Your daily rag dishes the dirt
What absurdities exist in your daily paper? Grab the San Francisco paper, and watch the tide:"Carter says Hamas willing to be Israel's neighbor" - forget for a moment the absurdity of Carter appointing himself to the position of diplomat to Palestine; since when has Hamas ever wished for anything short of Israel's destruction?
Letter to the editor: "Taxes on 'The Rich'" - here's a howler; the writer claims that George Bush's tax cuts "Resulted" in "The worst (job growth) performance over a business cycle since the government started keeping track in 1945", according to that oh-so-unbiased source, The New York Times. Talk about "Cherry-Picking the intelligence"; did no one bother to ask which particular cycle this was? Is it over George Bush's entire eight years, or a single quarter? Makes a difference, doesn't it? Next comes this bizarre claim: "In contrast, Bill Clinton's 1993 tax hike on the wealthiest 1.2 percent of taxpayers led to an unprecedented economic expansion" - The claim is clearly that the tax hike resulted in a larger economy, a connection which is spurious at best, and ground-breakingly ignorant at worst.
But the final insult comes right after these two Olympic-size stretches: "If the Republicans were talking about corporate taxes, they might have a point. But their admonishments against 'Soaking the Rich' are utterly refuted by simple logic and historical fact." - Presenting disconnected data and claiming a connection is an old tactic, and it's best used with the footnote that what has just been presented is "Simple Logic" and "Historical Fact", when neither contention passes any of the basic tests of analysis.
Bill Clinton's tax hike did not "Lead to" economic expansion any more than George Bush's tax cut "Resulted" in poor job growth. There are far more factors that influence economic activity than are addressed by these two points, but the basic proposition - that lower rates of taxation generally result in higher levels of growth - remains sound by any test (excluding, of course, that of the letter-writer's "Simple Logic").
And note again the contention that taxes represent money that is owned by the state first, and then the individual - this presumption has taken root like some kind of hideous cancer - fortunately, there have been great advances in treating such conditions, but they need a lot more publicity.
posted by ET @ 12:16 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home