Tag Archives: Irrationality

News

MUST-READ: Correcting the economic myths that liberals/leftists believe

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Here’s a nice New York Post. (H/T Mary)

Full text:

According to Barack Obama, “The arguments of liberals are more often grounded in reason and fact.” But according to Margaret Thatcher, “The facts of life are conservative.” Who’s right?

Myth: The deficit was caused by Bush’s tax cuts.

Fact: For over four decades, 1960 through 2000, federal revenues averaged 18.2% of Gross Domestic Product and the trend was virtually flat. The final Bush tax rates became effective in 2003. In 2006 and 2007, well after the new tax rates were in effect, federal revenues were 18.2% and 18.5% of GDP, above historical levels. The federal government collected over half a trillion dollars more in 2007 than it did in 2000.

Myth: Republicans spent like drunken sailors.

Fact: Federal spending from 1960 through 2000 averaged 20.3% of GDP, with a slightly upward trend. The average over all Bush years, 2001 through 2008, was 19.6% of GDP – below the historical average. The 2001-2008 average deficit was also below the 1960-2000 average.

Myth: Republicans exploded the federal debt.

Fact: Per the US Constitution, “all bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.” Democrats controlled the House from 1955 through 1994, leaving the federal debt held by the public at 49.2% of GDP. Republicans then controlled the House from 1995 through 2006 and left it at 36.5% of GDP — below the level left by Democrat Congresses.

At the end of Bush’s presidency the debt was 40.2% of GDP. Now, two years post-Bush and four years of a Democrat Congress, the debt is 64% of GDP, the highest it’s been since Harry Truman was paying off World War II.

Myth: The deficit is due to the Iraq War.

Fact: The Congressional Budget Office calculated that the Iraq War cost $709 billion from 2003 through 2010. Total federal deficits over those eight years added up to $4.944 trillion, with the bulk of that ($2.968 trillion) added in just the last two years, after Bush was out of office.

By contrast, federal spending on education over 2003-2010 was $792 billion, and Obama’s stimulus will cost $814 billion. How often do you hear that our deficit problem was caused by education spending?

Myth: The Reagan and Bush tax cuts only benefited the rich.

Fact: According to the CBO, “The lowest three income quintiles have seen declines in their average tax rates since the early 1980s .¤.¤. The average tax rate on the top quintile has fluctuated more, with periods of increases and decreases, and was somewhat lower in 2007 than in 1979.”

In fact, the top quintile (top 20% of taxpayers) paid about 25% of its income in federal taxes in 2007, about the same as it did in 1982. By contrast, the middle and bottom quintiles paid less than 15% and 5%, respectively, both lower than at any time since 1979. The bottom two quintiles had negative average income taxes – they received more in tax credits than they paid in income taxes. Per the CBO, “In 2007, about 35 percent of households did not owe any federal income taxes.”

Myth: The deficit is due to military spending.

Fact: If federal military spending had been eliminated in its entirety in 2009, the deficit would still have been $776 billion, a historical high. Defense spending is less than one fifth of the federal budget and less than 5% of GDP. When the economy was doing quite well in the 1960s, defense spending was twice as high in those terms. In fact, President Bush presided over smaller defense budgets (as a fraction of GDP) than all presidents from 1941 through 1993.

Myth: “The last eight years,” “the last ten years,” “the last decade,” “the lost decade.”

Fact: From 2000 through 2007 real GDP grew 2.4% annually and real disposable personal income grew 2.8% annually. The economy added 5.5 million net new jobs in those years. The unemployment rate stood at 4.4% in May 2007, just before the newly elected, Democrat-controlled Congress raised the minimum wage.

From August 2003 through December 2007, over eight million net new jobs were created.

Fiscal year 2007 was the last one under a federal budget written by a Republican-controlled Congress, and marked the peak in real GDP, jobs, and the stock market. The bad economy of the “last ten years” was all in the last three years – under federal budgets written by a Democrat-controlled Congress.

