I'll confess it - I'm a football fan. Big time. Love the game, hate the owners and their plutocratic, union-bustin' ways ... but that's for another post.
Anyway, I like to read Gregg Easterbrook's
TMQ column on ESPN's Page Two because it provides a slightly off-kilter, intellectually rich, and humorous read on the game. Sadly, however, he has a tendency to wander off into public policy, and I really dislike these wanderings. Briefly put, he seems to have decided that his need to stand out and get noticed (gotta keep those foundation bucks rolling in!) is best served by contrived contrarianism ("In reality, killing puppies is a good idea ...!"). I can't say how much is disingenuous self-promotion and how much he is just being a chump, but it is equally annoying either way.
Two examples in today's column - first, he calls for "cheers for Mitt Romney" for failing to take all of his charitible deductions and thus paying more taxes than was required, and for "jeers" for the Democrats for giving Mitt trouble for his "civic-mindedness." Pardon me, but that's just horse$#!t. First, Mitt Romney's actual 9-11% tax rate is rightly a national scandal, and the 14% rate he contrived to pay is just as much of a scandal. If Mitt had contrived to pay a reasonable rate (say 30%), I would give him cheers aplenty, but he did not. I'm not going to give ol' Mitt "cheers" for paying a tax rate around half of what one of the tech support guys at Best Buy would pay ("Yay Mitt! He's screwing the country, but he's using a condom!"). Second, the D's aren't critiizing him for paying more, they're criticizing him for: (a) being cynical (this is an obvious attempt to avoid scandal during a campaign, not an effort to be public spirited), (b) being full of it (before he said if he did not pay just the taxes required, he would not be "fit" to be president - now he is paying more than required for purely political purposes of appearance), and, most importantly (c) being the perfect example of everything that's wrong with the Republican approach to tax policy. Mitt has chosen to make this race about "different approaches" to the economy - the D's are doing right to pile on when Mitt's own actions show how wrong his approach is. Easterbrook's giving him props for his disingenuousness is just being a chump.
And then there is the citation to the "smart commentary" by Yale law professor
Stephen Carter. Carter is clearly a really smart guy, but a Class A chump. He opines that the growing opulence of the 1% isn't the real problem; poverty is. Or, as he more elegantly said, "In short, the moral dilemma of inequality arises not because some tiny number of people are too rich, but because some large number of people are too poor." WTF? This is the kind of half-baked, chumptacular reasoning that makes Paul Krugman's head explode. Stephen - this is not an "either-or" proposition. This problem is structural, long-term, and all-encompassing. In other words, your sentence would be accurate if you stated that "the moral dilemma of inequality exists not ONLY because a tiny number of people are WAY too rich, but ALSO because a large number of people are too poor." How can you be so smart, but be such a chump as to believe that growing poverty and income inequality is not related to the fact that nearly all of our economic gains over the past 15 years have gone to the top 5%? Mr. Carter, you've been hanging out at too many Yale Club functions for your own intellectual good.
