Budget Policy and the White Racist Vote

But among white people, the big issue is that ethnocentricity drives attitudes about social welfare spending. And not in a totally unambiguous way.

When it comes to programs targeted at the poor, ethnocentrism correlates with stinginess (you may have to take my word for it that that’s what this math means

But when it comes to programs targeted at the elderly, ethnocentrism correlates with generosity:

.. Now to be clear—there’s no particularly good reason for people to react like this. Blacks and Latinos benefit from Social Security and Medicare and most of the people on food stamps and Medicaid are white. But the politics are what they are. And so the point is that if you were to try to rework the GOP coalition to be less white-centric

Why Marco Rubio is insisting that his massive tax cuts will pay for themselves, explained

Conservatives hate taxes, they dislike deficits, and they’re scared of spending cuts. Dynamic scoring is the answer.

The basic idea here is that massive tax cuts boost growth so much that they pay for themselves, and so there’s no actual trade-off between lower taxes and balanced budgets. In this telling, eating your cake leads your body to burn calories so fast that it’s like you end up thinner than you started!

.. As Jonathan Chait wrote, the skeptical reception Rubio’s plan got among many on the right spoke to a problem almost without precedent in the modern GOP: Rubio had designed a tax cut “so gargantuan that nobody in the party actually believes it.”

.. While Rubio gives some lip service to deficit reduction — he later tells Harwood that balancing the budget will require entitlement reform, not just tax reform — he clearly cares a lot more about the tax cuts than about the deficit reduction, just as Bush did.