US debt to income ratio is 667%

Freeze Frame Studio, Inc. — iStockphoto

I've seen this quote, supposedly from Dave Ramsey, making the rounds on Facebook:

If the US Government was a family, they would be making $58,000 a year. They spend $75,000 a year, and are $327,000 in credit card debt. They are currently proposing "big" spending cuts to reduce their spending to "only" $72,000 a year. These are the actual proportions of the federal budget & debt, reduced to a level that we can understand. What I want to know is how they are somehow still AA+.

I've been unable to verify whether Ramsey actually said this: I looked on his website and could not find it. All the references I find online are out-of-context quotes. So the claxon on the the File 13-O-Meter sounded, and I started checking the numbers. Here's what I found:

The 2012 budget forecasts federal receipts of $2.174 trillion and outlays of $3.729 trillion. This is the proposed budget: The bipartisan commission formed as a result of last week's debt ceiling deal will presumably figure out how to close the $1.101 trillion deficit.

The national debt, meanwhile, is $14.5 trillion. But there's a number left out of the "Ramsey" equation: the gross domestic product, which is $15.81.

By comparison, in 2009, the most recent year for which I could find complete statistics, the U.S. median household income before taxes was $62,857, and average annual expenditures were $49,067.

An Associated Press analysis of a Federal Reserve report from about the same period shows average household debt of $114,434 and average household net worth of $455,173.

So let's see how this stacks up:

	Federal Government	"Ramsey" example	Average US Household
Income	$2.17 trillion	$58,000	$62,857
Expenses	$3.73 trillion	$75,000	$49,067
Expense/ Income ratio	171.5%	129.3%	78.1%
Debt	$14.5 trillion	$327,000	$114,434
Debt/Income ratio	667%	564%	182%
Net worth	$15.81 trillion	--	$455,173
Debt/Worth ratio	91.7%	--	25.1%

What surprised me about these numbers is that the average household net worth was as high as that. Remember these numbers are from 2009: Two years into the recession, after the housing market collapse destroyed a lot of value by pushing home prices down.

So yes, American families are doing a better job of managing our money than the federal government is. But remember this is a democracy, and the people in Washington are only there because enough citizens voted for them. The only way to see real change is to contact your senators and representatives and tell them what you expect from them. And then, when they are up for re-election, hold them accountable for the job they have done. Or failed to do.

SunRail off the shelf and on the way

After being shelved for a time while the governor decided whether it was worthy of his blessing, our local commuter train, SunRail, has finally been given permission to proceed. It was a bit iffy for a while there, despite lots of local support, because of course the governor already axed one local rail project. I was surprised to see a story about our little commuter train in the New York Times.

Comments on the article, though, reveal a common misconception about Orlando. Even the author of the article notes about SunRail, "It will not link to the Orlando airport or Disney World, among the region’s biggest traffic generators." A number of commenters (from everywhere, it seems, but Orlando) proclaim their shock that SunRail doesn't connect to the airport or Disney, and declare it therefore useless. Such comments reveal a lack of understanding of our geography and of the purpose of SunRail.

Tourists visit "Orlando" by flying into the airport (which is as far south and east as you can go and still be in the city limits) and then leaving the city limits and going waaaaaay south and west to WDW. They rarely come downtown. SunRail was never meant to serve them. A rail line serving tourists would run from the airport to International Drive, the convention center, Universal Studios, and then waaaaaay the heck down to WDW. And it would be of little use to most people who live here.

Most locals seldom visit WDW. But we commute to work five times a week. Many are stuck on the Interstate 4 parking lot at the beginning and end of every workday. They are the people SunRail is meant to serve. SunRail is meant to alleviate that I-4 traffic, most of which is caused by people driving from the suburbs in the north (Winter Park, Seminole and Volusia counties) to downtown. That's why plans call for building the northern part of the line first -- that's where most of the bedroom communities are.

