A comment on my blog post of last week, “Gridlock Stalls Recovery,” referred to my propensity to use metaphor to build a narrative. “Maybe it is time to speak in plain English rather than in metaphors,” wrote commenter and fellow Open Salon writer Alan Milner. He advocated the use of cold, hard, statistics to confront the lunacy of the hard right-Libertarian view of the economy and of the role of government in stimulating economic growth.
As a one-time English major, my attitude is it’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Novelists know that nothing is less important than a fact in constructing a compelling narrative. What matters more is how elements of character, plot, style, metaphor and voice combine to reinforce and play off of each other to create a compelling world for the reader.
While it would be cynical to argue that facts are irrelevant in the construction of one’s own social, economic, or political narrative, it is self-evident that they rarely win political arguments. What wins is story.
Story usually incorporates a few facts, and then twists them. “Factoids” Vonnegut called these; things that might be true, could be true, but just aren’t. These, it would seem, are the raw materials with which we often create our political narratives.
The conservative Republican and Libertarian narrative about our economic meltdown is that an irresponsible government took all our money and spent it. Therefore, to get right again, we have to take away all the money from the government.
Michele Bachmann’s narrative is that God says Christians must occupy positions of social authority in trust for Him until He returns, and that government is the Evil One and must be vanquished.
Mine is that capitalism is the best system we have come up with to run our economy so far and so long as government regulation keeps it in check. So while a conservative Republican wants his money back from the government, I think that irresponsible, underregulated capitalists squandered "our" money. Their actions killed the gigantic hog that produced the wealth and now we just have this scrawny little piglet we call our present economy and…. Oh. A metaphor.
Story informs who we are beyond the facts. Our story often says more about us than it does about external reality. I wish, despite my training in the solipsistic arts, that facts could win arguments. But beyond the Academy it just isn't so and even within the Academy, where we would hope facts might reign supreme…just ask any tenured professor or fledgling administrator if facts win arguments in the ivory tower.
On the cold, hard pavement of retail politics, facts are irrelevant. Why is it that every politician must start their introductory narrative with homespun personal origins and end with God? I guess it is that we want them to conform—or they think we want them to conform—to a shared narrative that makes us, in the words of President Obama, “a Triple-A nation.” Homespun. God-fearing. Bootstraps. Beats a fact any day.
People who live and die by facts usually lose. I think I lost, and my compadres lost, in our fervent support for health care reform because no facts were consulted in the making of that sausage. Not a single politician that I can think of cited baseline data from other countries that actually ran sensible systems.
Instead we got two stories. One narrative conjured government control of your body. The other, corporate control of your body. Those fearing the government trumped those who feared corporations. Why? Probably because fear of government is a super-popular story just now. The government took your cheese. That’s why you’re broke. Your schools are tanking, roads buckling, job gone, savings, well, what savings…the government did it all. Big. Bad. Government.
I have a lot of facts at my disposal and I use them when I can. I admire thinkers like Robert Reich and Frank Rich who use facts judiciously to build a compelling narrative, also relying upon the strength of character, plot, metaphor, voice, and, most of all, logic, to create their stories about our economic and political situation.
When President Obama was sworn into office there was a run on bullets. Gun enthusiasts across the nation believed and repeated a story that the government was going to stop gun dealers from selling ammo. There would be serial numbers on each bullet. No facts were employed in the transmission of that story, but it stuck.
Obama’s a Muslim. Death panels. Nine eleven was an inside job. Howling gaspers like these have legs. What seems to be the better strategy is not just to state the facts, but to devise better a better story, a more complete narrative that smacks of reality. President Obama is a centrist president, at minimum nominally Christian, partially of African descent, who benefited from Affirmative Action programs sponsored by the government, but due to his own hard work rose to the position of the most powerful person in the world, where he (may or) may not prove to be an effective leader when all is said and done. That beats the whole Muslim thing.
My commenter, Alan Milner, offered a compelling array of facts to support his case. I’m going to keep some in my quiver. He wrote:
I just completed a study that documents a plain fact: tax cuts have only resulted in job growth in seven out of the past 88 years. That's seven out of 16 occasions when the maximum nominal tax rate was cut. On the other hand, over the same 88 year period, tax HIKES resulted in eight occasions of job growth. That's eight out of 12 occasions.
