If you were watching the third Presidential debate, you may have noticed that John McCain had hit on a new line of attack: Barack Obama wants to “redistribute wealth.” To those of us who interpret phrases by attaching meanings to the individual words within them, this comes off as pretty weak sauce. Of course Barack Obama wants the government to redistribute wealth; so does John McCain. That’s one of the things that government does. Every time the government takes money in the form of taxes or fees, or spends money on social services or public works or anything else at all, it redistributes wealth. Most obviously, we have a progressive tax system: people with higher incomes (supposedly) pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes. This is nothing new, and no mainstream candidate for national office proposes to do away with it.
Admittedly, as a country we are not very good at redistributing wealth. The gap between rich and poor in the U.S. is larger than in any other developed country. And progressive taxation isn’t nearly what it appears at first blush:
Even in the United States, the rich pay a disproportionate share of the federal income tax, which mildly reduces inequality. Other taxes, however, like Social Security, are regressive: the rich pay a lesser share. Thus, the upper tenth of households pay 70 percent of the income tax, but only 52 percent of all federal taxes. State sales taxes make the system even more regressive, because poorer people spend a higher share of their total income on them. Kevin Hassett, of the American Enterprise Institute, estimates that a family of four earning $50,000 pays exactly the same share of its income (30 percent) on taxes as one earning $150,000.
There’s little question that Obama’s policies would be slightly more redistributive than the status quo. Most obviously, he wants to raise taxes on the upper few percent of earners, and cut taxes to the middle class; he also proposes to expand health care coverage quite a bit. These are concrete policy proposals that are squarely in the mainstream of popular debate — his health care proposal was notably less ambitious than those of Hillary Clinton or John Edwards — but are certainly arguable; a freeze on health-care spending and a giant tax cut for the wealthiest Americans is also squarely within the mainstream of popular debate. Here is the graph of the impact that Obama’s and McCain’s tax proposals would have on different income groups:
Obama’s plan would hit the upper 1%, who benefited the most from Bush’s tax cuts, and it would lighten the burden on the lower 80%; McCain’s help is targeted at the top 20%, and (by virtue of not raising taxes on anyone) would cost an extra trillion dollars over ten years. Given what passes for a mainstream consensus in contemporary U.S. politics, the choice between these two options is considered to be a close one. So there is nothing crazy or desperate about criticizing Obama’s proposals on the merits.
But McCain and his supporters aren’t fretting over graphs of the growth of American inequality, or even over the distribution of tax rates. They are fretting over this, the histogram of likely electoral-college outcomes from fivethirtyeight.com:
As a response to this stark reality, they have decided to seize upon “redistribute wealth” not in terms of the actual meaning of its actual words, but as a slogan of SECRET SOCIALISM. For whatever reasons — this is a matter for future psychohistorians, not for humble physicist/bloggers — a substantial segment of right-wing punditry refuses to believe that Barack Obama is what he says he is, or what he has actually acted like his entire adult life: a thoughtful center-left politician. They have no doubt that he is the most radical figure ever to come this close to the Presidency.
Obama’s entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. The “change” he peddles is not new. We’ve seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism… Unlike past Democrat presidential candidates, Obama is a hardened ideologue. He’s not interested in playing around the edges. He seeks “fundamental change,” i.e., to remake society.
To these folks, “redistribute wealth” isn’t a straightforward description of how the government operates under the present system. Rather, it’s a slip of the tongue, revealing the dictatorship-of-the-proletariat leanings hidden behind the nonthreatening exterior. And here is the revealing moment to which McCain was referring in that debate, when Obama explains to Joe the Plumber how his plans will remake Amerikkka as a socialist utopia:
Whew. Scary. This sort of wild-eyed communism is just what leads to endorsements from the Financial Times.
Which is why McCain’s allies are crowing with glee over the discovery of a 2001 radio interview with Obama, in which he again uses the phrase “redistributive change,” which is not precisely the same but close enough. Here is the kind of reaction this dramatic finding is receiving:
We have, in our storied history, elected Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives and moderates. We have fought, and will continue to fight, pitched battles about how best to govern this nation. But we have never, ever in our 232-year history, elected a president who so completely and openly opposed the idea of limited government, the absolute cornerstone of makes the United States of America unique and exceptional.
