I got a very nice e-mail from a very nice person who was complimentary of my column Sunday, but then it went on to say something that seemed to perfectly illustrate the point of the column. Here’s the message:
Dear Brad,
I very much enjoyed and agree with your editorial
"Policy isn’t about personalities". However, is
this not the reason why The State (and the media
in general) ignores the FairTax? This plan will
unburden American citizens and businesses and
create economic prosperity by making US-made
products globally competitive. The benefits to our
country are enormous, so I must ask, is it the
proposal itself or is it because Neal Boortz
co-wrote the FairTax book and the legislation is
sponsored by a Republican? (This is what I have
been led to believe). As your column suggests,
ideas should not be judged based on who supports
them.I welcome your comments.
And here was my response:
No and not. And now I have to ask you:
— Who is Neal Bortz? I’ve never heard of him.
— Why on Earth would you or anyone else have the impression that we would ignore something "because … the legislation is sponsored by a Republican." That’s bizarre.
With all due respect, I think your note is another illustration of my point. Only someone who thinks very differently from the way I do could think my interest in something could be turned on or off by an individual or the party associated with it. Those are alien concepts to me.
As far as the "Fair Tax" is concerned, is that the thing Jim DeMint was pushing back when he ran for the Senate? If so, we examined it pretty carefully at the time, and weren’t too crazy about it. No one has brought it up to me since then. I’ve been vaguely aware there was an effort out there to revive the idea — I think there was a meeting or something at the same time that everybody was busy with the GOP debate, and I saw a banner about it at the luncheon that Fred Thompson spoke at. That’s about all I know.— Brad Warthen
So now I guess I’ll have to look up this Fair Tax thing at some point, and this Neal Bortz guy too (I mean "Boortz," Google corrected me, sorry for not reading the message more carefully), and I have no idea that I will find either particularly interesting. But I’ll look, when I get time. Right now, I’m processing e-mail. I provide the links so you can look, in case you have time today.
(Tomorrow Mike comes back, and I go back to being only a couple of people, instead of three or four.)
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Gosh, Brad. Suffice it to say you should wish you could be half as entertaining as Neal Boortz. And you really expect us to believe that you, an editorial page editor, never heard of him.
Ever hear of Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity? I’d guess Boortz ranks next in that line in terms of popularity, though I might find him the most likeable of the bunch.
If you’re going to be in the opinion business, my man, check out the competition. Your supposed naivete will not further your interests, though it does make me chuckle.
Believe it, bro. I know who Rush is, and have actually heard him on the radio when I was rushing somewhere across town during the working day, but it’s been a couple of years. I’m vaguely aware that Hannity is another one of these guys who plays the partisan/ideological game on broadcast media, but I’ve never knowingly heard him and could not pick him out of a lineup. I HAVE seen O’Reilly and the guy one “Hardball” briefly when I was trapped in the presence of a television (giving blood, or — and here’s a laugh, given how long it’s been since I’ve had time — working out in the gym). I wasn’t favorably impressed. They certainly didn’t inspire me to spend any more time on them.
But no, if I had ever heard the name Neal Boortz, it had not registered on me.
So chuckle away.
Following up — I got another very nice e-mail from the same reader (with whom I have never worked or collaborated before today):
To which I responded thusly:
Now I’ve done it. I’ve mentioned band parents. Quick, let’s talk about the war, or abortion, or gay marriage, or something innocuous like those. It’s an axiom in this business — don’t ever say anything to or about band parents except "Yes, sir," "No, ma’am," or "I’m sorry you feel that way." They are not people to mess with. We’re talking scary intense.
Seems to me that the tendency to go into an ad hominem attack is because it’s so easy to do. Never mind the logic; it works well anyway. But, on a deeper level, personality does shape policy. Can you imagine our country running Abu Graib under Carter? or Kennedy? or McCain? Can you imagine it under Nixon? Because personality shapes policy, its easy to confuse the two. It’s also precisely why ad hominem seems so reasonable (logic be damned!)
A “fair tax” would be when The State newspaper gives up its sales tax exemption and pays its fair share of taxes on the revenues it receives. My calculation was that The State foregoes collection of at least $2 million a year.
Is that “fair”, Brad?
Brad,
The FairTax book is a quick read, so you should check it out. Congressman John Lindler is the other author (and sponsor of the Fair Tax bill).