That’s great. We need studies like this; we need facts like this. Some say a statistic is the lowest form of a fact, but that’s not entirely fair. Statistics are merely refined data, and at the best convey more concentrated factual content, the way refined sugar, for example, conveys more sweetness to the unit than, say, a raw sugar beet.
Nonetheless, our personal stories stay rooted in the fertile ground of what seems apparent. Story-centricity, it seems, is on the rise. In this Sunday’s New York Times Sunday Review section Frank Bruni writes in “True Believers, All of Us”:
…don’t we all also have to admit that to varying degrees and with varying degrees of stakes, there’s magical thinking in secular life, and that it springs from a similar yearning for easy, all-encompassing answers?
Easy stories; that is. Here’s the tweet-sized takeaway from an English major: in the marketplace of stories simple stories always win. In the rot of Weimar Germany a simple story took off: the Jews have all the money, proving, for the previous century at least, that simple stories can be dangerous.
In the same New York Times section, Emory University professor of psychology Drew Westin wrote, “Our brains evolved to “expect” stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or battle to be fought.” Whether it is Jews or Big Gummint who are the enemy at any given moment, I would argue against expectations of monolithic villainism.
For my story, I am astonished at the amount of wealth that vanished since 2007. Job loss only tells part of the story. Systemic changes in the economy explain more. The cumulative effects, however, of shrinking demand throughout the system does explain why so many people, even those who kept their jobs, feel such a pinch. But that’s not a simple story. If you run a hair salon and everybody extends their haircut cycle from three to five weeks; and two former mortgage brokers open a new salon, Shear Madness, across the street; and Supercuts is expanding in your area, you are going to feel the pinch. Can we wrap our heads around the fact that we are all that salon owner and this whole enchilada is going to stay shrunken for a long, long, time? Can we then stop blaming the Evil Government for it all and acknowledge instead that our capitalists have been very, very, bad, and we ourselves engaged in some intensely magical thinking about the depth of our pockets and, well, the whole real estate thing was maybe a mistake? If the government is evil—in my story at least—it is because government didn’t save us from ourselves by erecting a few sensible boundaries on our casino economy. But of course my story is not for everyone. Live by greed, die by greed. That’s how I see it. But certainly, don’t blame the government for all that mess. The mess, it would seem, is yours, Mr. Tax Cutter, Git the Government Out of My Way Magical Thinker. The horses are gone. The barn is burned. Humpty lies in pieces. Milk all over the floor. Just get over the government. The government was on spring break when this little Wonderland crashed and burned.
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For example, it shows a tax increase in 1942 and claims that caused decreased unemployment. What caused decreased unemployment was WW2, not tax rates. There, the cause is obvious.
The "study" can be dismissed simply based on the obvious lack of enough information to draw firm conclusions. The years when rates were raised or lowered and showed no move in employment should have been a clue that he was working a flawed premise to a flawed conclusion.
That dog don't hunt. Mr Logic was on vacation. Just a-cause grandpa sneezed don't mean grandma likes pancakes.
One big problem now is our pResident offers no compelling narrative, thus no alternative to the story told by those whose ideas caused the problem. They're telling the same story as before because it's the only story they know. I think the un-indoctrinated majority knows what the real story is, they're just waiting for a leader to read it back to them. Anybody know where we can get a leader?
In the full version of the table I used in the study, I added comments reflecting the extraneous circumstances affecting the jobless rate for each year.
For example, during the second year of the Nixon Administration, the tax rate was reduced from 77% to 72%, but the unemployment rate ROSE from 3.49% to to 4.98%, a 30% jump --at the height of the Vietnam War. In 1971, the interest rate was cut again, from 72% to 70%. For the next two year, unemployment went down and then, the following two years, unemployment went up, even though the tax rate remained unchanged.
The Republican Party hasn't said that, as a general rule, unless there's something else going on that may affect the jobs, that jobs will increase when you cut taxes.
What they have said, repeatedly, is that if you cut taxes you will get more jobs, a statement that is contradicted by the facts.
When you have an 88 year sample, and job growth follows tax cuts only seven times in 88 years, regardless of what extraneous circumstances might or might not exist, that statement remains patently false.
Sometimes, Paul, I agree with you. This time, you're riding a dead horse. As I said in the column to which you referred, tax cuts always put more money into circulation but that doesn't necessarily result in job growth. Tax hikes more often than not do, both in war and in peace.
