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Whopper of the Week: Paul O'Neill
Timothy NoahPosted Friday, March 2, 2001, at 1:23 PM ET"It's a nonsense set of statistics"
--Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, commenting on the Citizens for Tax Justice study showing that 43 percent of the proposed Bush tax cut (since revised upward to 45 percent) would go to the richest 1 percent, as quoted by Charles Babington in the March 1 Washington Post
"In truth, the number is neither difficult to obtain nor highly disputed. The richest 1 percent of Americans would get between 31.3 percent and 45 percent of Bush's tax cut. Without the estate tax cut--which is about a quarter of Bush's tax package--the haul for the richest 1 percent would be 31.3 percent, according to Citizens for Tax Justice. Even a conservative economist such as the Heritage Foundation's William Beach agrees with that. 'It's not a controversial number,' he said."
--Dana Milbank, "Tax Cut Statistics Disputed," in the March 2 Washington Post
Bonus Whopper: Fun with self-contradiction. Which passage by Washington Post movie critic Stephen Hunter is true, and which is the whopper? You decide:
"Perhaps you don't remember it, or perhaps it was over years before you were born, but '50s America was a peculiar place. It was not evil, as so many suggest, but neither was it particularly innocent, as so many others suggest. It was, rather, complacent and blind and bland. It was a giant suburb, mallifying, highway-building, power-lawn-mower trimmed, split-leveled, television-drugged, munching placidly on its collective cud, enjoying its triumph in the ever-receding war and the bountiful rewards of consumer goods and cars with tail fins."
--Hunter's Feb. 21 obit for director Stanley Kramer
"Harris gives us the moment in which Pollock ceased to be one of the pack, and the pack instead became lots of hims. That is, when he discovered the potential of paint flung, spattered, tossed at, dripped upon the canvas. Something in that gesture caught the American '50s ever so brilliantly: the sense of things speeding up, accelerating up to and beyond the limits of control, where everything was new again."
--Hunter's Feb. 23 review of Pollock
Whopper Archive:
Feb. 23, 2001: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton
Feb. 16, 2001: Oscar spokesman John Pavlik
Feb. 9, 2001: Lynne Cheney
Feb. 2, 2001: Bobby Thomson
Jan. 26, 2001: Denise Rich (Rules for submitting whoppers explained here.)
E-mail Timothy Noah at .
Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate. Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Joseph Britt and Christopher Schepp debated the taxes Whopper (follow the thread here) with knowledge, facts and elan, but naturally we can only feature a small taste of that, if we are to have room for the pop culture posts with silly song titles.]
As a teenager during the 50s I can testify that it was indeed a complacent, oblivious, Ozzie-and-Harriet era. As a musician, I suffered through 12 gold LPs of Mitch Miller and the Gang singing sanitized versions of Public Domain songs, the pop stars of the time reduced to songs like How Much Is That Doggie In The Window, The Happy Wanderer, and Sparrow In the Tree Top. The ultimate indignity was a saccharine Japanese import which for some reason was called Sukyaki (virtually no one could understand a word of Japanese then) [Fray Editor's note: as opposed to when?], which rose to #1 on the charts.
It was precisely this cultural low-pressure zone that swept in Rock-and-Roll, the music of rebellious teenagers, or at least alienated ones. Moving from Tucson to Stanford in the last year of the decade, I was suddenly plunged into the art and poetry of the bohemian avant garde, like a bath in chilly water. Many of my generation took this icy plunge, and formed the nucleus of the radicalization of students in the 60s.
Mr. Hunter has nailed it on the head.
--Joseph Byrd
(To reply, click here.)
Whopper of the week is only looking at the two passages in a superficial way. In both you have the context of a pastoral, cud-chewing culture, and something wild coming of age within it. In the first passage, yes the world is quiet, but you have fast, powerful cars, and monster lawnmowers. There is something wild and fast and out of control. Even though he does not emphasize that aspect of the 50's, it is there. In the second passage, although he does not emphasize the background, it is clear that for the painter to be exciting, he has to come from a placid cud chewing culture. Otherwise, how can he shock people by throwing perfectly good paint supplies against the wall?
--David W. Rochlin
(To reply, click here.)
