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If you look at total tax reciepts, it is always around 18% of GDP. It does not matter where you get it from, it is still coming out of the same economy.

As a practical matter, this chart shows us a very obvious, but little-understood phenomenon, namely, that 18% or thereabouts is the rate at which the electorate consents to be taxed. Think about that for a minute. Dwight D. Eisenhower presided over a system of steeply graduated tax rates with a top marginal tax rate of 90%. He got 18% of GDP in revenue. Ronald Reagan slashed tax rates, simplified the structure into three brackets, indexed for inflation, with a top marginal tax rate of 28%and got 18% of GDP in revenue.

http://www.qando.net/?p=11079

Your partisan blinders are showing. Paul Krugman hasn't been as accurate as you seem to think. It's not becaue they are paid to get it wrong that economists get things wrong. There are fundamental limits to what can be predicted. Your straw man dismissial of actual arguments for tax cuts make it pretty clear where you stand, and it's skewing your perceptions.

Just as a note on tax revenue in particular: Assume that permanent tax cuts which leave some non-zero level of taxation have a permanent positive effect on annual economic growth. There exists some year N such that from that year forward government revenue is higher than it would have been without the tax cut.

I'm well aware that this doesn't prove much, but it does reveal how people can legitimately expect tax cuts to increase net revenue. Since by the end of Reagan's term revenue was higher and tax rates lower after correcting for inflation and population growth, it's not necessarily wrong. OTOH, the system is sufficiently chaotic that some niche business might avoid going out of business, spark the next bubble, leading to a crash, which causes some suicidal person to set of a bomb and start a war between super powers, leading to mass extinction...

.There isn't a single credible scientist who says that the current observed increase in temperature isn't due to anthropogenic causes...

How about Dr. Madhav Khandekar, Dr. Tim Patterson, and other Scientists at Armagh Observatory?

You can read about what these people and others reported contrary to the CO2 mantra of certain groups:

http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=3056

...the information represents consensus opinion...

Of course the majority in every field, especially science, is ALWAYS right. If you were to go to the trouble to study the history of science or any other human endeavor, you would note that the majority has NEVER, even one time, come up with any significant progress for humanity. It has always been the lone Newton, Copernicus, Roemer, Kepler, Darwin, Einstein, Maxwell, Roentgen and countless others that challenged the majority status quo and brought about quantum jumps in scientific understanding. All of them were at first fought tooth and nail by the majority establishment.

Looking into the fields of Music, Literature, Philosophy and others, this is true as well.

If you want to read about well qualified climatologists who do NOT agree to the man caused global warming agenda, look here:

http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=3056

...Mars is also undergoing global warming...

Of course it is warming! Those Landrovers we sent up there are the cause.
Oh wait... Maybe the sun is putting out more power. Over all, it is remarkable how steady the power output of the sun is. It is far better regulated than the most well regulated outlet in any house on the planet. NO power company anywhere on earth manages to regulate their power as well as the sun does. Even so, the sun does vary its output a little, increasing very slowly over time. Look here for more:

http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=3056

Look especially at the output graph for the last 400 years or so.

There is also a prophecy in the Bible concerning the end of the age, where the sun will be seven times hotter: Isaiah 30:26

In the book of Revelation, which is about the end times, we also read about a very much hotter sun: Rev 16:8-9

Maybe scientists are beginning to measure the start of this dramatic increase already. If this is really to come true, eliminating greenhouse gases won't do squat. Maybe we'll have to send Al Gore up to the sun and turn down its thermostat.

Yup, only in America. If you make gun ownership illegal, then only people who break the laws will have guns. Making sure that criminals have the power advantage over most everyone. That's some good thinking there! Of course, legal guns never stop crime, right?

Krugman predicts doom in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007...

"What's the one time that Paul Krugman didn't forecast a recession? That would be when we actually had a recession. It just wasn't a recession that could be blamed on George Bush."

"Barack Obama is not a real progressive." -- Paul Krugman

"Iâ(TM)d give up the whole first page of my Google Scholar listing to have written 'The Queen and the Soldier.'" - Paul Krugman

What's not to like about Paul Krugman?

What is AGW? I have no idea what you talking about because I don't know what AGW means.

