Reading and Thinking

I don't think enough people do either of these things these days. If they did, they would be able to find out that the drivel that the right is spewing about how Obama is Leninist, Socialist, whatever, is just that. Drivel.

Here is an interesting snippet from Andrew Sullivan's blog:


No Empty Wallets responds to Jim Manzi's argument (and Jim responds in the comments). The data on job growth in the Bush and Clinton years are interesting (Clinton wins). I'm not sure that returning marginal rates to the levels of the 1990s is that big a deal. But long-term creep in government spending as a share of the economy is troubling, if it pans out. Matt Miller urges calm:

"We know from the Clinton boom of the 1990s that marginal tax rates of 39.6 percent put no brakes on entrepreneurship or growth. And the modest limits Obama is proposing on the value of itemized deductions for mortgage interest and charitable donations puts their value exactly where they were under Ronald Reagan, which no one would say was a 'socialist' interlude for the U.S. economy. So everyone jumping up and down about how supposedly 'radical' Obama's plan is should calm down and look at the facts."

You can get to more links if you go directly to Andrew's blog post here:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/03/taxes-and-entre.html

More reading, less listening to assholes like Rush Limbaugh or Roger Kimball or Ann Coulter. As you can see, Andrew is still skeptical, but he's certainly not stupid enough to think that there does not exist the possibility that what worked during the Clinton years might work now. Because only idiot ideologues would ever try to argue that times were better during the eight years of Dubya than they were during the eight years of Clinton. And the situations that these two presidents left for their predecessors were light years apart.