I’d call that a significant choice.
Ezra Klein offers the left’s intellectually bankrupt and futile response. Young Ezra has nothing to offer but emotionally manipulative appeals to sentimentality. The Obama budget must be supported, regardless of consequences or affordability because it spends lots of money on the poor. “The poor” are a species of Brahmanic sacred cattle whose interests trump reality.
It doesn’t matter if you bankrupt the country and strangle economic growth affecting everyone. If you fail to immolate the American economy on the altar of bleeding heart social consciousness, you are just mean!
Ezra is a member of the economic school that wants to raise taxes (and stifle economic activity) now. After all, as unidentified “experts” cited by the Associated Press announced today, no study accepted by the left proves that drilling (and thereby increasing petroleum supply) reduces gas prices.
If you are simply an irrational emotionalist, economics is whatever left-wing studies say it is, and the proper operation of any economy really consists of transfers of wealth from the more affluent to the less affluent members of society.
Hat tip to Bruce Kessler.
ThomasS
Ezra is right. The Republicans do assume something that drives their decisions. That is that we need a defense budget that puts us on permanent war footing with which we shall forever be at war. That is so “Right-thinking.” But Ezra is blind to the fact that the Left has made us a permanent welfare state as well. Put them together and we are a welfare/warfare state. That is what we are. All reasoning must start there. The Left sees the warfare part and is outraged, but fails to see the welfare part at all (after all they put the Waaaaaa in Welfare).
The Right sees the welfare part and is outraged, but fails to see the warfare part. The Right follows their vision of how God has arranged things here on Earth and the God of the Bible is a pretty warlike fellow and they want to be like Him. The Left, rather than having an imaginary “Father, Son and Holy Ghost†at their elbow, instead have an imaginary “academic, a psychiatrist and a crowd of enthusiastic well-wishers at there elbow. (“See there is Atticus Fitch waving at me just as I dreamed as a child!)
Together they are the perfect storm of hubris and blindness and we lack the moral compass and courage to stop these passionate men full of all our worst characteristics and habits from running us into the ground and destroying all we have built over the years. Not things like buildings (though these are among the final products and results of our virtues), but they have destroyed our most precious traits. These are ideas like freedom of mind to critically think for ourselves and freedom of body to act upon our thoughts and associate with those of like values. Things like the courage to follow our own lights and the nobility to use them wisely. I ask you, where have these traits been inculcated? Where have they not been unsystematically undermined?
So here is Ezra’s half-truth of the day. I anxiously await the half-truth that will rebut it.
SDD
Except that the percentage of GDP spent on defense has been steadily declining over the last fifty years while the amount of spending on welfare has been steadily increasing.
SDD
The left has always relied on emotion to sell their scheme. Financing the scheme is never really a matter of consideration. It wasn’t in places like Greece and Spain until recently either . No matter how many times you invoke The Poor, you can’t tax and transfer money that hasn’t first been earned by The Productive.
The economy is like a portfolio. You have assets that have high returns and assets that have low returns. The more of your portfolio you divert from the former to the latter, the lower will be your portfolio performance. It doesn’t matter how “loveable” the lower performing assets are to you. You can’t alter the mathematics with speeches and editorials and demonstrations.
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