Myth: Bush deregulated banks, causing the financial crisis. Fact: President Bush did not deregulate banks, or much of anything else. He increased staffing and spending on economic regulation more than President Clinton did. The number of pages in the Federal Register averaged more in Bush’s first term than at any prior time in US history. He signed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the most sweeping regulation of business since the New Deal.

The New York Times, no cheerleader for President Bush, said in 2003, “The Bush administration is rightly pushing for the Treasury Department to regulate the two giants [Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae], along with the network of federal home loan banks.” It was Barney Frank and other Democrats who helped kill such regulation. Frank said, “These two entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not facing any kind of financial crisis.”

Not a Myth: The above facts are matters of historical record. The sources of many myths are computer models rather than results from the real world. Remember the economic model that said the unemployment rate would not go above 8% if Obama’s stimulus was passed? The stimulus was passed, yet the unemployment rate went above 10% and has been above 9% for the last 19 months.

The models that say extending today’s tax rates would add to the deficit assume that tax rates have no effect on taxpayer behavior. That is an assumption virtually all economists, and most non-economists, know is false. Yet Congress requires the CBO to base its predictions on that bogus assumption.

The reality is that government spending is the problem. It is absurdly above historical levels right now and is unsustainable. It is driven by payments for individuals (64% of 2010 federal outlays) and entitlements, especially health care spending. ObamaCare did not bend the health-care cost curve down, either; it bent it up.

We have to go with Margaret Thatcher on this one.

What a great find by Mary!

Let’s re-post a Margaret Thatcher video and bask in her glorious competence and intelligence.

[youtub=http://www.youtube.com/v/okHGCz6xxiw]

She had a background in the hard sciences, like Angela Merkel, another conservative.

I think if Christian women want to impress men, they should talk like  the Iron Lady. Liberalism / leftism is really just selfishness, envy and blaming others for your own choices. What man wants to marry someone like that?

Commentary

Why do so many people oppose debating about religion?

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Consider this article by Barbara Johnson in the Dallas Morning News. Her title is “Don’t bother debating faith”.

Full article:

Recently Prestonwood Baptist Church invited Christopher Hitchens, a renowned atheist, to debate his views with William Dembski of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. While I applaud Prestonwood for having the courage to expose their young students to views which are so unlike those taught in their very conservative school, I question the idea of debating religious views at all. Debate or argument, while exposing us to the beliefs and convictions of others, can breed animosity, partisanship and an “us against them” mentality, as each side fights to defend a predetermined stance.

Because religious or spiritual views and experiences are deeply personal, I don’t believe they belong in the debate arena at all.

The spectacle of religious thinkers arguing and cutting down one another’s beliefs, practices and spiritual experiences makes little sense and is a detriment to what religion should stand for. Each individual must be allowed to walk his or her spiritual journey without outside pressure and condemnation. When one is pressured to “believe” a certain set of doctrines, or operate within a pre-set paradigm, true expression is suppressed.

Psychologist Carl Jung notes that “many of our institutions throw obstacles in the way of the individual’s self-discovery” and that through the institution of the church “people are effectively defended and shielded against immediate religious experience,” an experience I feel cannot be imposed upon anyone through argument or even reasoning.

The vast majority of the world’s population understandably practices the religious traditions of their own childhood. Having grown up Christian in the largest Muslim country in the world, surrounded by its good people, I have the privilege of a broad world view. Consequently, I feel that the all-too-prevalent idea that one entire group is misguided and needs to be enlightened with the ideas and dogmas of another group possessing a monopoly on truth is off the mark.

I don’t have the answer to the mystery and purpose of life, and I am convinced that no one else on earth does either. I like to heed Václav Havel’s advice: “Keep the company of those who seek the truth – run from those who have found it.” All people of the world must be free to practice their culture and religion as they please or to define their own individual spirituality through the wisdom they accumulate with life experience. Too much time, energy and focus is spent by many “religious” folks trying to figure out who is right and who is wrong; who is saved and who is doomed; who should be included and who should be excluded from their institutions.

