Sforzando: If this is a plan, then maybe we should praise gridlock.

Well, now, here's someone with a plan. Mr. Elder lays out his vision on how to not only fix current budget deficits, but also the long-term fiscal health of the government at every level.

Here's the plan, and why it needs more thinking than doing:

Accept the political reality that a) taxes cannot be raised, and b) entitlement spending (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) cannot be cut for current or near-future beneficiaries. Voters will not vote to raise their taxes. Voters will not vote to cut off their money. And politicians want votes.

To solve this, we need to raise money. How?

1. Fund current and near-term liabilities by selling federally owned land. The federal government owns more than one-fourth of the land in America. The land use could then be taxed, raising still more revenue. Most of that land is national park land, wildlife reserve, and other pieces of land that are intended to be used to conserve our natural flora, fauna, and to stop the ravenous appetite of corporations to despoil and strip all the things they can out of that land. If we don't want to become more like, say, China with the pollution clouds hanging over our heads, we should probably hang onto a lot of that land.



2. Sell or contract out government enterprises, including, but not limited to, Amtrak, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Hoover and Bonneville dams, operation of the post office, and government-run nuclear and other power plants. Shut down several federal departments and agencies, including Energy, Education, Labor, HUD, HHS (including the Office of the Surgeon General), Interior (no need after government land is sold), Commerce and the EPA. Abolish the IRS. With a dramatically reduced government, the essential federal duties -- set forth in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution -- could be paid for, as envisioned by the Founders, by duties and tariffs on imports and exports.
   Anything the private sector can do, let it. And this is supposed to end up with savings. Well, I suppose in the sense that such things will no longer be part of the government budget, and thus not require tax revenues. But to the people who would otherwise be paying the taxes, I don't think they'll be seeing any sort of savings in their expenses. Plus, we've already seen how the private sector pursues profit to the detriment of effective service or coverage. As for the IRS, I suspect an additional justification is "if it's not specifically delineated in the original Constitution, then get rid of it", and that he hasn't necessarily thought through all the ramifications of such a position. Plus, do we really want to spark trade wars and other goods ramifications by trying to get all of the federal governement's revenue paid for by duties and tariffs?



3. "Grandfather" workers 55 years of age or older into existing Medicare and Social Security plans. Offer those under 55 the option of setting up private savings accounts in lieu of Social Security. To replace Medicare, offer those under 55 the option of putting tax-free money into a health savings account. One can buy, as with car insurance, a policy with a high deductible for catastrophic care. Other medical needs would be paid for out of the HSA. Such an insurance policy would be cheap, and when people pay directly (not via a third party) for other medical needs, they're better shoppers, and providers would have to compete to provide quality affordable care. Once voters -- of whom many are on Social Security or will be within 10 years -- realize that they will not be "hurt," they'll be more likely to support this plan and to vote in politicians who do. And too bad if you have something that's expensive to care for, the market tanks when you're close to retirement, or the wages you're paid are insufficient to actually allow you to put any money away for either of those savings accounts. If those situations happen, then you can expect to go to work the day that you die, and you can also expect your significant other(s) to go to work they day they die, and you can probably expect your children to go to work as soon as they can. Unless you're rich, and then you can send your kids to college and keep them healthy, and retire when you want to. Normally, people are a little less subtle about the "I Got Mine, Frak You" plan. And not "hurt"? Perhaps not immediately, but I think there's enough brilliance among the people to recognize they will be beaten down in the long-term over it.



4. Grandfather everyone currently on Medicaid, and then admit no more people and end the program at the federal level. Charity is not allowed by the Constitution, and it should be left to the states -- even better, left to the private and nonprofit sectors. When you say something is forbidden, it's standard practice to cite your sources. Unless you can quote chapter and verse, I'm suspicious of your claim. Furthermore, how is Medicaid "charity"? Explain your reasoning.



5. Change the law that gives businesses write-offs for offering health insurance to their employees. People don't get car insurance or homeowners insurance through their employers. Why get health insurance via their employers? Give individuals that same deductible (assuming the IRS remains), thus encouraging individuals to purchase their own policies. This would end the "portability" problem that occurs when people lose or change jobs. Hey, look, "Obamacare"! Who knew Mr. Elder was such a socialist? Truthfully, though, getting rid of that subsidy wouldn't be a bad idea, assuming there was something there to replace it with that gave just as good of coverage and was affordable.



