Yet Republicans have treated the income tax as the same impediment to economic growth and middle-class millstone that it was in Reagan's day.
Of course, people are no longer starved or beaten to death in the millions, but the same structural impediments to the building of a civil society are still in place, leading to similar problems — systemic corruption, massive squandering on showcase projects of dubious worth, doctored statistics, an environmental catastrophe and a party fearful of its own people, among others.
Tiger Woods, who overcame a stutter as a child, wrote a supportive letter to a high school boy who tried to commit suicide after he was bullied for the same speech impediment, according to a fellow pro golfer.
His secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, announced new guidelines to remove impediments facing same-sex couples and other Americans in hospital visitation.
Knoblauch's problem takes the same form as many excruciating impediments in purely mental enterprises with writer's block as the most obvious example, when obsession with learned rules of style and grammar impedes the flow of good prose.
But they are impediments all the same.Two years ago, on one of his frequent trips to China, Bill Gates said he was often asked where the next Bill Gates and the next Microsoft might emerge.
Like changes in illumination direction, plastic surgery procedures induce intra-subject (face image versions of the same person) dissimilarity, which are impediments to robust face recognition.
Built out of necessity, they often serve as protection, but the same boundary can become an impediment over time.
If only the same could be said of other impediments to pleasant air travel.
