Okay, tonight we’re reporting directly from the official Talking Points sickbed. Anyone care to join me for another poke at the egregiously regressive GWB tax cut plan? Sure ya do. So here goes.
When faced with criticisms that the bulk of their tax cut plans go to the very wealthy, Republicans are apt to argue that it could hardly be otherwise since the great proportion of taxes are paid by the wealthy. Now there are all sorts of problems with this argument (which we’ll say more about later). But for the sake of discussion let’s accept the argument: which would mean that high-income earners would be entitled to a percentage of the tax cut bill equal to the percentage of federal taxes which they now pay.
Well it turns out that under the GWB plan high-income earners receive twice that amount. “The top one percent of the population,” says the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in a recently released analysis, “would receive about 40 percent of the tax cuts from the proposal, which is double the share of federal taxes that they pay.”
So, in other words, the Bush tax cut plan is wildly inequitable even on the largely bogus terms conservatives say we should use when judging the fairness of tax cuts. Go figure.
And now to another subject.
A couple posts back I said that Jonah Goldberg seemed like a decent enough guy when I met him in person on C-Span, despite his Clinton-hating political views – most all of which I find execrable.
Well in response to that post I got a few ⦠well, let’s just say a few not-uncritical emails from normally adoring Talking Points readers.
This got me to thinking. Before I moved to Washington it was easier for me to insult individual conservatives in print because there was little chance I’d ever run in to them. On the other hand one of the biggest problems with the “Washington establishment” or “the inside-the-beltway mentality” or whatever you want to call it is that the journalistic community here is too incestuous. People know each other and they’re afraid to criticize each other. And even more insidiously they become part of the same political milieu, with a shared set of political and values assumptions, and all the rest of it. And as I’ve written any number of times this is one of the greatest evils of our contemporary politics and political dialog, and contributes mightily to the persistent disconnect between politicians and journalistic elites and the public at large.
At the same time, though, there is a difference between levelling personal attacks and being willing to say that 9/10ths of what Cokie Roberts, for instance, says each Sunday on the This Week show is facile, protective of her class (the DC establishment/cave dweller tribe), and moronic — which is all true.
Anyway there are clearly pitfalls to be avoided on both sides of the equation.
But look! Enough of this rumination. Clearly there is an appetite out there among the Talking Points readership to toss some obnoxious conservative to the wolves, no? Well, hey, come on, I’m happy to oblige. From my experience of one very unpleasant personal encounter with conservative blowhard (and columnist) David Horowitz, I am happy to attest, affirm and stipulate to the fact that he is just as big a cretin in person as the one he plays on TV and in print. So there you go. More details? Stay tuned.