If this does not frighten you — regardless of your political affiliation — then you deserve what this man will deliver with both houses of Congress, a filibuster-proof Senate, and, to quote Senator Obama again, “a righteous wind at our backs.”
That a man so clear in his understanding of the Constitution, and so opposed to the basic tenets it provides against tyranny and the abuse of power, can run for president of the United States is shameful enough.
We’re just getting started.
You can listen to the entire interview here, in RealPlayer. As an Obama supporter, all I can say is: please listen. (The interview was conducted on the late, lamented WBEZ program Odyssey, hosted by the redoubtable Gretchen Helfrich. Other Obama appearances here.) The response of any non-crazy person to that interview would be “Hmm, he sounds like a thoughtful guy. It sure would be nice to have someone as President who understood some of the nuances of separation of powers and the role of the Supreme Court in the federal government.”
Because that’s all the interview is about. Obama is talking about the role of the Warren Court in the civil rights movement. He makes a simple and true point, one that conservatives should love to hear: policy-making should not be done through the courts. The Warren Court, he says, was not very radical, even if it was painted as such at the time; it was essentially reactive, and that’s always going to be a feature of the appellate court system. If you actually want to enact substantive changes that have a chance of sticking, the right mechanism is political action and the passage of legislation, not relying on the courts to fix things.
You know, I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way. [snip] You start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues, you know, in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time. You know, the court is just not very good at it, and politically, it’s just very hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard.
Communist! Oh wait, sorry, that didn’t seem very communist at all. The above quote is in response to a question from a caller, who wants to know whether the Court is “the appropriate place for reparative economic work to change place.” And Obama’s response is: no. Hardly very dramatic, really. As David Berstein at the Volokh Conspiracy, usually a reliably conservative voice, puts it:
The whole interview is worth listening to for another reason: Obama gives a very impressive performance as a constitutional scholar. Even though he was holding down other jobs while teaching at Chicago, he clearly had thought a lot about constitutional history, and how social change is or is not brought about through the courts…
What I don’t understand is why this is surprising, or interesting enough to be headlining Drudge [UPDATE: Beyond the fact that Drudge’s headline suggests, wrongly, that Obama states that the Supreme Court should have ordered the redistribution of income; as Orin says, his views on the subject, beyond that it was an error to promote this agenda in historical context, are unclear.]. At least since the passage of the first peacetime federal income tax law about 120 years ago, redistribution of wealth has been a (maybe the) primary item on the left populist/progressive/liberal agenda, and has been implicitly accepted to some extent by all but the most libertarian Republicans as well. Barack Obama is undoubtedly liberal, and his background is in political community organizing in poor communities. Is it supposed to be a great revelation that Obama would like to see wealth more “fairly” distributed than it is currently?
It’s true that most Americans, when asked by pollsters, think that it’s emphatically not the government’s job to redistribute wealth. But are people so stupid as to not recognize that when politicians talk about a “right to health care,” or “equalizing educational opportunities,” or “making the rich pay a fair share of taxes,” or “ensuring that all Americans have the means to go to college,” and so forth and so on, that they are advocating the redistribution of wealth? Is it okay for a politician to talk about the redistribution of wealth only so long as you don’t actually use phrases such as “redistribution” or “spreading the wealth,” in which case he suddenly becomes “socialist”? If so, then American political discourse, which I never thought to be especially elevated, is in even a worse state than I thought.
It is in a worse state, Prof. Bernstein! You have every right to be concerned about that. The generous reading of the spectacle of right-wing pundits leaping on the word “redistribute” is that it serves as a litmus test — to most people, it’s straightforwardly descriptive, but to a certain segment of the punditocracy that has long been convinced that Obama is a closet radical, it’s a rare glimpse at the socialist core of this man’s being. The less-generous reading (depending on one’s preferred mode of generosity) is that they know exactly what they are doing, and they understand perfectly well that Obama is not any more socialist than any other mainstream Democrat, but they are desperate to sling poop around and hope that something sticks, because the electoral college prognostications are not good.
