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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (43498)	5/26/2010 8:25:58 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

You can stick to just observed facts, but then you have just about nothing to back up any of your statements in this area. Observed facts are by themselves totally inadequate to answer the question. You can't know tell the effects of a policy change simply by looking at the situation before and after. The actual effect of the policy is the difference between what would have been without the policy, and what happened with the policy. The statement you quoted and later defended - "Notice that Ireland has the largest deficit, at 14.7%. This is in spite of (or more aptly because of) the enactment of severe austerity measures" - inherently involves speculating on what would have happened without those measures. "Because of", in other words its the cause of. That asserts a casual connection between one thing and the other. It inherently involved speculation.