One local commenter notes that right now, Central Floridians can't leave their cars home. There are no other options. It's true. I once looked into talking the bus to work, and found multiple problems:

Inconvenience: The bus route in my neighborhood was eliminated because of budget cuts, so I'd have to walk 1.8 miles to the closest stop, take the bus downtown, and walk 0.3 miles from the bus stop to the office. Walking more than 2 miles? In Florida? In the summer? By the time I got to work, I'd need a shower.

Cost: Bus fare is $2, one way. I drive an economical car and get about 29 miles to the gallon in the city. The trip from home to office is 9 miles. So even if gas were $6 a gallon, I'd still save money driving.

Time: This was the deal-killer for me. The walk to the bus stop would take about forty minutes. I'd spend half an hour on the bus. Then it's about a five-minute walk to the office. An hour and fifteen minutes for a commute that usually takes me 20-25 minutes by car.

I will ride SunRail, since it won't waste as much of my time as the bus. A station is planned for five minutes from my house, and another a short walk from my office.

Low projected ridership is a problem for SunRail. I don't know what the solution to the ridership problem is. But adding more lanes to I-4 -- on the false supposition that Central Floridians won't ever use a train -- is not a viable solution to the traffic problem.

Candidates oughtn't leave the electorate guessing

FFPC: One of the only sources for help with those Judge elections

As I finish up my candidate research for tomorrow's election, I'm struck by two things.

First, I see that both at CF News 13 and at Florida Family Policy Council, many candidates neglected to answer surveys. This not only makes voters' research more difficult. It also sends a signal that the candidate is either not dedicated enough or not organized enough to place his information into important forums.

Second, I'm really disappointed that once again I'm left having to choose between Republicans and Democrats. With few exceptions, all the others are just flakes.

Perhaps I'm being harsh. They may not all be flakes. Some of them may only be undedicated or disorganized.

Programming space

This came in too late to make OBJ’s April 9 issue, but the University of Central Florida’s Metropolitan Center for Regional Studies will host The Future: Florida, NASA, and the Space Industry April 16, 8-10 a.m., at the University of Central Florida Executive Development Center in downtown Orlando.

The featured speaker is Pat Duggins, National Public Radio's NASA correspondent. Duggins also wrote Final Countdown: NASA and the End of the Space Shuttle Program. Orlandoans will remember Duggins from his days covering the space program from WMFE. He is now news director for Alabama Public Radio, which covers the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

At the forum, a panel discussion will be moderated by Ray Gilley, president of the Metro Orlando EDC. The following panelists are scheduled to participate: Frank DiBello, president of Space Florida; Florida Sen. Mike Haridopolos; U.S. Rep. Suzanne Kosmas; M.J. Soileau, vice president of UCF’s Office of Research and Commercialization; and Lynda Weatherman, president of SpaceCoast EDC.

I plan to be there. If you wish to attend, admission is free, but reservations are required. Make reservations by phone, (407) 235-3934 or e-mail, metro@mail.ucf.edu.

This event takes place the day after the president’s “summit” at Kennedy Space Center, so it will be interesting to hear the reactions of these leaders to whatever comes out of that meeting.

We got one piece of good news today. Details from NASA's 2011 budget request show allocations of over $1 billion for programs and facility improvements at Kennedy Space Center. You can read more about that here.

This photo, taken at at Kennedy Space Center in January, shows the construction of a new mobile launcher that would be used in the Constellation Program. Photo credit: NASA/Jim Grossman.

They're certifiable

This just in, from the American Patriot Foundation:

"I am today compelled to make the distasteful choice to invite my own court-martial, in pursuit of the truth about the president's eligibility under the constitution to hold office," said active duty Army Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin. The American Patriot Foundation, a nonprofit group, set up a legal defense fund and will provide Lt. Col. Lakin with a defense team.

The foundation says the president's continuing refusal to release his original 1961 birth certificate brought Lt. Col. Lakin to the point where he feels the commander-in-chief's orders are unlawful, and thus must be disobeyed.

