Axis rancors attack Allied forces

FROM JASON’S RANCOR OBSESSION — I’ve seen some interesting wallpaper shoops lately that insert AT-ATs into World War II photos. Well, I’m a huge Star Wars fan and I couldn’t sleep Wednesday night, thanks in part to a Reese’s Pieces high, so I began toying lazily with Photoshop while listening to Dave and Joel’s Fast Karate for the Gentleman.

While I love me some AT-ATs (aka the Gobots Guardian Command Center), I’ve always had a thing for the rancor, and longed for one of the prequels to have a sequence on its home world, Domitian. No dice.

After a couple of hours toying with masks and contrast, I inserted five rancors into the ranks of attacking Axis hordes. They’re all yours. Click to enbiggen.

Anyway, it was time to do something a little lighthearted and fanciful after all the heavy political junk I’ve been posting. Hopefully, giant space monsters running amok in black and white glory does the trick.

The old tax-and-spend slur is laughable in the face of a $10 trillion debt

FROM JASON’S TAX STATEMENT — The Anti-Federalists were right in 1780s when they rallied against Big Government.

Since then, they’ve become Republicans.

I used to be one, at least from a fiscal point of view. The Republicans say they believe in limiting the size of government, preventing a nanny state, lowering taxes, protecting privacy, and keeping hands off business.

Good ideas, right?

But while they’re chanting those mantras, and while “Tax-and-Spend-Democrats” is a label used as a slur in Sen. John McCain’s campaign advertisements, the Republicans are spending us all into a black hole of debt.

The National Debt has increased an average of $3.6 billion per day since Sept. 28, 2007, reaching $10 trillion on Sept. 30, 2008. In 2006, the government spent $406 billion paying just the interest on the National Debt.

The total debt has jumped more than $500 billion every year since 2003. Meanwhile, the federal budget for 2008 is the largest ever — with a record $438 billion shortfall.

What could you buy with $10 trillion?

I don’t think people understand how much money we’re talking about. I have a calculator.

With 305 million people in the United States, $10 trillion would be enough to cut a check for $34,000 for every man, woman, and child — including illegal immigrants.

There are 124,000 chronically homeless people in the U.S. With $10 trillion, we could afford to give each of those homeless people $80 million.

The 2009 Honda Civic base model is priced at just over $15,000. You could buy 649 million of the cars with $10 trillion.

The Statue of Liberty cost $530,000 to build in 1886 (the statue and the base included). With $10 trillion, we could build 827,458 of them today, adjusted for inflation.

The Space Shuttle Endeavor cost $1.7 billion to build. With $10 trillion, we could build 5,582 space shuttles.

If we fed every single person in the U.S. a McDonald’s double cheeseburger for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, with $10 trillion we could feed everyone for almost 30 years. I’m not saying it would be healthy.

Jacob’s Field (now Progressive Field) in Cleveland cost about $176 million to build. You could build 56,818 of them with $10 trillion.

The average teacher for grades K-12 makes $46,752 per year. With $10 trillion, we could afford to hire nearly 214 million teachers.

As of August 2008, the average home in the U.S. cost $203,100. That means with $10 trillion, we could buy a house for everyone living in Atlanta.

Who is spending all this money?

We didn’t used to have  much debt as a nation. From World War II through Vietnam, it held fairly steady at well under $300 billion. It started to seriously spend up under Gerald Ford (R) and continued at a steady clip under Jimmy Carter (D).

The real problems began when Ronald Reagan (R) took office. During his eight years as president, the debt ballooned by $2 trillion, and continued on that line under George H.W. Bush (R). Spending only slowed when Bill Clinton (D) put tight restrictions on budgetary benchmarks.

This chart says it all: Mathematical proof that Republicans have not only outspent Democrats in the past half-century, but they have done so at an incomparable rate.

{CLICK CHART FOR LARGER VIEW]

At the end of the Clinton presidency, the National Debt was nearly flatlining at under $6 trillion. Then George W. Bush was elected, campaigning hard on the old Republican bread and butter of lower taxes, smaller government and more restricting federal spending policies.

“Spending without discipline, spending without priorities, and spending without an end,” he criticized Democratic candidate Al Gore in 2000 during a speech in Minneapolis. “Al Gore’s massive spending would mean slower growth and higher taxes. And it could mean an end to this nation’s prosperity.”

Under Bush II’s leadership since 2001, the debt has increased by $4 trillion — that’s more than 60 percent — and America’s economy has been plunged into chaos. That is not fiscal discipline. That is not small government.