As I understand it, Jim DeMint’s idea was sort of a hybrid consumption tax, that would retain some payroll taxes. That sort of defeats the purpose. The appeal of the FairTax is its simplicity.
Anyway, the FairTax book describes the concept, and addresses some common questions that arise at the idea of a national consumption tax.
Doug, it’s OK to tell ME it would cost $2 million a year, but don’t you dare tell my publisher, or else he and the other publishers will never stop fighting it. They’re business people.
Y’all know where I stand on this, since I’ve said so so many times: ALL exemptions should be on the table, as part of comprehensive tax reform. If you go after just this one or that one, you’ll never get anywhere. Just make everybody mad at once, and git ‘er done. That way, everybody will be howling at the same time, and our spineless lawmakers won’t be able to hear any particular complaint in the general din.
OK, so that’s the cynical interpretation. What I mean is, let’s have comprehensive tax reform because that’s what we need.
And Jeff M., didn’t DeMint call his idea the FairTax? That might be the source of my confusion…
Oh, and thank y’all, my dear friends and contributors, for steering this away from band parents. That was a really self-destructive thing for me to do, bringing them up unnecessarily like that, and y’all are true friends to pretend I didn’t say a thing, and just move on…
Maybe they won’t notice. It’s much, much safer for me if we just stick to subjects that might tick off the publisher.
I almost missed Karen…
Karen, you’re absolutely right that people go ad hominem because, for them at least, it’s easy. Beats thinkin’ ya know.
But I can’t agree with you that it works well. It just makes the person who does it look bad, and causes serious people of good will to stay out of the conversation or even tune out politics altogether. So OK, maybe it DOES work from the perspective of jerks who want to run our political conversations according to their rules, because once they run off everybody else, they have their way. But it does NOT work in terms of getting anything worthwhile done. It’s just destructive, and intellectually offensive to boot.
And no, I can’t imagine much of any bad stuff such as Abu Ghraib being that way under McCain. But consider the source — I always wanted McCain to be president, not Bush. Still do. Same with Carter. Broke my heart when Reagan beat him like that; Jimmy was my boy. Hey, I was even for Nixon once. But I was only 7 years old, so give me a break.
I realize I’m pretty far down the chain here, Brad, but you keep referring to the “partisan/ideological game” on the radio and elsewhere as if anyone had a choice but to be a partisan in one way or another.
Whatever a person believes, he or she must necessarily be a partisan toward that, be he Weldon VII or Brad Warthen or Boortz Limbaugh XXX. Likewise, each administration becomes a cult of personality, and people tend to develop a partisanship based on the personality of the leader.
Note that, in a way, I’m agreeing with you.
But, I never liked the war because I like Bush, or disliked the war because I dislike Bush. I liked the idea of the war at first because the idea of a foothold in the Middle East, particularly creating one where a mortal enemy had been, seemed a novel and desirable idea, and I hoped we were powerful enough and smart enough to pull it off.
But all I knew about Bush when I voted each time was, in turn, that he wasn’t Al Gore or John Kerry. So there’s your idea, in reverse, sort of. Gore and Kerry each represented an untenable option, so whoever else was available, I voted that way.
But, though I find Gore a detestable hypocrite on more than one front, I don’t oppose the idea of limiting greenhouse gases because I don’t like him.
Nor do I find Heinz ketchup distasteful because Kerry married that particular pile of money. I won’t, however, buy Heinz ketchup, because I don’t want any more money than absolutely necessary (and certainly none of mine) available to Kerry, one of the few people who seems to rival Gore’s arrogance.
Fact is, Brad, for almost every partisanship I feel, I have a reason based on something a lot more substantial than which wing my feathers seem to be stuck on.
Yes, even for the faces in politics I can’t stand, something somewhere along the line characterized them as people I couldn’t trust to vote the way I would, not just the party.
But you have labeled me a partisan, probably because I think the government that governs least governs best.
Pardon, but isn’t that your partisanship toward a more active government speaking?
Brad, think back thru the last several elections (especially presidential ones. Except for Clinton’s win (which was primarily powered by a downturn in the economy) the winners of the last several have used extremely nasty ad hominem attacks. This type of attack may repulse you and me, but the average joe out there buys it! So buy an ad that calls your opponent an unprincipled %$&@#!! get a photo op with youself wrapped in a flag, and sitting in a church pew, and you, too, can be president.
