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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cary Salsberg who wrote (43678)	3/13/2001 8:07:18 PM
From: mitch-c	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

Everyone is in favor of a tax cut in the face of mounting surplus forecasts. Bush has not tied his to a budget or to actual future surpluses. I learned to spot these fallacies while growing up in DC. You have posed the question in a manner that artificially limits the available solutions. You pose the budget as a constant and the tax cuts as a variable - a causality relationship - where in fact they are both variable, and not even closely dependent. There's a constant game of three-card monte when politicians discuss taxes, the budget, and the debt. It's a smart idea to reduce the problem by assuming one of the three non-variable; but you can use any one of the three. Why not start the problem with: Assume a 4% reduction in Federal spending? Instead, in the "Goldilocks" speech, Bush was more generous and allowed a 4% increase. (I understand the pragmatics behind that, but the concept still grinds my teeth.) Finally, I find your apparently serious use of the words "actual" and "future" as simultaneous modifiers of "surpluses" to be risible. Please tell us what the "actual future" close of the NASDAQ will be on Friday? Posing such an oxymoron as a precondition of tax cuts is begging the question. It fallaciously diverts the discussion to an artificially insoluble conundrum. - Mitch (@stayedawakeinlogicclass.edu)