6. To ensure that the federal government does not re-bloat, pass a constitutional amendment that limits the federal government to a small fixed percentage of GDP. (Ten percent?) Okay, Mr. Elder, you have to live on ten percent of the your current salary. Can you survive on that? (I guess he also thinks that with all of the privatization going on, the government won't need more than ten percent of GDP.)
   
   
7. Amend the Constitution to deny citizenship to children of illegal aliens. America -- unlike most industrial nations -- grants citizenship to children of illegal aliens simply because they were born on its soil. The 14th Amendment was meant only to confer citizenship on newly freed slaves, not on illegal aliens. But since the Supreme Court has ruled otherwise, the Constitution must be changed. Illegal immigration is unfair to those lawfully trying to gain entry, costs taxpayers money and affects the country's culture. Citizens ought to have a say about this. Close the borders. Put the appropriate mix of border guards, fencing and other methods of policing the border and stopping aliens from entering, whether from the south or the north. Establish a means of monitoring those here legally so they do not overstay. Check the immigration status of everyone arrested, and turn illegal aliens over to ICE. Mandate E-Verify for all workers. Require all illegal aliens to register with the feds, and deport those convicted of serious crimes beyond illegal entry and using fraudulent documents to obtain work, granting legal status for the rest -- but not citizenship. Amend the Constitution to overturn Supreme Court decisions that prohibit states from denying free public education and medical benefits, including emergency benefits, to illegal aliens.
   
   Increase the number of, and ease the process for, legal immigrants -- tailored to high-end, well-educated foreigners who would add to the industrial capital of the nation. Establish a truly temporary guest-worker program, the size and duration of which would be determined by the country's needs. Hold back a portion of the alien's salary in a government account, to be given back only when the alien leaves. Make sure those uppity brown people stay in their place by letting us deny them entry, making it hostile for them to stay, making them basically fear that they will be deported if someone looks at them wrong, and encourage them to stay silent, stay illegal, stay hidden, and be the exploited, rights-less underclass that modern society needs to survive and feel good about themselves. Give them no opportunities to become citizens or to improve their lot, and make sure that they make less than the wage they're entitled to, so as to make them even more enticing to our corporations - and to outsourcing.



8. Our military exists for our own national security. Europe and Japan can and should defend themselves. End all non-defense foreign aid, including contributions to the International Monetary Fund and to the World Bank. Because we shouldn't help anyone else in the world if we have something to spare. Mr. Elder is at least consistent - he doesn't believe the government should help anyone in the country, so saying he doesn't want the government to help any other country is logical. As I recall, though, an isolationist policy is just as bad for the United States as our current World Police policy. And furthermore, Mr. Elder's implication seems to be that money spent to do war and prepare people to do war is acceptable, but money spent to promote the cause of peace should be cut off.

So in short, Mr. Elder wants to strip the government of most of its functions, then get rid of most of its sources of revenue, make an isolationist and hostile foreign policy, hang the citizens out to dry at the whim of the private sector, and call it properly functioning government. We tried that once, if he remembers his history - the Articles of Confederation. We found out that they didn't work. Why repeat that chapter of history?

A quick media dump - 3-5 December 2010

Good day, readers, writers, and awesome people - A letter from one Leonard Bernstein about the opening success of one of his musicals. Would that we could get that kind of good reviews for our own materials and lives.

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind - a veteran was charged with several counts of misdemeanor use of a firearm and stalking when he followed members of the Westboro Baptist Church. Some part of me says "Well, they have it coming" and the other part says "But it's still not okay to do it".

NASA announces that they have discovered a new bacteria here on Terra that uses arsenic as a building block rather than phosphorous, which makes the possibilities of weird life expand dramatically. It's not necessarily completely alien, and there's no way of knowing whether it will replicate outside the lab or the conditions it was found in, but if substitutions like this are possible, then SETI likely has their work cut out for them...

And finally, meet Ballet Black, a ballet troupe composed entirely of African-American women who want to bring the dance out of the lily-white enclave it normally exists in.

Out in the world today, poring over the Wikileaks cables brings to light yet more things that deserve to be there, instead of shrouded in the dark, like an airstrike that killed children, and the fiction around it that made the Yemeni government take credit/blame for United States air atatcks, attempted squashing of stories that made contractors in Afghanistan look out of control, even as they detailed the level of graft and corruption in the country by both contractors and government officials. It becomes more clear that places like Saudi Arabia are both friendly and hostile to us, which presents rounds of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend, question mark?" when you have to make decidions.

Of course, even as we get this information and pore over it, governments are applying severe pressure to anyone willing to host Wikileaks data to have them banned or disconnected, and there are at least a few people who find the process leading to the arrest warrant for Mr. Assange to be far too convenient to have been organic.

