Look at the following

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Look at the following paragraph from Larry Lindsey’s article from last Friday’s Washington Post defending the Bush tax cut against possible repeal. The piece has already been rightly criticized for being wilfully disingenuous in using other peoples’ quotes in a misleading fashion. But look at this graf. Is this paragraph as intentionally misleading as it appears? And what precisely does it mean? We’ll say more on this latter point later.

Very high personal taxes were clearly one factor that helped choke off the expansion. While personal taxes on average took only 12 percent of personal income in 1993, they consumed almost 24 percent of the growth in personal income between 1999 and 2000.

The point isn’t simply that it’s misleading. The actual economic reality the statistics point to seems simply enough to understand once you look closely at the structure of the sentence. The point is that it looks intentionally misleading. And if that is so, where were the Post editors?

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