As if to prove that he really shines when the Times gives him more space for his columns, Paul Krugman contributes a great polemic against the tax-cut mania in this weekend’s paper. It takes on the misconceptions about tax burden and also places our tax policy in historical context. The entire article is worth a read, but the end is particularly to the point:
The tax-cut crusade has created a situation in which something must give. But what gives — whether we decide that the New Deal and the Great Society must go or that taxes aren’t such a bad thing after all — is up to us. The American people must decide what kind of a country we want to be.
This conclusion seems to echo the argument of his new book, The Great Unraveling, for which he is making a number of media and promotional appearances (He’ll be in Cambridge this Friday -see the Harvard Bookstore page for details). Calpundit has a forthcoming interview posting on his site… sure to be smarter than the Paula Zahn interview, in which she exclaims “And Clinton never fell prey to the left wing during his presidency? Oh!” If anything shows the limitations of “balance” journalism, it’s questioning like this - even if Clinton’s politics are to the left of one’s own, by any meaningful measure he represented a shift to the right for the Democratic party and a neutralization of the left wing that Zahn seems to think ran the show just because parties and presidents have to be equivalent. Well, they’re not.
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