This man is not a wonk: Why Marco Rubio is just another intellectual fraud

This man is not a wonk: Why Marco Rubio is just another intellectual fraud

by Elias Isquith at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/31/this_man_is_not_a_wonk_why_marco_rubio_is_just_another_intellectual_fraud/

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Rubio, too, has previously been described as at least a pseudo-wonk. A few years ago, in fact, when some of the less politically savvy policy journalists out there were falling for the “reformicon” PR campaign, Rubio’s embrace of George W. Bush-style tax cuts was greeted by some as proof of his wonk chops. Ditto his support for transferring responsibility for the safety net to the states, which he would do by giving them so-called block grants. Brooks breezes over the former and focuses on the latter, while also praising Rubio for supporting wage subsidies and an expanded EITC.

Then, as now, the problem with depicting Rubio this way is simple: It’s just not true. Describing a return to Bush’s deficit-financed tax cutting as fresh and wonky is self-evidently absurd; and while Rubio’s interest in a bigger EITC is laudable, there’s reason to worry his expansion would come at the expense of those who benefit from the policy currently. And in an era when many low-wage workers hold multiple jobs, Rubio’s subsidy idea has been dismissed by a (liberal) economist as destined to “run into real problems.”

But it’s Rubio’s block grant idea that really gives the game away, signaling how superficial is his concern for America’s downtrodden and how thin is his knowledge of public policy intended to combat poverty. Block-granting the welfare state is an old, old idea and one of the reasons it hasn’t been able to catch on as much as conservatives would like is because, well, it doesn’t work. States don’t use their no-strings-attached funding to innovate, it turns out. Often, they just spend it on someone else (ideally, someone who might vote for them during the next election).

So Rubio’s wonk résumé is about as paltry as Ryan’s. Both men are essentially pushing the same policies that have dominated the GOP since the Reaganite ’80s and both men are mostly able to obscure this by relying on the press’s ingrained desire to find a wonky conservative for “balance.” Both men are also good talkers — better than even most politicians — who know that a largely innumerate political press is easily impressed by a confident-sounding sale featuring charts and graphs (which they usually don’t understand).
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