Stuff I did not know, a continuing series - According to Senate majority leader Harry Reid, taxes in America are voluntary. Damn, I already filed!

By the way, I don't think I've ever heard anybody use the word "phraseology" since Mayor Shinn in "The Music Man."

Al Gore is super-cereal - He's launching a whole new "man on the moon" effort against ManBearPig.

Inter-species lust and anthropomorphic robots - Topless Robot: "The 10 Most Insane, Child-Warping Moments of '80s Cartoons"

Waiting on Zimbabwe - Election results so far are showing an even split between Mugabe and everybody else in the country. So they're rigged.

Not dead yet

Byron York looks deeper into the Democrats' race and finds that Hillary's numbers may not be as bleak as they've been portrayed:

In any event, when all of those numbers are combined into an overall horserace figure, admittedly an unpopular figure among political analysts, Clinton and Obama are dead even, 45-45. And people wonder why she is resisting demands that she quit the race.

Maybe, but it's looking like the superdelegates are starting to line up behind Obama in the interest of "party unity" and there's nothing Hill can do to reverse the tide.

Irony overload

Politico: "Clinton didn't pay health insurance bills"

Among the debts reported this month by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s struggling presidential campaign, the $292,000 in unpaid health insurance premiums for her campaign staff stands out.

Clinton, who is being pressured to end her campaign against Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination, has made her plan for universal health care a centerpiece of her agenda.

No wonder she wants universal coverage: then the government can pay those bills.

Howard Dean endorses John McCain

From Jake Tapper's political blog:

"The real issue is this," Dean said [snip] "Who would you rather have in charge of the defense of the United States of America, a group of people who never served a day overseas in their life, or a guy who served his country honorably and has three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star on the battlefields of Vietnam?"

McCain, by the way, has been awarded the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, two Bronze Star Medals, a Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Details aside, that was sure nice of Governor Dean.

Has Zimbabwe's moment finally arrived?

From the NY Times: "Zimbabweans Vote, Desperate for Change"

Lines were long at the polling stations here well before morning had unscrolled its first light. And when the doors did not open exactly at 7 a.m., voters in the impoverished township of Warren Park rushed the schoolyard gate, most of them desperate to cast a ballot to oust the man who has been president for most of their lives, Robert Mugabe.

Recap from the Atlantic: "Turning a breadbasket into a basket case in ten easy steps - the Robert Mugabe way"

More - From Gateway Pundit.

I've heard that song before

Marc Ambinder makes some corrections:

2. Yesterday, I wrote that McCain adviser Charlie Black was taking a "leave of absence" from his lobbying firm. In fact, Black is resinging.

Ha-ha. This, in turn, calls to mind this exchange:

Homer: Look kids! I just got my party invitations back from the printers.
Lisa: [Reading the invitation.] "Come to Homer's BBBQ. The extra B is for BYOBB."
Bart: What's that extra B for?
Homer: It's a typo.

Whoops!

Meanwhile, in Africa - Economist "Zimbabwe on tenterhooks": "No one is confident that President Robert Mugabe will let himself be voted out of office."

Eco-conscious Americans relieved of their green by ZAP

Who killed the electric car? This month's Wired magazine has an absolutely must-read account of the Zap Corporation which promised to deliver electric cars to the people, save the environment, and make a profit. It was all a green pipe dream and the only people enriched were Zap's top officials:

Scheder-Bieschin says that Starr and Schneider have been insulated from criticism because of the business they are in. "Steve plays the game that nobody's ever gonna be tough on us because we're the EV guys.'" (Indeed, Robert Taicher, a consultant for ZAP, called Wired editors as this story was in process, asking the magazine to tread lightly on ZAP, given that "we're in the green space.") "Gary Starr and Steve Schneider have likely done more damage to the EV industry than Detroit and the Japanese combined," Scheder-Bieschin says. "And the failure of this industry to thrive has affected everything from global warming to the war on terror. How do you put a price on that?"

(Have I mentioned before that Wired is the absolutely best magazine out there? Every month they have at least one great article, well worth the cover price. Word on the street is that Kevin Spacey read the September 2002 article "Hacking Las Vegas" and immediately optioned the story to make the movie "21.")

But I digress: the Zap story reaches its denouement with the story of Austin schoolteacher John Martin who turned over his life savings to Zap for a dealership. The cars didn't arrive and when finally did, they were impossible to sell (max range of a charged Xebra: 20 miles) and broke down constantly. The now-destitute Martin is delivering pizzas and at the end of the article you can feel his pain as he says: "I wanted so much to believe."

Coffee and "Juno" - Boston Globe: "10 things white people like"

One says $43 trillion, the other $53 trillion, but who's counting?

We're either in super-duper debt or mega-atomic debt. Glenn Beck reviews "The $53 trillion asteroid" heading our way:

Let me give you three numbers that will put this economic asteroid into perspective: $200 billion, $14.1 trillion, and $53 trillion:

- $200 billion is the approximate total amount of write-downs announced so far as a result of the current credit crisis.
- $14.1 trillion is the size of the entire U.S. economy
And $53 trillion is (drum roll please) the approximate size of this country's bill for the Social Security and Medicare promises we've made.

If Washington takes action to reform entitlements, the impact can be spread out over decades instead of slamming us all at once. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen. From the Christian Science Monitor: "Congress in no rush to fix Medicare and Social Security - A new report projects a $42.9 trillion shortfall for the two entitlement programs over the next 75 years."

To put it another way: It would take an immediate 122 percent increase in the payroll tax (to 6.44 percent) or a 51 percent reduction in program outlays to bring Medicare into balance, the trustees said.

