Let's Call a Detente in the Denier Wars
Jonathan Chait has a three-page fulmination this morning that comes within a cat's eyelash of branding as "income inequality deniers" those not taking a "new" CBO study about this topic seriously.
He notes:
Rising income inequality, like climate change, is an ideologically inconvenient issue for conservatives. They would prefer not to discuss it altogether. If forced to discuss it, they will generally either deny its existence or simply carry on as if it doesn't exist.
The underlying facts, like the facts of climate change, are stark.
I said something about these "stark" facts concerning income inequality in my morning column in The Daily and will have more to say about the specific "findings" in the CBO study and Chait's accusations later.
But I scanned (with my super-duper Mac finder no less) Chait's screed that Republican fiscal scrooges who oppose redistribution are worsening the problem and found that the word "deficit" appeared only once in it and that too in a quote by Paul Ryan. And the word "debt" didn't feature at all.
If we are bandying "denier" charges, then does Chait's omission show that he is a "debt-and-deficit denier?"
D-D-D does have a nice ring to it, but hurling denier charges is a cheap way of delegitimizing your political opponents. So I'll drop it if Chait drops it. This is getting much too catty!