Tax Cuts Were Not Going To Be

[the Us] Budget Is Dominated By The Retirement Programs, Social Security And Medicare - Loosely Speaking, The Post-cold-war Federal Government Is A Big Pension Fund That Also Happens To Have An Army.

What Happened After 9/11 - And I Think Even People On The Right Know This, Whether They Admit It Or Not - Was Deeply Shameful. The Atrocity Should Have Been A Unifying Event, But Instead It Became A Wedge Issue. Fake Heroes Like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, And, Yes, George W. Bush Raced To Cash In On The Horror. And Then The Attack Was Used To Justify An Unrelated War The Neocons Wanted To Fight, For All The Wrong Reasons....the Memory Of 9/11 Has Been Irrevocably Poisoned; It Has Become An Occasion For Shame. And In Its Heart, The Nation Knows It.

America's Political Landscape Is Infested With Many Zombie Ideas - Beliefs About Policy That Have Been Repeatedly Refuted With Evidence And Analysis But Refuse To Die. The Most Prominent Zombie Is The Insistence That Low Taxes On Rich People Are The Key To Prosperity.

In Fact, I'd Say That The Sources Of The Economy's Expansion From 2003 To 2007 Were, In Order, The Housing Bubble, The War, And - Very Much In Third Place - Tax Cuts.

If You Are A Good Economist, A Virtuous Economist, You Are Reborn As A Physicist. But If You Are An Evil, Wicked Economist, You Are Reborn As A Sociologist.