Jonathan Chait just makes the Fonzi of Freedom look like the fool that he is:
Reason.com editor Nick Gillespie has a response to my item gently pointing out his mathematical illiteracy and that of his co-author Veronique de Rugy. A good chunk of it seems to be tonal posturing whose purpose is to show that Gillespie is cooler than me. I’ll stipulate the point, because:
1. Everybody is cooler than me, and
2. Gillespie wears a black shirt and black leather jacket in virtually all his public appearances, and obviously you can’t get cooler than that.
As for the substance, Gillespie offers very little. Let me review my main point. He wrote an article, with de Rugy, suggesting that the federal budget could be balanced by 2020 without raising taxes from their Bush-era levels merely by cutting spending by 3.6% a year. He illustrated this with a video portraying the federal budget as a piece of pork (get it?) divided into ten slices, each slice representing a year. In the video, Gillespie slices off a small bit from each year, representing the tiny 3.6% of waste that would have to be trimmed.
As I showed, and Gillespie does not deny in his response, the claims he made in the video were false. The plan would require cutting the budget by 3.6% the first year, an additional 3.6% the next year, until the 2020 budget was 24% lower than it would be. In other words, Gillespie’s plan would not be slicing one little 3.6% off of each year. It would be slicing one piece off the first year, two pieces off the next year, three pieces off the third, and so on.
Reading Gillespie’s response, I don’t think he was being deliberately misleading. I think he genuinely does not understand the article he co-authored…
Too funny. The last I saw Gillespie, he was tweeting something about Net Neutrality being the greatest threat to freedom of speech EVAH. It’s completely distressing that anyone takes these clowns even remotely seriously.
And really- didn’t the House and Senate just prove once and for all with their votes on the tax cut bill that no one really gives a shit about the deficit?
*** Update ***
I need a cigarette after this:
I really advise Gillespie to confine himself to subjects he understands (motorcycles? picking up chicks with a snap of the fingers?) and find a fiscal writer who is able to make the libertarian case from factual premises.
Heh, indeedy.
Tom Hilton
“It’s a debate between Nick Gillespie and the laws of arithmetic.” That made me laugh out loud. Awesome.
General Stuck
Neither do I, but am glad you front paged them here to remind us.
Cat Lady
Just being called The Fonzie of Freedom would make a normal person curl up in a fetal position and never be seen in public again. The fact that he keeps the whole shtick going, after being called out so often, demonstrates the power of that sweet sweet Koch teat.
Steve in Iowa
Is this the same guy from Reason that maintains dual citizenship in France and gets all of his health-care treatments there because he prefers the French system to the backwards American system? But writes articles that the American healthcare system is better? I can’t keep track of all the idiots at Reason.
Mike in NC
Seems like all glibertarians are mathematically illiterate. Imagine that.
Crashman
This is the best line:
!!!
Pamela F
Hah! The glibertarians once again demonstrate how they’re “all hat and no cattle”. The John Wayners among them should appreciate that phrase.
Brachiator
Bingo!
Speaking of the Fonze, these Reason guys jumped the shark long ago. They are beyond clueless, and yet they keep plugging along.
Dennis SGMM
The importance of the deficit is in direct proportion to the GOP’s ability to use it to cudgel the Democrats. Contrast Cheney’s “Deficits don’t matter,” with the current “We’re not going to mortgage our grandchildren’s future!”
In fairness to the GOP I have to admit that when Cheney made that remark the GOP did get a low APR on our grandchildren’s future and the monthly payments on the two wars they financed with that mortgage were practically nothing because the term on them is infinite.
Bill E Pilgrim
This is great. So if you’re making let’s say $50,000 a year, all you have to do is take another part time job to make another $10,000 next year, then keep the job so you make $10,000 extra the year after that, and so on, and after ten years, you’ll be making $150,000 a year in income!
Damn, I should have been watching Libertarian videos long before this.
Sentient Puddle
Chait has one glaring factual inaccuracy in his post:
Incorrect. Gillespie is a terrible writer. If the goal of his writing was merely to entertain, then maybe he could be considered good by some weird standard that says out-smugging your foe is the way to go. But the goal is to inform, and even if he was factually correct, obfuscating those points with all this pretentious batcrap about how awesome you are detracts.
DonkeyKong
You could say that in Nick Gillespie’s response to Jon Chait he (drumroll please!) jumped the shark.
