In a Thursday post* that I somehow just got around to reading this morning, Jeff Jarvis argues that President Bush's fiscal policy -- tax cuts, deficits, soak the grandkids -- is "political cynicism at its worst," a fairly uncontroversial assessment with which even the conservative Andrew Sullivan (who used to edit The Even the Liberal New Republic, don't you know) would not take issue. Unfortunately, Jeff doesn't stop there:

Now Democratic New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey has made an equally cynical act but with a uniquely Democratic twist. In the state budget just approved, McGreevey lowered taxes by raising taxes. He is taxing income over $500,000 at a new and high rate to give property tax relief to people who make under $200,000 and it has been acknowledged that he can do that because there are only X thousand people in that high income bracket and, hell, none of them probably voted for McGreevey anyway. He also raised taxes on property sales so anyone in the state who is trying to use the money made in a home as a nest egg or as payment on the next home now has to pay the state on the way.

If either manager had cut spending to cut taxes, fine. That's good management. Government, just like industry, needs restructuring. But neither did that. Bush stole from our children and McGreevey stole from the state's most successful to give money and buy votes. That's bad management. That's political cynicism.

Now, I haven't studied the NJ state tax tables recently. [Recently? -- ed. Oh, alright, damn you. Ever.] It's entirely possible that McGreevey is, in fact, raising taxes on an already over-taxed group. And if Jeff wants to make that argument (with the aforementioned tax tables, of course), more power to him. But his suggestion that there is, ipso facto, some sort of moral equivalence between an effort to shift a portion of the tax burden from one group to another and a policy of slashing taxes on the wealthy and running ruinous deficits to pay for it is worse than silly; it's an insult to the intelligence of anyone who's ever spent five minutes thinking about fiscal policy. (Hell, it's an insult to anybody who's ever spent five minutes thinking about balancing a checkbook.) And the kind of moral distinction we're talking about here matters, particularly in a political era in which so much of our national debate revolves around questions of who gets and who pays and how much.

As anyone who reads his blog regularly could tell you, Jeff Jarvis is (a) a very smart guy, and (b) a man who takes the issue of moral equivalence seriously. In other words, he knows better. So, not to put too fine a point on it or anything, but ... hey, Jeff, what gives?

UPDATE: And while I'm catching up on Thursday posts that I somehow missed at the time (was I unusually busy that day?), here's Barry Ritholtz rounding up this year's "presidential indicators," and here he is again this morning with a followup.

UPDATE 2 (6/28): In case you mistakenly thought I was just being polite when I called Jeff Jarvis a very smart guy, read this sharp takedown of some of the blogosphere's nattering nabobs of know-nothingism.

*CORRECTION: Now I know why I just discovered Jeff's post: It was from yesterday, not Thursday. Sorry about that. As always, I'll try to do better next time.

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