Robert Maguire's Library tagged history →  View Popular

Previously, Americans (unlike Iraqis or even Afghans) were allowed to vote in the District of Columbia but were not allowed to have those votes actually affect public policy. Because the District's inhabitants were too black liberal for some of the more hardcore Republicans and Democrats from other parts of the country to allow them to govern themselves. The vote to legalize medical marijuana in 1998 arrived at a 69 percent majority in favor. This was not a narrow vote - it was an overwhelming popular majority more than ten years ago, long before the big increase in public support for medical marijuana over the last ten years.

I'm not entirely sure what the procedural steps are when Proposition 59 is allowed finally to take effect. But it seems to me that the moment the appropriations bill passes, and the block on Prop 59 falls, medical marijuana must become legal in the district.

By now a dozen U.S. officials knew about the agreement, and Carter
ordered them to maintain absolute secrecy. The President, during an
interview Thursday with ABC's Barbara Walters, gave a deft and
disarming response to a question about China. There was no hint that a
historic development was imminent.

Although Vance had told no one traveling with him, not even his closest
aides, what was going on, he had let on that the new matter involved
foreign policy and was not connected with the Middle East. When
reporters in Washington asked Press Secretary Jody Powell for
clarification, he silently closed his door.

Carter, after jogging calmly around the South Lawn, called in
congressional leaders for a 6:15 p.m. briefing and then swore them to
secrecy.

That evening the suspense ended, on both sides of the world. While
Carter was reading the joint communique on TV in the U.S., Hua
Kuo-feng, China's Premier and Communist Party Chairman, was reading the
statement to about 100 Western and Communist reporters in Peking. It
was the first press conference ever held by a Chinese Communist Party
Chairman, and Hua was in good form. He even answered a few questions,
ritualistically describing Taiwan as "a sacred territory of our
country" and its people as "compatriots of our own flesh and blood."

We'll start with the Civil War. Congress enacted various income and excise taxes to meet the rising cost of the war, most of which were repealed in the years after the war.

During World War I, the 1916 Revenue Act and the War Revenue Act of 1917 increased tax revenue from $761 million in 1916 to $3.6 billion in 1918. After the war, in the 1920s, Congress cut taxes five times.

The same was true during World War II. Tax increases over several years raised revenues from $8.7 billion in 1941 to $45.2 billion in 1945. Again, tax cuts followed the war.

"Traditionally countries raise taxes to pay for wars, then cut taxes by a portion of the amount raised once peace descends," agreed J.D. Foster, senior fellow in the economics of fiscal policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

But Foster noted two caveats. One, the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 came during a jobless recovery period after a recession. And the economic stimulus package championed by Obama includes $282 billion in tax cuts over two years -- also in the midst of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Notice
a few pages later Tocqueville has a moving section on how American are
"Restless in the Midst of Prosperity." A brief passage:

"When
everything is more or less level, the slightest variation is noticed.
Hence the more equal men are, the more insatiable will be their longing
for equality...That is the reason for the strange melancholy often
haunting inhabitants of democracies in the midst of abundance, and of
that disgust with life sometimes gripping them in calm and easy
circumstances."