The major source of growth in the US economy in the 90’s was the same thing that drove the dot.com bubble. Namely, a quantum leap in computer technology driving a massive increase in productivity and other production efficiencies. While the tax-hawks will never admit an up side to tax hikes, the Clinton-era tax hikes acted as a growth restraint when one was actually needed. Without them, the bubble would have been bigger, and the post-bubble recession much larger and longer.

IOW, restraining growth isn’t always a bad thing. Just as there is something to be said for cutting rates in a downswing, there things to be said for raising them in an upswing. Tax-hawks, of course, much prefer spending control to tax hikes–but spending control does nothing to restrain economic growth, and there really are times where restraining growth is smart.

Pete, the Sun Times piece is a great read and highlights the point that religion can be “a dangerous idea”

For millennia, the monotheistic religions have persecuted countless heresies, together with nuisances from science such as geocentrism, biblical archeology, and the theory of evolution. We can be thankful that the punishments have changed from torture and mutilation to the canceling of grants and the writing of vituperative reviews. But intellectual intimidation, whether by sword or by pen, inevitably shapes the ideas that are taken seriously in a given era, and the rear-view mirror of history presents us with a warning.

What he basically accuses Atheism of is not having it’s own moral code to “compete” with those of religion. Of course it doesn’t, because it’s not an organized belief system, just a lack of one. As to the religious moral codes, they say love your neighbor and they also say kill the infidel. We choose to do the first and ignore the second because it’s not really the religion that’s guiding us, but a wider social sense of right and wrong that we all, believers and non-believers, share.

Finally this:

one of this amounts to proof of God’s existence. But it clarifies a point of agreement — which reveals an even deeper division. Atheists and theists seem to agree that human beings have an innate desire for morality and purpose. For the theist, this is perfectly understandable: We long for love, harmony and sympathy because we are intended by a Creator to find them. In a world without God, however, this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature — imprinted by evolution, but destined for disappointment, just as we are destined for oblivion, on a planet that will be consumed by fire before the sun grows dim and cold.

The wording shows a very old stereotype of atheists; that we are essentially unhappy, depressed, empty and devoid of purpose. This stems from a false extrapolation; the religious person thinks what they themselves would be like without the comfort of their deity, if “God died” and assumes that this is what atheism is like. Many in religious authority carefully cultivate this prejudice. The happy, social atheist, who feels no less awe when contemplating as amazing as the diversity of the Earth achieved from such a simply mechanism as is evolution as others do thinking of God, is denied.