{"id":27,"date":"2002-11-06T08:12:00","date_gmt":"2002-11-06T14:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.laughingmonkey.org\/?p=27"},"modified":"2002-11-06T08:12:00","modified_gmt":"2002-11-06T14:12:00","slug":"does-it-really-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/?p=27","title":{"rendered":"Does it really matter?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Remind me who won in the election, the Republicrats or the Democans?<\/p>\n<p>I think the most insidious thing about the last fifty years of American politics is the pretense that there is any significant difference between the two major political parties.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s play Name the President:<br \/>\n&#8211; Pre-appointment, his 11 cabinet officers averaged a yearly income of $211K.<br \/>\n&#8211; His formulated tax cuts dropped the effective corporate tax rate to 13%. Eighty-five percent of his tax breaks accrued to the upper half of the income scale. Ninety percent of a capital gains tax cut benefited the top 1% of the nation.<br \/>\n&#8211; New York Times quote, &#8220;No president in living memory has courted big business as ardently&#8230;&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Who did you guess? Reagan? Bush (the Elder)? Dubya? Try Jimmy Carter.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m sorry, I just can&#8217;t work up a belief that the country would be significantly different if Gore was in the Oval Office today. I think we&#8217;ve been suckered into picking between the political equivalents of Coke and Pepsi as if we were making some meaningful choice. There&#8217;s just no room afforded in the political forums for discussion of legitimate alternatives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Remind me who won in the election, the Republicrats or the Democans? I think the most insidious thing about the last fifty years of American politics is the pretense that&#8230; <a href=\"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/?p=27\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}