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It's a chinese curse: "May you have an interesting life." I've been blessed, in a way, for many of the interesting things in my life have happened to other people. I first started to accumulate anecdotes in the newspaper business, and it turns out that I have a gift for interviewing people, in that I ask questions that others don't think of, or don't think of in time, and when I ask the questions, I pay attention to what the other person is saying.

It's amazing, what people will tell you, if they think you're listening to them. Most people shut up and soldier, and they're thrilled that someone thinks they actually know something. What sad lives these people must lead, that they get so little respect!

An Amazing Wealth

I wasn't a regular viewer of Keith Olbermann's show on MSNBC. If I saw it twice a month, it was OK, but it was an exhausting show to watch.

Jon Stewart says that KO brought five tools - rage, ego, wit, scholarship, and bombast - that most pundits lack. Who is going to fill the Olbermann-sized hole in our national discourse? None of the MSNBC crew are up to it. Ed Schultz does best with three of those five traits. Neither KO (who tweeted "OK, @TheDailyShow - I give. What the hell was THAT?") nor Ed Shultz (whose tweet was "OK... Jon Stewart thinks I'm too loud... o.k. big guy... I'll stay quiet if they ship your ass to China") seemed to appreciate Jon Stewart's compliment was a compliment, even if couched in humorous terms.

The new Congressmen say that we need to cut spending.

Our tax revenues, as a percentage of GDP, are the lowest since 1950, but Mr. Obama consulted with them, and not only decided to keep the temporary Bush tax cut stimulus (the one that failed to stimulate) but added some additional tax cuts as well.

So how are we going to pay for those tax cuts? Well, obviously, we need to cut spending. The four biggest areas of the federal budget are national defense, medicare, medicaid, and anti-terrorism, and the new Congresscritters want to focus on cuts in the 12% of the budget that isn't in those four areas.

Generic Paper Clips, Anyone?

Me, I think it'd make as much sense to balance the budget by switching from name-brand paperclips and staples to using generic brand staples and paperclips to hold papers together. It ain't gonna work. Fighting wars - not only the current wars but the past ones - amounts to 62% of the budget, and our military expenditures have grown 120% in the last decade, far more than the federal budget as a whole. Shouldn't we pay off the last war before we start a new one?

You can see by this table what taxpayers think about the matter. It's a poll released today by the Pew charitable trust. They have a habit of asking questions that many of us really would prefer to ignore the answers to, but when I get over my righteous indignation, I have to admit that they seem to be well-done polls, really getting to the truth instead of asking "have you stopped beating your wife" questions.

Maybe Taxes Oughta Go Up

If the economy recovers, that'll go a long way towards balancing the federal budget. Part of our problem is that the baby boomer generation is retiring, and we have fewer workers. We really need to bring in some wetbacks, and make them citizens to help carry the load. We also need to raise the tax rates. Neither of those solutions is very popular with the electorate, though.

I guess we can all choose to freeze to death in the dark. I'm doing my part. I spent most of the day under the blankets, freezing to death. The folks at the National Westher Service say things are supposed to warm up this weekend, and even hit above-average temperatures next week, but I've dealt with their treachery for decades. Mark my words, they're going to sneak up on us and present us with an icy wet March, sure as the world.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Congress - defense spending - federal budget - paper clips - Pew Charitable Trust - poll - taxes

They gossip says that Border Books can't pay suppliers, and is near to a bankruptcy filing.

It'd be easy to blame it on changes in the book industry. Amazon is selling 115 Kindle books for each 100 paperbacks, and the Kindle reader itself is Amazon's single best-selling product. I downloaded the Kindle software to my PC - it's free - and it's incredibly appealing. Reading on a monitor is hard to do, but I suspect I'd fall in love with reading on a handheld Kindle.

On the other hand, maybe there's another problem at Border's. The illustration here is clipped from the screenshot of an email Border Book mailed me overnight. (Incidently, you might note that today's date is two, eleven, two eleven.)