David Brooks is not a serious man

by David Safier

Quick, what's three percent of 15 trillion dollars? Let's see . . . 15 times 3 is 45. Now drop two zeroes. Got it. The answer is $450 billion. That's a hell of a lot of money.

The thing that makes David Brooks so annoying is that he hides behind a fig leaf of philosophy, intellectualism and famous names he learned in his freshman and sophomore years at college to disguise his disingenuousness. "Trust me, I wouldn't play tricks on you. I'm intelligent. After all, I paraphrase Cicero."

In today's column going after the Occupy Wall Street protests, Brooks says, listen, even if you raise taxes on the rich, it won't really help our government with its money problems. [Watch the shell game, where Brooks substitutes the National Debt — about $15 trillion — for our budget deficit, which is at the center of most current fiscal discussions.]

[Taxing the rich] will have no realistic proposal to reduce the debt or sustain the welfare state. Even if you tax away 50 percent of the income of those making between $1 million and $10 million, you only reduce the national debt by 1 percent, according to the Tax Foundation. If you confiscate all the income of those making more than $10 million, you reduce the debt by 2 percent. You would still be nibbling only meekly around the edges.

I'm not sure where his 1% and 2% figures come from. But if I take them on faith, he's talking about $450 billion dollars, which he discounts as chump change.

No, Mr. Brooks, almost half a trillion dollars is not chump change. The mounting National Debt is another issue entirely. That's not going away any time soon. What Republicans are screaming about is the current budget deficit. That's how they justify cuts to NPR and the arts. That's why they insist we cut way back on Social Security and Medicare. In that discussion, half a trillion goes a long way toward taking those programs off the chopping block. It's a serious chunk of change. But you, Mr. Brooks, when you play a shell game with your figures, are not a serious man, no matter how many times you put your sophomoric erudition on display.