On The Clock

Each morning, I sit and read my e-mail in the bathroom.

This morning, at precisely six, ThumbPer meowed. He meowed the meow of a cat who was patiently waiting his turn. It was time to go meditate with a cup of coffee and a cat.

At precisely six. I wondered how he knew, what biological mechanism made his clock tick at that exact moment? Can he read a clock? Does he own a watch?

Then I began to think about the world. We're all run on clocks and calendars. Most people in this country, and many more in the world outside it, have to live by a clock. We log into work, we run to catch a train, our TV shows are on at a specific time.

And then I thought about my job, and something odd occured to me: the people who own the company, they aren't really beholden to clocks. Things get done when they want them to get done, on their schedule. Yes, to a degree, where necessary they have to genuflect to time.

But not as often as you might think.

All this leads me to some thoughts about Barack Obama's address last night:

[W]e have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election. A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.

Well, that day of reckoning has arrived, and the time to take charge of our future is here.

He's right, you know, and he didn't single out anybody, didn't exempt you or me, the rich or the poor, the bankers or the brokers (well, maybe the bankers a little), or Democrats or Republicans.

We've all lived as though time was a renewable resource. But it's not. Time is the avenger. Time is what happens when you've lived one way, always looking in the other direction. Time is the wall you run into.

The most curious struggle within life is to balance two things: now and then.

We should all plan for the future and make contingencies for what happens then.

We should all "live in the now," as we say in acting classes.

Funny thing is, we've failed miserably at both.

We've had a thirty year headstart on renewable energy, a fairly simple, logical, and healthier alternative to burning mushed dinosaur soup. We import more of that goo than ever before.

We've had twenty years of warnings with respect to the rising costs of healthcare, and the declining wages to pay for them. Yet here we are, watching an American go bankrupt every thirty seconds because he or she can't afford to pay for the God-given gift of a healthy life.

We've had decades of warnings with respect to global warming and the twin disaster of sudden ice ages (and conservatives? These are not conflicting ideas. The earth can warm up as a whole while we plunge into an ice age in the northern and southern temperate zones), yet our planet is getting hotter and the warmest ten years on record have been the past ten.

And we've sat on our asses and did nothing, except mock Al Gore, mock Jimmy Carter and mock Hillary Clinton.

(Hm. Those are all Democrats! But I digress...)

The Obama stimulus package/budget announcement tries to reconcile these two aspects of time. The stimulus package is for the now. The budget is for the then.

It is a bold and grand vision, to be sure, and the real test comes in a year or two, when the economy has (we hope) recovered and the deficit inches down at first. Can Congress be mature enough to sit on its hands and continue to tinker with the deficit or will the special interests begin to ratchet up the rhetoric, which actually began with Bobby Jindal's amateurish and childish (Fox's words, not mine!)response to Obama's speech last night?

Time waits for no one, and it is on this basis that we, the people, must take control of our country again. It is we who must keep our Congresscritters responsible and it is we who must keep Barack Obama responsible (admittedly, I sense this will be the easier task). And it is we who must keep our local politicians responsible for the funds they receive from the Feds and from our tax dollars.

We have to get off our asses and own our time on this planet. Own the now. Own the then.

If the farm subsidy to Big Agra is about to be snuck through a late night session by the critters from the cornfields, then it's up to us to rally up the rest of the nation to put a stop to it.

If the Defense Department is insistent on buying yet another legacy weapon for a war they fought twenty years ago, it's up to us to call them on the carpet.

It's our future, not our elected officials, who, like my bosses, have forgotten what a clock really is.

A marker in the river of our lives that delineates the now from the then. We live on the clock. We need to act like it.

Bush's Final Budget

Bush's Final Budget. Sorry for repeating myself, but that sounded so delectable...

OK, so here it is: Bush's budget proposal for this final year of his circus administration:

President Bush’s final budget, a $3 trillion plan offered Monday that would continue his tax cuts and sharply reduce domestic spending, has little chance of surviving in a Democratic Congress. But the problems it lays out will survive and grow, presenting tough choices for the next administration.

How, for example, will the next president rein in the cost of retirement and health programs? What will he or she do about tax increases on Americans when Mr. Bush’s tax cuts expire at the end of 2010, or when the alternative minimum tax propels millions of taxpayers into higher brackets each year?

Beyond these familiar traps, how will a Republican president pay for further promised tax cuts or a Democratic president pay for a sweeping health care overhaul without increasing the red ink left by Mr. Bush?

Three trillion. By his own estimates, Bush projects a $470 billion deficit, which is higher than anything recorded previously, and that's before Iraq invasion spending!