If those prognostications hold true, and Obama wins on November 4, the conservative movement is going to have to do some serious soul-searching. Do they want to engage politically with the other side and discuss different policy options on the merits, or do they prefer the screeching-monkey approach? Do thoughtful economic free-marketers want to continue to tie their hopes for success at the ballot box to goggle-eyed know-nothing social conservatives, or do they want to try to construct a winning coalition among intellectually respectable lines? Politics is cyclical, and there is no question that conservatives will bounce back. But it’s not clear how quickly it will happen, or what form the resurgence will take; that’s up to them.
I agree with your numbers, but not all of your conclusions. Some conservatives (and this is probably a very small minority) aren’t just attacking the idea of “income redistribution”, but the repeated claim that Sen. Obama will lower the income taxes on 95% of Americans. Given that a significant percentage of Americans do not pay any income taxes at all, this figure sounds dubious until you realize that the tax credits he is proposing would create a negative tax burden on the lower income tax paying population – in other words, it would result in “refunds” when there was no money payed in to refund. This, in essence, is the “income redistribution” that these conservatives are criticizing, not the normal sense that federal and state income taxes are used to fund government services, but that higher tax rates on the upper percentages of wage earners would be directly redistributed in the form of cash. This could be seen as a form of welfare to some extent or as a heavy-handed attempt to balance income disparities – hence the accusations of socialism and communism.
A 10% reduction in income for the top 0.1% and an 8.5% reduction for the top 1%? I’m not in either category and I probably don’t know anybody who makes that much money, but even I can see that’s a bit unjust. No one should see his or her after-tax income drop by 10% just because of a new tax plan. I supported Obama before, but now I’m a little doubtful…
cmpalmer– The people making those accusations should look up “socialism” and “communism” in a dictionary.
joe– People in the top 0.1% of earners are those who make over $2,832,449 per year. They were the primary beneficiaries of the Bush tax cuts. Restoring their tax burden to Clintonian levels is not tantamount to socialism.
Redistribution of wealth you say? That sounds very much like a catchphrase summary of this passage:
“Servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.”
That statement was written by that paragon of Marxist thought, Adam Smith
When we talk about the ‘right to healthcare’ I’m not sure that anyone knows what we are talking about.
If we did, then these tactics wouldn’t work.
I suggest that instead of promising healthcare or college or educational opportunities (these are things no politician can actually deliver) they should run on the more honest- I will take money from people and give that money to other people.
Then we could have a better informed voting public.
Also re: the “tax credits he is proposing would create a negative tax burden”:
The most famous proponent of a negative income tax in the 20th century (who many in the US incorrectly take to have been it’s original architect) was the communist Milton Friedman in the 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom and also famously in the 1969 testimony before Congress. This is not to say that Friedman would’ve supported Obama; just to say that the idea that a negative income tax is socialist or communist is wrong.
It has to be repeated over and over again that even people who don’t pay income tax are supporting the federal government with taxes. Social Security runs a surplus. All the money from payroll taxes that doesn’t go out as benefits goes directly into the general treasury. Absent those contributions, spending would have to be less or deficits and/or taxes would have to be greater. Payroll taxes are a major reason why the American tax system is not very progressive overall.
Lessening inequality is imperative for at least two reasons, one economic, one political.
1. Inequality produces financial bubbles and depressions because the effective demand for products and services is not sufficient to provide opportunities for meaningful investments when the people who do the work don’t benefit from increases in productivity. You can only build so many yachts, so the rich bid up the prices of real estate and financial instruments in an attempt to find a profitable place to put their money. In the not very long run, these paper gains are unsupportable. We’re seeing what happens when the house of cards falls over. Capitalism absolutely requires redistribution to persist. In its absence, the most likely outcome is not laissez faire but some sort of authoritarian system where government spending on social control and the military supports an economy that would otherwise fail from lack of effective demand, in other words, modern China or ancient Byzantium.
2. Huge inequalities of wealth are dangerous to any republican form of government because disproportionate political power goes along with off-the-chart wealth accumulation. That’s why Theodore Roosevelt introduced estate taxes– you don’t have to be very left to object to the creation of a hereditary aristocracy.
The best arguments for the progressive income tax and other public policies that promote relative equality aren’t Marxist; they’re Keynesian and Madisonian.
