Proof by pundit

Quaintly Erroneous Demonstration

I am not fond of “slippery slope” arguments, despite their subtle Archimedean underpinnings. The sage of Syracuse enunciated the principle that you can get a lot from a little—provided you can have all you want. Switching from my clumsy prose to an elegant example, suppose you want to be a billionaire. I foolishly tell you that I refuse to give you any dollars, but you can have all the pennies you want. Are you defeated?

I hope not. In order to become a billionaire (in dollar terms), you need merely ask for 100 billion pennies. (Please don't spend it all in one place.)

By the way, I'm not good for it, so you can't be a billionaire after all (at least, not in this way).

The principle holds if you were similarly offered an unlimited number of farthings (each worth one quarter of a cent) or mills (one tenth of a cent).

And, as we all know, if you give certain people an inch, they'll take a mile.

Still, I doubt Archimedes—logical fellow that he was—would have been sympathetic to slippery-slope arguments that say things like:

• if a city enacts zoning laws, then tyranny is imminent
• if federal health care reform includes caps, then death panels will run riot
• if assisted suicide is permitted, then wholesale euthanasia is inevitable
• if marijuana is legalized, then cocaine kiosks will blossom in shopping malls
• if same-sex couples are allowed to marry, then Rick Santorum will marry his dog

You get the idea. If a little, then a lot. I was reminded of this while perusing a political column by Debra Saunders in this morning's San Francisco Chronicle. She was doing her best to shore up Carly Fiorina, the wicked witch of Hewlett-Packard, and tear down Barbara Boxer, an icon of fear and loathing for the right wing. Saunders watched last week's debate between Sen. Boxer and challenger Fiorina and discerned an angle of attack:

The Democrats want to claim the mantle of fiscal responsibility, but they want to keep spending.

So they've developed this myth that if they support extending the Bush tax cuts for all but the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans—those who earn more than $250,000—they are being fiscally responsible. It's true, that proposal is supposed to reduce the federal deficit by $700 billion over a decade. But note that practically no one advocates ending the rest of the Bush tax cuts, which by that logic, would be the height of fiscal responsibility.

Her argument is clear, right? If fiscal responsibility entails limiting tax relief to those making less than a quarter million, then ultimate fiscal responsibility would involve no tax relief at all. In fact, we should raise taxes on absolutely everybody. Saunders would be sure to endorse it.

Saunders expects us to fall for her coy argument that there is no basis for drawing a dividing line between those who can afford to pay more and those who can't. She obviously thinks all dollars are equal (although Jesus would disagree) and that there cannot be a rational argument for picking priorities. Besides, it's cruel to single out millionaires and billionaires and tell them their Bush tax cuts are going to lapse. (First they came for the wealthy ...) I guess those poor rich folk will have to scrimp and save to get by under the same tax burden that allowed them to be fat and happy in the Clinton years. Remember those years? They were better for just about everyone.

Does it all give you a headache? Take a thousand aspirin and call me in the morning.

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Preordained political punchline

Lisa Benson is the talented political cartoonist who never lets reality mess up a good storyline. She leaves no daylight between herself and the right-wing talking points of the day. In the main, Democrats are always stupid, incompetent, or evil and Barack Obama is an ignorant ideologue. (That seems a bit like projection to me.) Here's a recent example:

See anything wrong or misleading about it? While we understand that the political cartoon is not a format that lends itself to detail and nuance, it still seems a terrible oversight to have omitted a “George W. Bush was here” sign on the stump of America's economy and a GOP sticker on the chain saw (which Obama undoubtedly found lying next to the fallen tree). Lisa probably knows that the economy was actually devastated under the stewardship of Obama's predecessor, but let's be fair: she's simply doing her job as a right-wing propagandist. I guess we're supposed to take this in stride.

Because, you know, everything is fair in love and war—and politics. Even lies, apparently.

As a math teacher, however, there are certain lines that I cannot bear to see crossed. Check out this peculiarity:

Today we all know that the original Obama stimulus was too small. (Paul Krugman warned us at the top of his lungs, but most of us ignored him at our continuing peril.) Hence the risk of a double-dip recession is all too real. While the Great Recession itself has George W. Bush's oil-stained fingerprints all over it, a second dip—if it occurs—will owe much to Obama's timidity at the beginning of his tenure (and his foolish penchant for seeking bipartisanship from an opposition party that doesn't know the meaning of the word).

So what's wrong with Lisa's double-dip cartoon? It seems more on target than most, and even depicts the president as trying to carry Uncle Sam across a perilous chasm. It's this: How the hell does one get a double-dip in a rope bridge, for crying out loud? Catenary curves are uniformly concave up (as they say in calculus class). Benson has deeply offended my sense of mathematical reality.

Much as she often does my sense of political reality.

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