This is a serious constraint that the next President will have to deal with. Even tho spending for the Iraq invasion is off-budget, so not reflected here, ending the invasion as soon as possible becomes imperative, because many of the incidental costs of that conflict are reflected in the departmental budget requests of agencies and cabinet offices as diverse as the Pentagon right down to the Department of the Interior (National Guardsmen have to be reimbursed from *somewhere* when they respond to disasters).

Fortunately, it's not as bad as Bush's budget paints. Bush has long had a reputation for being Chicken Little (if not just plain chicken) about a lot of things, trying to literally scare up support for dicey propositions and bizarre programs that conflict directly with national security, much less any rational modality of governance.

Discretionary spending, that is, non-military and non-mandated spending (which excludes Social Security) is less than three percent of the budget, which means we can't cut the education, welfare, and public works budgets any tighter than we already have. That means one of two places for the money to come from: Social Security or defense.

Assuming Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama end up president, you tell me: which gets slashed?

If you said defense, that's the right answer. And wrong answer. Wrong answer, since I have an idea that might help refresh the military, offer opportunity to working class Americans, and right a faltering economy before it's too late.

A few days ago, I off-handedly proposed as part of my NotPresident noncampaign, a real stimulus package that would help the American economy while de-militarizing our presence in the Middle East. In that package, I mentioned that we could take the savings from the Iraq invasion forces and put them to use here at home, rebuilding and mending and upgrading the infrastructure in America.

I have an additional thought: energy independence. Yesterday, as a one-off, I said that a good idea for creating a new economy based on renewable energy would be to offer a billion dollar prize.

Guess what institution would be offering that prize? If you guessed the Pentagon, you'd be right. Why the Pentagon? Why not the DoEnergy?

Accountability, for one thing: the Pentagon regularly handles budgets of this size and has in place a responsibility infrastructure that would have to be built into the Department of Energy.

More important, tho, is that the first applications of renewable energy in the real world would be defense-related, so we might as well let them perfect the technology before awarding the prize. After all, is there a better testing ground for the efficiencies of scale, redundancies and safeguards than in the chaos of even test battlefields?

I doubt it.

By combining the energy prize (maybe I'd call it the Gore Award) with the defense budget, we'd pretty much ensure that no Republican might come along to gut the budget for it. The Joint Chiefs of Staff would welcome the job security, and the companies who would be applying for the competition could remain assured that politic donations and lobbying would have nearly zero influence on the outcome.

And we'd be beating plowshares into swords.

Would this solve our immediate economic problems? Probably not, but it might and it would ensure that $100 a barrel increases in the price oil would never trouble us again. People would have jobs, and those jobs would carry over to the new renewable energy companies that would spring up as this technology is leased for components, software, and engineering into new products.

Too, we'd create a viable, if not thriving, economy of companies that would be greening the infrastructure that the current energy economy has in place: reforesting mountaintop removal coal mines, cleaning up crude refinery sites, finding new uses for natural gas pipelines, and such like that.

Budget deficits represent challenges, but they also represent opportunities to change wasteful and irrational ways of the past, ways that have failed us now, and to move in a direction that makes sense for us and our children and grandchildren.

And we would hardly have to tinker with tax rates, and we'd take tax cuts off the table for decades.

Do As I Promise, Not As I Do

Leave it to New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg to put things in perspective:

Bloomberg earlier gave a speech to the opposition Conservative Party's annual conference in Blackpool and took aim at conservative American politicians who ran up budget deficits.

"It seems to me that the Conservative Party in the UK is much more fiscally conservative than many American politicians who call themselves conservative," he said.

"Too many of them want to run up enormous deficits and hope that some way, somehow -- someone else will pay for it. That's not conservatism, that's alchemy, or if you like, lunacy."

Or, create a problem, then pray it goes away.

But Mayor Mike's comments got me to thinking: why is it that Republicans and particularly conservatives, can't keep their peckers in their pants when it comes to running up a bar tab the size of Montana (or a national debt the size of, literally, China)?

After all, conservatives are supposed to be all about fiscal responsibility, personal responsibility, and restraint (of the unfun kind), and yet the last three conservative Presidents have run up massive Federal deficits.

There's a school of thought that says by running up these deficits, conservatives can choke off the money for discretionary spending programs, like Medicaid or welfare or mass transit grants, and to a degree, there's some truth: we probably would have had smaller budget surpluses under Bill Clinton (Greatest. President. Ever.) if we hadn't reformed welfare and cut some of the bloat out of that bureaucracy.

But Clinton's presidency also points out the folly of that plan: unless you can persuade the vast majority...not the majority, the vast majority...of the uselessness of a particular entitlement, all that will happen is a) the entitlement will get funded through deficit spending or b) you're going to have people agreeing to a tax hike to pay for it.