“Kevin Hassett, of the American Enterprise Institute, estimates that a family of four earning $50,000 pays exactly the same share of its income (30 percent) on taxes as one earning $150,000.”
At least as far as federal taxes go, I have found very illuminating the reports published by the Congressional Budget Office (see http://www.cbo.gov and search for tax reports, e.g.
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/88xx/doc8885/EffectiveTaxRates.shtml ).
Among the things you learn are, federal taxes really are progressive. However, the average tax on the very wealthy is really not much larger than the average tax on the upper middle class. For example, it takes a little work and guesswork to compare taxes paid by a typical $150k household to a typical $1M+ household, but I have played these games and find the respective rates ~ 21% and 31%. My *opinion*, having played with these numbers, is there is much to gain in terms of fairness with introducing additional tax brackets at the top, or taxing capital gains as income, etc. One surprising result: if you imagine a “flat tax” with a sizable “standard deduction” (i.e. >~ $15k), then you really have to make in excess of ~$250k or so in order to benefit! Perhaps few upper-middle-class Republicans in support of such a tax realize this.
Incidentally, although a very large fraction of households pay no (or negative!) income tax, most of they pay net federal tax (due presumably to payroll taxes).
@Sean
How would you respond to this article from the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122385651698727257.html
Especially the last paragraph where it states that for every extra dollar someone earns above $40k, they only make 60 cents. This provides a disincentive for people to work harder. Obama seems to be assuming that people will never improve their situation. Offering a disincentive to work harder seems to me to defeat the purpose.
Now, about Bush’s tax cuts. In your graph, are you counting the amount of extra taxes everyone will pay (INCLUDING the middle class and poor) when those tax cuts are not renewed? Because, if memory serves, it was a straight percentage cut across the board (which, obviously cuts more for those earning more). So, not only will the rich pay more, but everyone else will pay more. How much will Obama’s refundable tax credits (I refuse to call them tax cuts — see the article above) offset the increased taxes?
Another thing that Bush’s tax cuts did was to create a massively exploding economy. Only in the last 2 years (which, coincides with the time period the Dems took over congress) have we seen a recession, and it is due to Democrat reluctance to regulate Fannie and Freddie (even Clinton says so).
Obama wants to have windfall profits taxes and higher taxes in general on corporations. Have you stopped to think that not only will the oil companies (which are easy to hate) be caught up in this? Intel has made more profit in the last couple of years than any oil company. What will you say when increased taxes on Intel force them to raise the prices of their processors, which will in turn increase the prices of computers and put them further out of reach for the poor? Another problem with higher taxes on corporations is that they employ millions of Americans. What is the most cost effective way to reduce operating costs to offset increased taxes? Cutting jobs. Obama’s taxes will also affect SMALL corporations. LLCs (Limited Liability Corporations) are basically small businesses with more than one owner. They also will be hit with higher taxes simply because they are classified as a corporation rather than a “Small Business”.
As for Obama being a center-left candidate, you could not be more wrong. To be center-left, he would have had to vote (at least once) for something “conservative”. He has never done that. Not once has Obama voted against the Democrat party leaders. I call that far-left. He has also voted against requiring medical care for babies born from a botched abortion, and, despite what he says, the law that was “already on the books” that he said already protected the babies actually did not exist at the time when he was voting against protecting the botched abortion babies. This is a core conservative value, and would seem to be a no-brainer. How could it possibly be bad to require doctors to give care to their patients?
@joe
Did you know that the top 1% makes only 20% of the income, but pays 37% of the taxes? And Obama wants to raise their taxes… You are right. That is not fair. (note: I am lower middle class… but with expectations that, with hard work, I can join those at the top one day 🙂 )
I find amusing the Wall Street Editorial pages, which have published a number of editorials, presumably written by intelligent people, about how the Obama tax “increases” will slam small businesses and stifle the economy etc. Yet, so far as I can tell, Obama’s even for the wealthiest people, Obama’s tax increases simply restore taxes to a level at or below those for every year prior to 2001, down to at least WWII, except for 1988-1992.
