EVEN WHEN HE'S RIGHT HE'S WRONG. You know anyone like that? People who, even when they occasionally wander over to the right side on an argument, have such bogus reasons for doing so that you can't even agree with them without wincing?


Here's Mickey Kaus on the Clinton Boom versus the Reagan Boom (a concern brought up by this Times item):

In Sunday's N.Y. Post, Rich Lowry correctly notes that the sharply rising income share of the 400 richest Americans--implicitly lamented in David Cay Johnston's latest NYT piece--occurred on Bill Clinton's watch. Why didn't Democrats denounce the Clinton years as a "Decade of Greed," Lowry asks?... Someone should defend the Clinton Boom, precisely on the grounds that '90s income inequality was relatively benign compared with '80s income inequality... The basic argument: Most of the tech geeks and stock traders of the 90s couldn't possibly have thought they were better than the non-rich -- they had so obviously lucked out into a windfall... Secondary argument: In the Clinton boom, unlike in the Reagan boom, incomes at the bottom also rose quite quickly...

Only in the world of Mickey "But Is It Good for the Welfare Reformers?" Kaus would the spiritual life of Silicon Valley schnooks constitute a more powerful defense of the Clinton boom than the fact that poor people also got a little more money from it.