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This is “water wet, sky blue” stuff and I should probably be spending my time on something more productive, but…

It seems that Glenn Beck is now being promoted by CNN as a featured online columnist, which makes me wonder if that network has any journalistic credibility left at all.

And in this piece of drivel, he uses our current economic melt down triggered by the mortgage subprime lending crisis to accomplish two things: the first is to take another shot at Hillary Clinton, and the second is to tell us all that cutting corporate tax rates will solve everything (see, doing that will spur investment and job growth, encouraging people to spend and saving our economy).

The Repugs and their acolytes are nothing if not predictable, aren’t they? But in the real world, this tells us the following…

Congressional Budget Office data show that the tax cuts have been the single largest contributor to the reemergence of substantial budget deficits in recent years. Legislation enacted since 2001 has added about $2.3 trillion to deficits between 2001 and 2006, with half of this deterioration in the budget due to the tax cuts (about a third was due to increases in security spending, and about a sixth to increases in domestic spending). Yet the President and some Congressional leaders decline to acknowledge the tax cuts’ role in the nation’s budget problems, falling back instead on the discredited nostrum that tax cuts “pay for themselves.”

...

The claim that tax cuts pay for themselves had already been rejected by the Administration’s own leading economists. Edward Lazear, the current chair of President’s Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, has stated, “I certainly would not claim that tax cuts pay for themselves.” N. Gregory Mankiw, President’s Bush’s former CEA chair and a well-known Harvard economics professor, has written that there is “no credible evidence” that “tax revenues… rise in the face of lower tax rates.” Mankiw compared an economist who says that tax cuts pay for themselves to a “snake oil salesman trying to sell a miracle cure.”

And Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson echoed that line refuting Beck here.

Still, though, it would be nice if the Repugs would get it through their heads once and for all that tax cuts don’t do much by comparison to help the economy; indeed, the opposition to this often wrong-headed policy by St. McCain is one of the reasons why he’s in a dog fight with Huckabee in South Carolina; otherwise he would probably be ahead (here - I have other issues with “Senator Honor and Virtue,” but this shouldn’t be one of them).

And as far as the minimum wage increase which passed last year, Beck said that it would help primarily part-time, younger workers, when in fact (as noted here), it would primarily help full-time workers. And in the case of at least one state, Illinois (here), it was expected to stimulate job growth.

I realize I’d have better luck trying to explain this to my cat than to a hateful demagogue like Beck, but I feel like I have to take a shot at this every now and then (and to get a feel for what a low life this guy truly is, take a look at this).

And here is my final Media Matters link for this post in which Beck admits that he’s “a recovering scumbag.”

That much is certain.

Update 1/28: Why did I know that this involved Beck before I even opened the link?