"If your policies are adopted, people will die" is worse than hyperbole; it is a kind of intellectual blackmail — anyone who resorts to such language isn't trying to engage in debate; they are trying to shut off debate

In his Arguable column, Jeff Jacoby takes on The intellectual blackmail of 'people will die':

PAUL KRUGMAN … recently commented on President Trump's hostility toward the so-called "deep state" and the new administration's restrictions on federal employees. "Donald Trump Wants You to Die," his Jan. 24 essay was headlined. He predicted that under Trump, the National Institutes of Health and other agencies will be "emasculated and politicized" and "banned from making policy recommendations that are inconvenient for Trump. ... And many Americans will die as a result."

Around the same time as Krugman's piece was published on Substack, an article in The Appeal, a left-of-center news site that covers the criminal justice system, appeared under an equally dire headline: "'People Will Die' from Trump's Trans Prisoner Crackdown, Experts Warn." Over at Indivisible, another progressive website, Trump's short-lived order to freeze spending on federal loans and grants was described not only as a "dictatorial power grab" but as "chaos that will kill" and "a death sentence for millions of Americans."

I have long been struck by the popularity of such arguments on the left.

 … Once I started looking, I kept spotting examples of liberals playing the death card. There was the prominent Massachusetts welfare lobbyist, for example, who warned that if a 4 percent trim in the state budget were approved, "people will be dying in hidden corners all over the state. ... They may die slowly, but they will die."

 … At times it seemed as if liberals thought pretty much everything proposed by Trump or Republicans would leave the streets strewn with corpses.

Tax relief, for instance.

 … To be fair, conservatives have been known to do the same thing.

I have always been an admirer of Jeff Jacoby; but regularly, the Boston Globe columnist attempts to lump left and right together under his benevolent stare rising above all of them. "Well, the GOP is just as bad…" Thus, when Jeff Jacoby claims that "The spreading willingness on the right to engage in over-the-top 'people will die' talk is one of the most disheartening ways in which the MAGA movement has perverted conservative discourse ", he ignores the fact that there is reason and there are facts behind, say, Sarah Palin's claim that "Democrats were pushing legislation under which the sick and the elderly would have to stand before a government 'death panel' and have bureaucrats decide if they live or die." Or behind Trump's election contention that Joe Biden's "White House had admitted more than 13,000 convicted murderers, who were roaming the country." Jeff Jacoby does go on to admit that the Left — being Drama Queens, after all — is the worse perpetrator.

 … Much more often than not, however, it is pundits and politicos on the left who are quickest to play the death card. That reflects the attitude, long prevalent among progressives, that anyone who disagrees with their prescriptions is not just wrong but evil — someone to recoil from, not to reason with; not to debate but to damn.

"If your policies are adopted, people will die" is worse than hyperbole. It is a kind of intellectual blackmail. If you abolish rent control, people will die. If you cut taxes, people will die. If you confirm a conservative justice, people will die. If you modify Obamacare, people will die. If you don't seal the border, people will die. With rare exceptions, anyone who resorts to such language isn't trying to engage in debate; they are trying to shut off debate by invoking the ultimate moral trump card.

In a democracy, persuasion ought to matter more than panic. When politicians — or Nobel laureates, for that matter — think the way to win a policy debate is to claim their opponents are murderers, it's a good indication their position isn't as strong as they think.