Nevermind I looked up this article and I assume it means "Anti-Global Warming". Well if you listen what I said in my previous post I never denied climate change or even global warming. You are putting up straw man arguments so you can knock them down. Don't tell my what I believe. I'll tell you what I believe thank you very much.

I believe that in general aggregate temperature is rising (except for this year when it fell) and I believe that this is mostly caused by events beyond our control or that we do not understand. The greenhouse gas theory is fun and all until you look at how much of greenhouse gas is made up of CO2. It's a fraction of a percent. The major contributor? Water! Besides plants flourish in CO2 rich environments and counter rises in the gas.

Pollution on the other hand is bad for plants and bad for humans. We should concentrate on stopping pollution of particulate matter and mercury into the environment. Those two things DO need our attention.

Can you imagine CNN reporting thus: "Today President Bush attempted to link Al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein - this is a lie aimed at persuading Americans to support a war for oil/strategic dominance/etc."?

Yes, I can imagine that, because that "Bush lied" about links between Iraq and Al Qaeda is the dominant media meme.

Can you imagine that the whatever links exist between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein was not an invention of President Bush?

"In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the Government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq."

-U.S. Indictment of Osama Bin Laden, 1998

"National-security adviser Sandy Berger suggested that the U.S. send just one U-2 flight, but the report says Clarke worried that even then, Pakistan's intelligence service would warn bin Laden that the U.S. was preparing for a bombing campaign. "Armed with that knowledge, old wily Usama will likely boogie to Baghdad," Byron Clarke wrote in a February 11, 1999 e-mail to Berger. The report says that another National Security Council staffer also warned that 'Saddam Hussein wanted bin Laden in Baghdad.'"

-"Boogie to Baghdad"

"Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden, who openly supports Iraq against the Western powers."

-CNN, February 13 1999

And since the title of this thread is "An important debating point," here's a summary for both sides:

http://qando.net/archives/003279.htm

Sure, the new UI is better organized and much more n00b-friendly. But for people who want to customize anything it is a *disaster*.

A very simple example: I often use strikethrough in Excel, mostly for retaining outdated info in a list. Excel doesn't have strikethrough alongside bold/italic/underline. This is understandable, given that this probably isn't all that common.

As far back as I can remember, you could easily add/remove buttons from the standard toolbars. I would just add strikethrough right where it logically goes. In 2007? Can't be done. My only option is to put it on the ONE "Quick Access Toolbar", dangling by itself with other unrelated functions. Unless, of course, I want to make an entire new ribbon, with XML and C#, or perhaps one of the utilities that makes it for me. Then I have redundant areas of the ribbon.

Office 2007 is great for basic use, and still supports features needed for advanced development of Office-aware applications. However, it's left "power users" in the dust.

WTF?! Couldn't they find a way to hide some advanced features they *already had* such that they wouldn't scare the less sophisticated users?

Actually, this rant says it better than I can: http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=5709

I'll learn to live with it, but I won't learn to love it.

-bitrot42

When an unknown blowhard on the Internet makes this pathetically weak and logically worthless argument, it is lame, but understandable. Bilious partisan hatred does that to people posting on anonymous bulletin boards. I've done similar things myself.

For a reputable investigative journalist to make the same argument, it goes beyond lame. It is at the very least an example of reckless, willful, unprofessional, career-ending negligence. It is positively surreal how Rather thought he could produce such documents and then place the burden of disproof on his critics. Journalism simply does not work that way. It's preposterous. Bush is probably President today thanks to the bizarre antics of Rather and his cohorts.

By the way, the proportionally-spaced, perfectly-centered typography is far from the only reason to think these documents are crude modern forgeries. Content analysis shows dozens of reasons they could not conceivably have been written by a Texas Air National Guard officer at the purported time and place, but in all likelihood were forged by an Army National Guard officer unfamiliar with the differing terminology of another branch of service. Bill Burkett, take a bow.

-ccm

But then, don't complain if a bunch of angry webmasters decide to burn stuffed penguins, riot in the streets, and set your data center on fire. Descrating a web page in such a way is no laughing matter!

But if the webmaster did that himself in order to eat up all your bandwidth, it's a different matter obviously...

SCNR...

Kerry's campaign announced it had 'filed a legal complaint against Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT) before the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for violating the law with inaccurate ads that are illegally coordinated with the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign'