# Talk:Bill Bradley

I've heard Bradley credited with a Final Four record for points/game, but can't find what it was. Anybody know? Include it?  Trekphiler 08:56, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

He scored 58 in the consolation game of the '65 tournement being named MVP despite not being in the final game where UCLA beat Michigan. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.197.108 (talk) 01:10, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

The style in which the Oxford University section is written--very literary tone, little Wikification, and other telltale signs--smacks of copyvio.  Perhaps the most obvious sign is the following passage: "He and Smith squeezed onto a Vespa motorbike, large men both, ridiculous figures with knees bent to their chests. Gown flapping behind him, Bradley clowned and waved to passersby."  The mysterious "Smith" is never before referred to in the article.  The most logical explanation for this is that this was an unmodified excerpt cut-and-pasted in midstream.  A google search turns up nothing but Wikipedia results.  For lack of definitive evidence, I will leave it in the article for now.  Does anyone know the story behind this?  StarryEyes 13:15, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

This is obviously either copied from another source or original research, and as such I have no problem deleting the entire section.  Wikipedia is not the place to print chapters of your unpublished book. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.198.239.111 (talk) 19:10, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

This article needs a complete rewrite.  It's currently an overwritten, unsourced, fluffy narrative of his life, and doesn't even resemble an encyclopedic entry. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.198.239.111 (talk) 19:21, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

I think I eliminated a lot of the most unencyclopedic writing, but the tone of the article still feels a little off to me.  Also, there are no sources whatsoever. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.198.239.111 (talk) 18:50, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

What is the 57 consecutive made free throws refering too? It has been surpassed many times in professional basketball, as opposed to what the article says. 71.236.169.89 09:41, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Apparently, this refers to a record at the time (the early 1960's).  I'm not familiar with college records, but in the early 1960's Bill Sharman still held the professional records of 55 in a row during the regular season (1956) and 56 in a row during the playoffs (still a record in that context).  Sharman's 55 consecutive regular season free throws remained a record until Rick Barry broke it with 60 in a row in 1976.  Of course, the NBA record for consecutive free throws has evolved upwards and now stands at 97.  Myasuda 20:56, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Where the heck is Cornbread, MO? I can't find it in Google Maps or Mapquest. But it is making me hungry. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nonsense64 (talk • contribs) 20:41, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

please fix his religion from 'kkk' to Presbyterian (dang wiki-terrorism)
Roger3b 05:40, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

I read Bill Bradley's sports autobiography LIFE ON THE RUN.  And I also listened to most of one of his books about politics as a book-on-tape.
Bill's a cerebral guy.  He likes people just fine, but he also likes having time on his own to think through issues in his own way and at his own pace.  And regarding taxes, this absolutely played to strength.  When he first ran for the Senate in '78, he really picked up on on the fact that people had deep objections to the way the income tax system was then working.  Now a politician who was more of the backslapping variety may have just written this all off as, well, of course people are going to complain about taxes.  But Bill really listened, and came up with the idea that people don't like the complications both because such are directly frustrating and also because of the nagging idea in the back of your mind that other people are getting out of their taxes while you are paying your fair share.  And he moved toward the idea "less deductions, lower rates" [quote in doubt, Bill probably used different words, please see below].  It was not a blazingly original idea.  Academic tax reformers had had the same idea for years.  But Bill was among the forefront of elected officials, plus the fact that he had worked through this himself [plus reading, plus financial experience as a young professional athlete, please see below] gave him a lot of confidence in publicly proposing and publicly discussing this.  Then there was the question, what about the deductions that have built up a political constituency over the years, that are kind of a vested part of the system, like the deduction for home mortgage interest?  Bill and other Senate reformers came up with the idea of the "really sacred cows" [probably not Bill, probably another senator].  This is perhaps somewhat cynical, somewhat realistic, probably both, and we can argue how much of each.  However, all this was in public view.  With the voters in New Jersey, it was as if Bill was having a conversation in slow motion, and an honest, sincere conversation at that.  The voters told him that they wanted him to find solutions, he looked sincerely, gave periodic progress reports, and continued to listen.  There is indeed a good case for simplifying the system a whole bunch, maybe ten-fold, but also keeping the few deductions that people both like and are familiar with.
The result was the 1986 Tax Reform Act.  A success, by any realistic standard.  Some people think it's a failure because it didn't last forever and complications inevitably crept back.  Of course they did!  That's the overall cycle, periods of simplification and then longer periods when complications creep back in.  It's only a failure if we give up on the overall cycle.  Now in 2007, a good twenty years later, it might be time for another simplification, again keeping only the deductions that are working the best, this time perhaps adding the tuition and fees deduction to the list, along with perhaps a few others.
Would Bill Bradley have made a good president?  I think he could have done the same type of thing with health care reform and I think successfully.  However, a president also needs to do administrative tasks and make a number of small and medium decisions relatively quickly.  Like so many areas, it's hard to find a person good at both.  
Regarding the article itself, "less deductions, lower rates" [and again, this exact quote is in doubt, please see below] probably should be included as quote (which you can almost repeat as a mantra!), and maybe "really scared cows" [again, probably another senator].  The article mentions that Bill was sometimes perceived as aloof.  Okay.  But there's the whole other side to it, that he's thoughtful, and that he's a sincere listener.  Not every politician is.  FriendlyRiverOtter 07:20, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

