“Wingnut welfare” is an important, underrated feature of the modern American political scene. I don’t know who came up with the term, but anyone who follows right-wing careers knows whereof I speak: the lavishly funded ecosystem of billionaire-financed think tanks and media outlets that provides a comfortable cushion for politicians and pundits who tell such people what they want to hear.
Lose an election? Make economic forecasts that turn out to be laughably wrong? No matter, there’s always a fallback job available.
Obviously this reality has important incentive effects. It encourages conservatives to espouse ever-cruder positions, because they don’t need to be taken seriously outside their closed universe. But I’ve been noticing that it also makes them remarkably lazy.
Thus, Matt O’Brien recently marveled on Twitter at Stephen Moore’s latest article in The Weekly Standard, with its “cherry-picking and unsupported assertions.” What Mr. O’Brien, an economics reporter at The Washington Post, doesn’t note is that these assertions aren’t new; Mr. Moore and others have made them many times before, and they’ve been thoroughly debunked.
No, revenues didn’t grow miraculously under President Reagan; if you adjust, as you obviously should, for inflation and population growth, they grew less in the Reagan years than they did under Presidents Ford and Carter, and much less than under President Clinton. Yes, the share of taxes paid by the rich rose – but only because of soaring inequality, which raised the income share of the wealthy. And so on.
What’s remarkable, then, is that Mr. Moore, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, doesn’t even try to come up with new distortions.
He just rolls out the old debunked arguments, while ignoring the criticisms. There are many ways that you could describe this work, but the phrase that stands out for me is: just plain lazy.
But then again, why not?
The audience for this kind of thing doesn’t want actual insight, it just wants affirmation of what it already believes, and it doesn’t care how much you embarrass yourself, as long as you’re on the right side ideologically.
Someone like Mr. Moore effectively faces a 100 percent marginal tax rate on intellectual effort – no matter how much or how little time he puts into getting the facts right, it won’t have any impact at all on his career.
And the Heritage Foundation gets what it pays for.
Help us Prepare for Trump’s Day One
Trump is busy getting ready for Day One of his presidency – but so is Truthout.
Trump has made it no secret that he is planning a demolition-style attack on both specific communities and democracy as a whole, beginning on his first day in office. With over 25 executive orders and directives queued up for January 20, he’s promised to “launch the largest deportation program in American history,” roll back anti-discrimination protections for transgender students, and implement a “drill, drill, drill” approach to ramp up oil and gas extraction.
Organizations like Truthout are also being threatened by legislation like HR 9495, the “nonprofit killer bill” that would allow the Treasury Secretary to declare any nonprofit a “terrorist-supporting organization” and strip its tax-exempt status without due process. Progressive media like Truthout that has courageously focused on reporting on Israel’s genocide in Gaza are in the bill’s crosshairs.
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We’re preparing right now for Trump’s Day One: building a brave coalition of movement media; reaching out to the activists, academics, and thinkers we trust to shine a light on the inner workings of authoritarianism; and planning to use journalism as a tool to equip movements to protect the people, lands, and principles most vulnerable to Trump’s destruction.
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