Someone Buy Josh Marshall a Reason Subscription

From TalkingPointsMemo today:

A note from TPM reader Paul Krugman ...

Today's WSJ lead editorial is a classic. It's titled "All you need to know", and shows the CBO projection of declining deficits and stable debt. What they either don't know or believe readers don't know is that this is the *baseline* projection, which assumes that the sunset clauses in the tax cuts actually go into effect, with the whole thing expiring at the end of 2010 (which is halfway through fiscal 2011, in their chart.) It also assumes that nothing is done to reform the alternative minimum tax, which amounts to a stealth tax increase. So what they've proved is that the tax cuts are affordable as long as they go away ...

I say that man deserves a Special Edition Privatize This! TPM T-Shirt!

Man, I was so on that a couple months ago. Can I have Krugman's T-shirt? Course, I actually do want to privatize... well, most things, really.

Addendum: Commenter Morat, like an Eskimo dissatisfied with a mere one term for "snow," thinks the word "lie" is insufficient to capture the variety of truth-bending on the political landscape, and wants a word to describe "A lie no one believes, but was told for the sake of courtesy." May I humbly suggest a "Fleischer."

Comments

Gary Gunnels | January 26, 2005, 5:39pm | #

First rule in government spending: lie. :)

Morat | January 26, 2005, 5:48pm | #

I think we need to expand the word "lie". At the very least, we need a number of words to express the spectrum from "A lie no one believes, but was told for the sake of courtesy" to "Lies that are so vast, so pervasive, that they have the power to actually destroy truth".

At the moment, I'm having a hard time keeping the usual political BS in the same room with some of the BS coming out of the White House.

Gary Gunnels | January 26, 2005, 5:50pm | #

Morat,

Shit, and I thought I was cynical!!! :)

Morat | January 26, 2005, 6:00pm | #

Cynicism is merely the application of experirence to reality. :)

No, seriously, I expect politicians to lie. Their jobs require it. Laying aside the issue of whether it's "good" or "bad" or "desireable" or "undesireable" (all very fun arguments to have with libertarians) for the moment, and just focusing on what is:

The job of a politician is, basically, to make choices. Now, frankly speaking, every choice he makes is going to tick someone off. Some choices will tick a LOT of people off. So, in order to make that choice, a politician spends a lot of time lying about the choice, the options he has, the consequences of that choice, and the likely outcome of that choice. These lies range from "sugarcoating" to "spin" to "complete fabrications" to "lies so vile that God himself cringed when they were uttered".

No politician can come out and tell the truth. They can't say "Look, my job is to make the decisions. It's what you elected me for. It's not my job to make your life milk and cookies." (for the good ones) and "Look, I'm out for number one here, and I get to keep this cushy indoor job by way of large donations to my campaign fun if I give you the shaft. Unless you got a cool 250,000 in your pocket, you might as well bend over" (for the bad ones).

Their job is to sell unpopular ideas. One of the easiest and quickest tools is "lying".

The problem is that the word "lie" encompasses everything from shading the truth to the creation of an alternative reality.

And political discourse has become so dumbed-down that no one bothers making the disctinction anymore.

John | January 26, 2005, 7:33pm | #

Josh Marshall is a moron and an economic illiterate. The point the WSJ was making more than anything is that the deficit only means something as a percentage of GNP. What matters is not the raw number but that number compared to how wealthy your economy is. Even if the tax cuts are made permanent, it is pretty obvious from the numbers, even assuming that there is no growth associated with the tax cutes, the deficit still won't be a problem. Looked that way, we are way below most other industrialized countries and nowhere near the danger zone. The piece also makes the interesting point that Japan has a huge deficit and national debt especially as a percentage of its GNP, yet has real interest rates near 0%. Even Japan's prodigious savings rate cannot explain away that. It pretty much blows away the DNC's and by extension Marshall's, since Marshall never conceived of a thought that wasn't first planted there by the DNC, contention that deficits cause higher interest rates. They don't. Interest rates are driven by the money supply and by the anticipated future rate of inflation, something Milton Friedman established 40 years ago, but would no doubt go over a mental midget like Marshall's head.

joe | January 27, 2005, 10:08am | #

Given the strict adherence of Japanese banks to the laws of the market, I guess John's argument is irrefutable.

BTW, the projections also leave out war costs.

linguist | January 27, 2005, 12:23pm | #

...like an Eskimo dissatisfied with a mere one term for "snow,"...

To pick a nit, I just want to clarify that the whole Eskimos and 10,000 words for snow is a HOAX. People misunderstood how they form words. They have no more or fewer than English does...snow, slush, sleet, powder, white stuff, freezing rain, etc.

Note: I bring this up because the famous Eskimo snow hoax has often been cited to "prove" that Eskimos think differently than, say, English speakers and that language dictates thought. Which just ain't true.

Cheers!

Julian Sanchez | January 27, 2005, 12:35pm | #

linguist-
Yeah, I know (Steve Pinker actually has a great section on that in "The Language Instinct"), just couldn't resist the reference. It was that or a reference to the multiple terms in (ancient) Greek to describe the fluttering of a partner's buttocks during intercourse.

crimethink | January 27, 2005, 1:08pm | #

Thanks for sparing us the second reference, Julian. ;-)