If they are honestly seeking a personal relationship with the divine, they are wrestling with the wrong angel. True spirituality will never be achieved this way. More time should be spent searching for and recognizing the glimpses of God that are available each and every day in such things as expressions of love, acts of kindness and beautiful moments in nature.

As Henri Nouwen so perfectly puts it, “My highest vocation is to be a witness to the glimpses of God I have been allowed to catch.” I so admire the Zen Buddhists who don’t expend energy defending dogmas or condemning those with varying practices or beliefs. They concentrate on inclusiveness, peaceful meditation, private introspection, acceptance, and respect for people and environment. They see glimpses of the divine in the simple miracles around them every day. How can anyone argue with that?

Here’s a short bio of the woman who wrote the article:

Barbara B. Johnson is a life coach living and working in Dallas. She is also a Community Voices volunteer columnist.

I think that people with expertise in philosophy, a science, history or even engineering are more likely to disagree with her. But I think that her view is shared by many leaders in the church, and by many parents of children who attend church (H/T Tory Ninja).

Refuting her view is simple, it takes only one line. If she is saying that debating with people to persuade them of your view is wrong, then she should not be debating with we narrow-minded believers in truth to persuade us that she is right and we are wrong, that her view is… true, and that our view is… false. But maybe being good at recognizing self-refuting statements is not a prerequisite for being a “life coach”. Certainly a developed ability to reason logically is not a prerequisite for being published in the Dallas Morning News. One the one hand, she is telling us to accept her view, and on the other hand, she claims not to know anything.

And the worst thing is that it is people like this who protest apologetic debates, lectures and book studies who have marginalized the church from the public square. It is because the church is populated by people like Barbara, and because the pastors cater to the Barbaras in the church, that I struggle enormously with church attendance. I see her attitude everywhere in the church. In fact there is an entire movement called the emergent church, which is dedicated to reinventing Christianity based on Barbara’s view of religion.

Instead of reading books like “The Case for Christ”, “The Case for a Creator” and “The Case for Faith”, we have a generation of church people reading “The Shack”, “Conversations With God”, “Blue Like Jazz”, “Left Behind”, “The Da Vinci Code”, “Twilight” and other nonsense.

By the way, if you want to here someone like Barbara in a debate with a Christian Philosopher, check out this debate.

Commentary

MUST-READ: What can atheists do to counter religious parents?

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Here’s a neat post up an Uncommon Descent. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

What I found most fascinating about Longman’s analysis is that he is able to explain why he thinks religion will eventually triumph over secularism in purely Darwinian terms. Having a baby is, for most couples in the modern world, a choice, which reflects their personal values. “And so,” writes Longman, “by Darwinian process, those who adhere to traditions that preserve and celebrate the ancient injunction to ‘go forth and multiply’ wind up putting more of their genes and ideas into the future than those who don’t.”

I imagine that well-read atheists are already aware of these social trends, and I’m sure they are quite worried about them. On the one hand, atheists naturally want the percentage of people espousing their secular world-view to increase; on the other hand, most of them believe that the world already has too many people for the Earth to support – which is a natural consequence of an atheistic world-view, as I pointed out in a recent post. Now put yourselves in the atheists’ shoes: how do you think they would attempt to fight these trends? The only way they can achieve the dual objectives of keeping the world’s population down and boosting the percentage of atheists worldwide is to target the fertility of highly religious people. I can think of a few fairly obvious ways in which they might attempt to do that, and because these measures are, in my opinion, politically feasible, I don’t share Longman’s certainty that religion will inevitably triumph over secularism. Some of these measures are either currently being implemented or are already well in place in many countries; other measures are a decade or two down the track. Well, here’s my list. Recognize any of these in your country of residence?

