The Conscience of a Liberal

Docid=52&Topic2id=60; distribution, http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/ TaxFacts/TFDB/TFTemplate. cfm? Docid=50&Topic2id=60.

8.

Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro, Death by a Thousand Cuts (Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 222–24.

9.

Robert Dreyfuss, “Grover Norquist: Field Marshal of the Bush Plan,” The Nation, May 14, 2001.

10.

William Greider, “Rolling Back the 20th Century,” The Nation, May 26, 2003.

11.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Center_for_Policy_ Analysis.

12.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ethics_and_Public_Policy_ Center; http://www.epcc.org/news/ newsid.2818/news_detail.asp.

13.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Center_for_Public_ Policy_Research.

14.

Nicholas Confessore, “Welcome to the Machine,” Washington Monthly, July/Aug. 2003, cover story.

15.

David Maraniss and Michael Weisskopf, “Speaker and His Directors Make the Cash Flow Right,” Washington Post, November 27, 1995, p. A01.

16.

Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis, “Achieving a Leninist Strategy,” Cato Journal 3, no. 2 (Fall 1983), pp. 547–61.

17.

Edsall, New Politics of Inequality, p. 74.

9 WEAPONS OF MASS DISTRACTION

1.

See Larry Bartels, “What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas?”

2.

As with almost everything involving government finance, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Medicare Part A, which provides hospital care, is financed by a proportional tax on all earned income (but not on capital income such as dividends and capital gains.) The rest of Medicare is paid for out of general revenue, which mostly means the personal income tax, a strongly progressive tax that is mainly paid by the richest 10 percent of households.

3.

See Karen Smith and Eric Toder, “Lifetime Distributional Effects of Social Security Retirement Benefits,” paper prepared for the Third Annual Joint Conference for the Retirement Research Consortium, “Making Hard Choices About Retirement,” May 17–18, 2001, Washington, D.C.

4.

Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Henry Holt, 2004).

5.

“‘Welfare queen’ Becomes Issue in Reagan Campaign,” New York Times, Feb. 15, 1976, p. 51.

6.

Werner Sombart, Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus? (Mohr, 1906).

7.

Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, “Why Doesn’t the US Have a European-Style Welfare State?” (National Bureau of Economic Research working paper no. 8524, Oct. 2001).

8.

See Jill Quadagno, One Nation Uninsured: Why the U.S. Has No Health Insurance (Oxford University Press, 2005).