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Wingnut welfare is an important, underrated feature of the modern U.S. political scene. I don’t know who came up with the term, but anyone who follows right-wing careers knows whereof I speak: the lavishly-funded ecosystem of billionaire-financed think tanks, media outlets, and so on provides a comfortable cushion for politicians and pundits who tell such people what they want to hear. Lose an election, make economic forecasts that turn out laughably wrong, whatever — no matter, there’s always a fallback job available.

Obviously this reality has important incentive effects. It encourages conservatives to espouse ever-cruder positions, because they don’t need to be taken seriously outside their closed universe. But it also, I’ve been noticing, makes them remarkably lazy.

Thus, Matt O’Brien marvels at Stephen Moore’s latest, with its “cherry-picking and unsupported assertions.” What O’Brien doesn’t note is that these assertions aren’t new; Moore and others have made them many times before, and they’ve been thoroughly debunked many times, for example here and here. No, revenues didn’t experience miraculous growth under Reagan; if you adjust, as you obviously should, for inflation and population growth, they grew less in the Reagan years than they did under Ford/Carter, and much less than under Clinton. Yes, the share of taxes paid by the rich rose — but only because of soaring inequality, which raised the share of the wealthy in income. And so on.

What’s remarkable, then, is that Moore doesn’t even try to come up with new distortions. He just rolls out the old debunked stuff, ignoring the criticisms. There are many adjectives you could apply to this work, but the one that stands out for me is just plain lazy.

But then again, why not? The audience for this kind of thing doesn’t want actual insight, it just wants affirmation of what it wants to hear, and it doesn’t care how embarrassingly you screw up as long as you’re ideologically on the right side. Someone like Moore effectively faces a 100 percent marginal tax rate on intellectual effort — no matter how much or how little time he puts in getting facts and numbers right, it will make no difference at all to his career. And the Heritage Foundation gets what it pays for.