Brooks gets attacked for asking Republicans to accept higher taxes. | Photo provided by NBC Bloggers bop NYT's David Brooks

David Brooks, the New York Times scribe known as liberals’ favorite conservative, got no love from bloggers on the right Tuesday after penning a column trashing the tea party movement and calling on congressional Republicans to accept a small tax increase.

Timothy Carney of the Washington Examiner blogged that Brooks writes of a deal – trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for “a few hundred million dollars” in new taxes – that is not even publicly on the table.


“David Brooks loves the imaginary tax deal that exists in his own brain,” Carney headlined his piece.

He writes: “The columnist undermines his entire argument with his false premise. In fact, no Democrats are offering entitlement cuts in exchange for eliminating tax credits.”

At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey picks apart Brooks’s thesis that the no-compromise edict being brokered by tea party-backed legislators the Times writer calls “more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative” in a column Tuesday headlined “The Mother of All No-Brainers.”

“If we are net borrowing every year, adding to debt, then we will never be in position to fulfill a ‘sacred pledge to pay the money back,’” Morrissey wrote. “ That’s a rather large flaw in fiscal policy and in Brooks’ logic, which may be one reason why some of these Republicans don’t pay much attention to ‘intellectual authorities’ like, er, David Brooks.”

George Mason University economics professor Don Boudreaux wrote on the school’s libertarian blog Cafe Hayek of Brooks’s claim that output rising as manufacturing employment falls is bad thing for the economy.

“I wonder if Brooks writes his columns, essays, and books using only a quill, parchment, and snailmail. If he doesn’t use these inefficient means of production – that is, if he in fact uses computers, word-processing software, ink-jet printers, e-mail, and other modern techniques that increase his productivity (and, thus, that cause the amount of time that he and others spend producing punditicities to crater even as their output rises) – why does he bemoan increasing worker productivity in the manufacturing sector?”

The liberal blogosphere received the Brooks column with only slightly less anger.

Driftglass writes that Brooks, because he generally has supported Republican candidates and causes, is wholly responsible for the very uncompromising vitriol he now decries.

“The question remains, where were you, Mr. Brooks, when Reagan was instructing them that the government is always wrong, always evil? Where were you when the leaders of your Movement were teaching them that everyone not in the Movement was a Commie? That compromise was treason?” he wrote.

At Daily Kos, Litho calls Brooks “perhaps the very definition of Republican hackitude” and at Firedoglake, Scarecrow wrote that the Brooks theoretical no-tax proposal would result in tax hikes for states and local governments.

“He claims the deal does not increase marginal tax rates, a favorite canard of those who can’t connect the dots when the feds depriving states of needed funding to prevent massive layoffs and cuts,” Scarecrow wrote.

“So states raise effective tax rates on public employees by cutting salaries and pensions and raising employee benefit contributions. If the tax rate on the rich were increased enough to avoid these de facto middle class tax increases, Brooks would be howling along with Cantor and Boehner about how unfair it all is and how foolish it is to raise taxes in a bad economy.”