They call it "cherry picking" Win...or back-fitting data until you find what you want, but without regard to context.
lol, ain't that the pot calling the kettle black? Sort of like someone on LB's thread calling this one a " stale echo chamber." The answer to his question, BTW, is that the top rate was 90% until Kennedy lowered it to 70% in the early 60s. And yes, you are correct, it is taking it out of context, but at least there is a point to it--the country prospered while it had a steeply progressive income tax, with the top rate exceptionally high. Something that a tax maniac like Grover Norquist would have claimed was impossible, depending on the ignorance of his followers to allow his claim to pass. Of course, he has a lot of ignorant followers, including the people in Congress who came out of a meeting with Obama chortling and sneering publicly that he "told us that taxes are low by historical standards," when in fact they are, measured by various factors including tax rates and as a percentage of GDP.
You still haven't answered the questions I posed to you a couple of weeks ago and have reiterated at least 3 or 4 times now.
To: mistermj who wrote (165310) 7/2/2011 3:23:13 PM
From: Sam of 165989
I am curious to hear what you have to say to the two posts immediately before yours that Dale posted. About Republicans opposing the very policies that they were formerly in favor of when they were accepted by the Obama administration. Or what Alan Simpson, John Danforth and Pete Domenici said about the current batch of Congressional Republicans.
Here are the posts:
"As recently as 2008, it was very common for Republican officials at a variety of levels to support cap-and-trade, an individual health care mandate, the DREAM Act, comprehensive immigration reform, trying terrorist suspects in civilian U.S. courts and then imprisoning them on American soil, a payroll tax cut, a bipartisan deficit commission, infrastructure spending, the Economic Development Administration, routinely raising the debt ceiling without preconditions, and funding for Planned Parenthood. If we go back just a little further, we see that GOP officials also used to occasionally support modest tax increases as a way to maintain fiscal sanity.
As recently as three months ago, House Republicans wanted a deficit-reduction plan that included 85% spending cuts and 15% increased revenue.
Now, literally all of these policies aren’t just deemed problematic by Republicans, but are rejected as wholly unacceptable extremism. This week, the leading Senate Republican went so far as to characterize Democratic support for bipartisan compromises as “acting in bad faith.”
Seriously. That’s what he said.
How did all of these policies — some of which originated in Republican circles — go from sensible to radical? The ideas didn’t change; Republican standards did. A Democratic president got elected, telegraphed an openness to proposals the GOP has traditionally supported, and suddenly Republicans didn’t want to take “yes” for an answer anymore.
To Ezra’s question, how is President Obama supposed to work in a bipartisan fashion under these circumstances? He isn’t. I assume that next year, one of the more common complaints from the GOP will be, “Obama said he’d bring people together and reach across the aisle. He failed.”
But he really didn’t. He made good faith efforts to work cooperatively with Republicans, only to find GOP officials who are against the ideas they’re for.
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"Former Sen. Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican, is so frustrated with his party’s tactics on the debt ceiling, he’s created a “truth squad” with members of the H.W. Bush administration in the hopes of explaining reality to congressional Republicans.
“The debt’s coming due, and they say it isn’t coming due,” Domenici said in a recent interview. “They’re wrong.”
He expressed frustration that his party may be willing to let the debt limit be ruptured. “Who do we get?” he asked. “Bring God down, Christ” to make the case against doing so? […]
The current standoff, he added, “is absolutely beyond my comprehension.”
Former Sen. Alan Simpson, a Wyoming Republican, reflected this week on his party’s refusal to even consider additional revenue as part of a debt-reduction deal.
“We’re at 15 percent revenue, and historically it’s been closer to 20 percent,” says Simpson. “We’ve never had a war without a tax, and now we’ve got two,” he says. “Absolute bullshit.”
Of course, it’s not just the debt talks. I often think about a quote from former Sen. John Danforth, a Missouri Republican, who served with Simpson and Domenici in the Senate. Last year, he expressed some concern about the direction of his party.
“If Dick Lugar,” Danforth said, “having served five terms in the U.S. Senate and being the most respected person in the Senate and the leading authority on foreign policy, is seriously challenged by anybody in the Republican Party, we have gone so far overboard that we are beyond redemption.”
Message 27469307 |