That's the current (immediate!) impact just to cover the long-term liabilities of Medicare and Social Security. As we fall further behind, it's going to take much more drastic actions down the road to cover this debt.

Caring, not sharing - George Will in "Conservatives more liberal givers": "While conservatives tend to regard giving as a personal rather than governmental responsibility, some liberals consider private charity a retrograde phenomenon -- a poor palliative for an inadequate welfare state, and a distraction from achieving adequacy by force, by increasing taxes."

There but for the grace of God go I...not.

CNN has one of those human interest stories about a poor woman in California who fell on hard times: "From $70K to food bank, one family's struggle" The story is meant to evoke sympathy or warn us of the consequences of a sputtering economy but it doesn't take too long into the article to see that things don't add up:

Guerrero is estranged from her husband and raising her two young children. She's already burned through her savings to help make ends meet, and is drawing unemployment checks. She has had to take extreme measures to pay for her interest-only mortgage of $2,500 a month. In fact, her mother moved in with her to help pay the bills.

So:
1) She's too proud to ask her estranged husband for help, yet won't divorce him and sue for child support.
2) She had absolutely no savings if she's unemployed for a single month and already filing for food stamps.
3) There is no way somebody making $70K a year can afford a $2500/month mortgage. She's clearing somewhere around four grand a month, meaning she's spending a mammoth 63% of her take-home pay for a mortgage on which she's gaining no equity.

If only she had the fiscal knowledge that interest-only loans are a dead-end:

A former loan processor, Guerrero knows all about that, although so far she has been able keep her house.

There are genuine tales of hardship out there in America but this story just does not make any sense. Worst poster child since Graeme Frost.

Yeah, that'll bring 'em back - Taxpayers flee Massachusetts. Today in the Boston Globe: "State's fiscal picture dims - Cuts, tax hikes may be on the table."

And here's some fun trivia for you: "All of this is set against the fact that the state already has the highest per capita government debt in the country." We're #1 baby! Hmmm...I wonder where all that money went? Oh, wait, there it is: "Healthcare cost increases dominate Mass. budget debate" Universal health care is bankrupting the Bay State - who saw that coming?

Incurious Paul

NY Times columnist, alleged economist and self-regarding blowhard Paul Krugman does it again. In his latest blog entry, he's taken a look at the latest report by the Social Security trustees and finds that, since the actuarial balance not quite as red as before, everything's peachy:

Moral: Social Security's financial problem is relatively minor. It doesn't deserve the emphasis it receives from most pundits.

Big whoop! And the Titanic was fine until all that water rose above the third-class levels. Krugman has become so biased and intellectually dishonest that whenever the unemployment rate drops, he immediately assigns it to phantom "people who stopped looking for work." Now he sees a hiccup in the actuarial tables at Social Security, which is still going bankrupt in 2041, and shrugs his dwarfish shoulders.

What's worse, he doesn't seem the least bit interested in trying to uncover why the demographically-driven collapse of Social Security is showing signs of life. For that, we have to thank Kevin Drum for doing some heavy lifting to find that an accounting trick has tipped the balance somewhat:

Translation: instead of just pulling a net number out of a hat, the trustees built a model that estimated the actual demographic characteristics of both immigrants and emigrants. And guess what?

- Illegal immigrants tend to skew young. This benefits the system.
- Young people have more children than older people. This benefits the system.
- Some illegal immigrants pay taxes for a few years and then leave. This benefits the system.

Bottom line: "This year's report results in [...] a substantial increase in the number of working-age individuals contributing payroll taxes, but a relatively smaller increase in the number of retirement-age individuals receiving benefits in the latter half of the long-range period." Give or take a bit, it turns out that this shores up the Social Security system to the tune of around $13 billion per year. Thanks, illegal immigrants!

That's right, illegal immigration is shoring up Social Security and Medicare and this is precisely the kind of economic and social dynamic that drives most economists. But not Paul Krugman.

Extra - Here's Tom: "Let's fleece the illegals"

Jericho re-cancelled - Well, the nuts helped to gain "Jericho" fans closure, and the final episode of the post-apocalyptic show airs tonight. So we got that going for us.

The requisite Social Security trustee report post

For today's entitlement reform update, I'm going to borrow a headline from Fark:

Medicare program funds will be wiped out by 2019, Social Security by 2041. Thank goodness baby boomers are living their dreams while sucking the country dry

Yeah, that pretty much says it all, but in case you missed today's news, here's CNN: "Treasury Secretary says program is 'financially unsustainable.' - Trustee report says government will have to pay back what it owes starting in 2017"

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, saying that Social Security is "financially unsustainable," called Tuesday for quick action to keep the system strong and released a report detailing the program's funding shortfalls.

The federal government will have to start paying back what it owes the Social Security trust fund in 2017 so the program can continue paying 100% of benefits. By 2041, if the system is left unchanged, Social Security will only be able to pay out 78% of benefits promised to future retirees.

And from the Baltimore Sun: "Social Security, Medicare 'train-wrecks:' Warnings"

"The latest report from the trustees shows once again that the aging of the population along with rising health care costs per capita threaten to bankrupt the country if nothing is done,' Sawhill said today. "Yet, none of the presidential candidates has been honest with the American public about the magnitude of the challenge and the importance of dealing with it sooner rather than later."

Know why? Kids don't vote.

More - From Betsy: "Hillary on Social Security"

Obama's campaign hit hard by Wright controversy in North Carolina - And by "hit hard" I mean he's opened up a 21-point lead in the most recent poll. (Also, Hill is down slightly in Pennsylvania.) Quick, change the subject, Hill!