Chait's Numbers- As I pointed

Chait's Numbers- As I pointed out in yesterday's post on the subject, a whole crowd of conservative bloggers piled on Jonathan Chait.

And I didn't even count the big guns! Ponnuru at the Corner attacks Chait's math:

"I’ve been debating Jonathan Chait over at The New Republic about whether Bush hatred is justified, or at least rational. Chait had the last word, and I declined to prolong the debate. But I can’t resist making one small point. In the course of our debate we disagreed about whose tax cuts were bigger, the incumbent’s or Ronald Reagan’s. I said Reagan’s were bigger, in support of my point that Bush is not the rampaging right-winger Chait makes him out to be. Chait said that Bill Gale and Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institution had established that Bush’s tax cut was larger than Reagan’s as a share of GDP “if you allow for some technical corrections.”

In response, I noted that I doubted I’d agree with this duo’s technical assumptions—I’ve criticized Orszag’s work before. In his final entry to the debate, Chait explained what the “technical corrections” were. There were two. First, Chait and company exclude 45 percent of Reagan’s tax cut from consideration! That’s some technical correction. Reagan’s tax cut indexed tax brackets for inflation. In the 1970s, people were taxed on the basis of inflationary gains in income even though their real income hadn’t risen. For Chait, the 45 percent of the tax cut that was devoted to ending that practice need not be counted as a tax cut because it “merely offset natural revenue growth from inflation.” Second, the cost of Reagan’s 1981 tax cut should, in Chait’s view, be considered only after taking account of the 1982 tax hike that partly undid it."

So the question is - and perhaps Hewitt, with his contacts with Peter Beinart, is the one to answer this - will Chait sound off on this one again? Will he continue to rationalize his hatred, or transfer his hate to more plebeian targets?