Thanks folks, I’ll be here all week and don’t forget to try the waitress and tip the veal.
dmsilev
@Crashman: I saw that, and while it’s a good line, it does have one flaw: It implicitly posits the existence of a writer who can make the libertarian case from factual premises.
dms
Jager
I’d bet Nick Gillespie isn’t his real name, its just so Randian. Strong, masculine, square jawed, powerful, direct, the kind of name that makes women quiver and men quake.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Remember way back when the Mexicans were advancing in Arizona and the Muslims were building a mosque on Ground Zero. Those were terrifying times. Thank goodness we persevered and defeated the brown hordes.
Wolverines!
Steve M.
Just for the record, even Jonathan Chait is cooler than I am.
ChrisS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DX9T6A4lsk
“You know what would make tightening my belt a little easier? If I could tighten it around Jesse Helms’s scrawny little chicken neck. Ahhhhh I feel better about the sacrifice right now. … you scrawny, right wing fear mongering, piece of …. sucker of Satan’s cock!”
Zifnab
This argument would be more compelling if the vote hadn’t occurred after the election.
Besides, when Obama’s been cutting taxes religiously since his first day in office, and a majority of Americans are still completely convinced that taxes have remained the same or gone up… Why does it matter what people “give a shit” about? They’re so misinformed, they wouldn’t know how to vote even if they did care about the deficit.
burnspbesq
@DonkeyKong:
I stopped going to that club. They have this really weird waitress named matoko, who got caught putting nanotech in customers’ drinks.
Zifnab
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Have you considered buying gold? I hear that’s a real economic winner. If everyone just bought more gold, we’d be out of this mess in no time.
ChrisS
Politics sure is cyclical, ain’t it?
Hicks has been dead for 16 years and 90% of his political material could be played verbatim with almost zero change in any of names. Bush, Cheney, Limbaugh, etc.
Anonymous At Work
John,
“Heh, indeedy” doesn’t fit because they’d hire de Rugy and/or McMegan as the “fiscal experts”. If a company is out-sourcing stuff that they aren’t good at, then they have to at least be good at identifying the stuff that they aren’t good at. What about Reason strikes you as meeting that standard?
Calouste
The problem with that is that you can’t make the libertarian case from factual premises. You have to make shit up and lie through your teeth and ignore a few thousand years of experience of how humans work to be able to make the libertarian case. Factual premises would present an unsurmountable obstacle.
SRW1
I once half-jokingly remarked that conservatives are people who must have a mutation in their embarrassment gene, but in the meantime I have come to the conclusion that there may be something to this. If someone would come up with the money, it might be worth a study.
maus
@dmsilev: It implies that they should try to, not that they can. We’ll all be happier if they spend all their time on that snipe hunt. Sure, it assumes that they would know it if they saw it…
@SRW1: It’s nurture, they are conditioned to be shameless in a Dunning–Kruger meets white and/or male privilege framework.
geg6
OMG:
Even better:
I think I need a cigarette.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Zifnab: True. Actually this news changes investing in general, look, all you have to get is a return of 3.6% of your original investment, per year… and before long you’ll be getting a 24% per year return!
According to the Libertarian magic pig, anyway.
Brachiator
Nick fought the law, and the law won.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@burnspbesq:
“Hi there! My name is Guy Fieri and on this espisode of Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, we vist the Cudlips Cafe where they are known for .. ah .. WTF? What was the heyyyalll was that ??”
[We apologise for technical difficulties. Normal programming will resume in a few minutes…]
Brian J
What nonsense. I’m not going to take an opinion on what should or should not be cut, but from what I understand, the current Republican position is something along the lines of cutting spending, except for Social Security, defense, Medicare/Medicaid, and education (along with interest on the debt, which isn’t an option). In other words, they want to cut out lots of stuff, except for that which composes about 75 to 85 percent of the budget–also known as, all other discretionary spending. I think a lot of things are more politically possible than we realize, but man, that doesn’t seem politically possible, nor does it seem economically sensible. Considering that tax increases appear to be off the table, this means that the big things like Medicare will need to be cut, if the Republicans aren’t incoherent when it comes to this stuff.
And we all know Republicans wouldn’t be incoherent and irresponsible when it comes to the federal budget…right?
joe from Lowell
Wow.
That’s just embarrassing.
