A reader writes:
"I hate to sound like I’m degenerating into ad hominem, but Kevin Drum seems to lack a basic understanding of the federal budget. You are absolutely right to slam him for taking entitlements off the table. But there’s more direct dishonesty in the way he treats your proposals.
For starters, you need to call him out on the idea that Medicare pays for itself. That’s simply not true. Not even close. The lion’s share of Medicare – and I’m talking 2006 when the prescription drug bill hasn’t even come online – is subsidized by general revenues, not the HI payroll tax. Second, crediting you with $0 on corporate welfare is brutally dishonest. Yes, there’s corporate welfare on the tax side, but there’s also about $100 billion on the spending side: everything from the Export-Import Bank to the Advanced Technology Program to the Manufacturing Extension Partnership to the "Byrd Amendment" to Oil & Gas R&D Program and literally scores of other corporate subsidies not done through the tax code."
I think Kevin may have misunderstood my first post because of my own loose language. But I do see something at work here. It’s very important for some on the liberal-left to tar all conservatives with the Bush brush. His embrace of spending gobs and gobs of other people’s money is what some on the left have always wanted. Bush has already conceded their basic point: "when someone hurts, government has got to move." All they need to do now is to raise taxes and then fix the Medicare plan to screw the drug companies and bingo! As I’ve said now for years, the only real fiscal difference between Bush Republicans and Kennedy Democrats is the difference between Big Insolvent Governent and Big Solvent Government.
But many left-liberals don’t want this analysis to sink in with centrists, principled Republicans or fiscally conservative Democrats. So their preemptive move is to discredit the real conservatives who would actually like to restrain spending, rein in entitlements and keep much of the tax cuts (while reforming the tax code to eliminate the myriad deductions). So they have to insist that people like me and Bruce Bartlett are dishonest or have supported the Bush program all along, even when they know full well we haven’t. This is the Krugman line as well. The aim is to discredit conservatism as a whole for a generation. Bush has done much of their heavy lifting for them. But they still need to discredit the handful of die-hard fiscal conservatives left.
The Dish 