OK, now we’re getting somewhere — we’re moving, making progress.
Weldon and bud — when I use the word “partisan,” I mean in the sense of “party.” Yeah, it can mean other things, if you want to be pedantic, which I’m sure you don’t. You see, one reason I do a blog and write all these thousands and thousands of words is so that you will see what I say within a certain CONTEXT, and the context in which you should hear the word “partisan” when I use it here, is in terms of the slavish adherence to a party. OK. I can see how, if you’re inclined not to understand me, you might misunderstand that. But now I’ve told you. On this blog, unless I specify otherwise (say, I’m talking about irregulars fighting on the Russian front in 1942), when I say “partisans,” I’m talking about people who are really into the whole political party thing, OK?
I’m glad we got this straight.
There’s no such thing as an “online poll.” At least, I’ve never seen one. All I’ve seen is wildly unscientific surveys of self-selected respondents that don’t mean squat. If you’ve seen something else, let me know.
By the way, even if you could skipped the whole “poll” idea and got every single person in the world other than me to say what I am and what I think, that would not mean that’s what I am or what I think. Only God and I know that. And that’s why I do this blog — to tell you what I think. Duh. If God tells you something else, we’ll discuss it.
And Weldon, when did I say you were partisan? I may have; I just don’t remember it. Oh, and good for you that you go beyond personality (I think that’s what you said, right?).
While many who are invested in the current income tax system seek to demagog the well-researched FairTax plan (*), its acceptance in the professional / academic community continues to grow (**). Failure to enact the FairTax – choosing instead to try to “flatten” a NON-FLATTENABLE income tax system – will result in an IRREVOCABLE ECONOMIC MELTDOWN. (*** Impossible, you say?)
Here is why the FairTax MUST replace the income tax. It’s:
• SIMPLE, easy to understand
• EFFICIENT, inexpensive to comply with and doesn’t cause less-than-optimal business decisions for tax minimization purposes
• FAIR, loophole free and everyone pays their share
• LOW TAX RATE, achieved by broad base with no exclusions
• PREDICTABLE, doesn’t change, so financial planning is possible
• UNINTRUSIVE, doesn’t intrude into our personal affairs or limit our liberty
• VISIBLE, not hidden from the public in tax-inflated prices or otherwise
• PRODUCTIVE, rewards, rather than penalizes, work and productivity
Its benefits are as follows:
FOR INDIVIDUALS:
• No more tax on income – make as much as you wish
• You receive your full paycheck – no more deductions
• You pay the tax when you buy “at retail” – not “used”
• No more double taxation (e.g. like on current Capital Gains)
• Reduction of “pre-FairTaxed” retail prices by 20%-30%
• Adding back 29.9% FairTax maintains current price levels
• FairTax would constitute 23% portion of new prices
• Every household receives a monthly check, or “pre-bate”
• “Prebate” is “advance payback” for monthly consumption to poverty level
• FairTax’s “prebate” ensures progressivity, poverty protection
• Finally, citizens are knowledgeable of what their tax IS
• Elimination of “parasitic” Income Tax industry
• NO MORE IRS. NO MORE FILING OF TAX RETURNS by individuals
• Those possessing illicit forms of income will ALSO pay the FairTax
• Households have more disposable income to purchase goods
• Savings is bolstered with reduction of interest rates
FOR BUSINESSES:
• Corporate income and payroll taxes revoked under FairTax
• Business compensated for collecting tax at “cash register”
• No more tax-related lawyers, lobbyists on company payrolls
• No more embedded (hidden) income/payroll taxes in prices
• Reduced costs. Competition – not tax policy – drives prices
• Off-shore “tax haven” headquarters can now return to U.S
• No more “favors” from politicians at expense of taxpayers
• Resources go to R&D and study of competition – not taxes
• Marketplace distortions eliminated for fair competition
• US exports increase their share of foreign markets
FOR THE COUNTRY:
• 7% – 13% economic growth projected in the first year of the FairTax
• Jobs return to the U.S.
• Foreign corporations “set up shop” in the U.S.
• Tax system trends are corrected to “enlarge the pie”
• Larger economic “pie,” means thinner tax rate “slices”
• Initial 23% portion of price is pressured downward as “pie”
increases
• No more “closed door” tax deals by politicians and business
• FairTax sets new global standard. Other countries will follow
(*) http://snipurl.com/taxpanelrebutted (.pdf)
(**) http://snipurl.com/econsopenletter (Lists every tax that FairTax will eliminate, together with the power they represent to pol’s and lobbyists.)
