That's precisely how one should view Douthout's conceits comparing the Tea Baggers with anti-war protesters-as the would-be-clever conceits of a juvenile courtier making fart sounds while attributing them to the starving masses. A real Versailles prince he is. Let's bypass all that and look directly at his economic folderol-which, quite naturally, he's made hard to do by talking about it only indirectly, while trotting his colorful protesters talk out front. So using the old ellipses to make things, if not "perfectly clear" then at least less muddled:
there's something slightly odd about saying that if you didn't take to the streets to protests a $300 billion deficit you aren't allowed to protest a $1 trillion deficit. The numbers matter, surely ... So if you're inclined to sneer and giggle at the Tea Parties, keep in mind that just because a group of protesters looks ragged, resentful, and naive, that doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong to be alarmed:
This is, of course, a deeply dishonest graph in several ways at once. There's no indication of the wars' true cost, and the bailouts aren't credited to Bush's last year, the pretense that Obama has more than tripled the deficit is precisely that-pure pretense. Plus, whether or not you're in the worst recession since the Great Depression matters, surely...
A much more honest picture might look something like this:
But Douthout is an old, old hand at lying about economics. Here he was last July, lying on Bill Moyers Journal:
BILL MOYERS: -the working class that came over to the Republican Party. And George Bush won with the angry white man. But I don't see what any of those people have gotten from the conservative revolution because they're worse off today in real wages, adjusted for inflation, than they were 30 years ago when you came to power.
ROSS DOUTHAT: I'll push back on that argument a little bit. I think there are a lot of ways in which the working class is better off than they were in that era. I think if just looking at wages is misleading because one of the things that's happened thanks to free trade, thanks to policies that Republicans have championed, is prices, the cost of living, has fallen dramatically across the board for Americans.
If you look at the goods the poor and the working class buy versus the goods the rich buy, the goods that the poor and working class buy today are vastly cheaper than they used to be.
BILL MOYERS: You're not saying that workers face wage stagnation?
ROSS DOUTHAT: No, workers do face wage stagnation. But those wages do, in fact, buy more goods than they used to buy. There are ways in which the working class is better off.
Oh? Yeah? Well, what about this, then. Remember my diary "Credit Card Debt: Some Context For A Major Financial Dysfunction"? Remember this chart:
How, exactly, does one square that picture of ballooning credit card debt with the notion that the falling price of consumer goods more than offsets wage stagnation?
Or, to make Douthout's lie about that supposed trade-off "perfectly clear", as Tricky Dick would have it, here's two other charts from that same diary:
Here's the acknowledged wage stagnation:
And here's the booming burden of just trying to keep your head above water:
Which is why credit card debt goes up:
And savings plummets:
While tons of money gets pulled out of home equity:
Oh, yes! Waht a wonderful economic miracle conservatism has wrought! Especially for those on the bottom:
Not to mention those who aren't real 'Muricans!
And that was before it all fell apart, and put us into the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.
Such is your vaunted conservative intellectual. Nothing more than a spruced up street hustler, minus the self-generated gumption. |
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