Religious Freedom! (For Me, But Not For Thee)

It's quite short, so I'll print it in full. It's by Karoli at Crooks & Liars:

Study: White Evangelical Christians Are Paranoid, Delusional By karoli We've all heard the whining. From Louis Giglio to contraception, no issue is too small to gin up the whine that white evangelicals are persecuted at the hands of "culture" or alternatively, gay people. Yes, to listen to white evangelicals mule about things is to hear about how gays and lesbians are driving this country into a degenerate downward spiral while the black guy in the White House facilitates.

All of which makes this Barna Group study fascinating:

The findings of a poll published Wednesday (Jan. 23), reveal a “double standard” among a significant portion of evangelicals on the question of religious liberty, said David Kinnaman, president of Barna Group, a California think tank that studies American religion and culture.

While these Christians are particularly concerned that religious freedoms are being eroded in this country, “they also want Judeo-Christians to dominate the culture,” said Kinnamon.

“They cannot have it both ways,” he said. “This does not mean putting Judeo-Christian values aside, but it will require a renegotiation of those values in the public square as America increasingly becomes a multi-faith nation.”

Patheos notes the particular disconnect on what these folks define as religious freedom:

Well, they say there are numerous examples [of persecution], and then pick three:

The brouhaha over Louie Giglio and the Inauguration. The contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act. The demise of the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA.

Of these three, exactly none are “religious freedom” issues.

None.

They are, without exception, religious primacy issues.

None of these impact, in any measurable way, the ability of the Conservative Christian community to practice their faith openly and without fear of persecution in the United States.

Bingo. White evangelical Christians have confused their desire to use their religion as a bludgeon against everyone else in society as "persecution." Because they have been accorded power by the cynical right wing of the country (who doesn't really give a damn about their values but needs their votes), they translate that into a giant national whine about how Christians are persecuted, largely at the hands of gay people.

Yet when they're asked whether other religions such as Islam and Judaism should have the right to exist and practice their faiths, they answer "no" with a resounding majority, serving up a large portion of evangelical hypocrisy with their whine.

Bears!

Honor In War

Col. Tim Collins' inspirational speech to his troops in Iraq, recreated by Kenneth Branagh.



From an article by Blue Texan on Crooks & Liars:

Here's Gen. George Washington, on how he expected American soldiers to treat prisoners. “Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.”

When did it become acceptable for Americans to debate whether or not prisoners should be tortured?

Today's Talking Points

1. Legitimacy of recess appointments struck down by a federal court (will be appealed to the Supremes).
    - Obama appointed people to fill 3 vacancies in NLRB -- when there were only 2 members, with 3 needed for a quorum -- and a director of the CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) whose legitimacy is now in question. 3 NLRB nominations were made in 2009, no Senate action by March of 2010. 
    - 3-judge panel says recess appointments can only be made during the period of transition from one Congress to another; two of three say it can only be to fill a position that arises during the transition, effectively meaning there can be no recess appointments. (Period allowed would be the end of December session in even-numbered years, through January 2 of the following year.)
    - The law providing for recess appointments has existed since 1823, and was used by all of the last 5 presidents. Clinton made 139 recess appointments, Bush made 171, Obama has made 32.

2. Hillary Clinton, congressional hearings on Benghazi.
    - Republicans having been saying since September 12 that this is Watergate and 9/11 rolled into one, the worst thing the U.S. government ever did.
    - Most important question not asked: How can Republicans use Benghazi to harm Clinton in 2016?
    - "Did you see that cable?" "The State Department gets 1.43 million cables a year, all addressed to me. I don't read them all."

3. Decline in union membership.
    - 11.3% of the work force, lowest rate in 97 years.

4. Apple share price down steeply despite decent profits.
    - Losing smartphone ground to Samsung.

5. Republicans in all-red states trying to award electoral college votes by congressional district.
    - If the proposed system had been in place nationally, Romney would have won, while losing the popular vote by nearly 5 million.
    - Romney would get 13 of Pennsylvania’s 20 Electoral College votes; Obama won 52%
    - Obama won Virginia by 4%, but Romney would get 7 of Virginia’s 11 electoral votes.
    - Obama won Ohio by 3%, but Romney won 12 of 18 congressional seats.
   
6. Women allowed in front-line combat in the U.S. military.
    - This has been in practice in Canada since 1989, as well as Scandinavia, Australia, NZ, France, Germany, Netherlands, Israel, North Korea. (Not Italy, Spain, Portugal, U.K.)
    - 140 U.S. female soldiers have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
    - 800 injured, including House member Tammy Duckworth, helicopter pilot who lost both legs in enemy fire.

