Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute slays the beast that is “starve the beast”-the fanciful notion, advanced by a number of very smart people who ought to know better, that a revenue collapse driven by tax cuts will automatically lead to steep spending cuts. Drawing on the work of William Niskanen and Peter Van Doren, Wilkinson offers a far more plausible hypothesis:
When current spending is financed by current taxes, voters see it as their money being spent, and so are more motivated to be frugal. But when current spending is financed by debt, voters see it as future voters’ money being spent. If voters prefer to benefit now and have some one else pay later, there is no good reason to think legislators will see deficits as a reason to restrain themselves.
And so the fiscal strategy of the supply-siders has been exactly as counterproductive as the root-canal Republicans, the great Dick Darman among them, said it would be.
Read the op-ed and see why Wilkinson is the best thing to hit Cato since the bottomless largesse of some unnamed silver-haired tycoon.
TEARS OF A CLOWN: Imagine a papier-mâché mask with a wind-up device that would both a) play the melody from “Tears of a Clown” and b) slowly lower a small papier-mâché “tear,” painted light blue, from the “eye” of the mask, to which it’d be attached by a slender thread, to the ground. This, to my mind, would be the most terrifying Halloween costume of all. Please do not wear it in my presence. I might die.
MICHAEL LIND IS MAKING SENSE: The Democrats have a Greater New England problem. At one point, Lind draws a parallel between John Kerry and Charles Sumner. Fortunately, Zell Miller was never in a position to savagely beat John Kerry with a shillelagh-but really, who thinks he wouldn’t have if given half a chance?
I should add that I owe Michael Lind a lot. The Next American Nation sold me on the value of reading. I never would have picked up The New Republic otherwise, and I never would have started reading Andrew Sullivan. Instead, I’d be in the state pen, organizing a ferocious Afro-Asian gang to do battle with white supremacists and the Gangster Disciples. In homage to the historic Bandung Conference, a key event in the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement, the gang would be called “the Bandung Brigade,” and we’d perform an Electric Slide-inspired boogaloo called “the Non-Aligned Movement” to strike fear in the hearts of our enemies. In addition, we’d also sharpen cutlery and threaten to make “chow fun” of our enemies. Everybody Wang Chung tonight, for tomorrow there will be hell to pay.
“SOUTHERN BARBARIAN MONKEY”: In my never-ending quest for any and all information pertaining to monkeys, creatures I resemble in nearly all crucial respects, reckless disregard for the human taboo against going pantless in public among them, I’ve come upon an article, “From Protean Ape to Handsome Saint: The Monkey King,” by Whalen Lai (Asian Folklore Studies, Vol. 53, No. 1., pp. 29-65.). The abstract reads as follows:
The novel Monkey or Journey to the West tells of a simian’s revolt against Heaven, of its defeat by the Buddha, and of its later being recruited as a pilgrim to protect the monk Tripitaka on his quest for scriptures in India. This essay traces the Monkey’s background to a) a mythic battle between a land deity and a water deity; b) a myth about an aboriginal in a medieval forest who is converted by Buddhist missionaries and becomes a saint who protects his new faith, just as St. Christopher, originally a subhuman Dog-man in the forest, became the patron saint of travelers; c) a folk Zen parody of the Sixth Patriarch Huineng (who was called a “southern babarian monkey”); d) an ancient tradition about the Chinese Titans-the demigods of Xia-striking back at the Zhou god of Heaven that displaced them. The appendix goes into the folkore of the Frog, a chthonic deity kept alive among southern non-Chinese aboriginals.
Note the striking parallels to our own time. In his penetrating analysis of the presidential race, “How Southern Barbarian Monkey Really Won,” Mark Danner summons the spirit of the Frog-inhaled in smokable form-to outline the various ways in which Bush’s relentless demonization of the “land deity” led him to victory. Ross has dismissed this one out of hand.
— Reihan
The Dish 