In a November 26, 2005 interview with Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal, Senator John McCain said, in an excess of candor, “I’m going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.”

In the twenty-nine months since he made that candid admission the American people have been reminded of it repeatedly by his political opponents. The most gleeful purveyors of the McCain-doesn’t-know-anything-about-economics mantra have been, of course, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Their scoffing references to McCain’s “economic ignorance” have been such that their listeners might be led to believe that they, themselves, actually know a thing or two about economics.

Bear in mind that Mrs. Clinton once turned a $1,000 margin account into $100,000… by selling cattle futures short in a bull market (no pun intended). It has been suggested that the corporate attorney for Tyson’s Foods who provided her with trading advice may have been assigning other people’s gains to her account while assigning her losses to others.

Now, thirty years later, while continuing to claim that her 10-month 9,900% profit was nothing more than clever happenstance, she’s convinced that the average 7.5% profit earned by the major oil companies represents some sort of “windfall” that must be taxed away to provide economic relief for consumers at the gasoline pumps… and all because she and other Democrats have blocked drilling for new petroleum reserves on American soil and in our offshore areas..

Barack Obama, on the other hand, apparently thinks it’s not unusual for two young black people, from families of modest means, to attend the most expensive Ivy League schools… Columbia, Princeton, and Harvard … and, just twenty years out of college, find themselves with a million dollar annual income and living in a $2.7 million house. Since someone else paid for the grants and scholarships that funded a large part of their education expenses, we are forced to wonder if either of them have any concept of the cost of an Ivy League education, including three years each in Harvard Law School.

The staggering economic ignorance of both Democrats was put on full display during their recent Philadelphia debate. When questioned by ABC News anchor Charlie Gibson about their plans for tax increases, Obama suggested that the U.S. economy is “in a shambles” and “teetering, not just on the edge of recession, but potentially worse,” implying full-scale 1930s style depression. He appeared unaware that the generally accepted “full employment” level is 5% of the workforce, and that the current jobless rate stands at… 5%.

Nevertheless, in their never-ending quest to promote class warfare, both candidates proposed hefty increases in the capital gains tax… long a favorite whipping-boy of Democrats because they’ve been able to convince their party’s economic illiterates that it is a “tax on the rich.”

Pandering to the “great unwashed,” Obama suggested that he would nearly double the capital gains tax rate, increasing it by 87% from the current 15% to 28%, while Clinton refused to out-pander him, suggesting a mere 33% increase, from 15% to 20%, no higher than the rate during her husband’s presidency.

Moderator Gibson was particularly hard on Obama, asking him twice why he proposed to raise capital gains taxes since such a move would: a) fall heavily on the middle class, and b) produce less government revenue. Obama, who had just moments earlier promised not to raise taxes on people making under $200,000 or $250,000, didn’t seem to know that middle-class people also pay capital-gains taxes.

As Democrats see things, when a taxpayer realizes a capital gain from the sale of property or securities, that individual has suddenly grown wealthier relative to everyone else. They see that as the sum total of the transaction, much as if the taxpayer placed his/her windfall into a coffee can and buried it beneath the petunias in the back yard. And since they see this as an opportunity to promote class warfare, they’ve convinced other Democrats, all of whom received their economic education in public schools, run by other Democrats, that capital gains deserve to be taxed at a higher rate than wages and salaries… since it represents “unearned” income.

What they refuse to recognize is that those who realize a capital gain immediately deposit the money into a bank account, where it resides for roughly a nanosecond before being loaned out to someone who wants to buy a house or a new car, start a new business, or expand an existing one. Every dollar of capital gains creates a ripple effect across the entire economy because it creates jobs and income for everyone else.

Gibson repeatedly quoted IRS/Treasury Department statistics which prove conclusively that reductions in the capital gains tax rate produce more revenue for the government. But Obama was not to be deterred. His capital gains tax proposal was only, he said, in the interest of “fairness.”

In the closing days of the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson administered an Econ 101 “pop quiz” to Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. They both flunked. Why would anyone think that they could run the country?