Timmy and the Magic Money Machine

On a recent trip to our nation’s capital I went on a tour of the some of the major buildings where our federal government conducts its business including the Supreme Court, the Capitol Building, and the White House. At the end of the tour, our guide (an affable fellow named Ted) asked if we had any questions.

It turns out there was a precocious young man in the crowd named Timmy who looked to be around 12, and he had some rather interesting questions for Ted. The following is how their conversation went, to the best of my recollection.

Ted: Now are there any questions about anything we saw on today’s tour? Yes, young man?

Timmy: Yeah, how come we didn’t see the Magic Money Machine?

Ted: The what?

Timmy: The Magic Money Machine. I asked my Dad where the government gets the money for all the things it spends it on every year, and he said they must have one of those.

Ted: (Chuckles) No young man, your Dad was pulling your leg. The government actually has to collect money from its citizens, the taxpayers, to finance all the neat things it does for us.

Timmy: Oh, I see. (Thanks for making look like an idiot, Pop.) So that’s how the government decides how much to tax people, then? By how much it spends each year?

Ted: Oh heavens, no. The government spends a lot more money than it collects in taxes most years. It’s called “deficit spending.”

Timmy: It sounds like we’re getting back to that Magic Money Machine thing again.

Ted: Not exactly. The government actually has to borrow the money from investors and pay them interest on it.

Timmy: Hmm. So each year the debt keeps building up? And the interest we have to pay on that debt keeps going up too?

Ted: Yep.

Timmy: But isn’t that kind of…stupid? If you keep doing that, you’ll eventually have more debt than you can keep up with, and the interest payments alone will be more than you can handle.

Ted: That’s true. But it’s even worse than that. We also have huge entitlement programs called Social Security and Medicare that pay benefits to retired people. We’re about to see a huge wave of people hitting retirement age, and we’re going to have a lot less people working and paying taxes and a lot more people clamoring for these government benefits. No one knows how the government is going to stay afloat financially when that happens.

Timmy: You’ve gotta be kidding me dude! How can that happen? Isn’t it illegal or something?

Ted: Nope. There’s nothing in the Constitution that constrains the way Congress handles our finances. The only limit on their spending habits is their own consciences. Which is to say there is no limit.

Timmy: How do these people SLEEP at night? Can’t they see how badly they’re screwing the country?

Ted: Have you seen the people who run things around here, son? Most of them are over 50 and they aren’t likely to be around when the financial time bomb finally explodes. They’re leaving it for your generation to deal with. And they keep getting reelected, so they figure the voters must feel the same way they do.

Timmy: WHAT!?!? What is WRONG with you people? (He had turned red and was glaring at the adults in the crowd, most of whom were avoiding eye contact.) Why do you keep electing people who are hosing your children and grand children with these hare-brained financial decisions?

At this point most of the adults in the crowd had started to slink away and Timmy’s embarrassed parents were tugging at his arm, trying to drag him off. But I stood there, transfixed by his youthful indignation, and he noticed me staring at him.

He pointed at me and said “Well, what have you got to say to the younger generation, Mister?”

I just shrugged and said “Hey, don’t blame me kid. I vote Libertarian.”

Is Barak Obama a marked man?

It’s not unusual to hear supporters of Barak Obama admit, usually in a low voice, that they are worried. They are worried about his safety. Racism is still alive and well in America, they say, and it’s not hard to imagine some nut job taking a shot at him sooner or later.

I wish I could say that those fears are unfounded, but I can’t. I believe people are generally a lot less closed-minded on matters of race than they were a few decades ago, but I don’t think we will ever completely stamp out bigotry. It’s an unfortunate but undeniable part of human nature.

But according to some observers, racists aren’t the only ones who may have it in for Mr. Obama. (If you’re a Barak fan and you’re also a natural worrier, I suggest you read no further.) He may have some dangerous enemies most of us haven’t even thought about yet – Muslim extremists.

You’ve probably heard that Obama was born to a Muslim father, a man from Kenya who was not really involved in his life. Obama claims that he has never been a Muslim himself, and I’m inclined to take him at his word. However, that may not make much difference to some of the more conservative practitioners of Islam.

According to some interpretations of Islamic doctrine (and you know when it comes to religion there is always more than one point of view) a man who is born to a Muslim father is automatically a Muslim himself. For life. If he chooses not to practice Islam when he is an adult that does not mean he was never a Muslim, it means he is an apostate. And of course the penalty for apostasy is death.

And so we have to face the possibility that our future president could be seen as something much worse than an infidel in the eyes of the eyes of some Muslims. That might not, obviously, be a good thing in terms of Mr. Obama’s personal safety.

It also might not be a good thing in terms of our relations with Muslim countries. It has been assumed in some quarters that replacing the evangelical Christian we currently have in the White House with a liberal Christian with a Muslim-friendly name and family history would automatically ease tensions between the US and the Muslim world. Perhaps not. Perhaps an America led by a man who had abandoned the faith he was born into would inspire even more condemnation than we are already experiencing.

I don’t think anyone can say how these sorts of things will work themselves out with any certainty. Human beings, and the governments they spawn, are quite unpredictable by nature, and much depends on circumstance and the personalities of people as they interact with one another.

The big question is - should we let this sort of thing influence whether or not we vote for Obama? Given all the challenges our country currently faces, can we really afford to elect a president who might spend his time in office dodging bullets and causing even more friction between us and the Islamic world?

I submit that we had better not start thinking like that. Barak Obama has every right to be where he is and to do what he is doing. In America we believe in freedom of religion, and if someone has a problem with that, they are the ones with the problem. They are the ones who need to “change.”

