Patrick McIlheran has returned refreshed from a vacation of almost French duration and ready to blow minds.
This latest effort, hailing Bush for presiding over the fourth biggest deficit in our history, shows his powers have not been diluted by leisure. Folkbum shreds it, demonstrating again that his guitar is a machine that fights neocons.
Elsewhere, Patrick nyah-nyahs Democrats for seeking to get out of Iraq. Seriously, anytime Patrick and his cohorts in the MSM (Milwaukee's stupider media) attack Feingold for wanting to get out, they should be obligated to describe what victory will look like and what price they're willing to take to accomplish it. "More of the same" isn't a strategy. In the past week, with Shiites dragging Sunnis from cars and shooting them, it's difficult to see the lauded progress that McIlheran was talking about a month ago.
(Update: Uh, Folkbum link now leads to Folkbum)
UPDATE DOS:
Welcome, P-Mack readers!
Ever since noting late Friday that P-Mack was jabbing an elbow in our general direction, the Brawler was meditating on a response to his ongoing assertion of the power of tax cuts and dynamic scoring and whatnot.
How about this: Mr Bush's tax policy may have played a modest role in boosting a temporary revenue surge. But that is very different from suggesting, as the White House does, that tax cuts were the main cause or that they permanently pay for themselves. Most serious economists have long laughed at the idea that Mr Bush's tax cuts raise revenue. Now, it seems, the president's own boffins agree. Deep in the Mid-Session Review is a claim that the Bush tax cuts could eventually raise the level of GDP by 0.7%, a relatively modest effect, and one that itself depends on the tax cuts being financed by lower spending...
No, obviously, that's not the Brawler's words, it's from the Economist. That's the beauty of the open source world. The Brawler never would have thought to use the word "boffin."
Anyway, the Economist is hardly a leftwing rag. But they are, usually, reality based and have a tendency to bring more insight to the nation's economic news than most of our newspapers.
And certainly more than one would expect from the Heritage Foundation, the source of McIlheran's insight into the efficacy of tax cuts. Word to P-Mack: Just because the Administration and the Heritage Foundation are saying the 2003 tax cuts are working don't mean it's so. The Administration's interest is obvious. And the Heritage Foundation's goal is not to provide dispassionate analysis of the the budget, the world situation or anything. Its purpose is to advance a rightist agenda -- one you surely agree with. You might want to hip your readers to that.
The Brawler lifted the Economist passage from this great broadside from economist Brad DeLong, taking to task the administration for promulgating this spin and the media for swallowing it.
DeLong also cited a story by the WSJ that cuts to the heart of the matter:
David Wessel: WSJ NEWS PAGES Washington Wire: Do Tax Cuts Pay for Themselves?: Not if you read the fine print in the new White House midsession review of budget trends. "While difficult to estimate precisely," Treasury long-run analyses of the effects of President Bush's tax cut would "ultimately" raise total national output of goods and services by 0.7%.
So is that enough to pay for the tax cuts, even after allowing them to work their economic magic over the next 10 years? The Center for Budget Policies and Priorities, a Washington think tank and advocacy group that is distinctly unfriendly to Bush fiscal policies, says it isn't. "A 0.7 percent increase in the economic output that the Congressional Budget Office has projected for 2016 would represent an additional $146 billion [in gross domestic product]," it says. "If new revenues equaled as much as 20% of the additional output, the increase in revenues resulting from making the tax cuts permanent (assuming Treasury's best-case assumptions) would be $29 billion."
That's a lot of money. But how does it compare to the size of the president's tax cuts? The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, using conventional analyses, says making the president's tax cuts permanent would reduce federal revenues in 2016 by $314 billion. That is more than 10 times what the Treasury analysis suggests tax cuts would generate by prompting more hours of work, more savings and investment and more efficient use of resources...[Brawler's bold]
The headline of the piece is "Where are the heirs of Walter Lippman?" Certainly not our Mack, who may seek to be the next, I don't know, Westbrook Pegler.
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