What follows is a LONG list of items that the secular humanists can use to make sure that religious parents are not able to pass on their beliefs to their own children.

Here are a few from the list:

  • Outlaw home schooling.
  • Extend the number of hours that children are required to spend at school
  • Introduce compulsory “values” classes into public schools
  • Introduce compulsory classes on “religious tolerance” into public schools
  • Enact laws guaranteeing free access to birth control (including abortion) at school as a fundamental human right for all students over the age of 12
  • Encourage the passage of laws which make the possession of a college degree essential for getting almost any kind of job.
  • Deny government funding to religious schools that teach any kind of “bigotry.”
  • Enact legislative measures disallowing childless couples from adopting a child if they intend to bring that child up in a faith which encourages any kind of “bigotry” or “intolerance”
  • At a later stage, enact laws extending the same “protection” to all children, regardless of whether they are adopted or not.
  • At a still later stage, enact laws allowing social workers to take children away by force from their parents (natural or adopted), if there is sufficient evidence that they are being raised in a household that encourages any form of “bigotry.”
  • Citing concerns about children’s welfare following a string of highly publicized cases of child neglect reported in the press, introduce laws requiring all expecting mothers to submit to a home inspection by a suitably qualified social worker, with a follow-up interview

He explains each the bullet points I listed, and there are more bullet points in the original list that I didn’t list. Some of those have already been spotted in Sweden, Germany, Ontario, Quebec, and California.

Wow. The guys on the other side really are enraged by the thought that Christian parents might pass their moral and spiritual views on to their children. They would rather that Christian guys like me just confine our contributions to the next generation to supplying sperm and tax money so that they can push their moral and spiritual views on our children instead. And so what if their views result in our children having abortions, getting STDs, paying child support, or dying of AIDS? They know they are right, and we Christian men are just a naive wage-slaves who need to shut up and work to fund their indoctrination of our children.

I am not sure that these issues are on the radar of the church at all, because churches are very much focused on providing a non-confrontational, non-judgmental “show” to entertain their members and provide emotional comfort. Not only is the church mostly devoid of apologetics, but it is especially devoid of politics and economics. Everything controversial that might offend anyone like exclusive claims, arguments, evidence, politics, economics, abortion, marriage, etc. has been removed from most churches. Saying that pre-marital sex and drunkenness are wrong, and that global warming is a false religion might make some people feel bad. And if people feel bad, then the money might stop flowing into the plates. (I am not even mentioning the churches that are basically extensions of the secular left, and who do not even believe in orthodox Christianity)

The remarkable thing about this is that there are lots of Bible-believing Christians who persist in voting for left-wing parties governed by the secular left, in order to punish “the rich” or to get “universal health care” or to fight “global warming”. I find it amazing that churches are so incredibly naive that they do not care what the secularists are planning for their marriages, families and children – they don’t even realize that the worldview of the secular left is – gasp – ANTI-CHRISTIAN. We just don’t discuss these issues seriously in church. We want church to be about feelings and entertainment. We are so incredibly non-confrontational and non-strategic in our thinking. We just want to have a good time now and not think about the fact that the marriage and family boat is sinking on an iceberg called secular humanism. Theology and apologetics would be a good start, but if it is not worked into a worldview and a life plan and a vision of society and government, what good is it?

Just to be clear, I am not advocating surrender. I am saying that when I am in church, I am surrounded by people who have no idea what is really at stake. I keep getting urged by these people to sing songs, chit-chat about feelings, marry, and to have children. It’s not going to work. There is a huge gulf between the church and I – they want to have fun and feelings and dance and sing and to keep going as if the secular left is just going to step aside and leave us alone. But I want to effectively defend the ability of authentic Christians to live out authentic Christian lives. So long as the church keeps thinking that “better worship” is the solution to the mass exodus of young Christians from church and social problems like the massive increases in out-of-wedlock births then I really have nothing in common with them.