Whopper of the Week: Paul O'Neill

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

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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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