With a computer mouse, you can precisely position the cursor wherever you want. The motion of the cursor exactly mimics the motion of the mouse in your hand. It is a positional controller.
But in many computer games, you have no direct control over position. The joystick controller only controls the rate of motion. You have to provide a direction, and speed, and hope that it will get to the desired location at the desired time. As anyone who has played such games knows, position control using a rate controller is much less precise, and often not even accurate if you’re not a good judge of such things.
In last night’s political debate (as in almost all discussions of this topic), there was a lot of talk about “cutting taxes,” and “raising taxes.” Not to pick on him in particular, but as an example, here’s the reporting by Jim Geraghty:
Hillary laughs heartily at McCain’s comment about “they’re going to raise your taxes, and they have the aud-ic-i-ty, the audacity, to hope you don’t mind!”
With her laugh, she triggered a thousand primal screams on liberal blogs.
Steph asks if she’ll make a pledge to never raise taxes for those making under $200,000 per year. She says she’s “absolutely committed to not raising taxes on those making less than $200,000.”
Obama echoes the pledge, and says he’ll cut taxes for those folks.
I don’t trust either, but I’m rather surprised that they both were willing to be pinned down in the equivalent of “read my lips, no new taxes.”
Wow. Charlie Gibson notes that when the capital gains taxes were cut under both Clinton and Bush, revenues went up.
These are the GREATEST DEBATE QUESTIONS EVER.
Wow. Hillary: “I would not raise the capital gains tax above 20 percent, if I would raise it at all… I don’t want to raise taxes on everyone.” She rips Obama’s plan to raise payroll taxes.
Emphasis mine, in all cases. Every one of these statements is absurd. No one, not the mighty Hillary, not the saintly Obama, has the power to raise or cut taxes. They don’t have a tax revenue controller. All they can do is increase or decrease tax rates. And they can’t predict with certainty whether or not this will increase, or decrease “taxes” (that is, tax revenues). The absurdity of leaving out this key word is demonstrated starkly in Charlie Gibson’s statement: “when the capital gains taxes were cut, revenues went up.” How can that be? If taxes are cut, by definition, revenues have to go down. But if he had said that when capital gains tax rates are cut, revenues go up, this is perfectly sensible (though counterintuitive to people who don’t understand that tax rates modify behavior).
I expect Democrats (and journalists, who are generally Democrats) to play such word games, but I’m always disappointed when Republicans and so-called conservatives go along with it. People who want lower tax rates (and a more vibrant economy) have to demand them, and stop talking about lower taxes. Yes, it would be nice to cut off funding to the federal government (at least if we could get spending under control), but that’s a separate issue. By conflating tax revenues with tax rates, we grant far too much power to the big government types, when we should instead be pointing out their powerlessness. There are many unintended consequences of government action, and it is always useful to point out that this is just one more–that the federal government cannot directly control how much it taxes people (that is, how much money it actually confiscates)–it can only control the the rate at which it does so.
This is just one more example of how we small-government types have to start taking back the language.
about that.