Crusty Dem
Please help me, I started reading the comments there. The stupid is so thick…
Omnes Omnibus
@Crusty Dem: Bathe in acid. It can only help.
pragmatism
hey glibertarians, even mistress ayn thought you were ass clowns. i’d say you should go galt but you would be denied entry to the gulch. maybe she’d want to let fonzi pleasure her, however.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Brian J: If we’d just ignore the Republicans enough, they would spend so much of the government’s borrowed money that it would be easy for them to cut back 24%. Then everything would be balanced. At least that’s how I think Gillespie’s math is supposed to work.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@pragmatism: I wonder when many self-styled libertarians will realize that they’re the ones being left behind to run the businesses. All we have to do now is wait for them to turn the lights off on the upper floors.
pragmatism
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
perhaps we should write a new “Left Behind” series? i’m sure the glibs believe that their koch-masters will take them to reagan heaven when the econosociorapture happens.
some guy
remind me again why I should give a shit what some dickhead writing at The New Racist says about anything? because he made fun of some glibertarian asshole, that’s it?
PPOG Penguin
@geg6: Then it must be time for right-wing astroturfers to challenge the laws of arithmetic as having no basis in the Constitution.
the idler
@Crusty Dem: How thick? Can I use it to spackle my bathroom?
Bill E Pilgrim
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Really good point. The coming Singularity of Incompetence when what’s left actually needs to be managed and no one involved has ever done anything except frolic in imaginary DisneyRand.
Brian J
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Heh. That’s like the health care episode from the first season of “The Office” where Jim and Pam ask Dwight, who was assigned to pick a new plan and went with a bare bones option, why he didn’t want a good plan. He said that he had superior genes and health and, among other things, could raise and lower his blood pressure at will. When Pam asked him why he wanted to raise his blood pressure, he responded, quite seriously, “So I can lower it again.”
Anyway, I haven’t posted here regularly in a while, so people might not remember that I am a fan of Suze Orman and her CNBC show. Whatever her faults, she’s good at giving people basic advice about personal finance. At various points, she’s said to people that getting their finances in order is really some combination of cutting their spending and/or raising their income. There’s really no way around it.
While government finances are different from personal finances, the same sort of idea seems to apply here. If you want to cut government spending, figure out what you want to cut and then set a plan in motion in order to do it. People need to stop pretending as if it’s some sort of complicated process. Enacting such cuts might be hard, but that’s a different issue. Deciding what to cut isn’t fucking brain surgery, and I’m tired of people acting like it is, particularly assholes on the right.
arguingwithsignposts
What the fk is up with that look? Does he think he’s Lou Reed?
Crusty Dem
@the idler:
Spackle? Hell, if you could cut it into pieces (diamond saw), I’m pretty sure you could use it to tile your bathroom.
pragmatism
@arguingwithsignposts:
johnny cash?
also, as well, http://www.theonion.com/articles/heat-wave-forces-johnny-cash-to-don-black-shorts,8870/
NobodySpecial
You know the worst part?
Nick Gillespie has a well-paying job lying until the day someone takes all of the money away. And the people who pay him keep winning in the back rooms of policy, so that will never happen.
This man will die with his sinecure intact. And that’s fucking depressing.
DougJ
@DonkeyKong:
FTW
jl
I give the original Gillespie video an A for snark.
On what the heck he is trying show, not so much.
I like the specificity of the proposed cuts. It reads like a catechism written by someone on a long deep drinking spree.
What should be cut from the budget, Young Master?
The no good ‘fatty’ parts, should be cut from the budget, my good Sir.
pragmatism
shouldn’t ED be ombudsing this? we need some thin skinned responses.
arguingwithsignposts
Even Megan McArdle’s calculator couldn’t help Gillespie on this one.
ETA: @pragmatism – someone should invite the glibertarians from LOOG over to play.
DougJ
This is dumber than what I expected. Here’s a common mistake people make:
They say let’s cut 20% a year, so if the first year is 100, the next is 80, the next is 60. But in fact the in the second year, you’re really cutting 25% because 20% of 100 is 25% of 80. This is an understandable mistake, not everyone gets compound interest (which is what that is in reverse).
Gillespie is being much dumber than that. He doesn’t understand that cutting 3.6% the first year, then another 3.6% of your already cut amount the second year and so on, is not the same as just cutting 3.6% once and leaving that cut for your ten years.
