Dissent

If the average annual GDP growth rate is 1.5% for the next 80 years, the economy would grow 232%. A 2% climate-change effect would reduce that growth to 225%. As physicists say, that’s a difference “in the noise.”

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In total, the top quintile [of American households in 2017] paid some 61 percent of all federal, state, and local taxes as compared to 20 percent paid by the fourth quintile, 11 percent paid by the middle quintile, 5 percent paid by the second quintile, and 2 percent paid by the bottom quintile.

Dissent

The popular debate over the recent SCOTUS decisions on racial prejudice and personal belief has revealed that many people do actually not understand the debate. I saw a lawyer objecting to the Harvard racial preference decision who was so muddled she needed the moderator's help to formulate her very poorly constructed ideas. Her basic idea was that the demonstration of inequalities in life was prima facie proof of the need to influence the scale that everyone in this country agrees to. A thief must restore what he stole; here, someone has come home and found something missing and everyone in the culture has to stop what they are doing and contribute to its restoration.

The Constitution is a structure that limits the power the government can assume--even if it has good intentions--based upon limited personal responsibilities the people are willing to surrender. The conflict is not simply with a government that innately wants to increase its influence, it also is with those who are not willing, or able, to shoulder the burdens of living--and consequences of freedom--accepted by their fellow citizens. But the baseline idea that something is innate in the political makeup that guarantees balancing life among us all because it sounds like a good or kind idea is a very weak position that will only decrease sympathy for the real and legitimate problem.