The Buchanan Rule: Every Person -- Except Buchanan -- Who Propose Simplistic Rules Is a Hack or (and?) a Fraud
Although the chaotic news cycle moves inexorably forward, the sheer cruelty of the Trump budget law that congressional Republicans are celebrating deserves our continued attention. It is not as though the effects of the bill's many depravities are all behind us, because it has been the law for less than a week and will continue to inflict gratuitous harm on people -- including tens of millions of people who do not think of themselves as vulnerable or even "dependent" on the government -- for decades to come. In my column yesterday, I called out the non-Republican commentators who are opportunistically (at best) or ignorantly (at worst) pushing the narrative that the budget bill is bad because "it increases the debt by $3.3 trillion over the next ten years." As I pointed out, the bill could have been debt-neutral but even more harmful than it is. After all, if one buys into -- or merely accepts as a matter of political reality -- the Republicans' continued...