This is really idiotic, embarrassingly so.
arguingwithsignposts
@DougJ:
If you weren’t a libertarian, that fact might hold.
pragmatism
@arguingwithsignposts:
the members of the glibertarian circle jerk only come over here to check and see how DougJ’s perceived mancrush on radley balko is going. the verdict is in with those guys. ballon juice was interesting back when John was in transition but run of the mill now that John is an 0bot.
Kolohe
Glad you feel better. It’s totally awesome to cheer on and engage in scorched earth personal attacks against people who could be your allies on all the stuff that’s beenbringing you down lately.
It’s good to have a reliable pick-me up when your feeling bad. Mine’s a good cup of medium roasted Kona coffee.
MikeJ
@Jager:
Are you calling him a rapist? Did she ever write a male protagonist that wasn’t?
Kirk Spencer
@Brian J: And you, too, made the strange comparison.
For a family it’s cut expenses and raise income.
For government, however, it’s just cut expenses. What happened to raise revenues?
There are a lot of reviews of the laffer curve. The peak of the curve — the optimal balance of taxation for purposes of generating revenues for the government — varies depending on the analysis. However, they all come in higher than we are right now.
The optimal solution to the issue of reducing the deficit includes raising taxes.
IM
@arguingwithsignposts:
I am reminded of Tony Danza.
Early eighties opinions of cool.
Martin
@Brian J:
Actually, it is pretty hard. Balancing the national budget isn’t like balancing your personal budget, rather the budget of someone you barely know.
The national budget marinades in secondary effects. That’s why this whole argument takes place. Kill off something seemingly stupid like school lunch funding for low-income kids and you’ll have a corresponding increase in high-school dropouts, lower student performance, and a host of social problems in the host city that state and local governments will need to pay for, plus increased federal welfare services for a generation. It may not increase a lot, but then school lunches don’t cost a lot. Turns out buying a bunch of poor kids saves the government money. The only valid question is ‘how poor’. And nobody really knows that answer.
It’s hard. In fact, it’s really goddamn hard.
licensed to kill time
@Martin:
I know this is a typo but it made me laugh. Whatever are they going to do with all those poor kids?!
arguingwithsignposts
@Martin:
The enemies on the right know the answer. Their answer, anyway. “Are there no poorhouses?”
IM
@Kolohe:
I doubt that. I want to defend and expand the welfare state, regulate the financial sector, protect the environment etc.
On none of these things libertarians will be allies.
freelancer
@DougJ:
The Dumb is strong with that one.
arguingwithsignposts
@licensed to kill time:
There are four branches of the services and a penitentiary system that should provide you with an answer.
(I know, it was funny to me too when I read @Martin’s typo)
Bill E Pilgrim
@DougJ: I was playfully trying to imagine what the real setup would have to sound like to justify the whole thing, which would be something like:
“Here’s a piece of pork. It represents our current federal spending. Each slice represents a year of spending. Actually, each starting slice represents the previous slice, minus 3.6%. So really the pork roast should really be sort of tapered at the start, getting smaller from one end to the other, but that’s not important. So anyway each of these increasingly smaller slices gets cut by another 3.6%… wait no, the second slice represents the first slice minus 3.6%, then the third slice represents the second slice, minus a bit higher percentage than that, what would that be…. ”
All I can say is if this guy has a cooking show, I’m definitely not watching.
Martin
@licensed to kill time: Um, yeah. There might be a word missing in there. Though buying poor kids sounds like something that Reason would explore as a possible solution to what ails us.
licensed to kill time
@arguingwithsignposts:
I was going to ask if they’d get their own special house but you beat me to it :)
bemused
@Jager:
Origin of words are interesting to research. The word randy came to include sexual arousal or lewdness in the 1800’s but earlier it probably came from an old Dutch word “randen” meaning to rave or talk foolishly (rant), lacking any sense of propriety or restraint.
Brachiator
@Martin:
There are no poor kids in libertarian fantasy land. They could easily either get jobs (in the absence of anti-competitive child labor laws), start a business or sell body parts.
See how easy it is?
More seriously, good example.
IM
@Martin:
A modest proposal – the first libertarian tract?
norbizness
I always thought he was the Anton Chigurh of glibertarianism, blowing bolts in the heads of facts with an airgun.
MikeJ
@Martin: The problem is you’ve used logic to pragmatically make things better for everyone and save money too. You have not used principles to punish the weak or to comfort the strong. This will not do for Republicans of any stripe (even those that deny the label.)
norbizness
I mean, come on. This nickname was a no-brainer.
