But - I expect you to tell me why and how you think the New York Times is wrong. I expect you to dissect their arguments and explain to me why you think that those arguments don't hold up under close scrutiny.
I already did what you asked. I mentioned all the things they didn't bother to mention. Their premise is that supply side is bad, Clinton is good, but don't bother to explain all the circumstances surrounding their statistics. Given a good economy to start with, imagine what Reagan and Bush could have done. Now give Clinton a bad economy to start with and see what those tax hikes would have done to a faltering economy. Instead of zero growth, we'd have probably gone into recession. We'll never know for sure, but the Times did not present a level playing field. By mentioning the economic circumstances at the time, they would weaken their argument.
You've also acknowledged a bias in their reporting. So why bother using evidence presented by people you've even admitted are liberal and have an agenda against conservatives? Seems like a no-brainer.
At least Fox News has a ton of liberals on staff. I can't name more than one conservative on any of the "main stream" TV media like CNN or MSNBC. I even gave an example of how conservative Carl Cameron nearly sunk Bush's chances of election by reporting on the DUI arrest three days before the 2000 election. Roger Ailes, once Rush Limbaugh's boss, even crowed about that scoop that nearly put Al Gore in the White House. A network, biased only toward conservatives, would have sat on the story or published it after the election. I'm still waiting for any of the major news networks to report on the finding of 500 WMD warheads in Iraq. Somehow I doubt I'll ever see it. The motto of the rest of the media is "We won't report so you can't decide."
Fox doesn't pretend to be unbiased. They claim to have both viewpoints. The major media don't even admit there are viewpoints. They admit they have a lot of conservatives like Sean Hannity or Brit Hume. They also have a number of prominent liberals like Alan Colmes, Greta van Susteran, Neil Cavuto, or Susan Estrich, who managed Michael Dukakis's ill-fated 1988 campaign. Nobody can figure out exactly what Bill O'Reilly is. They report both sides of the story including the liberal viewpoint, not just one like the other networks. Because liberals are only used to seeing their viewpoint on the major news networks, they suddenly see a conservative viewpoint and believe that Fox is exclusively a right wing bastion.
Back to tax cuts, the supply side tax cuts were intended to fix bad economies. Clinton nearly killed a growing economy with his first two years of near zero growth following a healthy 4.6% growing economy before the tax hikes. The retroactivity of his tax hikes even made things worse since it didn't allow people to react to the tax hike. Furthermore, Clinton had campaigned on a middle class tax cut, but immediately broke that promise by raising taxes on everyone, including the poor, the most egregious being the increasing of Social Security income subject to taxation. Before the tax hike, only 50% of Social Security income was subject to income taxes. After, it was 85%. I'm sure you were all for that, right?
I don't blame Clinton at all for the dot com bust. I don't blame Bush for the sub-prime lending mess now. Neither situation was in their control. What I do blame Clinton for is doing nothing afterwards. Once the dot com bubble bust, Clinton essentially kept saying everything was good but didn't lift a finger as he watched trillions of dollars of wealth vanish.
Bush, on the other hand, even if I don't agree with his methods, proposed the tax rebates which won't work. Given a Democratic Congress, that's probably all he could get. It's a band-aid on a potentially gaping wound. But at least he's trying. Clinton didn't bother, preferring to leave the mess to his successor. Remember, I'm the one who gave Bush a D for his handling of the economy late in his administration with an A for early in the administration. Clinton got an F for early in his administration for nearly killing the economy, a B in the middle when he signed the capital gains tax cut the Republicans passed, and an F for late when he didn't bother to do anything when the dot coms went bust.
BTW, after Clinton signed that capital gains tax cut, the Treasury got a windfall of capital gains revenue after forecasting a fall in revenue because of the lower rate.
