Word: argument
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Once you’re on the plane, the humiliation doesn’t stop. On that same AirTran flight out of Logan, I ran to the gate, fearing I had made myself late with the luggage argument. I arrived sweating and parched. Just after the woman scanned my ticket, I noticed a water fountain no more than ten feet away. I asked the gate person if she would watch my bags while I stopped for a drink. Her dry response: “Sir, we are trying to board the plane on time. I can’t allow...
...biggest split is over whether stimulus should take the form of tax cuts or government spending. The main argument for spending over taxes is that at a time when American consumers have turned suddenly frugal, they're more likely to save any extra cash they get than spend it. This may be the right thing for most people to do, but it won't stimulate the economy. Meanwhile, if consumers do spend the money on TVs and cars and such, much of the impact will leak out overseas to pay for imports...
...cuts have the advantage, though, that they can be put in place quickly. There's also the more ideological, if still possibly valid, argument that they don't encourage the growth of bureaucracy. And recent empirical research - some of it by Christina Romer, the University of California, Berkeley, economist who will be chairwoman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers - indicates that tax cuts have been quite effective as stimulus in the past. All of which helps explain why 40% of the Obama stimulus consists of tax reductions...
...Then there's government spending. One argument is that if you're going to stick future generations with added debt, you might as well put the money into something that will leave them better off - infrastructure, alternative energy, etc. But these projects take time to get up and running. If they're rushed, they're likely to be botched. That's where the case comes in for simply backstopping existing state- and local-government spending that would otherwise have to be cut back sharply. The Obama plan includes elements of both...
...ground-zero wreckage, glad-handing troops and seniors). Chapter titles touting Bush's accomplishments--"Established the Freedom Agenda to Spread Hope Through Liberty"--read like handpicked epitaphs. History, as Bush likes to say, will be his judge, but it's worth reading this report if only as the closing argument before the defense rests. It's not as though the prosecution lacks fodder for a rebuttal...