Can’t Negotiate With Crazy People

Steve Benen has a great post today about the “fundamental impossibility” of negotiating with people who are “detached from reality.”

Mary Katharine Ham helpfully provides the case in point by arguing, in the same post, that (a) tax cuts are a more effective economic stimulus; and (b) that John Kerry is right when he says that tax cuts only help the individuals who receive them (emphasis in original):

During his speech, he addressed the argument made by fellow senators and many economists that tax cuts might be more helpful to stimulating the economy than long-term government spending. The American people are also coming around to that view, according to a recent CBS poll, which found only 22 percent of them favor more government spending over tax cuts as stimulus.

His argument against tax cuts for Americans during these hard economic times was illuminating:

 

I’ve supported many tax cuts over the years, and there are tax cuts in this proposal. But a tax cut is non-targeted.

If you put a tax cut into the hands of a business or family, there’s no guarantee that they’re going to invest that or invest it in America.

They’re free to go invest anywhere that they want if they choose to invest.

 

Indeed, people with their own hard-earned money in their own pockets are free to spend, save, invest, or not wherever they please. Kerry betrays the fear that haunts every good liberal— that the American people won’t spend their money on exactly what good liberals would spend it on. Good liberals must, therefore, advocate for forcibly relieving the American people of the better part of a trillion dollars of their own money to fund things like STD education, welfare programs, and water parks.

Senators like Kerry have placed their own ideological desires over the right of the American people to a clean stimulus bill without the long-term spending even Obama himself admits is in it.

So which is it, Mary Katharine? Do tax cuts stimulate the economy as a whole, or do they stimulate only the pocketbooks of Americans wealthy (and employed) enough to receive them? It can’t be both.

Oh, wait. I just remembered. MKH is a far right Republican, which means that, by definition, she is unmoored from facts and the real world.

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