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Hmmmm. What if you're both wrong?

Cloudy once again bringing everyone down. Seriously sir... what's up with that?

Not trying to bring anyone down, IO, just suggesting that merely because the American people take your side, that doesn't make them wise, nor you wise because they agreed with you. It's the same principle that requires me to say that if the American people disagree with you, that does not make them stupid and ignorant. Something I think has been forgotten too often in recent years.

Blackcloud you should hear the stuff my conservative father-in-law and brother-in-laws are saying on a daily basis. "Obama will immediately disband the military and all servicemen/women will be out of a job." "Obama will tax the wealthy at a rate of 50% or more." And of course he's a Muslim. And so on. They truly believe this stuff. It's frightening.

For the record I don't mean to imply that all conservatives are like this or that they are no loony Dems out there. This is just my own personal experience based on having solely conservative relatives on both sides of my family (other than my parents).

Also for the record, the top income tax rate was over 50% until Reagan's tax cuts. So I guess Nixon was a socialist too.

Everyone can agree there are absolute batshit insane people of both parties. The idiocy factors in when people start presuming outliers can be used as generalizations for a whole populace.

Also, the deluge of e-mails I have gotten from my family and a few of my friends (re: Obama) demonstrating a complete inability to comprehend how taxes actually work is grotesque.

Stella, I would say in response to you: 1) neither side has a monopoly of believing the worst about the other; 2) much of the hidden beauty of politics is that so often it depends on disappointment, not only of one's hopes, but of one's fears. Although I suppose that is more a beauty of history, and not merely of politics.

Regan's tax reform was the last time the tax code in this country even remotely resembled something rational. Before that, it was riddled with loopholes and exceptions, which is why the official 90% rates which existed at one time did not actually yield 90%. Since then, the code has steadily proliferated once more with loopholes and exceptions and grown irrational. Anyone who believes the government does not or ought not discriminate against citizens, need only take a brief glance at the tax laws of the country to be disabused of that childish notion.

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