If Lt. Col. Lakin wishes to sacrifice his career on the altar of obstinacy, that's his prerogative, but it seems foolish to make such a great sacrifice for such a pointless purpose. I wonder whether this is just another attempt to get the birth certificate matter before a court. Any court.

The "birthers," as those obsessed with the president's origin are pejoratively called by those of us with more important things to worry about, keep trying to file suit over the authenticity of the president's birth record. Their suits keep getting thrown out.

Birthers have made such a nuisance of themselves in Hawaii that legislators there are now considering a bill that would let state recordkeepers classify "vexatious" requests as an "abuse of process" and ignore them. Since Hawaii reportedly gets 10 to 20 birther requests each week, one can hardly blame them.

As this Associated Press article points out, Hawaii's health director and state registrar of vital statistics have verified that the health department has the original birth certificate. The department won't release it to birthers because state law restricts the release of such records.

There are heaps and heaps of evidence that the president was born where Hawaii's state officials say he was, and none that he was born anywhere else. What bothers me most isn't the time wasted on this nonsense. What bothers me most is that a barrel of crackpots are -- without any evidence -- accusing public servants of fraud.

Maybe Hawaii should sue the birthers for slander. That would be a trial worth watching.

It must take a rocket scientist to figure this out

I find it absurd that today, NASA's remembrance day for those who gave their lives to further the cause of space exploration, the Interwebs are buzzing with speculation about the president pulling the plug on the Constellation Program.

He claims it will be better to turn rocket-building over to private companies.

Whom does he think built the Ares-1X? The SeaBees?

NASA directs the program, but the heavy lifting is -- and always has been -- done by private companies.

The Saturn V rockets were built by Rocketdyne. The lunar landers were built by Grumman.

Orbiters for the space shuttle program were built by Rockwell International with parts by Grumman and General Dynamics. The shuttle's external tank is made by Lockheed Martin. The solid rocket boosters have motor segments made by ATK, with avionics and final assembly by United Space Alliance, which is a partnership between Lockheed Martin and The Boeing Co.

This New York Times story says NASA is getting a budget increase over five years. But if Constellation is scrapped, it seems much of that budget increase must go to a whole new round of requests for proposals, design review meetings, and test flights.

Ares already had a successful test flight. So why are we starting over? And why does the president who came closer to nationalizing our banks than anyone since FDR want to privatize the space program? Does he not realize that the Ares was built by private companies? From NASA:

ATK Space Systems of Promontory, Utah, is the prime contractor for the first stage reusable solid rocket boosters. Jacobs Engineering in Tullahoma, Tenn., is the prime contractor for Ares I-X avionics, with Lockheed Martin of Denver, Colo., as subcontractor. Teledyne Brown Engineering of Huntsville, Ala., is the prime contractor for developing the roll control system. United Space Alliance of Houston, Texas, is the prime contractor supporting launch operations at Kennedy Space Center.

Mr. Change wants to discard the work already done by these private companies so astronauts can fly on rockets built by ... private companies. But there are only so many companies capable of building a rocket that big. Apparently it escapes him that the companies most likely to bid on a "commercial rocket" will be those already named.

That's not change. It's just a waste.

Putting a republic to the test

I just finished Michael Lind's book What Lincoln Believed. It's not a biography, it's a philosophical examination. It covers Lincoln's religious, economic, and racial views. For most of his life, he was a deist. He was a Hamiltonian, while most of his Southern opponents were Jeffersonians. And while he belived "all men are created equal," he believed human rights didn't necessarily equate with civil rights.

What stunned me most about this book was how it changed my view of the American Civil War. Common wisdom says the war was about slavery. Confederate sympathizers have said it was about state's rights, but none could pretend that the primary right being argued about was anything other than the right to buy and sell human beings.

Lincoln did not run for office on an abolitionist platform. Like the country's founders, he was willing to allow slavery to remain where it already existed. The point of contention was whether Southern slaveholders would be allowed to export slaves to the new territories in the West.

