Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

Recent Items
 
Honey, Where'd You Put the Bloggo?
 
Simple Geek Pleasures
 
Pictures from Home
 
Seeing Double
 
Candling Phish
 
Pent up Blogophilia
 
All-Clear #1
 
Microsoft Scores for Respecting Its Customers
 
Difficulties of Wireless Mesh
 
What Is RFID Technology?

Serious Hand-Wringing: The Borrow-Spend Death Spiral

Dan Appleman: Kibitzing and Commentary » Lies and Truths.  Dan Appleman, the cool head behind Always Use Protection: A Teen's Guide to Safe Computing, has provided a guide to election-year analysis that is scary-on.  The simple clarification of positions, stripped of pretense, is liberating.

After brightening up over this handy analysis and moving along in my everyday world, one piece of this rocked me from behind, like a delayed claymore that I thought I'd snuck past.  It comes down to this:

Since all politicians and media are lying (either through omission, misdirection, or outright), you cannot predict their future actions based on what they say.  This implies that you can only anticipate their future actions based on past actions of themselves and their supporters.

Generalization, yes, but the admonishment to ignore their lips and watch their hands strikes me as useful in these times of distorted politico-speak.  I can follow Dan's analysis of what those behaviors are, and I can situate myself in terms of the world I want to live in.  Then I stumbled.

• Taxes:
  This one is simple.  You either choose a Tax and Spend Democrat.  Or a Borrow and Spend Republican.  Sorry, you can’t have a true responsible economic conservative (control spending and balance the budget) -- that was Clinton and he can’t run again.

That's cute.  And I let it pass, accepting that I had been offered another clear choice:  We're going to spend, now how do we choose to pay for it?

Oh, wait. It isn't such a small thing, is it?  We gave away a surplus, we are insisting on more tax cuts to de-progressify the system, and we are going to move the borrowed debt into future tax bills, with interest.  Lots of interest. And who is going to be handed the bill, why those who haven't figured out how to be excused from paying taxes: Your and my kids and grandchildren. It should be payback time right about when the petroleum economy has failed and there is no social security and high-quality public healthcare for taking care of their parents.  Now there's a legacy to be proud of.

No thank you.

---

I usually have more-idealistic concerns and I don't like it that the senior senator from my state appears to have been rolled by the administration, focusing on local issues in her Democratic-primary statement with this aside to who we are in the world: "[Our troops] deserve a plan for the war on terrorism that brings them home safely."  I bite my tongue.  1,000 times.  Tears and grief.  I would have liked to take candidate Mohammad Said seriously and honor his boldness as a Palestinian running for the U.S. Senate.  His "pox on both your houses" approach to the Middle East would at least make for lively debate.  I guess my foray into liberalism will be limited to having burned my Republican voter registration, from when I had one of those, and supporting every Democrat I can find, like it or not.

posted by orcmid at 9/8/2004 11:48:37 AM