I think you need to also factor in, besides the compelling "story" framing of reality (and yes, that is so true ... and when the 100th monkey as they say is telling the same story it is supposed to spread to the whole monkey nation" ... they say Cronkite was the 100th monkey to change (replace) the Vietnam War narrative ... to one based on reality, that we will not win this and should stop), the enormous power of "cronyism", then "egotism" and finally authoritarian "mystification."
Asserting the story you are committed to isn't easy when you are amidst your own network of "other" (opposing) story holders. Messengers can get killed as they say. So some give up and numb out rather than push their own story.
And also the sense of identity- "exceptionalism" with one's own and cronies' narrative, to emotionally plug into the team group-think. Also one's own willfulness not to admit to being or having been wrong about something, admitting to a bit of misperception or even some of it, but not all of it, is also a challenge. I think people going whole hog for Obama created a serious inability later for them, some, to ultimately call him out on betrayals he deserved to be called out on.
Collective ego ("my country right or wrong" without even realizing that is the stance often) is also dangerous. Part of the jingoism exploited by the military industrial security complex all these years. War is a money maker for corporations. So they lie and people die but they make the story about "patriotism" -- but it is really whipped up "jingoism". They make it unpatriotic to question wars and twist it so questioning the war is against (very Orwellian) the soldiers risking their lives, instead of what questioning war is about. An attempt to save lives!
Finally, the propaganda 24/7 of the media which spins an amiable "trust the experts" .... "OUR" experts "authoritarian following" enthrallment. In games people play it would be "let us take care of your little brains." Keep the citizenry in a state of learned helplessness. Greenspan was the master wizard of toxic bullshit and they are still fawning over him in the media. David Gregory is always apologizing because of the depth of what Greenspan says he cannot grasp. Mystification! THIS, IN FACT, AFTER THE ECONOMIC CRISIS!!!! Can you imagine? Geeeeeez. Greenspan filled the role of the wise "daddy" economist. But at this point, keeping him the wise old daddy STill shows our ms media is stupid as well as corrupt.
I fought hard, too, for single payer expanded Medicare for all. The more I saw the facts, the clarity of savings and the humanity of it all the more I felt sure it would be recognized by everyone as the best and humane answer. The win/win universal coverage (that every other industrial national has some form of and believes it is the government's obligation to its citizens), and that the corporate vendors were using health care as a cash cow and had somehow captured the whole process as Ralph Nader has cried out. Why are the VENDORS running the complete show and sucking up all the money? How many people not necessarily "liberal" on other issues were fighting for single payer health care but the media demonized those as radicals or more often blocked out acknowledgement that we existed.
And then the pragmatic hungry for media access faux-progressives decided that the "public option" was a compromise which was insulting to those promoting single payer. But the media went with their "story" as you say, because it was a diluter and dismantler of the single payer story.
This generation deserved universal health care and the faux-progressives ended up with no moral imagination (their political ones too hungry and blind) and turned on their own constituency and generation, actually, with that "perfect enemy of the good" crap.
And the media and administration used the "pragmatics" to divide up and conquer the single payer movement. You are not gonna get public optioners to cop to that TODAY, speaking of egotism. (or is it egoism?) That brilliant coalition "physicians for a national health care" and California Nurses association were so awesome in their fights. I was dumb-founded and enraged at what short shrift we were given by the administration and media. Really made me recognize how totally captured the Congress and administration and media, of course, was by corporatism. And how anti-facts they really are.
As Nader said, the VENDORS had taken over everything and had no right to insert themselves in there to run EVERYTHING that should have been between the doctors, the patients and the government. I have a particular bitterness with Obama at his profound disrespect and manipulation over the health care issue.
My additional 2 cents. libby [r]
Nevertheless, we have a very basic disagreement here. I believe that facts are the antidote to false narratives, as they are in this case.
I was an English major myself, between chemical engineering, psychology, journalism and philosophy. I've written novels. (Who hasn't?) I understand narrative is important but, even more than the content of the narrative, the delivery of the narrative is paramount.
Sure, narrative is important, even crucial, to political conflict. There’s absolutely no doubt that the Conservatives – I don’t really think the term Republican applies any more - have been far better at telling their story than the Liberals have been, but the compelling nature of that narrative is actually based more upon the delivery mechanism than the content of the narrative.