When, after Lincoln's election, Southerners demanded concessions on threat of secession, Lincoln refused to be blackmailed. In a letter rejecting one compromise proposal, he wrote, "We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told … the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten…"

The "beaten" pro-slavery minority, tried, as Lincoln put it, "to break up the government." When Lincoln said, in his address at Gettysburg, that the war was testing whether the republic "can long endure," he was not talking about slavery. He was talking about the ability of a democratically elected government to quell an internal rebellion by an angry minority.

In an address to Congress in 1861, Lincoln summed up the matter this way: "When ballots have fairly, and constitutionally, decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets…there can be no successful appeal, except to ballots themselves…whatever they cannot take by an election, neither can they take it by a war…"

I have sometimes wondered why the union bothered to fight. If Southern states no longer wished to be part of the Union, why force them to stay in it? Here's why: The Constitution contains no mechanism for a state, once admitted to the union, to later separate from it. That means the Southern states' secession was unconstitutional. Lincoln's duly elected administration was opposed by insurgents who flouted the country's founding principles. As Lind puts it, "The Civil War was about law and order in the service of democracy."

Lind's text is a bit dense at times, but it is worth working through to get at these gems of insight about one of our nation's finest presidents and darkest times.

Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

When do we get to the last "first?"

I long for the day when the first deaf Jewish female president nominates the first quadriplegic Buddist of Kazakh descent as a supreme court justice, and the only thing the media mentions is ... you know, the nominee's actual judicial record.

In training

Like John E. McIntyre, Mark Twain, and Spamalot's Sir Fred, SunRail is “not dead yet.”

One of the proposed stations is near my home. I look forward to the day I can take the train to work and use my commute for writing or knitting. I just hope they get SunRail built and the station opened before I retire.

That's looking a bit iffy these days.

As if public restrooms weren’t unpleasant enough

A number of local elections are coming up this month, and one in Gainesville quite rightly has conservatives on high alert.

The Gainesville City Commission earlier passed a "Gender Identity Ordinance" that allows individuals to arbitrarily declare their gender based on "an inner sense of being a specific gender . . . with or without regard to the individual's designated sex at birth."

We received word of this today from John Stemberger, president of Florida Family Action. Stemberger, who is a lawyer, writes, "the law's wording is so vague that it allows any man -- even a sexual offender or pedophile -- to legally use facilities designated for women. If a majority of voters in Gainesville vote 'Yes' on Charter Amendment 1, they will be able stop this unbelievable law right in its tracks. Opponents as predicted are engaging in fraud and deception about what the amendment is really about."

The organization Citizens for Good Public Policy in Gainesville is working to rally support for Charter Amendment 1, which would overturn the rather silly Gender Identity Ordinance.

Yes, I said silly. While I have great sympathy for those who genuinely have Gender Identity Disorder, there are times when we must judge gender based on simple, observable things. Like anatomy.

I hate to be so blunt, but a similar gender identity ordinance passed in Colorado has already produced complaints from women about men using ladies' bathrooms and locker rooms. It should be obvious that because the women filing complaints could tell that the people they were complaining about were men, we have a problem.

Yet all these men have to do to defend themselves is claim a "gender identity" issue, and they're off. The Citizens for Good Public Policy Web site shows that while genuine transgender persons are not known to commit restroom crimes, male heterosexuals are:

The [gender identity] ordinance can be easily exploited by the heterosexual males who commit the vast majority of restroom crimes, as it gives them legal cover to scout for opportunity, and a convenient excuse if questioned about their presence. Why make it easier for criminals to plan their crimes?

An educated electorate being vital to the welfare of a democracy, I urge you to educate yourself on this matter. And if you happen to live in Gainesville -- get out and vote on March 24.

As Stemberger points out, "if this nonsense is not defeated in Gainesville now it will be coming to a city council in your Florida neighborhood."

What the Pickens

T. Boone Pickens met with American City Business Journals editors at their annual meeting this week. Pickens explained his plan for diversifying America's energy sources.

