The Third Republican Debate and the Tale of the Terrible Tax Plans

In the third republican presidential debate, the moderators gave the candidates a hard time over their tax plans, and the candidates responded by accusing the moderators of being biased. Said Ted Cruz:

The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media. This is not a cage match. And, you look at the questions — “Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?” “Ben Carson, can you do math?” “John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?” “Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign?” “Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?” How about talking about the substantive issues the people care about? And Carl — Carl, I’m not finished yet. The contrast with the Democratic debate, where every fawning question from the media was, “Which of you is more handsome and wise?”

This was a clever move by Cruz–republican voters have been trained to believe that the media is out to get them, to suspect that whenever the republicans get asked tough questions that the journalists’ claims are exaggerated or even fabricated. He succeeded in distracting the viewing audience from the real story of the third debate–the deeply flawed tax plans laid out by the GOP candidates.

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The 2016 Candidate Evaluation Series Finale

Now that Joe Biden has finally made up his mind and decided not to run for president, I can conclude my candidate evaluation series. This series finale post will provide you with a number of election-related resources:

  1. My thoughts on Biden’s decision
  2. Links to all the extant candidate evaluation posts along with all the additional election-related content I have written so far.
  3. A full league table of the presidential candidates in which they score points for supporting policies that would benefit the country and lose points for supporting policies that would harm the country.
  4. Mini-Evaluations of some of the third party candidates and marginal figures (e.g. Jill Stein, Lawrence Lessig, etc.)
  5. Statistics on how popular the different candidates’ evaluations have been with blog readers

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Trump’s Tax Plan is Regressive and Unrealistic, Copies Bush and Romney

I was disappointed to read Donald Trump‘s tax plan today. In recent weeks, Trump has been talking a pretty progressive game on taxes. Many of us, myself included, speculated that Trump might be a bit left wing on this issue and might be attempting to shift the Republican Party a to the left on economic issues. Unfortunately, this appears to have been wishful thinking. Trump’s new plan is almost precisely the same as Jeb Bush‘s and Mitt Romney’s. This still puts him to the left of flat tax and fair tax candidates (Carson, Cruz, Paul, Huckabee, Perry, Walker all explicitly endorsed one or both, while Rubio and Kasich have expressed interest in ultimately going to a flat tax), but it puts him to the right of Hillary Clinton and far, far to the right of Bernie Sanders. So let’s talk a bit about how the Romney/Bush/Trump tax plan works, why it’s so disappointing, and what the differences are between the various versions of the plan.

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Hillary Clinton Started the Whole “Obama is a Muslim” Thing

Over the last week, republican candidates Donald Trump and Ben Carson have been taking a lot of heat–Trump for refusing to deny that Obama is a Muslim foreigner, Carson for explicitly stating that Muslims should not be president. We’ll discuss what both of them said, but I want to remind everyone of something we seem to have forgotten–it was Hillary Clinton who started this, and any person who supports Clinton while criticizing Trump or Carson is at best deeply ignorant of Clinton’s past and at worst a naked hypocrite.

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I Read It So You Don’t Have To: The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump

There are a lot of people out there who say that we shouldn’t write about Donald Trump. They call him a figure of fun, an entertainer. But at this point, Donald Trump has been leading in the national republican primary polls for longer than any of the anti-Romneys we saw in 2012:

GOP Surges

The day may come when Trump no longer leads in the polls, but it is not this day–despite the claims of pundits to the contrary, far more viewers picked Trump as the winner of yesterday’s GOP debate than picked any other candidate:

2nd Republican Debate Survey

So I think it’s appropriate to take Trump seriously, to really try to figure out what makes him tick and what his appeal is. To that end, I have acquired and read, cover to cover, The Art of the DealTrump’s 1987 bestseller. I am now prepared to share what I have learned with you.

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