revenues from $4.55 trillion today to $3.4 trillion in 2018, according to Len Burman of the Brookings Institution’s Tax Policy Center.

Federal revenues would account for 15.3 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, the lowest level since 1950.

Ah yes, 1950. Let’s turn back the clock and all return to a time when John McCain was a strapping 14-year-old, fresh from his home in Panama but poised to attend prep school in Alexandria, Va. Things were simpler then, or so they tell me since I wasn’t born yet. So enough memory lane. The next president cannot propose any more tax cuts unless he or she wants to officially bankrupt America.