You need to start by reading Brian Riedl’s excellent post from last week over at National Review Online, How the Far Left Fails Basic Math, as it’s my jumping off point. One of my key frustrations with the socialist/progressivist domination of the Democratic Party is their complete disconnect with reality in what they propose to do. While I’ve seen many arguments like Riedl’s in the past, especially with respect to taxation, e.g., the policy proposals that argue we can just tax the rich to pay for whatever policy we want, his short piece devastates a large part of the agenda that is current in vogue. It’s no wonder many on the far left openly embrace just printing the money we need to pay for our fantasies (i.e., Modern Monetary Theory). Formerly the left would try to make the case they could “pay” for whatever policy proposal they had. And while political proposals, left and right, were always heavily skewed in favor of whatever way they wanted to go (optimistic revenue and growth prospects, minimalist cost growth, etc.), the numbers themselves were at least not disconnected with reality.

Unfortunately fringe arithmetic is rapidly becoming the core Democratic position, as Riedl shows. And let’s not leave Mr. Trump out of this either–he’s the guy who campaigned in 2016 by saying he would balance the budget while cutting taxes and he would not touch entitlements–all in the face of the demographic tsunami of baby boomers retiring and the explosion of entitlement spending that is actuarially our destiny. How do we have any sort of public policy discussion about what’s best when the partisans refuse to begin with reality? Riedl’s summary shows that the disconnect is not small nor debatable–it’s in many cases orders of magnitude off.

In the early 2000s I worked on Capitol Hill with professional staff of both parties, and they were all good and very competent people. I can’t even imagine any of the professional staff putting together these type proposals, and yet now, how can they not be? The ironic thing is that the Democratic Party demands that much more of our lives be placed within the sphere of government control, and the arguments they use precisely show why government is uniquely not to be trusted.

So why do we have this now? Will a remedial math class fix the problem? Unfortunately no. What we have is a population that wants to be lied to. If you increase the incentives for politicians lying, why would we be shocked when we get more of them? But lying is probably not the right word–we need a new one, beyond spin. Something that means to spin with false facts and logic, but the falsity is known to all, except the partisans who want to be lied to. Mr. Trump is factually challenged, and prone to….ahem, hyperbole, but I don’t think he’s really lying in the sense I grew up with. Why not? Because he has no intent to deceive–everybody knows what he’s doing–just pick a fact from the air to support what you claim. Same thing with the left–nobody cares what the numbers behind the proposals mean, we’ll figure it out later, after all, it’s bourgeois math that says we can’t do it! The false facts are only given to deceive those that want to be deceived! The rest of of us on the other side know that it’s patently untrue. We want someone to lie to us to give us what we want. For the left, it’s “somebody else needs to pay for what I want. It’s only fair!” For the populist Trumpians, it’s “building a wall and getting rid of NAFTA is going to make America great again.” The Demand Curve for lying politicians has shifted right, and according to those fundamental laws, the quantity supplied has increased. Just tell me what I want to hear.