For the record, when I said that I didn’t fully agree with your conclusions, I was primarily referring to the conclusions about how the term “income redistribution” was being (ab)used by the Republicans. I think that many of them think they are using the term correctly, even if they aren’t.
Personally, I know that this doesn’t exactly equate to communism or socialism and I know that several pro-capitalist economists support the idea with great arguments. My personal jury is still out on whether it’s a good idea or not, but I’m not an economist and we’re about to see (hopefully) a good experiment on the change being done on a nationwide scale in a few months. I hope they’re right.
Finally, many conservatives I know are not the “Screw the poor! I want to be rich, rich, rich!” stereotypes they are made out to be (nor, to be fair, are the liberals I know all closet-Marxists – although there are a few on the extremes of both ends of the scale). Instead, there is a very strong Horatio Alger type individualist ideal among many conservatives that thinks that hard work and dedication is always rewarded and, by contrast, laziness and apathy should be punished. This is why their perception of “income redistribution” rankles them. What I think is missing from the mindset is the fact that hard work and determination are not rewarded proportionally (note that I didn’t say “fairly”), that sometimes if you work hard and are dedicated, you still get crapped on by fate, and that corporations are, for the most part, entities driven by greed with no moral or ethical concerns.
Matt– No, I have no real desire to respond to someone who claims “Obama seems to be assuming that people will never improve their situation” and “He has also voted against requiring medical care for babies born from a botched abortion.” Stuff like that does not bode well for a rational conversation conducted in good faith.
However, I cannot resist (Scott Aaronson’s good example notwithstanding) mentioning how dramatically you miss the point. If anyone wants to have a substantive discussion on the fairness on fiscal impact of the actual tax proposals of the candidates — awesome! Debate away, the country needs to hear the best arguments of both sides.
Instead, we are getting accusations of “Socialism!” It’s a cry of desperation from a party in dire straits, and I optimistically look forward to a day when Republicans decide that they will have to try harder.
Matt (#9):
if you look at the tables I linked, you’ll see that’s simply not true.
Granted, if your household makes over $250k a year, then for every dollar raise you get you get to keep “only” 60 cents. But that still seems to me a strong incentive to work harder. Especially because, if you make that kind of money, a promotion doesn’t mean a $5k/yr raise, it means many tens of thousands of dollars, meaning you’re still taking in tens of thousands of more income.
The logic people won’t work for more money, I think, is actually sillier than that. One could argue, for example, that if you make $1M a year, what’s the incentive to work harder for more money? $1M a year provides quite a luxurious lifestyle, and one might argue incentive would be to enjoy that life, rather than spend more time in the office to make more money. So, I think people’s real motivations go a bit deeper.
Just a little rhetorical question: How come we don’t describe the flow of massive amounts of USD to fewer and fewer citizens of the US during the last eight years as “income redistribution?” Socialism of risk, born now by we the citizens, has privatized massive amounts of profits protected from US tax codes through changes in the law that allowed “money managers” to only pay at a 15% rate. It is very hard to be a “money manager” if you make $100k, but much easier when you have more than $20 billion in 2008 bonuses waiting to be paid out at the end of the year(even though your corporations are receiving nearly a trillion in bailout money). We have one of the most productive socialist economies of the world, only in that trillions of dollars are distributed to fewer and fewer through specific governmental legislation, rather than the other way around.
Another unspoken assumption: it’s always a good idea to encourage people to work harder. Tax cuts for upper bracket earners probably do encourage them to work harder, and the real estate speculators and hedge fund brokers have obviously been at it 24/7 for the last decade. What exactly were the social benefit of this maniacal effort? Maybe we were better off when bankers worked bankers hours and took long lunches. Fewer foreclosures.
Another odd thing: people who trot out the argument about encouraging hard work, never seem to notice that proposals to cut the taxes of working people also encourage hard work.
Never in my life have I come across anyone who has express this view as a disincentive to work harder at their jobs, and that’s including the decade I spent in the British workforce, where taxes are far higher than they are in the US.
It just doesn’t happen. I have encountered people who have express all kinds of other reasons as to why they stopped working as hard–like balancing work and family and deciding they no longer need to earn more money to live comfortably (yeah, those socialists!), but in 25 years of working, no one has ever said to me “what’s the point? The government takes most of it anyway”.