No one objected to Clinton's tax hikes after the fact, because Clinton's tax hikes were directly linked (perhaps justifiably, perhaps not) to the booming economy of the 90s, where Reagan and both Bush's have tax cuts that led nearly directly to recession and even economic depression.

Despite increased Federal spending, something that should mitigate economic slowdowns. Thus you have ballooning deficits, since economic slowdowns produce even less tax revenue than anticipated.

One possible reason, exogenous to any economic or political theory we might examine this issue of conservatives and ballooning deficits, is a psychological one: there are very few fiscally conservative Republicans who had to "come up through the ranks," so to speak, who actually had to scrape from paycheck to paycheck to pay off a mortgage.

And who's businesses always had a bail out at the dead end of the street.

Let that last thought sink in for a moment.

And now let me emphasize this next point:

Don't you think it's odd that the men who have made the most of the American dream, the Bloombergs, the Buffetts, the Gates', the ones who started from the ground up with a business, and struggled and perservered without a hand out, without Daddybucks behind them, are fairly liberal people?

And then there's George W. Bush: a man who has failed at each and every business he's ever run, a man who's had to have handout after handout from the bin Laden family, from the people of the state of Texas, from James R. Bath, from his daddy.

Are we seeing a pattern here? An entirely paternalistic concept-- to let your boy run a business into the ground, then pay off his mistakes-- has become national policy for an entire party.

And we're Daddybigbucks, backing these assholes.

A Second Chance For The Democrats

The recent weak-kneed Democrats buckled to Bush's veto, and agreed to substantially give up any opposition to funding the war, for reasons that are not particularly clear to me. I might be missing some polling data, or perhaps there's some behind-the-scenes arm twisting (photos of Harry Reid in drag?), but nonetheless, the Dems failed us.

Bush, in his signature hubris, has opened a second door, and this might be the last chance liberals around the nation have to get the Iraq funding linked to a time table:

CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - President George W. Bush blasted Democrats on Saturday for bloated annual federal spending bills and threatened to use his veto liberally, despite failing to carry out similar threats in the past.

Democrats who now control the Senate and the House of Representatives are crafting a dozen bills for more than $900 billion in government spending to fund items ranging from the space program and education to foreign aid and defense.

"I will use my veto to stop tax increases and runaway spending that threaten the strength of our economy and the prosperity of our people," Bush said in his weekly radio address. He was spending the weekend at his Texas ranch.

Now, I could focus on the inanity of calling an additional $20 billion above Bush's own budget proposal of $933 billion "bloating the budget." After all, it's barey a two percent increase, not even an inflation adjustment. Or I could rant about Bush's own inability to keep the Republican congresses of the past six years in check and never calling them on it. Or I could mock his terming our economy "strong" and saying our people are prosperous, when mortgage foreclosures and bankruptcies are at all time highs, and wages have been stagnant (or worse) his entire presidency.

But I'm a positive kind of guy, and here I think we have a chance to help our Democratic brethren see the light of salvation, to take Jesus in their hearts and SHUT THIS WAR DOWN!

Currently, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are funded off budget. Oh...you didn't know that? You would if you were a regular reader of Simply Left Behind since its inception.

Turns out that, unless there's a formal declaration of war, it's considered emergency spending, and so doesn't have to be accounted for in the run up to passing a budget (meaning you can add at least half a trillion to the budget bill for an accurate picture of our government's financial strength).

We need to find a Congresscritter with the guts to stand up on the floor and introduce into the funding bill a measure finally recognizing the costs of war, so that a figure is presented to the American people that accurately (or at least, ballparks for them) reflects what's coming out of our pockets and out of the budgets of thousands of more vital programs. Why is e. coli suddenly showing up in our food? Blame Iraq for sucking the FDA budget dry. Or melamine in our toothpaste? Blame Iraq for sucking our FTC budget dry. Why are people still having trouble getting disaster relief in New Orleans? Blame Iraq for sucking FEMA, the SBA, and myriad social service agencies, public and private, dry. Why are governors screaming about the lack of National Guard troops for domestic disasters? That's a no-brainer.

By introducing Iraq as a budget item, the Democrats have a chance to do two things: 1) Slap that silly grin off Bush's mug, and make him look abjectly silly for whining about $20 billion dollars and 2) force Bush to come up with a whole lot of 'splanations about why this is necessary and how it's affecting the rest of this country and gee, why are we still there, hemoragging our Cold War surplus and more?

I urge you all to contact your Congresspeople and Senators. This is an issue and an opportunity that even the bluest of districts can help contribute to.