Buck
OT: Corker starts the ball rolling…
Sen. Corker Threatens Reid: If You Bring DADT Repeal For A Vote, We’ll Walk Away From START
arguingwithsignposts
@Buck:
Oh, please, Sen. Reid. Call his fking slimeball ass on it. Please!
Buck
@arguingwithsignposts:
I didn’t hear that part… Have a link?
Omnes Omnibus
@Buck: @arguingwithsignposts:
Un-fucking-believable. They really just won’t quit.
nhoj
@Omnes Omnibus:
Kyl was talking about how they couldn’t get to START because the partisan nature of the other things that the senate has taken up this year. Right.
Then McCain, Kyl and Graham all clutched their pearls over the insinuation that there was a quid pro quo for voting on the tax policy meaning taking up start. Do they remember the letter they sent two weeks ago?
pragmatism
@arguingwithsignposts:
exactly. poker, not 11 dimensional chess. dems check, gopers raise with nothing, got to call at least and preferably raise. put those vinegar based feminine products all in.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Buck: I think awsp was imploring Reid to have the vote anyway.
arguingwithsignposts
@Buck:
The link is to my “Dear Santa” letter. It’s in the mail. I’d paste it in, but I can’t find the right tray for paper in this computational machine.
ETA: what @belafon said.
MikeJ
The republicans are self destructive if they don’t let the DADT repeal vote happen. Think of what repeal does for them electorally. 1) One less reason for gay people to vote for Dems, since they’ll have one of the things they want. 2) They can campaign on opposition, which is always easier. They’ve made hay for 40 years off Roe v Wade.
Sure they’ll posture, but if they have any sense they’ll let it slip through.
Buck
@Omnes Omnibus: & @Belafon (formerly anonevent):
With all things considered, I (unrealistically) thought DADT might be repealed without a hitch.
I was wrong, of course. So wrong, nothing short of a hammer-blow to my skull is called for.
Buck
@MikeJ: That seems logical.
MikeJ
@Buck: Which means it’s probably a pile of crap.
Buck
@arguingwithsignposts:
Oh.
(PS- I love BJ commentariat’s snappy responses. No other blog can compare!)
Douglas
@MikeJ:
Dunno, maybe they’re counting on gays and liberals not coming out to vote in 2012 cause Obama failed in making good on his promise to end DADT.
Just have to be enough news proclaim that Obama/”congress” failed to repeal it, without explaining what actually happened.
jwb
@Omnes Omnibus: “Un-fucking-believable. They really just won’t quit.” You expected they would? Listen, the result here has never been in doubt, and if anything more gets passed this session it will only be because someone on the Gooper side of the aisle missed their assignment. Really, the only question is how they will manage to scuttle everything while convincing the media to blame the Dems.
Martin
@IM: Yeah, it seems the ideal Libertarian solution would be to feed the poorest kids to the next group (soylent sloppy joes) and repeat until the problem eliminated itself. This would cost nothing, and have numerous additional fiscal benefits.
Omnes Omnibus
@jwb: At one level, I know this; at another level, I simply can’t believe that they are as crassly cynical as they are.
les
Where’s Demosthenes when you need him?
Omnes Omnibus
@les: For a second, I was thinking of Diogenes and was confused about why he would go anywhere near the libertarians.
62across
@Kolohe:
It’s not really useful to have an ally in an ideological fight whose arguments can’t withstand scrutiny. It’s actually hurtful.
Now, if your new allies could be counted on to deliver a bloc of voters maybe you’d overlook the weak arguments, but as the self-proclaimed libertarians don’t have that to offer, they aren’t worth the effort.
Woodrow "asim" Jarvis Hill
As my brother put it after I walked him through all this, “More like the Fonzi of Fuckups. Jackass.”
silentbeep
@Steve in Iowa: No that’s Matt Welch. I keep track of them so you don’t have to.
Tax Analyst
@Calouste:
That’s where lying through your fucking teeth comes in so handy.
asiangrrlMN
Marvelous. The only quibble I have is with this line:
Asshats like Gillespie talk about getting chicks more than they actually do. He’s completely repulsive.
Mark S.
I haven’t read Reason’s idiot comment section in a while so I’m a bit surprised it’s gotten even dumber. Jesus, I will never dis on Megan McCardle’s comment section again: they’re mother fucking geniuses compared to the dipshits who comment at Reason. Only one comment mentioned the incredibly stupid math error Fonzi made, and of course that got no response.