(***) Listen to an interview where Prof. Kotlikoff elaborates: http://snipurl.com/meltdowninprogress
The time for sitting around, pontificating, is over. We have NO CHOICE but to ACT: http://snipr.com/scrapthecode
Thanks, Ian; that certainly saves me a lot of research. Everybody, thank Ian. Good thing for us we don’t live in an Ian-less universe (just to toss in one more gratuitous movie quote, or book quote, or however you want to look at it).
Actually, Brad, I think the first two words you used in my direction were “You partisans.”
‘Twas a while back, not publicly.
FairTax seems like a good idea to me because it would shrink government and give everyone a fair share to pay. I’m tired of both the poor and the rich getting a free ride from the middle class.
I imagine, however, that no value-added tax will ever actually substitute for the income tax. We’ll wind up with both, pay a lot more overall and Hillary Clinton will eventually use that gob of funds to support the single-payer form of health care you posit with an adoring eye.
Yes, Brad, it’s health-care ideas, Rose Law Firm and that dead lawyer whose death I think the Park Service investigated back during the Clinton presidency — not her sunny personality — that I hold against Hillary.
And with our Sen. Graham, it was the specifics of the immigration bill, not the facets of his personality, that turned me off.
But when they lose me with big failures that I thought were bad ideas anyway, it’s hard to win me back on anything.
Once bitten, twice shy. But it’s not really about personality, even if Gore, Clinton and that loony guy I voted for last time all scare me.
Thank you, Ian; nice summary. There’s also a fairly new national grassroots movement of and by the citizens, called OPERATION: OFF THE FENCE! – It has participants in 23 states after just 11 weeks.
And, Brad: I’m not sold on your defense of the media — last July 2006 I was part of a crowd of about 10,000 Fair Tax supporters gathered in the streets of downtown Orlando, and we received very minimal, very slanted local coverage, no national coverage. (And that was after inviting the main reporter, who was subsequently bombarded by many, many local supporters for her misleading words, to come and get the facts of the Fair Tax before writing her article.)
Defend the media? Oh, goodness, no. Not me; you’ll have to find somebody else to do that. I was just explaining how stuff like that happens.
I have no idea what sort of interactions you had with a reporter in Orlando. That reporter could be a total idiot, for all I know.
Meanwhile, here’s a link to the thing you mention — OPERATION: OFF THE FENCE!
This sounds far too good to be true. What you’re saying is every household in America gets a check from the Federal government to offset retail prices that won’t actually go up (because businesses don’t pay business taxes?) even with the addition of the fair tax. All business, capital gains and income taxes are abolished. And the fair tax will then generate the same amount of revenue as our current system even after deducting the prebate.
This sound great! Too great. I’m skeptical. One obvious problem is that wealthy people don’t spend nearly all of their income on domestic goods (they invest or spend abroad at much higher rates than the poor) so they will not contribute the same percentage of thier income that poor people do. The taxes paid by the poor will be offset by the prebate so their effective tax rate is zero. That leaves the middle class. They are now stuck paying a disproportionate share of taxes. Isn’t that exactly what you’re trying to avoid?
Bud,
The question will always be why should someone who makes more should pay a higher percentage of taxes. Isn’t enough that a person might pay thousands of dollars more? Just like now, I pay more property taxes than my neighbor just because I have one extra bedroom than he does. Where is the fairness in that?
Why? : Because capitalism is unfair to begin with. It’s not just a little bit unfair-it doesn’t need just a little bit of tweaking to be made alright. It’s totally out of bounds and beyond the pale of acceptability. A fair tax system would ensure that wealth is distributed normally, yet the proposed so called “Fair Tax” will make the situation even worse than it already is. For example, if wealth were distributed normally, then the top 1% would own 2% of the wealth rather than 35% of the wealth as they do today. The bottom 40% would own 28% of the wealth rather than 0% (rounded off) as they do currently. Sales taxes are terrible for everyone in he bottom 80% of the population because they in effect re-distribute wealth to the wealthy.
We need instead to go to a national corporate wealth (market capitalization) tax and to eliminate all other taxes. Our national goal should be to reduce wealth in equality to 1960s levels where the top 1% owned about 19% of the wealth, as is still the case in Northern and Western Europe. We also need federal portable pensions, national health insurance, and a federal consumer debt relief program with new national usury laws. We also need a system of tariffs to protect American workers.