I’m not an Obama supporter and I don’t plan on voting for him in November. But that has nothing to do with fear for his safety or worry over how he might be perceived in the Muslim world. We’re supposed to be electing a leader after all, not a spokes-model or a goodwill ambassador.

Leaders look forward, not back over their shoulders. We should all try and do the same.

An Independence Day quandary

In America we have set aside this day to celebrate our independence, and hopefully we will all take a little time to consider how blessed we are to live in a country where we enjoy such a great degree of personal freedom. I expect that with this being a presidential election year we are all a little more mindful than usual of our rights and responsibilities as citizens of this great country, particularly our right and responsibility to elect our own leaders.

Deciding which candidate to support is a lot greater chore for some of us than it is for others. Polls have shown that about one third of the population nearly always supports the Democratic candidate and another third usually support the Republican, regardless of who the parties put on the ticket.

But that is not quite the whole story. A very small percentage of US voters hold some allegiance with third parties, parties that usually don’t get a lot of attention next to the well-established and well-financed Big Two. But they are out there – the Libertarians, the Greens, the Constitutionalists - wild-eyed idealists standing up for their principals in the face of overwhelming odds.

For the most part, the third party system is usually passed over as a mere curiosity on the political scene. The actual number of votes they accumulate (assuming they can actually get on the ballot) usually peaks at no more than a few percentage points, if that. But in a very close election, a third party candidate can play a spoiler role. It is widely acknowledged, for instance, that George Bush would most likely have lost in Florida in 2000 if Ralph Nader had not been on the ballot in that state, and that would have changed the outcome of the entire election.

Nader is running again this time around, but he does not appear to be generating enough buzz to be much of a factor in this election. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a potential spoiler in the field. This year that role could be filled by Mr. Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman from Georgia who is carrying the banner for the Libertarians this year.

If Barr can siphon off a few disenchanted conservatives from John McCain in some closely contested states, he could swing the election to Obama. And Barr’s home state of Georgia is one in which he could draw enough support away from McCain to make a difference in the outcome.

That puts me in something of a difficult situation. Although I do not belong to any particular party, I have long felt an affinity for the libertarian view of “hands-off” governance, and I have pulled the Libertarian lever in the voting booth a number of times.

If my only consideration was picking the best candidate for the job, I would almost certainly vote for Barr. But reality being what it is, I have to consider the fact that the odds against his being elected are exceedingly long, and in a sense a vote for him could arguably represent a vote for my least desirable candidate (Obama). That isn’t a factor I can completely ignore.

But neither can I ignore the huge disappointment I feel for what the Republican Party has become. There was a time when they strove to be the party of small government and personal freedom, but that time has obviously passed. Today Democrats and Republicans both believe in large, intrusive federal government with virtually unlimited power. They merely have different opinions on which sections of the Constitution should be trampled on the heaviest.

So, do I vote for the candidate who most closely shares my views, even though he has no realistic chance of winning, or do I hold my nose and vote for the “lesser of two evils”? I guess in the end the decision will rest on just how much separation I see between those two “evils.” For now, the jury is still out.

The incredible shrinking newspaper

If you’re anything like me, your reaction to the newly “redesigned” versions of the Monday and Tuesday editions of The Telegraph which debuted a few weeks back was probably something along the lines of - “where’s the rest of it?”

I’m sure many readers were dismayed to find that their paper had been slimmed down to only two sections on those days. I was particularly disappointed to learn that the editorial section, which formerly consisted of a full page of columns and another page of letters to the editor, had been squeezed down a single page. But the worst was yet to come.

When Sunday rolled around and I pulled out the comics, I found that once again something was definitely missing. The regular six pages of funnies had been reduced by a third. All the same comics were still there, they had just been downsized to take up less space. They were now so compact that my over-40 eyes could not make out some of the text.

I was not pleased. It reminded me of the time a certain snack food manufacturer decided to cut costs by selling a smaller amount of potato chips in the same size bag at the same price. The whole thing seemed a little underhanded. It seemed like they were hoping that we wouldn’t notice the change, and therefore not change our buying habits. I understand that sometimes business realities demand that prices be raised, but I’d prefer that such changes were made in a more straightforward manner.

Nevertheless, I am not angry with The Telegraph or their parent company for making these changes. I know that the newspaper industry has fallen on hard times in recent years and they are desperately trying to stay afloat in an environment of rising production costs and falling revenues. Although I’m not an employee of the paper and therefore have no insight into how these kinds of decisions are made, I’d be willing to bet that they looked at a lot of different options for dealing with their financial woes and decided that a little nip here and tuck there was the best way to make their product a little more profitable without alienating too many customers.

Will it work? It’s hard to say. I am sure that some subscriptions will be cancelled over this, but I expect a lot of readers will do what I did – grumble a little about how they don’t like the changes but still leave their subscription in place. For now, at least.

I know that a lot of people have abandoned newspapers completely and now get their news from the Internet. It’s understandable, because you can get all the all the news any time of the day or night with a few strokes of the keyboard. And most of it is free. Still I find that there are things that I like about getting an old-fashioned newspaper delivered to my house every morning.

I spend a great deal of time staring at a computer monitor every day in my job, and my eyes appreciate the change of pace that scanning the newsprint provides. And you can’t beat a newspaper for convenience and portability. I can take it with me wherever I go, and I don’t have to worry about finding a power outlet or a Wi-Fi hotspot. Plus it won’t break into a hundred pieces if I drop it.

So I hope The Telegraph stays around for a long time, and I hope that is doesn’t have to continue reducing its content to stay afloat. But if they do have to make any more reductions, they should definitely stay away from those features that give the paper its unique identity and intrinsic value. Like this column, for instance.