The Conservatives have a large number of talking heads, both in and out of government, who constantly reiterate their misstated facts, and their overheated opinions about their manufactured facts.
It is this constant reiteration of the same narrative that, through repetition, convinces large numbers of people of the accuracy of these reiterated opinions on the grounds that, if so many different people are saying it, then it must be true.
Stop a moment and ask yourself where, in history, we have seen this technique before.
The public – and that would be us – is constantly being barraged with one salvo of bullshit after another, involving the constant reiteration of the same basic talking points.
When these opinions stated as facts come at you from one person, you can easily dismiss them. When they come from dozens of different sources, including elected officials, media pundits, academics, performers, and everyone else who has a pubic pulpit, it becomes increasingly difficult to dismiss the lies as lies because the reiteration wears you down and, unless someone convincingly demonstrates that the lies are in fact lies, you become helpless to withstand the onslaught….but you can’t even begin to dismiss the lies as lies unless you have the truth to back you up.
That’s what’s happening in America today. We have lost the truth in the verbiage.
From the moment you wake up in the morning, until the moment you go to sleep at night, regardless of whether you watch television, read newspapers, or try to cut yourself off from the whole media circus, you are filled with anxiety.
If you don’t subject yourself to the lies directly by watching Fox, or one of the other propaganda outlets masquerading as news organizations, you are subjected to the same lies when you watch the coverage on CNN about the lies the Conservatives are telling. If you cut yourself off completely from the news media, and you wander onto Open Salon, you will get caught in the cross-fire. Eschew that, and you will get emails from the right and the left reiterating their talking points. Turn off your computer, and friends and neighbors will raise the issues to get your informed opinions and offer you theirs despite the fact that neither of you know what you’re talking about.
The onslaught has been unceasing since Obama took office, and the reason for it is simple:
They have a sitting duck in their sights.
You see, the president supposedly represents the party in power and, accordingly, the president (and, of course, his alter ego, his press secretary) is really the sole spokesperson for the administration. (Have you noticed how fewer and fewer members of the president’s administration speak in public these days?)
Therefore, while the opposition can have any number of talking heads repeating their narrative, the party that is (presumably) in power has only one: the head of state.
It is interesting to deconstruct this phenomenon in action.
The president has a thousand critics, but no one can defend the president except for himself because if he allows others to defend him, he looks weak.
If anyone from the president’s own party speaks up, and makes good points, the media will ask why this person is saying these things rather than the president.
If someone from the president’s party takes exception to any of the president’s statements, the media will fasten upon that as evidence of dissention in the ranks of the party.
If a non-elected media person sides with the president, and expresses similar positions, that person’s personal baggage taints the president’s message. It is no help to the incumbent that some of his strongest supporters in the media were people like Bill Maher, and even less of a help when Maher and his cohorts, such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, excoriate the president for not doing what they would have done, regardless of the fact that they don’t have the same information the president is working with.
The net result of this situation is that, while the Conservatives are seen as serious players whose opinions are being represented by serious people, the Liberal agenda is being defended by….comedians. Hell, we've even got a Democratic comedian in the Senate, where he's doing a pretty good job of being a senator but not such a good job of being a comedian.
Yes, the attempt to win hearts and minds through the recitation of dry little facts and figures like mine (and they weren’t really statistics at all; just numerical facts) are doomed to failure. Most people won’t read them, and most of those who do will dismiss them for one reason or another, as you have.
Facts, nevertheless, are important, but you have to break them down to their smallest possible simplicity, and then you have reiterate them over and over again. You have to call into radio talk shows, you have to post twitter comments, put the stuff up on facebook, and whenever the other side shouts their lies, you shout your facts back at them.
The narrative alone won’t do a thing, Steve. The narrative is the gun, the facts are the bullets. (METAPHOR. SORRY.)
The technique the Conservatives are using is Big Lie in action, a technique described by Machiavelli and adopted as his basic operating strategy by Adolph Hitler, who, in “Mein Kampf,” claimed that he first observed the technique when it was used by German Jews to place the blame for Germany’s defeat in World War I on the German commander, Erich Ludendorff.
There was no such campaign. Hitler invented that notion out of whole cloth, and used it to restore the luster to Ludendorff’s image because Hitler based his entire war strategy upon Ludendorff’s 1935 book, “Der Totale Krieg” (The Total War), and he needed to restore Ludendorff’s reputation in order to use his ideas as the basis for his military “genius.”
