Word: argumentative
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...Texas' nachos on more menus. They also think the U.S.'s local cuisine is kept fresh since it is always being tinkered with because of our lack of a food canon. While there might be only one right way to make bouillabaisse in France, there's always a new argument about how to barbecue...
Every major newspaper and online news service carried that same headline, perhaps all written by the same copy desk: "Medicare And Social Security Face Insolvency." Cynics said that the announcement by the Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees will be used as a powerful argument to raise taxes to replenish the funds. Skeptics said that the data is based on forecasts which could change radically over the next several years. Anyone who doubts the projections will say that they are the work of actuaries who practice an art as dark as voodoo...
...eliminate gym class, school kids will get fatter. In 2006, a blue-ribbon commission released a worried report about the precipitous decline of physical education in schools since the early '90s, coinciding with a ballooning rate of obesity in kids. Both Democrats and Republicans have latched onto that argument to criticize school districts for eliminating P.E. in order to spend more to meet the rigorous testing standards of 2001's No Child Left Behind Act. Even G.O.P. Senator John Cornyn, a Texan who despises most government spending, has bragged about his support for a federal program that gives grants...
...Just as reliably, you can count on it to make a big stir and then vanish with hardly a trace. If there's any reason to hope that things might be different this time, it comes from looking at what is driving the conversation. In the early 1990s, the argument was all about covering the 37 million or so uninsured. In 2009, after much of the rhetoric on last year's campaign trail focused on the growing ranks of the uninsured, the major thrust of health-care reform centers on something that affects everyone: the staggering cost of a system...
...What we need to do, that argument continues, is frame information about how much credit cards cost in a way that really drives the point home. In 2007, a group of Senators introduced a bill that would have required credit-card companies to state on each billing statement how long it would take a person to pay off his balance and how much it would cost in principal and interest should he make only the minimum required payment each month. (That's another psychological trip-up: having a low minimum payment printed on the statement in a big font ratchets...