I kind of like David Brooks. He’s one of the few people I generally agree with politically, and I can just listen to him, Kathleen Parker, and Eugene Robinson debate all day.
Do you think his growing baldness has anything to do with the number of times Mark Shields reaches over at pats him on the head?
I resuscitate last month’s thread.
Pretty much. Brook got his groove back on October 30th. In a fit of wishful thinking he lauds Marco Rubio’s policy chops while managing to look away from his actual proposals with this bit of curtaining:
[QUOTE=David Brooks]
At this stage it’s probably not sensible to get too worked up about the details of any candidate’s plans. They are all wildly unaffordable. What matters is how a candidate signals priorities. Rubio talks specifically about targeting policies to boost middle- and lower-middle-class living standards.
[/QUOTE]
Um, no David. Actually policy proposals matter a lot. GWBush ran as a moderate Republican in 2000. Pundits took his dishonest tax proposals with a grain of salt because math is hard and anyway things will be comprised in Congress anyway. This flies in the face of the evidence: in fact, “… presidents usually try to enact the policies they advocate during the campaign.”[sup]1[/sup]
So what does Rubio propose and what does Brooks ignore? Jonathan Chait crunches the numbers. Rubio says that current military spending levels set “ourselves up for danger” and wants to increase the military budget. But let’s say he keeps military spending constant anyway. Rubio proposes a tax cut costing $11.8 trillion over 10 years. 34% of that revenue goes to those in the highest 1% of income. (That’s pretty generous considering that group earns 21% of all income as it is.) By way of comparison, GWBush’s tax cuts cost $3.4 trillion over 10 years. 11.8 >> 3.4.
Rubio wants to pass a balanced budget amendment. That’s nice. Total 10 year revenue under current policies is $41.6 trillion. Subtract out 11.8 and you get $29.8 trillion. Rubio doesn’t want to cut benefits for current or near retirees. At the moment defense, Medicare, Social Security and interest payments on the debt total to $30.7 trillion, with interest payments increasing over the next decade if we emerge from the lost decade.
That leaves nada, nothing at all, for Medicaid, veterans’ health insurance, transportation, border security, and education, justice, the EPA, whatever. This proposal is detached from reality.
So Brooks concludes that, “Of all the candidates, Rubio has done the most to harvest the work of Reform Conservatism, which has been sweeping through the think tank world. In a year in which many candidates are all marketing, Rubio is a balance of marketing and product.”
What utter horsepucky. Marco is more of a flimflam artist than GWBush but alas less of one than Ted Cruz. David Brooks is a hack without any real interest in informing his readership.
From here:
[sup]1[/sup] See Krukones (1984) and Fishel (1985) cited here.
Oh? He’s a partisan asshole. On MLK Day he posted a column praising Martin Luther King for 2 paragraphs, then spent two paragraphs explaining why MLK supporters should vote for the assholes. He jumped on Clinton with both fists for Monica-gate, but when GWB came under criticism for starting a criminally stupid war, he denounced that criticism as partisan … and said he “now regretted” his own criticism of Clinton.
I agree it would be nice to have commentators who are non-partisan intellectuals. Brooks fails strongly on both counts.
PS: When I explained upthread why I prefer a “bombastic oaf” like Krauthammer over a “pretentious twit” like Brooks, I did not intend that as a ringing endorsement of Krauthammer! :smack: I do recall a non-political column Krauthammer wrote two decades ago that I agreed with. If I’ve read more than a snippet of any Krauthammer column since, it was accidental.
Graphical presentation of tax plans of Bush, Trump and Rubio. This is the sort of article you write when you care about informing your readers.
Remember though according to David Brooks, “At this stage it’s probably not sensible to get too worked up about the details of any candidate’s plans. They are all wildly unaffordable.”
Ah but some are more unaffordable than others. Rubio’s for example. And how is Clinton’s plan “Wildly unaffordable?” Apparently Brooks has fully adopted modern conservative logic. It works like this:
I wish that P were true.
Therefore P is true.
Measure for Measure - thanks; that is helpful as an example. Reading some of the comments about Brooks’ statements is helpful as context.
The OP thought Brooks was truth telling, when the columnist was merely taking sides in an internecine battle. Brooks poses as the sober face of conservatism and if there are no responsible GOP Presidential candidates on offer, he will invent one. If he has to perform such literary acrobatics as saying that overall budget plans don’t matter then so be it.
[QUOTE=David Brooks]
At this stage it’s probably not sensible to get too worked up about the details of any candidate’s plans. They are all wildly unaffordable. What matters is how a candidate signals priorities.
[/QUOTE]
I say that when a third of your tax breaks are funneled to those in the top 1% (who earn $1.7 million per year on average), that’s a pretty clear signal. Brooks disagrees. How he determines how Rubio would favor one promise over another is left unstated.