Prompted by right-leaning Atlantic Monthly blogger Megan McArdle's criticism of Jon Chait's The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics, left blogistan has fired off a volley of posts refuting McArdle's assertion that free-lunch supply siders are an obscure, rare breed. McArdle:

Why do Americans think inequality is a bad thing? There are, at least, five distinct explanations. A. It's in the majority's self-interest to redistribute. B. The public thinks unequal market outcomes are undeserved. C. It believes in unconditional equality. D. It believes in redistribution according to need. E. It believes unequal market outcomes are inefficient.

In his Washington Post column this week, Bob Samuelson abuses Census Bureau's Income, Poverty, and Health insurance Coverage in the United States 2006 to launch a critique of immigration policy. The gist of his "reasoning" is this: From 1990 to 2006, the number of poor people increased by 2.9 million people. In those same years, the number of poor Hispanic people increased by 3.2 million while the number of poor whites and blacks and fell by 0.6 million and 0.8 million respectively. If we subtract out the increase in poor Hispanic individuals from the increase in the total number of poor individuals, we are actually left with a net decrease in the number of people in poverty from 1990 to 2006. Ergo, satisfactory progress has been made in poverty remediation, and flawed immigration policies are primarily responsible for strained social services, health care, and public education systems. Why is it important to get this story straight? One reason is truthfulness. It's usually held that we've made little, if any, progress against poverty. That's simply untrue. ... We shouldn't think that our massive efforts to mitigate poverty have had no effect. Immigration hides our grudging progress. A second reason is that immigration affects government policy. By default, our present policy is to import poor people. This imposes strains on local schools, public services and health care. Samuelson, however, is simply peddling statistical misdirection and obfuscation.

Yesterday, the Senate voted 69-24 to confirm former Rep. Jim Nussle (R-IA) as director of OMB. Every GOP Senator voted in favor of Nussle; 23 Democrats did likewise while 23 opposed him.