People who don’t live in Indiana may have been perplexed by Senator Evan Bayh’s recent vote for the President’s tax cut. After all, our junior Senator is–theoretically–a Democrat. He was also a governor for eight years, and ought to understand what virtually every credible economist in the country has been saying about claims that the President’s tax cut package will create jobs: If jobs are the goal, the best way to create them in the short term is to help the states out of their worst fiscal crisis since the Depression–a crisis that has been caused in large part by the economic and tax policies of this administration.
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Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance
Priorities
When Bart Peterson became Mayor of Indianapolis, those of us who had followed the prior Administration’s fiscal operations felt sorry for him.
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Spinning Whole Cloth
Now, I know that–consciously or unconsciously–we all engage in spin; what each of us sees as reality is shaped to a considerable extent not just by our individual beliefs and/or prejudices, but by how much we really know about the subject at hand. But more and more, people are spinning whole cloth?what we used to call lying.
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War of Words
As Humpty Dumpty famously said to Alice, "When I use a word, my dear, that word means whatever I want it to mean." Here in the U.S. of Wonderland, we are about to launch a "preemptive" attack on Iraq–preemptive being the word that means whatever George W. Bush wants it to mean.
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Unending Culture Wars
Whatever one’s position on same-sex marriage, it is difficult to understand why the issue is suddenly so much more urgent than tax relief or job creation. In the wake of President Bush’s call for an amendment to the federal constitution, even reliable culture warrior Tom DeLay responded by saying "there is no particular reason for haste." For that matter, in the (highly unlikely) event that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of recognizing same-sex marriages, a state constitutional amendment would provide no more protection than the defense of marriage statute currently on our books. Aside from its symbolism, the proposal has no substance.
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