Boy oh boy, David Brooks really is
incapable of telling the truth. Now he lies by the hundreds of billions. He makes the presposterous claim that the Bush Social Security plan is, in fact, a call to share the pain:
Over this time, Democrats have been hectoring President Bush in the manner of an overripe Fourth of July orator. The president should be summoning us to make shared sacrifices for the common good. The president should care for the poor, and stop favoring the rich. He should make the hard choices and impose a little fiscal discipline on government.
Sometimes you had to walk through Democratic precincts in a gas mask, the lofty rhetoric was so thick. But now we have definitive proof that they didn't mean it. It was all hokum.
Over the past few weeks, the president has called their bluff. By embracing the progressive indexing of Social Security benefits, the president has asked us to make a shared sacrifice for the common good. He's asking middle- and upper-class folks to accept benefit cuts so there will be money for the people who are really facing poverty.
He has asked us to redistribute money down the income scale. Why should programs for children and families be strangled so Donald Trump can get bigger benefit checks?
Shared sacrifice? What a liar. Let me remind you of that Brooks wants folks to forget, Bush's tax giveaways to the rich:
The Estate Tax:
The House voted 272 to 162 yesterday to permanently repeal the estate tax, throwing the issue to the Senate where negotiations have begun on a deep and permanent estate tax cut that can pass this year, even if it falls short of full repeal.
The House vote pitted repeal proponents, who held that a tax on inheritances is fundamentally unfair, against Democrats, who questioned how Congress could support a tax cut largely for the affluent that would cost $290 billion over 10 years, in the face of record budget deficits.
Income Tax Cuts:
The tax plan approved by Congress on May 26, 2001 preserves the high-income tax cuts proposed by George W. Bush, but adds enough new tax breaks to make the final bill 20 percent more costly that the original Bush plan.
A distributional analysis released by Citizens for Tax Justice shows that when the tax plan is fully phased in:
* The typical tax cut for the median income taxpayer will be $600 a year.
* For the 78 million taxpayers in the lowest 60 percent of the income scale, the tax cut will average $347 a year.
* In contrast, at the top of the income scale the average tax cut will be $53,000 annually--virtually identical to the $54,000 annual tax cut proposed by the President.
"Congress has given the President what he truly cared about--gigantic tax cuts for the rich," said Robert S. McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice. "But Congress reneged on its promise to honor fiscal responsibility. Instead of a tax cut one-quarter less in size than the President's plan, Congress actually increased the fully-phased-in cost of the tax cuts by a fifth."
Brooks mentions Donald Trump's Social Security benefits. The thing is since Trump is in the top 1% of income earners, a group whose taxes Bush has cut by 24%, it is not clear what pain Brooks thinks Bush has imposed on Trump. Handing Trump and Paris Hilton millions of dollars is not exactly a normal person's idea of imposing pain.
But for a liar like Brooks, the truth no longer has a chance.
Update [2005-5-7 21:14:8 by Armando]: For those who want to debate the "merits" of Brooks' non-analysis of Bush's SS plan, DeLong references Krugman. I'll stick to Brooks' Big Lie of Bush as Robin Hood.