Keep in mind that the bottom 60% in the US only owns 5% of the wealth. As I’ve pointed out many times before, early in this century the wealth distribution was accurately duplicated by new stochastic programming techniques. Capitalism by its nature is just about as unfair as possible because it re-distributes the wealth generated by the society into the hands of a tiny minority.
Mark,
How does your model account for rewarding people who work hard, take risks, educate themselves to make themselves more valuable, etc.? Can a Bill Gates come out of your system? How about Warren Buffett? Those guys didn’t steal their wealth and they have made thousands (perhaps MILLIONS in Gates’ case) of people wealthy because of their business acumen.
I would agree with you on portable pensions as long as that means I own every penny of what my employer and I contribute and I am not responsible for paying the retirement for somebody else.
Doug, for now I’m going to set aside equity issues regarding the “fair” tax. That is really a philosophical question. Right now my skeptisism is strictly in regard to the claim of tax neutrality. I see a tremendous amount of taxes done away with to be replaced by a relatively small sales tax that people can readily avoid. All they need to do is exchange goods and services in the black market (you cut my hair and I’ll do your dental exam) or by saving/investing, or by spending overseas.
Doug, why do you feel that way — about wanting to make sure that you’re not expected to help anyone else in retirement?
That might sound facetious, or provocative, but I’m sincere about wanting to know. The concern you express seems to be at the heart of the whole libertarian impulse, which I find it so impossible to connect with. And one thing I keep wondering is, how do people develop an attitude of “this is mine; it’s just for me; don’t anybody expect me to share it.”
It might be that it’s a perfectly natural impulse, as many would maintain, and that some of us just have it conditioned out of us — or, we become conditioned to be embarrassed to express such a thought, whether we have the impulse or not. Our mother tells us when we’re young that it’s mean not to share. Or we hear the Bible story in which Cain acts like the Lord is out of line by suggesting that he should in any way be his brother’s keeper.
But I’m not sure I feel that impulse at all. I mean, if somebody came and took all I had so that I was hungry and cast into the cold, I’m pretty sure I’d feel like saying, “Hey, that was mine! You can’t do that.” But when I’m able to get by, however hard it might be paying bills from month to month, I just don’t even feel a murmur of protest at the idea of paying into a system that makes sure nobody else starves in old age, or into a system that makes sure no one will be turned away when they need medical care.
It would be one thing to say, “I don’t think the plan would work,” or “there are better ways to build a Safety Net,” or whatever. But when you say that WHATEVER the system, you want to make sure you’re not paying in to help somebody else — that it’s the INTENT of doing that that bothers you — you leave me bewildered.
So why do you think that way?
Doug’s argument, with which I happen to disagree, seems to me different from that of the typical “fair tax” proponent – certainly the proponent who seems to feel that recitation of talking points passes for an argument. Doug has a particular philosophical outlook, which he seems to apply consistently, but that’s his grounding for his own argument in favor of whatever tax structure he views as appropriate, whether it be the “fair tax” or some other tax structure.
The typical “fair tax” argument, though, isn’t based on a philosophy different from the relatively liberal philosophy shared by a majority of Americans. Instead, the “fair tax” proponents – for example, Ian, above – make numerous unsupported claims about the supposed wonders of the “fair tax” system. They do not admit that it would cause a huge shift of the tax burden onto the middle class; instead, they ignore, or make specious arguments against, this obvious point. They make unsupported claims about the supposed economic growth that would result from the “fair tax”, and fail to address what seems to me to be a noteworthy objection, namely, that consumption would be seriously burdened, quite possibly resulting in a serious decline in consumer spending, and leading to an economic decline, or even an economic collapse. It’s consumption that drives prosperity, not investment. Investment naturally follows profitable opportunities, and so doesn’t need any special tax treatment. It’s consumption that makes profitability possible, giving rise to incentives for investment.
Typical “fair tax” proponents don’t address the numerous objections to their proposals, choosing instead to recite claims off a list.
That being said, I think Brad’s post shows a misunderstanding. The email he received suggests that the reason the arguments of “fair tax” proponents is due to a dislike of particular “fair tax” proponents, and that argument is in line with the argument that Brad makes below, that we ignore or reject the arguments of the various writers and speakers he refers to based on their identity, rather than a consideration of their arguments.
