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I miss the halcyon days of the mid-1970's when the scientific community was warning about the impending return of the ice-age.


Or the 1980's when El Nino was causing earthquakes. Or whatever is was.

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are there any Bush voters that still think they made the right call 7 years ago? Using the cliched litmus test of "Are you better off than you were?", do any Bush voters have the slightest doubt that they voted for the right man? but I'm genuinely curious to hear how Bush has left America stronger than it was 7 years ago.


I don't think there's much question that Bush has been a big step backward. It's just hard to say that Gore would have done better. Different yes, but better? We'd trade one set of problems for another.

Part of the fault lies with the Democrats for putting up such abysmal candidates. And it's happening again: instead of putting up the best candidates they're putting up the worst and least experienced, giving the Republicans the best chance of winning (though I think Republican chances are about zero now: too much pandering to the right).

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If the wingnuts give them just one more tax break, I'm sure it will finally trickle down to the middle class!



As shocking as it may seem, the "rich", however you define it, pay a lot more in taxes than the middle class, individually. As a group they may pay less because they are far fewer of them, but they pay taxes at a much higher rate than the middle class, and a far greater portion of tax revenues than their numbers suggest. And the poor don't have to pay at all.

The problematic trend in my opinion is not in individual income taxes but rather in the effective corporate tax rates. Lowering the effective rate does make export-oriented companies more competitive globally, but it's not clear that shifting the tax burden further towards individual taxpayers - and that means shifting towards the burden towards the middle class - is overall a good thing.

And amazingly enough the US economy has been doing pretty well. In Bush's first two years the economy did spectacularly better than I expected - no real fallout from the bubble burst. I'm not sure who deserves credit but clearly things went much better than one would have expected.

Right now I'm seeing the first real warning signs on the economy in a long time - the credit markets may have been in a bubble that burst. We'll see, but up to this point the hard reality is that the economy has done pretty well.
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"If they can't picture me with a knife, forcing them to strip in an alley, I don't want any part of it. It's humiliating." - windsock