In the first five years of Bush’s administration, while he had the backing of a Republican congress, federal spending exploded by 45 percent. In his final year in office, Bush has asked for $3.1 trillion going into 2009, which is a spending increase of 6 percent over 2008 and 67 percent over 2001.

Cut taxes and spend

Democrats have been labeled as the “tax and spend” party since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. But no president since FDR has orchestrated such blatant expansion of the federal government and its spending as Bush II.

Worse, his initiatives have been riddled with problems. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform found $1.1 trillion was spent between 2002 and 2008 on 700 projects that were mismanaged, wasteful, fraudulent, or abusive.

At the same time he was spending recklessly, the Bush congress agreed to lower taxes. So less money has been coming in to feed more programs, which in turn means the country has to borrow even more to stay “solvent,” by which we apparently mean choked on debt but not officially pronounced dead.

The Tax Policy Center has projected the impact of the Bush tax cuts will cost $1.9 trillion in lost revenue between 2008 and 2017. By that same year, the tax cuts will have increased the National Debt by another $3.4 trillion.

Republican fiscal conservatism, according to the math, is a joke. No, it’s a myth. If you want better government, choose a party that won’t lie (as much) about its spending policies. But for the love of your pocketbook, don’t let the Republicans continue to choke us to death while telling us they’re good with money.

Face-to-face with Barr pushes me further to the left

FROM JASON’S FURTHER ELECTION ADVENTURES — Bob Barr lives in a perpetual set of parentheses.

Slumped in a chair a few feet away from me last week, the former Georgia congressman tried to explain his position on the economy.

Along the way, he got bogged down in a string of his own subclauses. As soon as he got rolling on one idea, he would abandon it in favor of whatever new one sprang to mind, shifting directions mid-sentence.

It wasn’t going well for him: The day’s stocks had fallen about 500 points, and he was having trouble (in my opinion) justifying his hands-off economics approach with reality. It’s hard to champion deregulation when it’s so very visibly destroying the fabric of an entire nation’s economy.

“Bob the Builder,” as he christened himself, finally jumped that line of thought and instead tried persuading me we need to repeal the 16th amendment.

It’s a very Libertarian idea, after all, and he’s the party’s candidate for president, which is why he was sitting with me during a stumping pit-stop in Ohio. National polls show him with tentative support from about 4 percent of voters. He told me he expects to be on the ballot in at least 47 states, but he’s not expecting to win.

I wouldn’t expect him to, either. With the exception of his rather ardent opposition to the Iraq war and open-mindedness about legalizing marijuana, on most issues he comes across as distinctly neo-con.

He authored the Defense of Marriage Act, asked the Pentagon to ban Wicca in the military, is anti-abortion, wants to “secure our borders” (by which he means cracking down on immigration), is a former member of the NRA’s board of directors, and supports dropping pretty much all government programs except ones connected to national security.

During my few minutes with him, he got pretty heated about the banking bailout. His argument: Let failing businesses fail, no matter how many people will lose their jobs and homes.

“We’re really going to pay $700 billion to save these businesses? That’s not government’s job,” he said, grinding out the words in a Tony Clifton-esque voice. “We’ve got to get rid of this inequity between individuals and big companies.”

The framers of the Constitution didn’t think the government should be involved in the economy at all, he said.

Well, that might have been fine when building ships and exporting slave-picked cotton and tobacco was our economic forte, but things are a little different now. The economy is no simple machine and as much a free market idealist as I’d like to be, history’s proven that when it’s left to naturally balance itself without regulation the result is a lot of financial suffering for the nation’s poorest citizens.

What really got under my skin was how Barr transitioned from a laissez faire rant to pushing for a Fair Tax. Now, I’m no economist. And I haven’t been through the Washington hellfire like Bob Barr. But I don’t need Alan Greenspan perched on my shoulder to tell me a consumption tax is a bad mechanic.

If you really want to stagnate an economy, try attaching a heavy tax on purchasing goods and services.I know people who will cross county lines now to avoid a one-percent sales tax difference; what would happen with a 25 percent-or-so consumption tax?

Keynesianism is all about spending. Slap a high enough tax on, say, a Ford Mustang, and *BAM!* they’ll stop selling. When people stop buying, producers lose money and lay off workers. A nasty cycle begins.

When I raised the point, Barr looked at me as though I were a two-headed Gidra and told me it was no problem — businesses wouldn’t have to pay income taxes, so his plan should work.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get more muddled, Barr brought up the silver standard.

The supporters of metal-backed money seem to be very vocal these days, forcing my brow to wrinkle in frustration. Linking the value of money to a mineral supply is bad for so many reasons. I thought we’d figured that out in 1857.

