Brooks and Dumb

Don’t worry about National Socialist Security

It’s getting more difficult to sort out the NY Times’ David Brooks’ columns when you try to rank them in order of how much they are beginning to remind me of the old Nazi adage “Just repeat the lie; it will become the truth.”

Yesterday’s column, in which he excoriated the Democrats for failing to embrace Bush’s latest crock re Social Security takes the cake, though.

Brooks takes the Democrats to task for not supporting Bush’s call for indexing Social Security benefits to income. He sanctifies Bush for putting forth a plan to save Social Security (by cutting benefits to “wealthier” retirees) and damns the Dems for not leaping into what is clearly a political trap. With astonishing intellectual dishonesty (even for Brooks,) he says “He [Bush] has asked us to redistribute money down the income scale. Why should programs for children and families be strangled so Donald Trump can get bigger benefit checks?”

Try substituting “up” for “down”, and “tax cuts” for “benefit checks” in the previous sentence and see if you don’t get a much clearer picture of what Brooks is actually defending. After all, if the top of the income pile is getting a tax cut far in excess of its Social Security benefit reductions, we can all live with that, right?