Typepad HTML Email “Get a goat, slit its throat and sacrifice it to the Gods why dont you”That quote says it all. What do you do when you want to mock religion, but you yourself still believe there’s an invisible man in the sky directing traffic? Why you speak disparagingly of goat sacrifices, of course, and you make sure that the reference to deities is plural, because, in your hopelessly confused little mind, believing there’s one invisible man in the sky is rational, but believing there are more than one is crazy. And, of course, the ritual of sacrificing a goat is crazy, but the ritual of eating wafers and drinking wine because they represent God’s body and blood, well, that’s totally rational.

I see your point. I was focusing on elected Dem officials and giving them the benefit of the doubt that they themselves were not bigoted. But underlying their actions, albeit indirectly, likely are differences in the underlying attitude of their constituents. So, yeah, when you get to the bottom of it, it is an attitudinal thing. Thanks for clarifying.

Yeah, I think we're all making the same general point. The difference in the way Dem leaders have handled 1062 and 1070 doesn't reflect a difference in attitudes towards LGBTs vs. Latinos, but differing political calculations. When they think it's better to be politically craven on issues involving LGBT rights, like in the 90s, they'll be just as craven as they were about 1070.

Tom, go back to the 90's and the early 00s and look at how Democrats, especially Democratic leaders, were handling DOMA and state level initiatives opposing same sex marriage. Even ENDA had trouble getting full throated D support. It's not the difference between 1070 and 1062, but the difference in the political environments surrounding them. More and more, the political battlefield these days is over abortion rights and LGBT rigths, with centrist Ds anxious to show their progressive cred to their base by taking strong positions on those issues, while quietly cozying up to corporate America on issues of economic justice. So, it's not that folks are less outraged at bigotry towards Latinos than they are at bigotry towards gays and lesbians. It's just that speaking out against bigotry towards gays and lesbians is really safe territory for D politicians right now.

Actually, if you read this, it looks like Huppenthal doesn't even need robocalls. Based on what this letter writer had to say, the guy prefers to bug the crap out of people live -- http://azstarnet.com/news/opinion/mailbag/letters-to-the-editor/article_6167d56b-23c0-5b0c-8c71-4cecaf3bb973.html The letter writer: "Some years ago when he was in the Arizona State Senate, my privacy was regularly besieged with his message du jour via robocalls. It became so annoying that I looked up his email address and asked him to take me off his call list since I was not in his district nor was I aligned with his partisan ideas regarding topics important to him at the time. As a result of that email he not only didn’t stop the calls, but decided instead to invade my privacy further by telephoning me and attempting to debate his “rights” and his ideas. After I asked him what about “do not call me” didn’t he understand, I finally got rid of him by blocking any further calls. His ideas were dangerous in the Senate, but putting him in charge of public education? What were voters thinking?"

Anti-choice politicians do indeed tend to be double-highs, although the thumpers that flock to the mega-churches tend to be authoritarian followers. And, in the context of choice, the hypocrisy of double high authoritarians surfaces whenever they are faced with an unwated pregnancy. A perfect example of anti-choice double-highs would be the C Street house.

Well, your comment is telling. If your biggest beef with my analysis is that you disagree on whether the Waltons and Bill Gates will pay capital gains taxes, then I did rather well. After all, that item was minor, minor part of the post. And you're wrong to boot. For stockholders in publicly held corporations, dividends and capital gains are practially interchangeable. If yuu lower the cap gains rate, you pretty much have to lower the rate on dividends as well. Otherwise, corporations simply forgo dividend distributions and buy back shares instead. Truth is, one of the few things W Bush did that made sense was equalize the capital gains and dividend rates. And for folks like the Waltons and Bill Gates, dividend income is a fairly large chunk of their income. So, taking your lead and lowering the cap gains rate to 5% indeed would help our nation's plutocrats, not to mention the hedge fund managers whose incomes, derived from their carried interests, are largely comprised of capital gains.

This is what you do at two in the morning? Post moronic comments on blogs. State tax rates are not at all time highs. Again, you're lying to make false arguments.

I've already addressed this. Your reading skills are a bit lacking, my friend.

I think you just made my point.

The type of robocalls you reference in your comment are not the type referred to in the post. The suggestion was that Huppenthal continue to use robocalls to hawk the tax credit program for private schools, not that he make the usual campaign robocalls to which you refer. Do you not get that distinction? By all appearances, you're one obtuse dude. I don't think the issue is Huppenthal's support of school choice. Rather, it's what appears to be a clear preference for charter schools and private schools over public schools and a desire to dismantle the public school system as we know it.

That's not the issue raised here. If you and Huppenthal are correct, why doesn't Huppenthal continue with the robocalls, and why didn't he announce the public service he was performing at the time he performed it? Why did it require Brahm Resnick to point it out? Truth is, Huppenthal, an elected official running for re-election with both a primary and general election opponent, would have us believe that he performed what he thought was a public service, but did nothing on his own to let the public know, in an election year. That's kind of absurd isn't it?