An INTERPOL arrest warrant has been issued for Richard Cheney in connection to a bribery case in Nigeria from his company, Haliburton. I do not know whether the United States will honor it and turn over Mr. Cheney, but my bets are against, even as the calls for arrest warrants against Julian Assange grow.

Finally, Israel receives aid from interanational groups to help fight a very large forest fire. Anyone close to the action that can give us more details on how big it is?

Domestically, rumblings of a deal on the matter of tax cuts, allowing Republicans to make good on their threat that the tax cuts had to be dealt with in a manner they find agreeable before they would get back to the work of delaying everything else. Mr. Rove's column here is instructional in how it passes all the blame onto the Democrats for not giving the Republicans everything they want and making the Dems out to be the monsters for "raising taxes on the middle class". The truth of the matter comes from Represenative Grayson, pointing out just how much money the advocates for a blanket tax cut stand to gain if they are successful. It's pretty big.

Speaking of making money at the expense of others, JP Morgan Chase suspected Bernie Madoff, the Ponzi scheme mastermind, or fraudulent investments, but continued to do business with him anyway, probably because the profits for them were pretty good, too.

Cumulatively speaking, during the course of a fund set up to lend money overnight from the Fed, almost $9 trillion USD was lent to keep banks propped up and with sufficient cash to continue operating. And, as you crunch the numbers, you find only six companies, even though they were borrowing with acquisitions and ancilliaries, are responsible for almost all of that borrowing.

IAVA throws their support behind the repeal of the ban on opely gay military members, as a reminder that even though the report is out, the action still has to happen. And that's not always a smooth sail. After all, you can have the paper advocate for this long-overdue change and have the comment section not only miss the point, but proudly display their phobias. And both the Army and the Marine Corps chiefs think that gay soldiers shouldn't be allowed to serve openly, at least not now, because it will affect the troops, even though the troops have already said it won't affect them or their missions. They also said that the study didn't ask what the troops thought of the policy - in response to that, the document itself said "We do not do these things by referendum, so asking the troops what they think is out of scope. All we want to know is whether they will be hindered should the policy be repealed."

After examining its effectiveness, the mayor of New Orleans pulled funding for the city's video surveillance program, leaving the cameras but not providing maintenance for them. We're rather surprised that something was chopped because it was ineffective without someone raising the spectre of "national security" or some other boggart.

In technology and the sciences, in addition to the NASA report, shall we peer in a bit at the conditions of making electronics in China to see how much they resemble the world of Dickens?

Additionally, the continued popularity of streaming video services may mean that ISPs enforce bandwidth caps, throttles, and other "network shaping" measures even more zealously in response.

Google admits to trespassing on property to get a Street View picture, pays $1 USD in fines, and reminds us that while their ideal is "Don't Be Evil", sometimes they fall short of the practical implementation. And sometimes they hit it square on by implementing data that tells their engine what kind of reputation someone has instead of just ranking pages by whether or not someone has a huge reputation, after seeing how a troll got his PageRank up by insulting, threatening, bullying, and otherwise making people write about him, promoting his reputation and his rank.

Into opinions, where Mr. Mauro feels that the Green Revolution might be ramping up again, with the public defection of a military officer to the opposite side. As with all things regarding the situation, there may be mountains out of molehills if one expects a full-fledged "Away with the State!" movement.

Having learned about what kind of electoral stomping can be generated if your candidate doesn't reach out to Latino and Spanish-speaking voters, Heritage launches their Spanish-language site, Libertad.org. Whether this means the conservative movement will start trying to actively court Latinos and have positions on immigration and other issues that will appeal is as yet indeterminate. But now at least they're trying.

Mr. Krguman smashes a hammer on the thumb of the Beltwawy class by explaining why politicians are all about cutting Social Security when they won't make a peep about Medicaid or Medicare - most of the affluent could do without Social Security, but they understand full well what Medicare does. Because changes to Social Security don't affect the people in that strata, they don't know firsthand what those changes do to people.

Getting out of opinions, the Slacktivist points out that asking whether all paths lead to God is not the right question, because all paths run in at least two directions, and it depends on the orientation of the traveler where they go.

Last for tonight, the Someone Else's Problem field at work - read how quarterback John Elway goes about his life in plain sight, Escher via LEGO, and BoingBoing asks the same question a Reddit article does - what are your favorite culturally untranslatable phrases? For those looking for the original, Reddit has the thread, ready for you to contribute.