The cutting and taxing will not be easy, but we can offset it through innovation and economic growth.

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The risk is that both will find it too politically convenient to hide behind the easy pieces of taxing the rich and discretionary spending caps--both of which have been enacted, and neither of which are sufficient to fix the problem instead of focusing on the real issues of entitlement and tax reform.

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That is consistent with a second theory, familiar from other studies, that decision making is mentally taxing and that, if forced to keep deciding things, people get tired and start looking for easy answers.

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And it is easy to empathize with those students who view with trepidation beginning a high-pressure and physically taxing salaryman life.

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