I wonder why people listen to doctors about the state of their bodies, to physicists about the state of the universe, but not to sociologists about the state of their society.
From a sociologists point of view a lot of the comments here sound like Christian fundamentalists talking astro-physics.
Things like this really hurt.
Of course it is possible for you to reach “the top one day”, but chances are slim to none.
Look at these graphs:
http://contexts.org/socimages/2008/10/27/historical-changes-in-us-income-inequality/
And tell me if you really think, that any kind of justification for it exists.
Also no one outside the US would consider Obama even center-left.
I have been doing a lot of the shoe work for the Obama campaign. I have on occassion, such as this weekend, run into the type who calls Obama a marxist or communist. I have also run into a number of those sullen quite angry types who retort that Obama wants to take their guns away. These people are in the minority fortunately.
I have always said that everyone should read Marx & Engel’s “Communist Manifesto,” of course as well as Adam Smith. This is not about adopting these things as an ideological belief system, but just to know what the hell you are talking about when you call something communism. Obama is also no communist! I know two card carrying members of the Communist party, and believe me calling Obama a Communist amounts to calling a shrub a redwood — it’s an exaggeration of extremes. Obama is not even a socialist, at least if you compare him to the Socialist Worker’s Party. Obama is a basic Democrat from that wing of the party which works with social issues and labor unions. Obama is not really that much of an ideologue at all, which is in his favor.
Economic and political ideologies can all sound really great. Even the GOP ideal of limited government, low taxes, let people use their money as they see fit and so forth can all sound great. The Libertarian types go so far as to concoct a quasi-utopian philosophy based on this. The problem is that these things never work the way they are intended, or more realistically advertized. The three decades of conservative governance has been one of the greatest social engineering periods in history, though the GOP hates the idea of social engineering. The trickle down has really been a gushing up which has enriched the wealthist in the jet-set & country club class. Ever since the 1980s there has been a bifurcation in the middle class, first seen by sloughing off the so called “labor class.” As time goes on $9.00/hr is becoming the “new middle class” left behind by the few in the middle who can reel themselves up to the wealthy class. Redistributing wealth? Yeah the Republicans have been all for that from the beginning, but they are doing in opposite directions from what might be called progressive redistributions. They call their redistributions “good,” and many Americans have been stupid enough to believe it.
Lawrence B. Crowell
Beyond socialism and communism, what’s another system which is based around redistribution of wealth? Capitalism.
Joe the Plumber wants to redistribute wealth from people with clogged drains to his plumbing company. Car companies want to redistribute wealth from car buyers to car dealers and manufacturers. Investment bankers have very complicated methods of redistributing wealth.
The question is not “Should wealth get redistributed?” The question is “Using what methods and with what goals should wealth be redistributed?” Libertarians have one answer, communists have another answer, but they’re still addressing the same question.
Joe Biden doesn’t always say the right thing, but I think he handled the socialist question pretty well here: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2008/10/27/sot.biden.marxist.wftv
I have parents who lean conservative, and my mom said Obama was a socialist long before anyone else was. This isn’t for reasons you think- rather, my mom grew up in a communist country (where they were never REALLY communists, or true socialists at that) but several times she’s heard Obama say something that she heard in her youth. So whatever, it’s her opinion and I tend to think the future is not quite so bleak, but I’m just trying to explain the “Obama is a socialist” stance as I have heard it.
A more basic point is that Obama and his team actually have a self-consistent plan to deal with national issues, so even those of us who don’t particularly like it have come to accept that it is better than a collection of planks cobbled together based on who they please, and not what they do.
Yvette,
OK then… Your mom grew up in a communist country that wasn’t really communist or socialist, but she heard Obama say some things (those things you don’t bother to tell us, though) that she heard in her youth and therefore she thinks he’s a socialist even though you’ve made it clear she probably doesn’t know what communist or socialist even means… and this explains why the right is calling Obama a socialist. Whew. Thanks for that clarification!
Sean,
I agree with your post, but the the Republican ticket is simply and clearly anti-scientific:
http://www.slate.com/id/2203120/
This should be enough for everyone who is thoughtful enough to read your blog.
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