George Rebane

• A Democrat agrees with George Will
• TechTest2008 Awards Coverage
• Trillion dollar ‘Stupidity and the State’

A notable Democrat agrees with George Will (but just this once).  My friend Dick Dickenson took a look at the latest from syndicated columnist George Will on Obama choosing his VP.  Will writes a short and compelling piece – ‘Obama’s choice can’t be Clinton’ – about Obama making up his own mind and Hillary disappearing into the night quietly.  I asked Dick to comment, not knowing what to expect from a dedicated Democrat and former political editor of The Washington Post.  With his permission I share with you his reasoned, revealing, and somewhat testy observations.  (Would love to be at a lunch table with these two gentlemen.)   

This is one of the rare Will columns with which I agree.  He wastes so much of his intelligence, erudition, and articulateness on being just dead-ass wrong most of the time (I would add intellectual arrogance and all the problems that entails to his list of qualifications) but he does hit the mark on this one.  It’s inevitable that we all waste some time on Hillary’s run and her future ( ! ) because she is not the run-of-the-mill candidate–how much would we be talking about John Edwards or Chris Dodd at this point?–but she after all is the loser.  I think Obama has made the right moves so far.  He has been totally unmoved by the idea of even considering naming her to the ticket at this point.  He’s making it clear that it’s his decision and he’ll do it on his own schedule.  He’s also not responding yet to McCain’s self-serving proposal of informal "town meeting" debates, the only format in which McCain is adequate, and not letting McCain set the agenda for the general election.  My final thought on Hillary as vice presidential candidate: Who in his right mind would choose as his running mate the one person in the U.S. who can unite the Republican party?  It certainly isn’t John McCain.

Mike McDaniel, Executive Director of the Sierra Environmental Studies Foundation, reports on the results of TechTest2008 here.  Mike presented $15,000 worth of scholarship checks at awards night held last Wednesday evening at Nevada Union High School.  These merit awards represent some of the largest scholarships given in Nevada County.  The small men at the helm of The Union, which has studiously chosen to refuse any coverage of this notable event that promotes and recognizes the county’s top technology-bound high school seniors, made it a clean sweep by ignoring the top-scorers of this grueling annual four-hour exam.  The Sierra Sun of Truckee decided that it was worth covering the TechTest2008 awards and “the number one math student in Nevada County.”   

In the WSJ Ernest Christian and Gary Robbins (‘Stupidity and the State’) highlight some of the trillion (yes, that’s a million million) dollar mistakes that the federal government has made, continues to make, and proposes that we approve of the process going on into the indefinite future.  After giving a couple of mind-jarring examples they say –

On top of everything else, Washington tries to cover up the cost of its failures and incompetence by officially misstating the government’s financial results. For instance, the government says that the tax burden will be $2.6 trillion in 2008. But counting the "deadweight" loss from damage done by taxes to the private economy, the real tax burden is twice that – roughly $5.2 trillion, according to various estimates, including ones published by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Congressional Budget Office. On the spending side, a study by the Office of Management and Budget showed that government programs on average fall 39% short of meeting their goals. Thus, in 2008, government will spend $2.7 trillion to provide $1.65 trillion of benefit.

These learned men end their article with a totally erroneous conclusion that invokes a hope for which there is no evidence.

A real tax burden of $5.2 trillion to pay for a $1.65 trillion benefit seems a bit excessive, even by Washington standards. Perhaps one of the presidential candidates should do the voters the courtesy of at least telling them the truth, and asking them if they really want quite so much government at such a high price. Then again, maybe the voters already sense the truth, and perhaps that is why they are so furious.

The fact of the matter is that the voters don’t sense the truth and are anything but "so furious" at government spending and interference shenanigans.  The majority of them will continue happily voting for candidates and policies that promise no hope of change in spite of what the candidates’ placards say (McCain and Obama, call your office).