Back to the Cruz comments (Ed: I posted this initially in response to a post that now appears to have been removed), I think it's a question of the person reading. A democrat reads the Cruz quote as describing the "crime" as working with democrats. A republican sees the "crime" as increasing spending and taxes. I don't think there's a TEA Party member alive who would view working with democrats to LOWER spending and taxes as a "crime."

(08-04-2012 03:17 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  Back to the Cruz comments (Ed: I posted this initially in response to a post that now appears to have been removed), I think it's a question of the person reading. A democrat reads the Cruz quote as describing the "crime" as working with democrats. A republican sees the "crime" as increasing spending and taxes. I don't think there's a TEA Party member alive who would view working with democrats to LOWER spending and taxes as a "crime."

Yeah, I deleted my response because it would have been easy for somebody to take it personally. Thanks for not doing so.

Your interpretation is plausible if you take that comment in isolation, but Cruz was explicitly agreeing with what the Chronicle wrote about them (link) which was primarily about Dewhurst being a "stabilizing influence" compared to Cruz's disinclination to work in a system of respectful give and take. In this piece that Cruz offered as a criticism of Dewhurst, that Cruz "actually can't put it any better," there was NOTHING about increasing spending or taxes.

And FWIW, Cruz's claim that "Dewhurst himself raised state spending by 62%" is based on obnoxiously misleading statistics, ignoring both population growth and inflation. Politifact (link) found that during Dewhurst's tenure as LG, adjusted state spending actually went down by 4.7%. That's not quite what Dewhurst claimed but still a decrease.

(08-03-2012 02:57 PM)JSA Wrote:  

(08-03-2012 01:28 PM)WeatherfordOwl Wrote:  One thing I have observed in these discussion I have had with my liberal friends about politics: We don't speak the same language at all on these matters. We use the same words, but they mean different things, sometime dramatically different. So we are talking past each other.

Sigh, I know. I have the same experience with my conservative friends.

For what it's worth, I was at Burger King yesterday for lunch. As I was walking to the counter, I heard a man on his cell phone say, "Well, that's the liberal agenda." I can only imagine the conversation he was having.

At work we have had this problem in the past, but not so much now. We started using this thing called Quality Function Deployment (big acronyms, you know) or aka "House of Quality" to get everybody on the same page as well as on the same sentence, when discussing technical issues. It works if everyone really wants to go through the discipline necessary to use it properly.

(08-04-2012 06:53 PM)Gravy Owl Wrote:  Cruz's claim that "Dewhurst himself raised state spending by 62%" is based on obnoxiously misleading statistics, ignoring both population growth and inflation.

Unadjusted spending levels is neither obnoxius nor misleading -- it's just a different statistic from the adjusted levels. The US and China are winning of a lot of medals in this Olympics, but they also have large populations, and the number of medal events changes over time as well. So is it "obnoxiously misleading" to track the medal count rather than medals divided by population divided by number of events? You can argue that the latter statistic is more relevant or more meaningful or whatever (and I do think it's pretty interesting), but that doesn't make the former obnoxious or untrue.

(08-04-2012 03:17 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  Back to the Cruz comments (Ed: I posted this initially in response to a post that now appears to have been removed), I think it's a question of the person reading. A democrat reads the Cruz quote as describing the "crime" as working with democrats. A republican sees the "crime" as increasing spending and taxes. I don't think there's a TEA Party member alive who would view working with democrats to LOWER spending and taxes as a "crime."

I didn't see the deleted post, but I already said my use of "crime" was wrong. And it detracted from an earnest request for opinions.

But it was obvious from all I read and watched that "compromise" was a dirty word in this GOP primary season. (Note I have said nothing one way or the other about the Democrats.) And we've seen what lack of compromise has led to in our federal legislature.

(08-05-2012 01:53 PM)S.A. Owl Wrote:  

(08-04-2012 03:17 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  Back to the Cruz comments (Ed: I posted this initially in response to a post that now appears to have been removed), I think it's a question of the person reading. A democrat reads the Cruz quote as describing the "crime" as working with democrats. A republican sees the "crime" as increasing spending and taxes. I don't think there's a TEA Party member alive who would view working with democrats to LOWER spending and taxes as a "crime."

I didn't see the deleted post, but I already said my use of "crime" was wrong. And it detracted from an earnest request for opinions.
But it was obvious from all I read and watched that "compromise" was a dirty word in this GOP primary season. (Note I have said nothing one way or the other about the Democrats.) And we've seen what lack of compromise has led to in our federal legislature.

I think at least part of the problem is that you have two totally different visions that I'm not sure how you would fashion a compromise. I think Bowles-Simpson and Domenici-Rivlin represent two useful efforts to fashion a solution to a major problem, but I don't see anyone on either side picking up on either of them.

(08-05-2012 11:43 AM)georgewebb Wrote:  

(08-04-2012 06:53 PM)Gravy Owl Wrote:  Cruz's claim that "Dewhurst himself raised state spending by 62%" is based on obnoxiously misleading statistics, ignoring both population growth and inflation.

Unadjusted spending levels is neither obnoxius nor misleading -- it's just a different statistic from the adjusted levels.

Over the past 10 years, Texas's economy has grown while the tax and government spending rates have shrunk. Isn't that exactly what conservatives say they want?

And yet Cruz has chosen a metric that conceals all of that. The only realistic way to "succeed" by his metric is to shrink the economy. So yes, I think that is obnoxious and misleading.

(08-06-2012 11:54 AM)Gravy Owl Wrote:  

(08-05-2012 11:43 AM)georgewebb Wrote:  

(08-04-2012 06:53 PM)Gravy Owl Wrote:  Cruz's claim that "Dewhurst himself raised state spending by 62%" is based on obnoxiously misleading statistics, ignoring both population growth and inflation.

Unadjusted spending levels is neither obnoxius nor misleading -- it's just a different statistic from the adjusted levels.

Over the past 10 years, Texas's economy has grown while the tax and government spending rates have shrunk. Isn't that exactly what conservatives say they want?

And yet Cruz has chosen a metric that conceals all of that. The only realistic way to "succeed" by his metric is to shrink the economy.

That's not true. You could slash spending even further, so that it is not merely proportionately less, but absolutely less than in previous years. I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's possible.

(08-06-2012 11:54 AM)Gravy Owl Wrote:  The only realistic way to "succeed" by his metric is to shrink the economy.

Not true.

(08-06-2012 12:09 PM)georgewebb Wrote:  

(08-06-2012 11:54 AM)Gravy Owl Wrote:  Over the past 10 years, Texas's economy has grown while the tax and government spending rates have shrunk. Isn't that exactly what conservatives say they want?

And yet Cruz has chosen a metric that conceals all of that. The only realistic way to "succeed" by his metric is to shrink the economy.

That's not true. You could slash spending even further, so that it is not merely proportionately less, but absolutely less than in previous years. I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's possible.

I didn't say it was not technically possible, I said it was not realistic. More to the point, it is also not what Cruz himself advocates, which is a federal spending limit of 18% of GDP -- which means the absolute number will increase as the economy grows.

In other words, if we want somebody who can avoid Cruz's criticisms, we need somebody other than Cruz.