Stunning piece on 60 Minutes last weekend about David Walker, the comptroller general of the United States (Walker runs the Government Accountability Office, “which audits the government’s books and serves as the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress.”) He’s a prudent guy with a frightening message: The U.S. is radically over-promised, fiscally speaking. The numbers just don’t add up, and we’re heading for a fall – possibly financial collapse – if dramatic changes aren’t made, and fast.

Example: The first wave of Baby Boomers will hit the Medicare system in early 2008, and soon that system will be 5 times more overburdened than Social Security is now. He calls Bush’s prescription drug plan “the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1960s” — with one stroke of the pen, Medicare’s obligations were stretched by 40-75% over the next 75 years. We’d have to have $8 trillion invested in treasury bills today to begin to cover the bill. The reality: We’ve got zip. A pile of promises backed by thin air.

His message isn’t new – he’s been trying to get the word into the ears of politicians for years, but they don’t want to hear it. So he’s taking it to the streets, on an extended “wake up” tour of the U.S., talking to people and the media – whoever will listen.

What would happen in 2040 if nothing changes? “If nothing changes, the federal government’s not gonna be able to do much more than pay interest on the mounting debt and some entitlement benefits. It won’t have money left for anything else – national defense, homeland security, education, you name it.”

Our children’s future has been mortgaged over a barrel so many times over, it’ll be a wonder if there’s even such a thing as public schools in 20 years. Thinking about this kind of thing is like thinking about what life will be like when “the big one” hits California – so hard to contemplate the reality of it that, for the most part, we don’t.

Heartbreaking photo. “Wounded US Marine returns home from Iraq to marry.”

Dave Winer, on how to buy Bush out of office early:

I just got off the phone with Sylvia, who passed on a great idea that just might work, to help George Bush leave office early. Here’s how it goes. We all contribute to a fund, that hopefully would contain a lot of money, say $150 million. If Bush resigns on the first day, he gets the whole $150 million. Every day he waits, the fund goes down by 10 percent, so there’s a real incentive for him to act quickly. On Day 2 it’s worth only $135 million. On Day 3, $121.5 million. And so on. It’s kind of a simplified version of Deal or No Deal.

I love the idea! I’d kick in $5K.

Back when I worked at Ziff-Davis in Boston, a multimedia developer named David Drucker provided my first introduction to the Macintosh (an introduction I resisted, though his predictions that I would someday become a Mac-head ultimately proved true).

When Bush won re-election in 2004, Drucker and his wife did something many liberals talked about doing, but that few actually followed through on – they up and moved to Canada. Today, the LA Times has published a brief piece by Drucker on whether their commitment to Canada has changed now that Democrats are back: Dems in control? We’re still staying in Canada, wherein he marvels at the fact that Canada’s “conservative” prime minister Steven Harper recently referred to a new “holistic” approach to environmental policy. Imagine anyone from the Bush administration using the term “holistic” with anything but sarcasm.

We’ve come to the conclusion that the United States has drifted so far to the right that any self-respecting Canadian Conservative would be considered a raving liberal in Washington.

Fun fact, from the Wikipedia entry for Gerrymander:

The word “gerrymander” is named for the American politician Elbridge Gerry (July 17, 1744 – November 23, 1814), and is a combination of his name and the word “salamander,” which was used to describe the appearance of a tortuous electoral district Gerry created in order to disadvantage his electoral opponents.

So… when is redistricting going to be put into the hands of an independent body, rather than incumbent legislators? Why is it even legal?

Defective Yeti with punctuation-related Bushisms… and spinoffs:

“I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, [the current violence] will look like just a comma.” (cf. original comma quote )

“The only way to stop the sectarian violence is to find a bridge between the Sunnis and Shiites, a hyphen that will join the two separate parties into one compound nation.”

“Victory is still possible in Iraq — albeit a victory enclosed in scare quotes and followed by an asterisk.”

Nicholas Kristof for the NY Times:

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Donald Rumsfeld estimated that the overall cost would be under $50 billion. Paul Wolfowitz argued that Iraq could use its oil to “finance its own reconstruction.” But now several careful studies have attempted to tote up various costs, and they suggest that the tab will be more than $1 trillion — perhaps more than $2 trillion. … Just to put that $2 trillion in perspective, it is four times the additional cost needed to provide health insurance for all uninsured Americans for the next decade. It is 1,600 times Mr. Bush’s financing for his vaunted hydrogen energy project…

Not to beat a dead horse, but this horse ain’t dead. Every minute we spend losing a war that not even the generals think we can win is costing us $380,000.

via pseudorandom

Cheerful stuff for a gloomy Friday. Christian Science Monitor: “The United States is the world’s only military superpower and has the globe’s largest economy. Yet, by some measures, the US is a second-rate industrial nation – at best.” Quoting CSM via plastic.com:

Most Americans take it as a given that the US economic model is the best in the world, way better than the interventionist models offered by European social democrats or by Chinese Communists. Many non-Americans disagree, and they argue that by some measures, the US is a second-rate industrial nation at best. 17% of Americans, and 21.9% of US children, live below the poverty line, the worst showing among 16 wealthy nations in a recent study. In life expectancy, the US shared the bottom rung of the study with Denmark, even though Denmark spends half what the US spends on medical care per person. Even in areas like productivity and employment, where the US considers itself a world-beater, it came in at number 5, even as Americans work the most hours. But in certain respects, the US is truly unequaled. For example, the US’ Defense Dept. budget is responsible for 47% of world military spending, with no other nation or combination of likely adversaries coming anywhere close. It spends 57 times more than all “rogue” nations combined.

So where does the perception that Americans live better than anyone in the world come from? Is it a left-over mystique from the 1950s that seldom gets re-examined? A lie we tell ourselves to reinforce the status quo? An artifact of hubris? Or are we just not paying attention?

A little Memorial Day contribution — found a book of 1943 war ration stamps in a box belonging to a passed relative. The name written on the book does not belong to my relative, so I’m not sure how they came into the family. Trying to imagine today’s war getting to the point where consumer goods were in a state of similar scarcity, or of Americans today tolerating having their bread, sugar, and gas dribbled out in thin streams by the Feds. But what really bakes my noodle is trying to imagine today’s government printing a tagline on any literature like “Be guided by the rule, ‘If you don’t need it, don’t buy it.’” Or that the U.S. Government once had an “Office of Price Administration.” The actual stamps are quite small – check the high-res versions on Flickr to see them in full glory.

Against all common sense and human dignity, Congress is once again considering the discriminatory and barbaric Federal Marriage Amendment. The Senate will vote June 5 whether to define marriage in the Constitution as being between a man and a woman. Once enshrined, it would be very, very difficult for states to rise above. John McCain:

The Constitutional Amendment we are debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans. It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed, and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them, and which they feel capable of resolving should it confront them, again according to local standards and customs.

The Human Rights Campaign is running a postcard campaign to counter a similar one being run by FMA supporters. Whatever you think about the efficacy of digital postcard campaigns, it’s at least worth ensuring that the numbers aren’t grossly skewed by vigorous religious campaigns. HRC also has tips on setting up a meeting with your congress critter.

Technorati Tags: fma, gaymarriage, hrc, humanrights