David Brooks offers us another steaming pile of Stupid. This time, he’s concerned that some folks on the left are complaining about income inequality and ultra low taxes on the wealthy, so he attempts to invoke Alexander Hamilton as the kind of guy who would have no truck with class warfare. Yes, it’s odd to summon the ghost of the foremost advocate of a strong central government to argue for the virtues of limited government, but this is David Brooks we’re talking about here, and nonsense is the name of his game.
He creates something new, which he calls the Hamiltonian Tradition even though the thing he describes has nothing to do with Hamilton. But that’s all just jive-talk. The real meat of the piece is his assertion that the progressives, the New Dealers, and the folks of the New Frontier and Great Society were all well-intentioned people who simply went too far. They wound up creating a system that has unsustainable debt, invests in the wrong things, and morally corrupts the American people. Now, mind you, he’s saying all this in the context of a complaint about criticisms the left has aimed at the very rich.
About a year ago, the Center for American Progress issued a report on what our debt would look like if there had never been any Bush tax cuts. They started out with a reminder:
President Bush inherited perhaps the strongest federal balance sheet in postwar history. There were record-high surpluses, debt was at around 30 percent of GDP and falling, and the Congressional Budget Office projected that the federal government would be debt free by 2009. The country was in great fiscal shape to deal with any crises or emergencies coming down the road, and it was even ready to deal with the coming retirement of the baby boom generation.
Now, a sane or honest person might ask how we could have been in such great shape if the progressives, the New Dealers, and the Great Society folks had screwed up the system and corrupted all our morals. I mean, debt-free in 2009 sounds pretty good. But it didn’t happen. And rather than learn from that mistake, the Republicans refuse to raise any taxes on the wealthy at all, instead insisting that all the budget balancing come out of government services, research, and investments. They created a debt crisis with their policies and now they want to dismantle a century of progressive government to pay for their folly. They gave the ultra-rich twelve years of absurdly low taxes that directly ruined our balance sheets, and now they refuse to allow any of those people to pay into the system. No wonder people are getting angry with the rich. You’re going to make me work two more years before I can collect Social Security just so a billionaire can keep a few more million bucks?
David Brooks continues to concoct new ways to excuse this behavior, and he’s probably going to burn in hell for it.
