It's the law, stupid

Memo to all bloggers, pundits, and most importantly, to all journalists:

The NSA scandal is not a scandal because the administration violated our civil liberties. That is an interesting and disturbing effect of their actions, but not what makes this scandal unique.

It's the fact that the President knowingly violated Federal law.

You can't impeach someone for the former. You can for the latter.

The two numbers

Republicans and Democrats talk a lot of about taxes. And the role of Government, and what our priorities are. (Haha! Well, in an ideal world). At the end of the day, the dialog usually boils down to name calling and "Big government liberals" and "small government conservatives". Lies all. For me, I think it boils down to two numbers.

Just two numbers.

Let's look at the first one, shall we? See, every person in the country, if you sat them down and asked them to think about it awhile, has a sortof mental picture of the ideal government. D's, R's, independents, libertarians--all picture some sort of government. Some want just national defense. Others want court systems and a postal system. Still others want programs to help the less fortunate. All of these things cost money, and thus, every person in the country has in their head a cost figure for their ideal government. We'll call that number the "total gov't spending as a percent of the GDP". To make it easy, we'll shorten that to C, for Cost.

Apparently, this Republican congress (and due to the lack of any vetos, the President), have in their head 20.2. They think that the ideal government should cost 20.2% of the GDP (for 2004). Under Clinton and a D congress it was 22.1. For you, maybe it is 10.0%, or 35.3%

Now, on to the other number. That's the amount of money you bring in--we'll call that "total gov't revenue as a percent of GDP". Let's shorten that to I, for income.

Here is where it breaks down. To be fiscally sound (dare I say it? "Conservative"), you need to make sure that I is greater than or equal to C. That's it. Pretty simple.

How is our "conservative" congress doing in this regard? Well, for them, I is 15.7.

Sigh.

They keep cutting the "I" part of the equation. Tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts. They are really good at cutting the "I" part (except for cell phone bills and airline tickets... See my previous post on that subject)

They keep promising to cut the "C", part, but never do.

Why, exactly, are they conservative again?

My lobbying reform plan

Here is my plan for cleaning up the legalized bribery going on in Washington. It is extremely simple:

1. Private corporations may not give money to any politician, political party, or organization which represents the above mentioned groups (e.g., "Swift boat veterans for Truth")
2. Individuals may give money to said groups, however their money goes into a blind trust. This prevents political parties and politicians from knowing the source of the money

That's it. Enjoy your newfound democracy.

And tax cuts for all?

Conservatives love cutting taxes. Even more than they love Jesus. [Joke courtesy of Bill Maher]

We all know about how the richest 1% got their taxes cut down while inflation-adjusted hourly wages have gone down 0.5% Blah blah blah. The blogsphere has covered this to death.

I've got three questions for conservatives:

1) I just got my W-2, and my taxes went up this year. WTF? (and by the way, I'm definately in a lower income bracket)

2) How come certain airplane tickets have up to 30% taxes added? Cut airline taxes, help out airlines... what could be better?

3) Why does my cellphone bill have 25% in taxes?

Us liberals don't like taxes, but we realize that they are necessary to live in a decent society. What drives us crazy about conservatives is that for all their tax-cutting talk, our taxes aren't going down--they are going up. It is only the uber-wealthy that benefit.

Spin all you want, my W-2 doesn't lie.

All our base are belong to them

Republicans are great at energizing their base, and offending everyone else. The house leadership thinks nothing of making hay out of Terri Shiavo, creationalism, homophobia and the marriage ammendment. On the left, though, we obsess about all Americans, not just those that are part of our base.

For example, from Salon.com's War Room:

Samuel Alito is by no means extremely popular with the American people -- but a Fox/Opinion Dynamics poll taken after the hearings began shows that substantially more people support his confirmation than his defeat, and Rasmussen's daily polling shows that his support has increased, rather than decreased, during the hearings.

"Substantially more people".

"popular with the American people".

Notice the difference between that type of thinking and the play-to-the-base red meat the R's throw out to their base?