I am now not so sure about the quotes and I apologize.  Bill said something very similar to less deductions, lower rates, but it may not have been exactly that.  And really sacred cows may have been said by one of the other Senate tax reformers.  Furthermore, I’m not sure how many levels the slow-motion conversation went, in particular, whether Bill brought back the idea of really sacred cows to his constituents.
I do think he did good work in taxes and played to his strength.  And I do think there is indeed another side of the coin to the label aloof.
Now, you might be thinking, Oh, Come on, RiverOtter, if you’re going to include quotes, you’ve got to be sure that they are right.  I agree.  All I can say is that this is a learning experience for all of us.  I acknowledge the sloppiness and the possible mistakes, and will endeaver to do better in the future.  FriendlyRiverOtter 20:46, 8 April 2007 (UTC)


### Bill’s 1996 Book
The following is an excerpt from TIME PRESENT, TIME PAST: A MEMOIR, Bill Bradley, New York: published by Knopf, distributed by Random House, 1996, page 92-93.
	“When I first started playing professional basketball, my tax attorney told me that I had to make a decision about how much I wanted to pay in taxes.  At age twenty-three, I found that hard to believe.  How could I decide how much to pay in taxes?  He said that I could take my pay as salary, or defer all or part of it, or take it as property, or take it as a long-term consulting contract, or take it as employer-paid life-insurance and pension plans, or take it as payment to my own corporation, or take it . . .
	““I just want to play basketball and be paid well,” I said.
	““It’s not so simple,” he said.
	““Taxes,” observed Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “are what we pay for civilized society.”  Yet, ever since I read articles by the economist Milton Friedman and Harvard law professor Stanley Surrey in the mid-1970s, I believed that the income-tax system was inequitable and in need of fundamental restructuring.  After I was in the Senate less than a year, I realized that most Americans paid at higher tax rates than necessary so that a much smaller group of Americans could take advantage of loopholes.  These loopholes (credits, exclusions, and deductions) for the few distorted the market’s role of allocating resources, and this meant that taxpayers with the same income paid varying amounts of taxes, depending on their personal probity or the acumen of their accountants.
	“In the early 1980s, a poll by Daniel Yankelovitch asked, “If you abide by the rules, will you get ahead in America?”  An astonishing 81 percent of Americans said no.  While many breaches of the social contract no doubt contributed to that answer, certainly one of them stemmed from the set of rules that affects a hundred million taxpayers annually—the tax system.  As long as the code was so complicated that only experts could understand it, as long as almost as much money was excluded from tax collection as was collected (and for reasons that were never examined), and as long as the system produced widely disparate effects on similarly situated taxpayers, many Americans would remain convinced that you were a sucker if you played by the rules.
	“After a few years on the Finance Committee, I floated my version of basic tax reform—lowering tax rates and eliminating loopholes.  Russell Long, the king of the tax loophole, told me I was “barking up the wrong tree.”  He would fight me at every step of the way.  Journalists laughed at me.  Other senators ignored me.  I wrote a book called The Fair Tax about my ideas, and I tried to sell tax reform to Walter Mondale when he was running for president in 1984.  Though he rejected my proposals initially, the Republicans thought he might take them up, so they called for a study of tax reform themselves.  The study was adopted by the Reagan administration as a position partly out of fear that, by advocating the fair tax, Democrats would reassert control over the issue of cutting tax rates for the first time since the administration of John Kennedy.  
	“In his second term, Ronald Reagan proposed a version of the fair tax.  It was known as the Tax Reform bill of 1986.  I had opposed simply cutting tax rates in 1981 as an act that would increase the deficit, but I supported cutting rates if the cuts were paid for by eliminating loopholes.  That way the deficit would not increase.  I became the president’s strongest ally in Congress, selling the idea to Dan Rostenkowski, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and to Republican Senator Bob Packwood, who was by then the chairman of Finance.  Both Rostenkowski and Packwood were used to the loophole habit, but when they went on the wagon they became tenacious advocates of lower rates and fewer loopholes.”

So, yes, it looks like I was mistaken about the words Bill used to express this idea.   FriendlyRiverOtter 08:33, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

We do it on taxes, and we do a pretty good job at it.  We also do it with the 1981 budget stating that he was one of only three Senators to vote for Reagan’s spending cuts, but against his tax cuts.  But we don’t really do it for any other issues (at least not that I can see).
For example, why did Bill initially support the Contras in Nicaragua and then change his position?  And if we really want to do grad level work—and why not! I mean, let’s make our article as good as we can—knowing what we now know about the Cold War in hindsight, what should we have known in the 1980s?  
Okay, so Bill favored vouchers for private schools and then reversed this position during his run for the presidency in 2000.  That sounds like political expediency to me.  But, I would like to know his thinking behind it.
And one issue we haven’t mentioned, I think Bill was a big supporter of debt relief for third world nations, and I for one would like to know some of the specifics of this.   FriendlyRiverOtter 23:13, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

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I won't do a review but some points: the lead needs to be expanded to properly summarize the article and there are too many short and choppy paragraphs that could be combined. Hekerui (talk) 09:25, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Does anyone think this photos really dated? It's in Black and White, and in the picture he looks like he's in his 30's or 40's, but now he is in his 70's. does anyone think the photo should change. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.70.122.117 (talk • contribs) 

He's 66, but the comment is definitely relevant anyway. Do you have any options for a photo that meets policy? (We can't just go left a photo from some other web site.)  Frank  |  talk  17:33, 9 March 2010 (UTC)

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