Welcome to your Monday open thread. It’s everyone’s favorite day of the week! Enjoy your Monday, and share your thoughts below.
Alan Simpson has said a lot of strange things (like 310,000,00 tits and Snoopy Poopy Poop Dog) so I figure people have stopped listening to him. It’s a shame because he’s been telling Republicans what they don’t want to hear, namely that taxes will have to increase to balance the budget.
Simpson appeared in Denver recently, and argued “vigorously for tax increases to help balance the budget.”
Simpson said he confronted anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist when the commission met and they exchanged words over the legacy of Ronald Reagan, claimed by both as their personal hero. When Reagan was president, he raised taxes 11 times, Simpson said, a bit of history that made Norquist squirm.
“I knew Ronald Reagan and you, Grover, are no Ronald Reagan,” Simpson said he told the president of Americans for Tax Reform, who famously said his goal was to make government small enough it could be drowned in a bathtub. Reagan didn’t raise taxes to give Norquist something to complain about, Simpson said. “He probably did it to make the country run.”
“We’ve never had a war with no tax to support it, including the Revolution,” Simpson said, after pointing out that taxes account for an increasingly smaller share of the economy. But the harsh partisan atmosphere in Washington makes any discussion of tax increases dangerous, Simpson said. “People are told in Congress if they raise taxes by a nickel, they’ll be strung up by their heels in the town square.”
For all of the comments Simpson makes that leave one dumbfounded and asking, “What was he thinking?” this was actually a very sensible thing to say. It’s also a message that too few Republicans are even willing to acknowledge out loud.
Shame on Simpson for taking St. Reagan’s name in vain. Republicans will continue to pretend that Reagan only cut taxes and that he didn’t create a huge deficit.
I got this link from a special correspondent. It’s an article showing there are actual brain structure differences between liberals and conservatives. Cause or effect?
This is going to sound sort of obvious, but here we go: A study from University College London published this week in Current Biology has discovered that there are actually differences in the brains of liberals and conservatives. Specifically, liberals’ brains tend to be bigger in the area that deals with processing complex ideas and situations, while conservatives’ brains are bigger in the area that processes fear.
According to the report: “We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala.”
People with larger amygdalae respond to perceived threats with more aggression and “are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions.” The anterior cingulate cortex, however, “monitors uncertainty and conflict.” “Thus,” says the report, “it is conceivable that individuals with a larger ACC have a higher capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts, allowing them to accept more liberal views.”
You can definitely see the difference in the rhetoric that both sides use. I think the conservative advantage here is that everyone responds to fear-based arguments on some level. That’s why their rhetoric has such power, even if a lot of it is nonsense.