How about one to Jared Bernstein, for a wonderful takedown of Robert Samuelson's column equating Grover Norquist with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Just to pile on a bit...Samuelson ends with the old saw about "Governing is about choosing." Well, yes -- and by taking a comfortable position that they're all the same, Samuelson is failing to do just that. Jonathan Chait had a wonderful piece about this. It's really just astonishing that anyone who claims to care about deficits could consider the parties, or Norquist and Robert Greeenstein, as equals. And while it's not the biggest factor, I'd certainly say (with Chait) that one thing that really undercuts efforts to close the government's budget deficit is the absolute, unwaivering, evidence-free belief that there's no difference between the parties on deficits. As though the last thirty years never happened.
Anyway: nice catch!
Monday, July 11, 2011
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Re this fallacy, Joe Klein offered tonic back in April:
ReplyDeleteHere is the reality: the Republicans have spent the past 30 years creating deficits and the Democrats have spent the past 30 years closing them. The unimportance of deficits became an article of faith during the second Bush Administration: "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter," Dick Cheney famously said. It has been rather hilarious for those of us with even a minimal grasp of recent history to watch these folks pull fierce 180-degree turns on the issue--and it is even more hilarious to watch them accuse Obama of hyper-partisanship after the dump-truck full of garbage they visited upon his head these past few years.
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/#ixzz1JYIDGlDP