But both the person who initially emailed Brad, and Brad himself, are wrong. We don’t reject the “fair tax” proposals (those of us who do reject them) because of the identity of the proponents. We reject them because we don’t believe the various claims that are made. It actually doesn’t matter who the “fair tax” proponent is, except for those few like Doug who have some philosophical underpinning for their view. The typical “fair tax” proponent recites an argument that seems drawn from a list of talking points. Rejecting the argument has nothing to do with personalities, because the argument seems to be identical in every case, and entirely independent of the personality of the speaker.
We reject the “fair tax” proposals because they seem to make no sense.
Similarly, Brad is mistaken when he believes that the reason we reject the arguments made by people like Charles Krauthammer, Kimberly Kagan, and David Brooks because of a personal dislike. We reject their arguments because their arguments are unconvincing. I did go to the link Brad provided, and found that Krauthammer’s article consisted of nothing but his saying “al Qaeda, al Qaeda, al Qaeda, Petraeus, Petraeus, Petraeus,” over and over. Bud discovered that Kimberly Kagan made false factual claims. I read Brooks’s article, and it seemed to me to be weakly reasoned. He acknowledged that a substantial majority of the House and the Senate wants to find a way to extricate the U.S. from Iraq, but said that the fact that the various groups are presently somewhat divided on the approach to take makes departure impossible. I don’t see that the conclusion follows. I don’t see how it is impossible for the various factions that want out of Iraq to unite behind a plan, and I don’t see how it is impossible to marshal enough public pressure to move additional members of Congress to the conclusion that we must leave Iraq.
Brad’s argument that political decisions should not be made on the basis of personality is, it seems to me, misdirected, because that’s not what’s happening, either in consideration of the various arguments being made in favor of continuing an occupation of Iraq, or in consideration of the “fair tax” proposals.
We reject the arguments because we find them unsound. Or rejection is indpendent of the identities of the proponents of the arguments.
Three quick things, Tom:
Good questions.
A normal distribution (Bell curve) takes any kind of merit or differential ability into account-that’s my point. So, with a normal distribution we would have a few poor people, a bunch of people in the middle, and a few wealthy people, just as we are taught all of our lives that things are, but aren’t.
Compare this with what we have now: a giant swath of relatively poor people, a relatively smaller percentage that shoots up in net worth exponentially, and then a fabulously wealthy, numerically tiny elite.
Another way of saying this is that statistically speaking; capitalism’s distribution of wealth is at odds with the notion of rewarding hard work or merit. Most improvements and technical advancements are made by workers rather than by entrepreneurs or investors, yet these innovations are seldom rewarded substantially.
Sure, Bill Gates is loaded with money, and people often cite his activities as some sort of vindication of capitalism, but look at what he really did. He convinced (suckered) IBM into letting him keep the rights to the operating system. How many other competing companies had just as good or better operating systems at the time? Perhaps 50 or 60? Without IBM, Gates would have been nothing- no one would have ever heard of him. So, what does he do next? He steals the concept of Windows from Xerox because Xerox never filed a patent on it. All during this time he pushes the idea that software is proprietary- a concept that to this day is at odds with the thoughts of many people who invented programming languages and operating systems to begin with. He convinces Congress to make software “piracy” an international crime in exchange for advocating free trade agreements that have since so damaged many of my friends and co-workers. Then he tries to destroy Netscape and Sun Microsystems by imitating their software and making their software incompatible or not deliverable with Windows. Then he lobbies Congress to allow even more H1-B visas when he knows good and well that is already a glut of programmers (who won’t work for third world prices).
How is that we let one person create a monopoly when there are so many other better (and free) choices for operating systems and programming languages out there? Why didn’t IEEE or the government make the decisions concerning software when this certainly is the case for every other electronic protocol?
I am sorry for my word omissions in the writings above. I need to do a better job of editing. Please forgive.
Mark,
I work for one of Microsoft’s biggest competitors. I would like nothing better for us to crush him.. but fairly and by creating better software and working harder. But your list of the supposed lucky/sneaky/monopolistic events that created Microsoft leaves out a whole lot of engineering, marketing, and salesmanship that went into creating Microsoft… and neglects to consider all the ancillary businesses that have been created as a result of Microsoft. Companies like Oracle, Google, Red Hat, Sun, etc. exist because they can and do compete against Microsoft. Innovation and excellence do get rewarded.
