Quote:
Originally Posted by Griff
I must be crankier today than I thought.
What percentage would you put on consensus? I'd say it has to be broad enough to encompass about 68% of the population so you can drop the nutters off each end of the bell curve.
|
I would put the percentage as somewhere between one half and two thirds.
But, I'll use your nutters on the end of the bell curve as an example.
You posted earlier that Frank Gafney is an extremist and I agree. But I would suggest that when the conservative Republican presidential candidates espouse his position that Sharia law threatens the American lifestyle because they believe such a position will help raise their credibility with conservative voters, then the nutter end of the bell curve on the conservative side is wider than just the most extreme nutters.
On the issues of abortion and gay marriage, I would never suggest that opposing those issues is extremist, given that nearly half the country probably hold that view. Counseling young women against abortions is not extreme unless it crosses over to intimidation and spreading misinformation. And I said earlier that if one does not want to have his church sanction gay marriage, I dont think that is extreme or intolerant.
The extremism is the idea of legislating that moral position through a Constitutional amendment denying rights to a segment of society. This has significantly less support, yet is the official platform of the Republican party. Again, that extreme end of the bell curve on the conservative side is wider than just the nutters.
On the issue of lower taxes that you raised, particularly for the middle class, who doesnt support that?
But when all of the Republican candidates support a flat tax or flatter tax (like lookout's), they are not support lower taxes. They are support equalizing the tax rates (or coming closer) among all taxpayers in the form of tax simplification. As I pointed out in another thread, the flatter tax would raise taxes on those current paying no tax by 10% (lookout's proposal) and raise taxes on the middle class (who currently benefit from lots of deductions) by 15%. The only taxpayers not paying significantly more under his proposal are the wealthy.
IMO a tax policy that is so drastically altered, not to lower taxes, but to make the working poor and middle class pay a higher percentage or a "fairer" share, not to mention the adverse affect it would have on the economy (middle class paying 15% more are not likely to have much more disposal income to spend), that is extreme.