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Here's so-called "business columnist" Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post:

Leave it to Charlie Rangel to come up with a tax bill that is both good policy and great politics... But because Rangel proposes to pay for his AMT fix by repealing the Bush marginal income tax cuts for households with incomes above $200,000 a year, and by closing tax loopholes enjoyed by managers of private equity and hedge funds, Republicans immediately cranked up their Big Lie machine and attacked Rangel's proposal as the "biggest income tax cut in history."

Well, actually, er... no. What Republicans are calling it is what it is "the largest single income tax increase in American history." You hear that, Pearlstein, you blithering fool? Increase, not cut. Do you know the difference between an increase and a cut? Do you know what Republicans are actually saying? Do you know anything at all when you write one of your so-called "business columns"?

My DC-insider pal "Mick Danger" comments,

I guess it's in the water here in Washington: lies, damn lies and lying about lying. No wonder the rest of the country tunes us out.

Pearlstein praises the "Mother of all Tax Reforms" by Charlie Rangel as a complete tour de force of redistributive economics. He got that part right. Pearlstein then twists the knife and the truth with it by condemning the Democrats for lacking the political courage and political skills to push it, as if Rangel can?t stand up in that wind without support from Pearlstein.

Pearlstein doesn't mention that Rangel is more powerful than any other committee chair in the House or the Senate; perhaps Pearlstein doesn't know this. The party ratio on the Ways & Means Committee is stacked 2-to-1 in favor of the majority by a long-standing tradition in the House. (The Republicans also stacked the Way & Means Committee during their majority.) Pearlstein wants to blame someone, or something, for the fact that Rangel?s big bill is not on the real agenda. Hey, Steve, it?s only intended to get the hard corps liberals excited about ?possibilities.? If Charlie Rangel wanted to pass the Manhattan phone book, he could do it. (Forget about the Senate.)

Leading up to all that silliness, Pearlstein rattles on about the Republican "Big Lie" campaign, asserting, as if he was only stating the obvious, that Republicans would rather impose a tax on emergency room doctors than on hedge fund traders*. Sigh. Note to Steve: emergency room doctors are covered in the Rangel plan -- their tax bill goes up.

Republicans are against raising taxes per se; Republicans are even against raising taxes on biased political writers pretending to be business columnists.

Update... And speaking of the AMT, here's a great letter from Don Boudreaux to the New York Times (which they will surely never publish):

There's widespread agreement that the alternative minimum tax - because it is not indexed to inflation - is mistakenly raising the taxes of millions of Americans ("House Democrats Propose Tax Overhaul," October 25). Happily, there's also widespread agreement that this mistake should be corrected.

So, given that the current operation of the AMT is a mistake, why do Rep. Charles Rangel and so many others talk of the need to "pay for" fixing the AMT? A merchant who mistakenly overcharges customers is obliged to refund the money and stop overcharging, period. This obligation kicks in whether or not the merchant devises some way of replacing the revenue that he loses by correcting his mistake

.Thanks to reader Richard Sinda.

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