This post makes an excellent point. We see this occur repeatedly: Politician is outed for corrupt conduct. He vehmently defends the conduct, but hypocritically discontinues it. The obvious takeaway is that a calculated risk was taken, with plan B being to defend but discontinue, thereby minimizing the downside. When you think about it, the hypocrisy is there even before the conduct is discontinued. In this case, for example, if Huppenthal's robocalls were as justified as he claims they were, why did it take an interview with Brahm Resnick to bring them to our attention? Why didn't Huppenthal issue a press release advising us that he was going to perform this public service?

I could ignore him, Bess, but he's actually a fascinating case study. Think about the pathology here. He's a mental midget, but apparently reads a lot, or at least reads headlines and conclusions. Then, when he engages in his own analysis, he completely botches it more often than not. He purports to be ultra-confident in his views, yet not enough to stop hiding behind a screen name, and also not enough to own up to his own analytical mistakes.

Q: Was Cornelius Vanderbilt a "robber baron" or a "captain of industry" or both? A: He was a robber baron. During the Civil War he sold or leased to the U.S. Navy unseaworthy vessels at inflated prices, some were in such bad shape they sank before leaving port, at least two of his ships sank in open sea taking their entire crews down with them. After the Civil War he used lawyers and hired guns to steal land from settlers and indians to build his railroads on, the only reason he's considered a captain of industry is because his family wrote his biography. Have you ever heard the saying "behind every great fortune is a great crime", well, the Vanderbilt fortune was the source of that saying.

Dang, Dang, good to have you on board on this one.

I actually believe you grew up poor. Someone who starts out poor and escapes often is the most likely to be harsh towards those not as fortunate as he.

Again, you evade. You've repeatedly used "top rankings" to breathe credibility into the views of the economists you idolize. But when I asked about Stiglitz's ranking, you evaded. And you don't seem to be acknowledging that Rogoff's ranking didn't prevent him from blowing it big time. The upshot is that you invoke the rankings out of expedience. When an economist you don't agree with is highly ranked, you minimize. As I said before, you're a fraud.

No, I have. In both this post and the last I demonstrated that the synapses aren't quite firing for you. You even implicitly acknowledged so mjch with your arrogant yet pathetic statement that I "lawyer technicalities" while you "conceptualize."

Okay, so you attempt to engage analytically and you get blown out of the water, so you respond by saying that I "lawyer technicalities" while you "conceptualize." Yet the economists on whom you rely live in the technicalities. You're a fraud. The upshot of your comment? I nailed it on your religioin. If you could have called me on this one and said "you're wrong, I'm agnostic" you would have. By the way, on this ranking of economists, where does Joe Stiglitz rank as compared to Richard Rogerson? And how much does the ranking mean anyhow if a highly ranked economist like Rogoff could completely blow it on a major study?

What planet are you living on? State and local governments have been engaged in a destructive race to the bottom where they bid against one another by lowering tax rates of the wealthy and corporations in order to attract business to their state. It's foolhardy, because the other states and localities follow suit, the net result being that the state and local tax base gets decimated nationwide. Federal tax rates are low by historical standards. The top marginal corporate rate has been virtually unchanged since 1987, but the effective rate has dropped dramatically. Again, you're blindly repeating conservative talking points. Your comment confirms the observation I made in my post.

You forgot about Reinhart and Rogoff. Don't you want to list them?

Hard to argue with that. It's a great line, one which I fully intend to steal. Thanks.

You just can't really think very deeply. People coming off welfare, taking low-end jobs and paying the lowest effective tax rates would drive the ratio down, not up. This is not about growth, except to the extent the growth drives gains, which increase the numerator of the ratio, not the denominator. If what you're saying were correct, you'd see the ratio peak during W Bush's term. But it didn't. And get some rest. The times of night at which you're posting comments are not lost on me.

You make no sense. The 20.6 number was reached during Clinton's presidency. In fact, the best 4 year period was the last 4 years of Clinton's presidency, right after he hiked tax rates in his first term. The number came down to 16.1% during W Bush's first term, after massive tax cuts across the board. So, your theory has no support in practice. Nor could it. Even Arthur Laffer wouldn't sign on to your theory. Lowering tax rates might increase total revenue if the stimulative effect were strong enough, but how could lowering rates increase revenue as a percent of GDP. If you, and Laffer, are correct, the effect of lowering tax rates would be to increase the DENOMINATOR of the revenue to GDP ratio more than it increases the numerator. If you look at the history of this ratio, you'd notice that the average over the last 40 years is nowhere near 20.6%. So your analysis either is dishonest or off base. You pick. What's really going on with the tax revenue to GDP ratio is that it ticks up in years when there are likely to be cap gains, and down when there are likely to be losses or only marginal gains. Why? Because gains don't go into the GDP number, the denominator, but the revenues go into the numerator. Think of the captial losses that folks took in 2009 and which were carried forward to later years. Those depress the numerator of the revenue to GDP ratio, but not the denominator. The revenue to GDP ratio over the long-term reflects the effective overall tax rate, and nothing more. One other thing. If you look at the ratio for 2011 and 2012 and drill down to the categories of receipts, you'll see that employment taxes, which are fairly consistent from year-to-year, are down half a percentage point in those years. That depressed the total by half a percentage point. And that decrease was directly attributable to a tax decrease, not a tax increase. Your analytical skills are terrible. They really are.