Krugman- Means testing doublethink

[n2doc]

Reading Dean Baker this morning, something occurred to me: if you look at what passes for serious commentary about our fiscal situation, what you see is a remarkable example of doublethink: believing two contradictory things at the same time.

On one side, we have a steady barrage of articles about how it would be cruel to raise taxes on everyone making more than 250K, even though that puts you in the top 2 percent of the income distribution, because 250K isn’t really rich.

And on the other side we have confident assertions that we can curb entitlement spending by means-testing, by not giving full Social Security and Medicare benefits to people who don’t really need them.

And by and large the people saying these two things are the same people.

So apparently the universe of people so affluent that they don’t need Medicare is a large segment of the population, while the universe of people who can afford to pay even slightly higher taxes is a tiny segment.

Oh, Kay.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/means-testing-doublethink/