Twelve years ago we were able to maintain a thriving economy, the entitlement programs, and top marginal tax rates below 40%, and we had budget surpluses. Now we have lower tax rates, a huge debt problem, and people saying we have to chop off support for the most vulnerable segments of society. We can fix the budget problem by a convex combination of entitlement cuts and tax increases, but you can't have it both ways and most people want the entitlements.

The lower graph is the debt/gdp ratio. As parent points out, growth is mostly in the last three Republican administrations. Also note that Obama wasn't sworn in until 2009, and the huge increase at the right began before Obama took office. In other words, it's the recession rather than the stimulus package.

Your claims reflect a very common misconception. Basic supply/demand analysis shows how it actually works. The relevant slides are on pages 2-3 of the handout. The question of who bears the brunt of taxes depends on the relative elasticities of supply and demand.

Python has more market share than Ruby and I hear lots of other folks talk about how beautiful they find it. However, my primary field is computer simulation and object-oriented modeling is extremely important to me. I find it hard to get past having to explicitly include "self" as the first argument to methods in Python -- to me it makes Python feel like a procedural language which bolted objects on as an afterthought, while in Ruby OOP is integral. I seem to be in a minority on this, though.

Not even close.

What I'm saying is that being ambidextrous in a one-side dominant population provides some quality-of-life benefits. I thought that viewpoint was relevant to the topic and I shared a few examples to illustrate the point. Nothing in that list is a big deal to anyone but my wife. It's the luck of the draw that I happened to be born ambidextrous, and to the extent that I think about it I consider it one of several ways in which I am fortunate.

You joke, but that was literally true for me w/ regards to handwriting. Then one day my second grade teacher saw me switching hands and freaked out. She made me sit on my left hand for the rest of the year and had the colossal gall to tell me that someday I'd thank her for it. When my doctor learned about it at my next annual physical, he was pissed off beyond belief. He didn't cuss, but he kept muttering about "superstitious morons" and "subjecting kids to the prejudices of idiots", or words to that effect.

Fortunately the only thing impacted was my handwriting. Fifty years later my left-handed writing still looks like a first-grader while my right-handed writing got arrested at a second grade level. But I'm one heck of a typist, when I played soccer I did equally well on either left or right wing, I'm popular at dinner parties because I can accommodate whoever I am seated next to without bumping elbows, and my wife thinks I'm a very versatile fellow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy