If you can think of a more boring combination of words than "Pawlenty" and "economics," I'd like to hear it, the next time I suffer from insomnia. But Tim Pawlenty offered up his economic plan today, and apparently this counts, to some, as "news." I read the text of his speech—someone had to!—and here's the gist. Pawlenty calls to "cut the business tax rate by more than half...from 35% to 15%," while cutting the personal tax rates to 10% (for under $50,000) and 25% (for over $50,000). He proposes a constitutional amendment that requires a balanced budget and caps federal spending to 18% of GDP. He wants to raise the retirement age for "the next generation." Then he gets cute—all weird sentence breaks are (sic) by the way—in a passage that comes as close to folksy as Pawlenty gets:

We can start by applying what I call “The Google Test.” If you can find a good or service on the Internet. Then the federal government probably doesn’t need to be doing it.

He rails against scientists and economists who are creating government regulations:

It”s fundamentally immoral — to force working Americans to hold down two or three real jobs. Just to afford the whims of “experts” — who’ve never had one....we don’t need the unelected officials at EPA — to do what our elected officials in Congress have rejected. We need less EPA monitoring of our economy. And more monitoring of EPA’s affects on our freedom. I will require sunsetting of all federal regulations.

Then it starts to get strange and scary.

The most frightening thing he asks for is additional authority as president to address the budget crisis, which brings to mind some scary W. Bush-like abuses of power:

So — I propose that Congress grant the President the temporary and emergency authority. To freeze spending at current levels. And impound up to 5% of Federal spending. Until such time as the budget is balanced. If they won’t do it — I will.

Then, weirdly, he rants against inflation for a while, accuses President Obama of being "a champion practitioner of class warfare" (God, I wish!) and supports free trade agreements with just about every nation on Earth. Of course, he doesn't ever get into the fact that corporate profits are mind-bogglingly high right now, or that corporations don't pay their fair share of taxes. He makes the necessary gratuitous whack at President Obama's health care reform, and he of course touches on a few other boring Republican necessities along the way.

This is not quite your standard teabagger boilerplate; it's more a funhouse mirror of Reagan-era policies, amped up to untether the market while protecting the social programs that older voters love so much. It's a weirdly Frankensteined-together economic plan that isn't coherent enough to align with any single doctrine. Conservative pundits will probably call it an adult, common-sense plan that addresses hard realities, but the truth is that it's an inelegant, pandering mass of red meat for a thousand tiny Republican constituents. Honestly, I expected something better—which is to say, something smarter—from the Most Boring Republican Alive.