It appears that I'm not the only one who was struck by the sheer arrogance of Greg Mankiw's stupid proposal to raise gas taxes. There are five letters to the editor in today's Wall Street Journal in response to this left-wing lunacy. My favorite was written by Keith Carpenter from Fort Worth:
My feelings exactly, Keith. And I must admit I was quite surprised when Bush picked Mankiw for his Chairman of the CEA. The good professor has done some excellent research in macroeconomics, but when it comes to government fiscal policy, he has strong Keynesian/saltwater tendencies.Whenever I read an article or listen to someone crow about raising the gas tax. I am reminded of how far removed some people are from the rest of us who have to work for a living. Every point in Prof. Mankiw's commentary boils down to improperly using the tax code to force a certain behavior and enact social change, all in a quest to show us poor fols who have to drive to work, to the store or to pick up the kids that we're just not in line with the professor's progressive thinking. If being in traffic makes Prof. Mankiw wish the rest of us would drive less, reading socialist diatribes like his make me wish people like him would write less.
Greg Mankiw got his Bachelor's degree from Princeton, his PhD from MIT, and now he's on the faculty at Harvard. I don't know him personally but I know some people who do and they tell me he is a decent fellow. The problem is that he doesn't have a clue about the middle class Americans in the red states. He hasn't spent much time interacting with some guy who works as a plumber in Pensacola, Florida, or some woman who manages a 7-11 in Killeen, Texas. He has spent all his adult life in the rarified atmosphere of the elite in the Northeast. He probably had no intention of coming across as so arrogant in his Op-Ed, but in the circles he travels there is nothing but disdain for the little people, and some of it has rubbed off on him, either consciously or subconsciously.
No comments:
Post a Comment