Between them, Hitler and his propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, used the concept of the Big Lie, told often and loudly, to convince the German people that the Marxists and the Jews has caused their misery in the midst of a world-wide depression that had nothing to do with the German Jews at all.
I feel like I have said this all before, but I think it requires restatement. The basic principles of the Big Lie are:
1. Never allow the public to cool off: instead, make sure that you are constantly reiterating and expanding on the same very basic message. If you don’t have a convenient issue on hand….invent one, such as a non-existent financial crisis.
2. Never admit that any of your “facts” are wrong. Simply restate them even louder than before. (Tax cuts will stimulate job growth. There were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.)
3. Never concede to the idea that your opponents might have some valid points about your proposal. (Tax the wealthy a little bit more.)
4. Never leave room for alternatives: Do not accept compromise. (“I got 98% of what I wanted!”)
5. Never accept blame when something doesn’t work. Blame someone else for the failure. (Who was responsible for most of the debt growth?)
6. Blame everything on the same victim over and over again for each and every failure until the public will no longer believe anything that person says, regardless of how obviously true it might be.
Sounds very familiar, doesn’t it?
The Libertarian Republican Objectivist Right has been using this technique for a generation and more. Bush II used it to instigate wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to great effect and, when his facts turned out to be false, his only excuse was that they believed them at the time and, when subsequent information came to light showing that they knew their facts were wrong, the Bush people said nothing at all. Never admit a mistake.
But Obama is a sitting duck for this tactic because he made two terrible, unforgivable blunders coming right out of the gate.
First, he set out to revamp our entire health care system in his first term, when he should have waited for his second term to address that volatile issue.
Second, he failed to address the deficit and debt issue as his first major legislative initiative during the first two years of his first term, when he had the minority Republicans over a barrel.
By leading off with his health care reform package, he presented the opposition with an unparalleled opportunity to convince the American people that Obama was evil while he was trying to do good. Once into the debate, however, he had to come out with something or risk an ignominious defeat.
The failure of his health plan initiative to gain widespread liberal support undermined his party right before the mid-term election, which he practically conceded to the opposition by giving them the health care issue to campaign on, hence his status as a sitting duck and very soon, quite possibly, a lame duck.
The most curious thing about this Big Lie phenomenon is that it doesn’t work both ways: there’s no such thing as The Big Truth.
Truth comes in small packages. It doesn’t raise amazed eyebrows, nor does it encourage fantastical speculations about secret cabals and hidden agendas.
The truth, once spoken, and verified, is so obvious that, like good news, it doesn’t nearly as far or fast as bad news does.
The media has failed in its function to distinguish truth from falsehood because the media is supposed to be impartial, but the truth isn’t impartial: it’s unilateral.
And the American people would never tolerate an administration -or at least this administration - taking to the airwaves every day on multiple stations, reiterating their facts precisely because it would appear to be an attempt at brainwashing the public.
So, the incumbent must be more circumspect than the opposition, and this reality will soon come back to haunt the next Conservative incumbent.
And, since truth is always a matter of opinion, I have to fall back upon my facts again.
Now, some people may argue with my conclusions….such as the conclusion that tax rate changes have no predictable effect upon employment….but they can’t argue about the facts that relate the increase and decrease in unemployment rates to changes in tax rates.
This reminds me of another one of my lost facts, the one that says it didn’t matter where Obama was born. As long as his mother was born in the United States and lived here for at least six years before the age of 13, then her children are citizens of the United States regardless of where they were born.
You see, that’s not an opinion. It’s a fact, but you probably never heard it from the media because no one on Obama’s team ever spoke up about it, but you can be sure that, as a Constitutional expert, Obama surely knows this fact by heart….and that’s what the old man in the Paul Newman movie, "Hud," meant when he said, “What we have here is….failure to communicate.”
Libby, the 100th monkey story is a myth. Never happened. And Walter wasn't the 100th Monkey. He was the first truly major pundit to break with the administration. (Eric Severiad, as I recall,was muttering the same things but, back then, it was Walter first then everyone else.) I was working for ABC News in New York when that story broke and everyone there was amazed when Walter came out with his position, even though he had been telegraphing his intentions for weeks. It was only after that that every one else came of out of the wood work.
