Word: taxed
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...heart of a successful democracy. The current Administration, he said, "is ripping away at the fabric of the American community." The story lingered as I listened to Bush once again ask nothing from the American people in his speech and, worse, issue his annual call for lower taxes. The President's addiction to tax cuts has become rhetorical boilerplate, so totally expected that it's no longer noticed. But I found it particularly annoying this time...
...there was a budget surplus. We have big deficits now, and an economy chugging along at 4% growth. Bush's addiction is a reflection of ideology run amok and a twisted reading of recent history. Yes, the economy began to pick up when Ronald Reagan offered his famous 1981 tax-reduction plan, but it continued to grow when Reagan raised taxes in 1982 and '83. And how to explain the economic boom of the 1990s? Bill Clinton's tax increases for the wealthy, which were smaller proportionally than Reagan's, certainly didn't seem to dampen the irrational exuberance...
...case can be made for targeted tax cuts to encourage socially beneficial behavior like research into alternative cars and fuels. A case can also be made-though Bush would rather see Brokeback Mountain than make it-for targeted tax increases to discourage things like, well, an addiction to oil. But what are we to make of the perennial conservative call for the elimination of the estate tax, which would cost $750 billion over 10 years? Republicans have done a clever bit of marketing here by calling it the death tax. Perhaps Democrats should nickname estate-tax repeal the Paris Hilton...
...months from industry leaders, scientists and legislators, Bush announced in his State of the Union address last week the launch of what he called the American Competitiveness Initiative. The plan: double federal funding of research in basic areas like nanotechnology, supercomputing and alternative energy; make permanent the R&D tax credit; and train 70,000 additional high school science and math teachers. Aboard Air Force One the next morning, the President told Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican Senator who has been pushing the idea hard for the past year, that he's determined to make it happen. "I want...
...employees for two weeks as it searches for new sources of funding, and we are certainly not celebrating the hardship that many Palestinian families will face. We acknowledge the difficult choice that Palestinians faced at the polls, but we cannot accept, on a categorical basis, that our own tax dollars be given to any authority that promotes terrorism.Hamas’ democratic ascent to the helm of the Palestinian Authority highlights an underlying tension in U.S. policy of promoting democracy abroad. It is important to recognize, however, that supporting the democratic process does not necessarily entail supporting its outcomes...