The Greatest Trick David Brooks Ever Pulled Was to Convince His NYT Editors That It’s OK to Completely Undercut Your Argument So Long As You Do it At Least One Graf Apart

From today’s column: 

States with public sector unions tend to run into fiscal crises. They tend to have workplaces where personnel decisions are made on the basis of seniority, not merit. There is little relationship between excellence and reward, which leads to resentment among taxpayers who don’t have that luxury.

Yet I think Governor Walker made a strategic error in setting up this confrontation as he did. The debt problems before us are huge. Even in Wisconsin they cannot be addressed simply by taking on the public sector unions. Studies done in North Carolina and elsewhere suggest that collective bargaining only increases state worker salaries by about 5 percent or 6 percent. That’s not nearly enough to explain current deficits. There are many states without collective bargaining that still face gigantic debt crises.

  • The New York Times

Notes

  1. jvbrewer said: This is unfair. The statements in bold are not logically inconsistent, nor do these premises undercut his argument that Gov. Walker erred, since he notes problems with the unions while still distinguishing them from causes of the larger debt crisis.
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