Here’s some factual statistical evidence about the supposed “success” in Anbar.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/07/success-in-anba.html
Basically, the number of attacks per day in the Anbar province alone are more than the number of attacks in all of Iraq four years ago.
Quoted:
“Reducing the level of violence by 10% nationwide is a positive step in reducing suffering, but it does nothing to further anything that vaguely resembles a US strategic goal. Reducing the level of violence by 25% is a positive step in reducing suffering, but it does nothing to further anything that vaguely resembles a US strategic goal. Reducing the level of violence by 50% nationwide is a positive step in reducing suffering, but it does nothing to further anything that vaguely resembles a US strategic goal.
To have a chance in hell of accomplishing any US strategic goals, the level of violence in Iraq has to decrease by 80 to 90% to return to the June, 2003 levels. Everything else is, unfortunately, statistical noise within a very negative trend line.”
Doug, nice graphic. It shows just how little the “surge” has accomplished in the Iraq occupation. I would just add that the July numbers for civilian deaths in Iraq is now back to nearly the levels we were seeing early in the year. In spite of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis abandoning their homes in favor of a safer, if not more satisfying life, the numbers killed are far higher than for the same period in 2006.
Tom Robinson, as usual, great points. The Krauthamer piece had 7 direct mentions of al-Qaeda and 8 of David Petreaus. There were many other indirect references. Few actual facts were used to support his claims.
Brad, thanks for your question. I’m always happy to try to explain things you don’t understand. In my view, you are wrong about the point illustrated by the discussion of the “fair tax” issue. You seem to be saying that it illustrates the point you were making below, which is that people believe or disbelieve claims based on the identity of the speaker. In my view, your emailer’s claim illustrates the opposite of what you are saying below. The emailer, suggests, falsely in my view, that people ignore or discredit arguments in favor of the “fair tax” because they dislike or distrust the people making the arguments, and are not responding to the arguments themselves.
This claim, to me, illustrates that people are too ready to ascribe disbelief in their claims and arguments to irrationality on the part of others, rather than a careful, good faith judgment of the value of those claims and arguments.
Similarly, you seem to be saying below that disagreement with Ms. Kagan stems from a personal dislike or distrust of her, giving too little weight to the possibility that we may have carefully judged her arguments and found them wanting. It seems to me that the argument you make in your post below is the same argument you reject in the post that started this thread.
Please, if you have any difficulty in understanding, or if you need clarification of anything, let me know and I’ll do my best to serve.
I disagree with your proposition that discussion of issues is pervaded by consideration of personalities, and I especially disagree with your proposition that the point is so obvious as to admit of no argument. I’ll consider carefully any factual support you make for the claim.
I did not expect people to accept my analysis of Krauthammer’s article without reading it, but I did believe that an objective reader would find that my analysis was, if not compelling to them, at least well grounded. Krauthammer focuses very heavily on al Qaeda, which is not by any means our principal obstacle in Iraq, and in any case, al Qaeda in Iraq is unlikely to survive an American withdrawal. The various Iraqi factions are, to a large extent, united in their loathing for al Qaeda and will very likely turn on and annihilate al Qaeda as soon as the American soldiers leave. Krauthammer seems to be using the word “al Qaeda” as some sort of talisman, trying to win support for a continued American presence in Iraq by conflating the Iraqi opposition with al Qaeda.
His argument with respect to general Petraeus also seems to be a sort of talisman; the argument is that members of Congress shouldn’t question the policy being pursued in Iraq because it would show a lack of confidence in general Petraeus. That seems to me to be simply an attempt to stifle opposition. Members of Congress are obligated to use their own objective judgment, to support what should be supported and to oppose what should be opposed. Members of Congress should not suspend their judgment in order to avoid questioning some general or other.
I therefore find Krauthammer’s argument wanting.
Finally, yes, my name is Tom Robinson. Why do you ask?
Because, Tom, your writing is in a voice that sounds quite familiar, and which concerns itself with familiar themes and habits of expression. Only in the past, I did not hear it in posts by anyone named “Tom Robinson.”
That’s why I asked the other question, the one you didn’t answer: Have you posted here under other names?
For the truth on the FairTax bill please see http://fairtaxfraud.com. It’s only fair to hear the other side of what we think is a terrible and shameful bill. Then make up your own mind. : – )