Month: September 2010

Mickey Kaus, who literally wrote the book on "the end of equality," talks to Tim Noah, whose current Slate series on America's increasing income inequality is here.

Right Wing Watch draws our attention to the other harbinger out of Delaware:

Since Mike Castle vacated the seat in order to (unsuccessfully) run for Senate, the Republicans nominated [Glen] Urquhart in a tight primary election. A wealthy real estate investor who self-financed his campaign, Urquhart campaigned as a social conservative with the backing of the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America and the National Conservative Fund, along with Tea Party groups such as the 9/12 Delaware Patriots.  Here is Urquhart’s opinion regarding the separation of Church and State, where he misattributes Thomas Jefferson’s quote that the US Constitution creates a “wall of separation between Church & State” to… Adolph Hitler.

Yeah, it’s all about economic issues, innit?

Reihan Salam and James Poulos insist there is value in treating small government as an ideal that guides American policy-making. They’re riffing off that recent Wall Street Journal piece by Arthur Brooks, President of AEI, and Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin wunderkind. Here’s Reihan:

Politics is not always about highly technical debates concerning progressive price indexing. It is often about shaping our shared normative understandings, and, as Ryan and Brooks argue in their Wall Street Journal essay, our shared aspirations for the kind of society we’d like to live in. And on those grounds, at least, Ryan and Brooks are offering an attractive alternative to a society that looks first to the federal government to solve problems. 

Neither David Brooks nor Will Wilkinson liked their approach very much. As any reader of The Conservative Soul would see, I favor small, limited government (with a cyclically balanced budget) and foreign policy prudence as the core conservative platform. But I agree with Will that there is something lazily reflexive about Brooks-Ryan assumptions about what Americans really want:

[P]olitical scientists Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza have argued that the size of a country’s welfare state tends to track public opinion pretty closely. America’s welfare state is less generous than Denmark’s largely because Americans like it that way. If Messrs Brooks and Ryan would like congratulate Americans for liking it that way, or argue that Americans are right to like it that way, or that it would be better if Americans wanted it to be even less generous still, that would be terrific. However, it’s incorrect to suggest, as they do, that the American public has been nickeled and dimed into “a system that most Americans manifestly oppose”. Of course, correctness isn’t the idea. The idea is to make it true by persuading enough Americans to believe it.

The great tragedy of Reagan is that he never actually persuaded Americans of this – because he never forced the real cuts in spending that should have accompanied tax cuts and forced Americans to choose between the visions of left and right. Bush II was even more irresponsible, simply borrowing to bribe voters and pay for wars, while slashing taxes. A Palin-Beck party? God help us. Or maybe they might bring this phony long argument to a conclusion.

It seems he has created a little distance between Chavez and Ahmadinejad on anti-Semitism and Holocaust-denial.

A right-left convergence. Glenn here. Pat here:

To the Republican establishment, tea party people are field hands. Their labors are to be recognized and rewarded, but they are to stay off the porch and not presume to sit at the master’s table.

Greg Scoblete sees recent US arms sales to Israel and Saudi Arabia as "the close of the Obama administration's 'carrot' phase of Iranian diplomacy":

It's impossible now for the United States to convince Iran that it doesn't need a nuclear weapon when the U.S. is helping to massively boost other militaries in the region. From an Iranian perspective, U.S. arms sales will only reinforce the notion that they need a nuclear weapon to offset the large and growing imbalance of conventional military power in the Middle East.

The good news is that the balance of power in the Gulf is stacked overwhelmingly against the Iranian regime.

The bad news is this won't stop Netanyahu from launching World War III.

Of course I'll be there. With bells on. Ringing quietly.

Arloc Sherman analyzes new census data on unemployment insurance:

[A]n exclusive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of the new survey data shows that unemployment insurance benefits — which expanded substantially last year in response to the increased need — kept 3.3 million people out of poverty in 2009. In other words, there were 43.6 million Americans whose families were below the poverty line in 2009, according to the official poverty statistics, which count jobless benefits as part of families’ income. But if you don’t count jobless benefits, 46.9 million Americans were poor.

Jonathan Cohn explains how even that number is understated.

TNC lets go.

Bruce  Bartlett on the economic failure – and fiscal calamity – of the Bush tax cuts.