His opinion on the two major parties' presidential candidates is particularly interesting: "They do not know anything about energy."



Pickens spent an hour and a half with ACBJ's editors. As of this writing, two video excerpts have been posted. I anticipate more to come.

Mainstream media fails the electorate--again

Orson Scott Card handed out some harsh medicine to local dailies in this opinion piece:

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

In which he accuses daily newspapers of bias in failing to cover Barack Obama's part in the run-up to the subprime mortgage crisis. An excerpt:

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats -- including Barack Obama -- and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans -- then you are not journalists by any standard.

Card's point is cogent, and eloquently put.

But many in the media are equally guilty of a less obvious bias: As long as mainstream media outlets continue to pretend that the Big Two are the only parties in this country, they cripple the democratic process.

An informed electorate is one of the keys to a successful democracy. Traditionally, Americans have looked to the media to consolidate the vast amount of information available. But when journalists employ bias in the process, or when they ignore third-party candidates simply because those parties are statistically unlikely to win, they prove themselves unworthy of the task.

The City Club of Cleveland hosted a debate today between Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr, independent candidate Ralph Nader, and Constitution Party nominee Chuck Baldwin. C-Span recorded the debate for addition to its archives.

I'm glad someone is paying attention. Because when I checked the "Election" tab at Google news, the only mention I found of any of these gentlemen was in this AP story, which is about a poll, not the debate.

So far, the blogosphere is picking up the slack, if you can pick through the slag. While I was picking, I came across this article, which shows that 55 percent of likely voters felt Barr should be included in the presidential debates. But the commission that organizes the debates will only admit a candidate who has "a mathematical chance of winning a majority of Electoral College votes, and . . . at least 15% support in national public opinion polls before the debates."

Get this, though--younger respondents were more likely to say that third-party candidates should be included. Because of this, the parties--and the media--need to change their approaches.

The more the love-hate triangle between the Democrats and the media and the Republicans continues to follow the same worn-out plot, the more disaffected voters are going to look for someone telling a new story in a new way.

Do the clothes make the woman?

Or is it the other way around?

Everyone, it seems, is in a tizzy about the Republican Party having given Governor Palin a designer-clothing shopping spree so she would look appropriately vice-presidential on the campaign trail.

"What a waste!" They claim. "Wretched excess!"

Of course, you realize that if Governor Palin campaigned in her usual Wasilla togs, no one would praise her frugality and down-homedness.

"What a slouch!" They would howl. "Wretched stinginess!"

We like to pretend that we judge people, as Dr. King once said, on the content of their character.

Baloney. Americans judge by image more often than not.

And, as Senator Clinton and House Speaker Pelosi already learned, female politicians are much more likely than their male counterparts to be judged by their dress. Or pants, as the case may be.

Libertarians use Internet to make flanking maneuver

This just in, from the Barr 2008 Presidential Committee:

"Using the latest advances in campaign social networking and Internet communication, Libertarian Party Presidential Nominee Bob Barr will be participating in a real time, virtual debate during the televised debate between Senators Barack Obama and John McCain. Barr's virtual debate will be streamed live over the Internet" beginning at 9 p.m. Eastern time.

I point this out not to endorse Barr, but because the Big Two have dominated American politics for far too long. Someone should have broken this stranglehold a long time ago. Ross Perot and Ralph Nader each gave it a good try, but let's be honest. Both of their parties proved to be too flaky to pull it off.

Russell Verney, Barr's campaign manager, says "It's important that voters hear all the voices in this election, especially since Republicans and Democrats—on whose watch all of these problems were created—have proven they don't have the answers Americans are looking for. The advances in Internet communication are making it harder and harder for the two-party system to shut out alternative voices, which American voters are desperate to hear."

I'm not sure the electorate is "desperate" to hear third-party voices. I fear most of them have forgotten there even are other parties than the Big Two.

Great Leadership

In Demon-haunted World, Carl Sagan pointed out that the founders of our nation were a highly educated group of philosophical thinkers—products of the Enlightenment.