As I understand those rules, a "Whopper" must be unambiguous. The quote from Treasury Secretary O'Neill ("a nonsense set of statistics") isn't. The tax distribution statistics in question could be called "nonsense" because they are wrong or because they are irrelevant, in this case to the Bush Administration's reasons for promoting its tax cut proposal. I grant that if O'Neill meant the former we're at least arguably in "Whopper" country. However, if one subscribes to supply-side doctrine about the growth producing effects of lower marginal tax rates, or believes that passing the President's plan quickly is simply the best way to prevent Congress from spending the surplus, then we're talking about differences of opinion. Such differences may have a right side and a wrong side, but not a "Whopper" side.
--Joseph Britt
(To reply, click here.)
Chatterbox blurs two somewhat separate issues in this Whopper, by conflating the CTJ study, which includes the estate tax, the effect of which on the overall balance of the plan is rather controversial, with the income tax reduction number, which is the number that Beach says is basically inarguable. But O'Neill isn't even prepared to grant that point, and thinks pretty much all numbers are silly, as he points out several times during the course of the briefing. The administration hasn't yet been bothered to produce its own distributions, preferring instead to recycle their 1999 numbers (read: a campaign document) until after the tax cut gets fast-tracked through the House at least. So, more like a Whopper Jr. than a Whopper. How can it be a lie if you think all statistics are nonsense?
--Christopher Schepp
(To reply, click here.)
(3/5)
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Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Joseph Britt and Christopher Schepp debated the taxes Whopper (follow the thread here) with knowledge, facts and elan, but naturally we can only feature a small taste of that, if we are to have room for the pop culture posts with silly song titles.]
As a teenager during the 50s I can testify that it was indeed a complacent, oblivious, Ozzie-and-Harriet era. As a musician, I suffered through 12 gold LPs of Mitch Miller and the Gang singing sanitized versions of Public Domain songs, the pop stars of the time reduced to songs like How Much Is That Doggie In The Window, The Happy Wanderer, and Sparrow In the Tree Top. The ultimate indignity was a saccharine Japanese import which for some reason was called Sukyaki (virtually no one could understand a word of Japanese then) [Fray Editor's note: as opposed to when?], which rose to #1 on the charts.
It was precisely this cultural low-pressure zone that swept in Rock-and-Roll, the music of rebellious teenagers, or at least alienated ones. Moving from Tucson to Stanford in the last year of the decade, I was suddenly plunged into the art and poetry of the bohemian avant garde, like a bath in chilly water. Many of my generation took this icy plunge, and formed the nucleus of the radicalization of students in the 60s.
Mr. Hunter has nailed it on the head.
--Joseph Byrd
(To reply, click here.)
Whopper of the week is only looking at the two passages in a superficial way. In both you have the context of a pastoral, cud-chewing culture, and something wild coming of age within it. In the first passage, yes the world is quiet, but you have fast, powerful cars, and monster lawnmowers. There is something wild and fast and out of control. Even though he does not emphasize that aspect of the 50's, it is there. In the second passage, although he does not emphasize the background, it is clear that for the painter to be exciting, he has to come from a placid cud chewing culture. Otherwise, how can he shock people by throwing perfectly good paint supplies against the wall?
--David W. Rochlin
(To reply, click here.)
As I understand those rules, a "Whopper" must be unambiguous. The quote from Treasury Secretary O'Neill ("a nonsense set of statistics") isn't. The tax distribution statistics in question could be called "nonsense" because they are wrong or because they are irrelevant, in this case to the Bush Administration's reasons for promoting its tax cut proposal. I grant that if O'Neill meant the former we're at least arguably in "Whopper" country. However, if one subscribes to supply-side doctrine about the growth producing effects of lower marginal tax rates, or believes that passing the President's plan quickly is simply the best way to prevent Congress from spending the surplus, then we're talking about differences of opinion. Such differences may have a right side and a wrong side, but not a "Whopper" side.
--Joseph Britt
(To reply, click here.)
Chatterbox blurs two somewhat separate issues in this Whopper, by conflating the CTJ study, which includes the estate tax, the effect of which on the overall balance of the plan is rather controversial, with the income tax reduction number, which is the number that Beach says is basically inarguable. But O'Neill isn't even prepared to grant that point, and thinks pretty much all numbers are silly, as he points out several times during the course of the briefing. The administration hasn't yet been bothered to produce its own distributions, preferring instead to recycle their 1999 numbers (read: a campaign document) until after the tax cut gets fast-tracked through the House at least. So, more like a Whopper Jr. than a Whopper. How can it be a lie if you think all statistics are nonsense?
--Christopher Schepp
(To reply, click here.)
(3/5)