Tuesday, June 10, 2003

Three Years Old. The only thing that surprises me about the Israeli Defense Force's murder of 3 civilians today is that they did not attempt to describe the 3 year old girl they killed as a "gunman". 8:55:03 PM    comment []

I Beg To Differ. Ole Eichorn thinks single moms usually have children to get tax credits!  Giving a tax credit to someone who "pays no income tax" is spending.  And...a young girl is better off having a child, than working for minimum wage.  He calls this the mutilated beggar effect, a reference to the horrible practice of mutilating children to multiply their begging capability. First of all, there's this popular right-wing myth that the poor pay no taxes.  BS.  There are sales taxes.  There are payroll taxes.  There are property taxes (which get factored into rents).  So this notion that the poor pay nothing is just plain wrong.  Payroll taxes are around 15.8%, if you include the portion that employers pay on your behalf, which you should. The real problem is the minimum wage.  Why is a young single mom better off with a welfare check than a job?  The minimum wage should be pushed up by a dollar or two, so this simply won't be true any more.  Conservatives will cry that this will surely cause job losses. Yes, it will cause a few.  The very vast majority of jobs being done for minimal wage are things that pretty much have to be done.  Employers can absorb another dollar there. Under the total tax structure in Alabama, I recently read that someone making aroun $14,000 a year pays about 13.5% of his income in tax.  Someone making $200,000 a year pays about 4.5%. Nobody likes paying taxes.  If the child tax credit situation is so great, why doesn't Ole dump his job, take his wife and start making babies?  Because it would suck, that's why.  It sucks to be on welfare.  The lifestyle is really poor. I have been in favor of welfare reform, as a whole.  I think that there were a lot of able-bodied people who just plain went out and got a job.  Pushing them off welfare has done a lot of good.  But we're talking about kids, here.  Cutting the child tax credit is just going to mean that there are going to be starving kids.  We're not exactly talking about the most responsible parents in the world.  Who is going to help these kids?  What will become of them? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And quoting Tom Delay?  Tom Delay is perhaps the evil politician in America today.  He has no discernible principals other than naked power.  He is violently, abusively partisan. 2:06:51 PM    comment []

Revisionism? Condi Rice: National security adviser Condoleezza Rice described as "revisionist history" recent criticism that senior Bush officials starting with the president may have overstated what was known about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons leading up to the war in March. "The truth of the matter," Rice said on NBC's "Meet the Press," "is that repeated directors of central intelligence, repeated reports by intelligence agencies around the world, repeated reports by United Nations inspectors asking hard questions of Saddam Hussein, and tremendous efforts by this regime to conceal and hide what it was doing, clearly give a picture of a regime that had weapons of mass destruction and was determined to conceal them." It would be revisionism if we'd all agreed back then that there were WMD, and then later on a bunch of us decided that there weren't.  It seems to me that a pretty good chunk of the world (say, like 90% of the population of the planet) just wasn't seeing the evidence.  UN inspectors were in there, and weren't finding anything.  What Rice is saying is that, hey, the administration isn't at fault, because they were just acting on what they were told by the intelligence chiefs.  The intelligence chiefs, meanwhile, are saying that they didn't say that there were WMD.  They used words like probable, possible, and so forth. Which leads me to the conclusion that a FUNCTIONAL VOCABULARY is a necessary attribute for a President.  If Bush had a better command of the English language, he would have understood that when the CIA said probable, it meant that there might or might not be WMD in Iraq.  Somebody hand Bush a dictionary before he starts another war. 1:29:17 PM    comment []