Sagan noted that, at the founding, the population was about 2.5 million. At the time he wrote, the population was about ten times more. Now, it is even greater. Then, Sagan asks this profound question:

"If there were ten people of the caliber of Thomas Jefferson then, there ought to be 10 x 100 = 1,000 Thomas Jeffersons today.

"Where are they?"

Sagan wrote that book in 1995. We're still waiting for the answer. Ronald Reagan suggested that the great leaders were probably in business, but given what's been going on in the Wall Street soap opera these days, I'm not so sure.

Here, courtesy of The Teaching Company, are a couple of freebies--lectures that examine two great leaders: Lincoln and Churchill.

We still may not have leaders of this caliber today, but we can still look to the past--since hindsight is so much more acute than foresight--for what defines a great leader.

What this election is really about

Oddly enough, before the vice presidential candidates' debate started last night, I wasn't sure there was any point in it.

But when the candidates were speaking about health care, not only the debate but the whole election became clear to me.

Both candidates want to:
• Fix the economy
• Provide health care
• Create jobs
• Decrease the country's reliance on foreign energy sources

This election isn't about goals. It isn't even about change.

It's about methods.

The Democratic Party's method to solving these and other problems is to let the government manage them. The Republican Party's method, as Sen. Joe Biden sarcastically remarked, is to let the free market handle them.

Whom you choose to vote for, then, depends upon whether you want the federal government to control these elements of our society, or whether you think, as Gov. Palin said repeatedly, the government should get out of the way.*

Personally, I think there is a middle ground, in which matters are left to the free market as far as it is feasible to do so, and in which the government steps in with regulation or federal management only when the free market fails.

But the Republican and Democratic parties are so polarized now, having moved so far to the respective extremes of deregulation and government management, they have left the middle ground a vast, empty no man's land.

* It bears mentioning that the Libertarian Party, which has been excluded from the televised debates, is even more resistant to government intervention than the Republicans. If you didn't think it was possible to be further to the right than the Republican Party, this may come as a surprise.

Powerful insight

William Falk, the editor of The Week, combs through hundreds of news sources for each weekly issue of The Week. So, he says, he has a grasp of the usual party positions.

Or so he thought. But, he notes, "Conservative pundits who once disdained feminism are lauding Sarah Palin’s heroism in pursuing a demanding career while raising five kids. Liberal feminists, meanwhile, are suggesting that because of her unseemly ambition, Palin would be either an irresponsible absentee mom or a distracted vice president."

He also notes the conservative/liberal flip-flopping relative to teen pregnancy, in light of Bristol Palin as compared with Jamie Lynn Spears.

"One day," Falk writes, "Republicans say a lack of political experience is a fatal flaw; Democrats say it frees you to see things anew. Now it’s the other way around. It’s as if these strongly voiced opinions were simply debating points, chosen because they suited the circumstances—and candidates—of the moment."

In The Week's print edition, Falk has only a few inches to work with. In that small space, he makes the most concise, cogent observation about partisan posturing I have ever seen.

At the moment, the full editorial is viewable only by subscribers. It looks as if they free up the print edition content to non-subscribers after 90 days.

Loose lips sink ships — or reputations

In this case, the ship -- or rather, reputation -- sunk by a loose-lipped soldier was his own.

---------- Forwarded Message ----------

“As you know I am not a very political person. I just wanted to pass along that Senator Obama came to Bagram Afghanistan for about an hour on his visit to 'The War Zone'. I wanted to share with you what happened. ...
“As the Soldiers were lined up to shake his hand he blew them off and didn't say a word as he went into the conference room to meet the General. ...”

---------- End Forwarded Message ----------

Well, dontcha know, the American soldier who fired off this miffed missive signed it with his full name, rank and unit – which, since he is in a war zone, is just a teensy bit off-protocol.

He later recanted this testimony, but not before his family, friends, friends of friends and probably a few thousand people he never heard of were forwarding it to everyone in their e-mail address books.

