{"id":121,"date":"2004-10-15T12:37:10","date_gmt":"2004-10-15T12:37:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=121"},"modified":"2004-10-15T12:37:10","modified_gmt":"2004-10-15T12:37:10","slug":"more_recommended_reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2004\/10\/15\/more_recommended_reading\/","title":{"rendered":"More Recommended Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Johnathan Chait <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/news\/opinion\/commentary\/la-oe-chait15oct15,1,6676900.column?coll=la-news-comment-opinions\">writes<\/a> today about Bush&#8217;s misleading claim that Kerry voted to raise taxes 98 times. I always cringe when candidates on either side start throwing around specific numbers like this without any further elaboration. In the case of &#8220;raising taxes,&#8221; it&#8217;s especially egregious because most bills that Congress votes on are conglomerations of many different &#8220;action items,&#8221; some of which a Congressman may support while others are harder to swallow. Oftentimes, a member of Congress is forced to hold their nose and vote on a bill that has portions they dislike in order to make sure something they do like passes. It&#8217;s lesser-of-two-evils time, something I think that few &#8220;civilians&#8221; understand. Politicians use that ignorance to their advantage when making this sort of attack. Yeah, a candidate may have voted on a bill that raised taxes or cut a particular defense program &#8212; but that same bill most likely also funded a school or provided disaster relief or trimmed fat out of a bloated budget or any of a thousand other positive results that taxpayers and voting citizens would likely approve. It&#8217;s the same scenario in reverse when a president is forced to veto a largely popular bill because someone managed to tack an unfavorable amendment on to it.<\/p>\n<p>Attacking an opponent with this sort of claim is the worst possible case of taking something out of context.<\/p>\n<p>Striking paragraphs in the Chait piece:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>Kerry&#8217;s campaign has a detailed list of 642 Kerry votes to reduce taxes. (Maybe Bush should be painting Kerry as a crazed tax-cutting zealot totally unconcerned about fiscal responsibility.)<\/i><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i>Meanwhile, Dick Cheney as a member of Congress from Wyoming voted to raise taxes 144 times. If 98 tax-hike votes make Kerry a far-out liberal, than Cheney would have to be placed somewhere in the ideological vicinity of Che Guevara.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Johnathan Chait writes today about Bush&#8217;s misleading claim that Kerry voted to raise taxes 98 times. I always cringe when candidates on either side start throwing around specific numbers like this without any further elaboration. In the case of &#8220;raising taxes,&#8221; it&#8217;s especially egregious because most bills that Congress votes on are conglomerations of many [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}