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To: TimF who wrote (631079)	10/10/2011 1:08:49 AM
From: TimF	4 Recommendations Respond to of 1576601

Fisking Krugman is like probing a sore tooth… September 23rd, 2011 · 3 Comments · Critical Thinking, Demagoguery, Media, Politics It hurts, but, fascinated by the pain, one cannot stop doing it. Paul Krugman: This week President Obama said the obvious: that wealthy Americans, many of whom pay remarkably little in taxes, should bear part of the cost of reducing the long-run budget deficit. Bullshit. This has been thoroughly debunked – see, e.g., here and here. That the rich pay “remarkably little in taxes” is only obvious to those leftist hacks who haven’t done their homework. And Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan responded with shrieks of “class warfare.” It was, of course, nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it’s people like Mr. Ryan, who want to exempt the very rich from bearing any of the burden of making our finances sustainable, who are waging class war. It is class warfare, if by class warfare we mean an attempt to intentionally increase friction between different social classes for purposes of political gain. That’s exactly what Obama was doing. And I’ve never heard Mr. Ryan say he wants to exempt the rich from taxes. …Meanwhile, over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. No, that isn’t a misprint. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million. So do the wealthy look to you like the victims of class warfare? This is retarded even by Krugman’s standards. That they are wealthy, and increasingly so over time, isn’t even remotely an argument that they aren’t the victims of class warfare. In fact the opposite is true: they are the victims of class warfare specifically because they are wealthy, and consequently it is politically advantageous for leftist politicians to stir up friction against them. To be fair, That would be a first for Krugman. there is argument about the extent to which government policy was responsible for the spectacular disparity in income growth. Feh. Income inequality in and of itself is not worth worrying about, as discussed here. I could go on, but it’s just more of the same: Krugman straw-manning and unfairly misrepresenting the opinions of those to whom he is ideologically opposed, so he can show that they, and not the left, are the ones engaging in class warfare. The bottom line is that income inequality does not equate to class warfare. Some people being tremendously wealthy is not class warfare. Some people being poor is not class warfare. Class warfare is when people engage in cheap rhetorical attacks against the wealthy with the intent of stirring up friction between social classes, for purposes of furthering their own political and ideological agendas. Paul Krugman is what real class warfare looks like. thethinkerblog.com