Then, one of those thousands forwarded it to me.

Now, you must understand, anything with “Fw:” at the beginning of it that lands in my inbox -- unless it’s a joke -- gets run through the Snopes-o-meter.

Sure enough, the folks at Snopes were getting this thing almost before Obama returned to the States. They also got a bunch of mail from troops whose experience with Obama was completely opposite that of the disgruntled correspondent quoted above. One of those soldiers wrote, “I don't know who this captain saw, but it wasn't the Barack Obama *I* just saw in Afghanistan. Unlike most of the pols who breeze on through for nothing more than brief photo ops before leaving he was warm, friendly & engaging (as much as security would allow) with the troops he met and he was genuinely interested in us and our mission and how we could best serve our country.”

As for myself, I disagree with Barak Obama’s political positions on ... just about everything. But let’s fight fair, shall we? I mean, if you are going to slam a candidate, do it on the basis of his benighted ideas about how to fight a war or his lack of support for manned space flight.

But don’t lie about him.

Some of us saw this coming

When the national media talk about Florida's January election, it's usually in reference to the Democratic Party representatives losing their seats at the convention.

What often goes unmentioned is the misguided action by some of my fellow Floridians to cut our property taxes. The amendment passed easily, because a lot of people, apparently, are more concerned about their own short-term finances than the state's long-term solvency.

Cut property taxes, as my benighted neighbors chose to, and you cut funding to a whopping number of municipal services, including schools.

Last week, Superintendent Ronald Blocker of Orange County Public Schools sent out a recorded phone message to parents that must have been as painful for him to say as it was for us to hear. OCPS must cut $17 million from the 2008-2009 budget.

Now, the state Legislature must figure out how to pay for stuff. The latest suggestion? Increasing the sales tax.

Goodness gracious. Did you not see that coming? Police and fire departments, road crews, and schools do not pay for themselves. Those of us clever enough to have opposed Amendment 1 know that.

Jesus said, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's,"* but it seems to me that a great many people are more interested in finagling their way out of rendering anything. They are, to apply the British idiom, penny wise and pound foolish.

My fellow Floridians, we must pay for our schools and roads and public safety professionals somehow. A property tax was an entirely reasonable way of doing this. Now we are faced with a sales tax increase, which will, instead of putting most of the burden on those of us fortunate enough to own real estate, put a disproportionate burden on the poorest of us: our service-sector wage-earning renters.

Of course, any new taxes have to go on the ballot in November, and I don't suspect the penny-pinchers to have come to their senses by then, if ever.

The squeeze is on the local municipalities, and there's no telling how they're going to manage, especially as we appear to be in a recession.

Pembroke Pines Mayor Frank Ortis summed it up very well. He's quoted in the Orlando Sentinel as saying "This state is on the verge of being in the toilet with the economy. This act could be the final flush to make that happen."

____________

* Of course, people usually leave off the second clause of that famous quote from the Lord, which in its entirety reads: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's."

Five years on...

My media colleagues are fervently publishing lists of anti-war vigils being held around town.

Where are the pro-war vigils? Or, if that term is too hawkish for you, the pro-troops vigils.

I'm no warmonger. I pray, as fervently as anyone, that we would all just grow up and learn to settle our differences without blowing stuff up.

But when megalomaniacal dictators slaughter their own citizens in the hundreds of thousands, we must take action.

It would have been nice if, when confronted about his atrocities by the United Nations, Saddam Hussein had said, "Oh my goodness, I'm so terribly sorry. I'll step down now and let a peaceable person run the country."

As you may have noticed, this didn't happen.

On this discussion board, writer G. Glyn Shull Jr., under the pseudonym Christian Soldier, explains why our presence in Iraq is a good thing. He is now back in the states, but at the time he wrote that post, he was stationed in Iraq.

I agree with Glyn that we need to remain in Iraq to help stabilize that country and build a strong ally. If we pull out, as some would have us do, we'll just give people in that part of the world one more reason to bash Americans: "they don't follow through on their promises."