Many Republican readers have written to ask why I have posted "partisan" charts, like the one after the jump, that use data from the Congressional Budget Office and elsewhere to show that tax cuts over the past decade have played a huge role in creating mammoth federal debt.
In my view, these have been "charts," rather than "partisan charts." And to me their significance is less in allocating responsibility for creating the problem than in clarifying the real options for dealing with it.
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I too have noticed that when facts are presented, 1) they don't usually support the Republican position, and 2) I get dismissed by Republicans as being "partisan" for presenting them. You may have your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts. If the facts seem partisan, maybe the party they support is correct. Yet the Republicans seem to dismiss facts (seemingly systematically), on everything ranging from climate change to the role and purpose and impact of taxation, to biology, to sexuality, to drug policy, to the economics of health care, to foreign policy, to the impact of small arms proliferation, to the history and attribution of culpability for our current economic woes. The Republican party seems to operate in a faith based manner in everything it does, and on every point, it seems to gravitate towards the wrong thing and commits itself with faith.
Here's some news, Republicans: it doesn't matter how much you believe tax cuts for the rich will produce jobs (data shows that they don't), or how much you believe filling our society with assault rifles will make us all safer (beyond a certain capability of the gun, widespread availability of guns gives you the conditions you see in Mexico or Somalia), or how much you think the globe is actually cooling/not warming/warming but not our fault: your ignorance will damn us all. If only you could secede into your own damn country so you alone could suffer the consequences of your willful blindness, we could just agree to disagree. But instead, you obstruct and water-down and force the compromise of every good thing that sincere politicians are trying to do for the US so that we all suffer, from your relentless obstruction of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to the non-stop attacks on the EPA, to forcing the Public Option out of Health Care Reform.
Is it not enough that the states you dominate--the so-called "Bible Belt"-- also prove to be the ignorance belt, the poverty belt, the STD belt (http://i.imgur.com/t3ex1.jpg ), the obesity belt, the teen-pregnancy belt (http://colorlines.com/archives/2010/10/teen_pregnancy.html ), the welfare-state belt (http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/2051834 ), and the pollution belt? You reap what you sow. Wake the hell up; your party has betrayed you and continues to betray you. Each time you vote Republican, you're voting against your own interests.
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