When you get the chance, check out my latest "Crusader Christianity, Tea Party Cult, & The Left"
http://open.salon.com/blog/ronrobinson/2011/08/02/crusader_christianity_tea_party_cult_the_left_wip
When A LOUD ENOUGH MINORITY believe something and espouse it long enough and finally get enough recruits, there is suddenly a tipping point and that message of that finally substantial minority does impact the rest of the monkey nation very quickly. You go from glacial speed of protest to a very fast final collective revelation.
That story gives protesters and advocates of truth to power some hope.
No, it didn't have to be Walter, that is just an example sometimes used to explain the phenomenon, that is not important to my point ... though I don't think I am getting yours. Why wasn't he a tipping point in the Vietnam case and especially if he was the first major pundit to join the media opposition. I didn't mean the 100th pundit, I meant the metaphorical hundredth monkey among all of us protesting and asserting truth to power. Walter did, and things rapidly began changing thereafter and reportedly had LBJ finally saying the proverbial "oy vey" and resigning.
The proverbial 100th monkey recruited by the anti-war people could have been Walter or Joe Smith down the block, there was the saturation point! They finally had their proverbial 100th monkey! I think the story still stands with Walter even though he was famous. To me that does not change the phenomenon.
"Cool Hand Luke" is one of my fave movies. That had the failure to communicate line, right?, from the bastard prison warden and then turned on him by Paul at the very end.
if capitalism is the best we can do, why do countries with less resources and more socialism deliver better health statistics for less money spent?
As a Neo-Keynesian, I believe that ceteris paribus, all things being equal, running a bigger deficit increases aggregate demand and therefore jobs.
Of course, all other variables are never 'equal'.
Regarding this particular economic cycle, extending the Bush Tax Cuts increased the deficit and therefore increased jobs.
And, various ways of running a deficit can be better than others at increasing jobs.
Lowering taxes is obviously less effective, but still has some sort of multiplier effect.
The best, of course, is to go to war, eliminate any and all civilian capacity excesses, bomb the shit out of all global competition, and then grow like crazy for a couple of decades. In other words, WWII.
People tend to underestimate the future effect of destroying productive capacity, focusing only on spending.
But back to this cycle. Excluding two sectors, the current recovery is working. Those are obviously housing, for one. The other is state and local government. The latter have had to cut spending by 1/2 trillion/year.
So the federal government has had to run enormous deficits to keep things from imploding.
Once again, everyone agrees that over the next decade, federal government spending needs to become aligned with revenues.
But, you have two groups that are conflating the same basic problem. The short term problem is growth. And the only government response is running deficits. The long therm problem is government deficits. And the solution to that is to solve the short term problem. As well developing a roadmap towards addressing the long term problem. Like the bi partisan Simpson Bowles commission.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
"And Deutsche Bank strategist Binky Chadha points out that the economic trend most salient to corporate performance–real gross domestic product excluding government and housing activity–has grown at a 4.6% rate for the past two years, and even last quarter was up 1.8% versus the 1.3% headline GDP figure. "
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424052702304719804576468181817163622.html
This refers to GDP rather than job growth per se. But housing itself was a big producer of jobs prior to the bubble bursting.
The real error, in as simple a terms as possible, is that residential housing is CONSUMPTION, not investment. And consumption for a lengthy period of time. It takes a lot of years to 'use up' a house.
Therefore, we moved consumption forward during the bubble. And it is unwinding. Too slowly.
State and local governments that can't run deficits because of balanced budget amendments and whose revenues are directly related to the business cycle - e.g. sales taxes, simply increase the amplitude of a business cycle.
The Federal Government is the ONLY entity that can provide significant counter cyclical stimulus. To that end, they have done a pretty good job. They prevented a catastrophic deflationary spiral ala the 1930's.
However, it is essential to run surpluses during periods of strong private sector growth.
The point being that there is no real contradiction between a plan for short term deficits and long term surpluses. They are essential parts of the same basic economic paradigm.
Paul O'Rourke is right, your tax/employment analysis did not show a cause-effect relationship. Pure coincidence the times you say one "resulted" in the other, pure unmentioned when one didn't accompany the other, and pure post hoc overall.
you nailed it. ~R
Spin, spin, spin. You have nailed it with this one sentence, although I studied all of your sentences. I was so starved for reason. Thank you for the meal.