What these nickle-heads don’t get is that fiat currency is pervasive and useful. Credit helps grow the economy by encouraging spending. It allows for upward mobility by allowing people to make investments in homes and vehicles. The sheer volume of money alone — thanks to electronic transactions like debit and credit cards — that exists today could never be covered by the silver supply. And that’s a good thing, because it allows for incredible liquidity and versatility.

If you want more on problems with gold- and silver-backed currency, just listen to FDR’s 1933 radio address about how it caused the 20th century’s worst banking crisis.

I left that room last week not much enamored with Bob Barr. He seemed a pleasant enough fellow, though a bit erratic, but he lacked any kind of presidential charisma. More importantly, I simply don’t think he has the intellectual capacity I would expect from the leader of the free world — or even the leader of a free economy.

But what bothered me most was that he also seemed to lack compassion. His viewpoints were couched so much in terms of moral and idealistic absolutes that I don’t think he was seeing the millions in this country who fall through the cracks. I fear that if he were president, he would zealously walk over the backs of many hurting Americans in the name of freedom.

Pre-election pandering in Ohio is out of control and just plain stupid

FROM JASON’S STATE — In Ohio right now, everything is politics.

Being a battleground state isn’t easy. Just ask the guy who was run off the road Wednesday on a highway near my house.

The man was forced off the pavement by a crazed Obama fan because he had a “Nobama” bumper sticker, according to a police report. It doesn’t help that the alleged offender appeared to be Arab and was screaming and throwing unidentified objects from his window.

Add to the problem crazy stumping by every imaginable political talking head as they criss-cross the state. In my job as a newspaper reporter this election season, I’ve written lots of stories about “star” visits to my 800,000-population (158,000 registered voters) area. Ohio has 20 Electoral College votes and is polling three points in the blue.

Newt Gingrich told me Democrats are bad at economics.

Adrian Fenty, mayor of Washington, D.C., told me they can rescue the economy.

Caroline Kennedy compared Barack Obama to her father.

U.S. Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY) and Academy Award-nominated actress Rosie Perez told me the large local Puerto Rican population could win Ohio for Obama.

Obama’s chief medical issues advisor, Dora Hughes, advocated universal health care, while U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) told me John McCain’s $5,000 tax credit will fix the health insurance crisis.

Hillary Clinton has spoken twice within eight miles of my humble abode. Obama has swung through once.

McCain and his lipstick-laden pit bull, Gov. Sarah Palin, town-halled it up this week just 10 miles southeast of me.

Gangs of roving voting registrars have been patrolling sidewalks every weekend for a month, trying to drive up participation on both sides of the fence. Obama’s student-heavy grassroots push was balanced by GOP blue hairs knocking door-to-door to encourage absentee balloting. All that madness ended Monday as the voter registration deadline passed.

Now we’ve entered the most wonderful phase of any dirty election: Sign-stealing. Those suckers have already started mysteriously disappearing from yards overnight. It’s been coupled in isolated cases (one of which I’ve seen documentation, the others rumored) with absentee voter card thefts from mailboxes.

Meanwhile, I’ve gotten a few nasty calls from old white people today who are angry that local college students from out of state have been lining up for early balloting here. One woman told me it’s fraud for college students to vote, and they shouldn’t have representation no matter what taxes they pay.

She told me — in her most patriotic tone — that it doesn’t matter if the Supreme Court’s ruled in favor of a student’s right to vote in the state where he or she attends school. They’re “dirty little hippies supporting that black Obama,” and I’m biased to say otherwise, she told me.

Have you ever noticed that Republicans eagerly support wars to “defend our freedoms” but are equally eager to attempt to deny a woman’s freedom to choose, a gay person’s civil freedoms, a student’s freedom to vote, an immigrant’s freedom to come to America, a non-English-speaking person’s freedom to abstain from English, and a black person’s freedom to… um… be black?

That observation aside, I’m really starting to tire of all the “celebrity” political visits. Honestly, if you haven’t by this time researched and decided which presidential candidate to support, you should have “idiot” tattooed on your forehead.

With roughly three weeks to go, if you’re a so-called “undecided,” then you are probably either mentally challenged, criminally ignorant, the product of rampant Deliverance-style incest, have an advanced case of Alzheimer’s disease, or are suffering from cripplingly explosive amnesia.

If you are basing your presidential vote on television ad spots, what you heard from your brother-in-law, a gut feeling, the candidates’ favorite colors, looks, skin color, Fox News reports, or who has boobies, then you should be slapped with the moron stick and forced to wear a T-shirt that reads, “I am bad and should feel bad.”