7. Saxby Chambliss, wing-nut Republican senator from Georgia, says he will resign; most popular Republican replacement at the moment -- Herman Cain.
     - That's good for a laugh, but it won't last.
 
8. Virginia jams through redistricting with an ambush amendment on MLK Day in a 20-20 senate when one old black Civil Rights senator missed the day to attend Obama's inauguration -- and then closed the day's proceedings in honor of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson.
    - Republican governor disapproves, but ambivalent about veto (has presidential aspirations).

9. Republican wingnuttery: Congresscritters come from such deep red districts, they care about pleasing their voters regardless of national opinion.
    - 91% of Americans approve of background checks for guns; some Congressmen will vote against it anyway to curry favor with their deep red constituencies.

10. Colorado Catholic hospital denies responsibility for fetal death on legal grounds that a fetus is not a person; church freaks out.

11. Anonymous declares war on U.S. government, Operation Last Resort.
    - Demands less harsh treatment of hackers and whistleblowers like Aaron Swarz and Michael Bradley.
    - Hacked U.S. Sentencing Commission and distributed encrypted files, says it will release de-encryption keys if the government doesn't meet its demands for legal reform.

12. Sandy Hook truthers.
    - It was a government gun control, or New World Order, or Israeli commando plot.

13. Beyonce.
    - If Romney had won, we could have had Meat Loaf.

14. Bobby Jindal: "We have to stop being the stupid party."
    - And he's a creationist who once performed an exorcism.

15. Republicans oppose any path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
    - Because they'll vote Democratic.

17. Bill Maher: "President Blackenstein."
 

THOMAS TALKS!

From Kaili Joy Gray at Daily Kos:

One of the abiding mysteries at the Supreme Court is why Justice Clarence Thomas has failed to say a word in almost seven years of arguments. On Monday, when he finally broke his silence, the mystery was replaced by a riddle: Just what did Justice Thomas say? [...]

The court transcript confirms that Justice Thomas spoke, for the first time since Feb. 22, 2006. It attributes these words to him, after a follow-up comment from Justice Scalia concerning a male graduate of Harvard Law School:

“Well — he did not — .”

Guess we'll look forward to more brilliant scholarly insights from him in another seven years.

 UPDATE (Reuters):   

At the January 14 argument, the justices considered the qualifications of two court-appointed lawyers, one from Harvard and one from Yale, who had once represented a Louisiana death penalty defendant. It was a side issue as the court weighed whether the defendant was denied a speedy trial.

The revised transcript shows that the lawyer representing Louisiana, Carla Sigler, called the Yale-educated lawyer a "very impressive attorney" and the Harvard-educated lawyer "very exceptional."

That prompted Thomas to weigh in. "Well, there - see he did not provide good counsel," he said.

The original transcript had Thomas saying "Well - he did not" but it was hard to make out the words because there was much courtroom laughter and cross-talk among the justices.

Free Cloud Storage - Nine Sites, Two Managers

Here I am posting another useful Bob Rankin site. Click here for access to Bob's article entitled Nine Free Cloud Backup Services.

The big three are Microsoft SkyDrive, Google Drive, and my favorite -- Dropbox. But the three of them only give you 14GB of space altogether. Symform starts you off with 10GB for free. Others are MediaFire, ADrive, FileLocker, 4Sync, and MiMedia. Bob's article contains hypertext links to all of them. The nine sites provide a total of 170GB of free cloud space.

Another program he mentions is Otixo, which:

gives you a convenient way to manage multiple cloud storage accounts, lets you Search and find files across them, and even lets you drag and drop files from one cloud provider to another.

PrimaDesk.com also provides an interface to multiple cloud storage accounts, but supports Android and iOS devices, plus other services such as Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and Picasa.

Leap Motion: Control Your Computer With Gestures

Click here for an article at technologyreview.com entitled Leaping Into the Gesture-Control Era.


Leap Motion has racked up millions of views with a demo video of its gesture-control technology and is taking orders for the $70 device, due to ship in early 2013. A demo of the technology at the startup’s offices last week showed how mid-air swipes, pokes, and grabs could control 3-D environments and existing software such as the game Fruit Ninja.

Debt Ceiling - Aaaargh!

If I start posting everything I can find explaining that the debt ceiling, unlike the "fiscal cliff," is a deadly serious situation with possibly catastrophic consequences for the world economy, this blog is going to get a great deal bigger -- fast -- and even more boring than it already is. I'm going to make a sincere effort to restrain myself from blowing up about every new Republican outrage on this subject.

I'll allow myself this one: Click here for an article by Steve Benen on msnbc.com entitled Political hostage taking should never be normalized. (I'm also getting sick and tired of the word "hostage," but there's no end to that in sight.)

Benen:

Let me say this as plainly as I can: congressional Republicans are threatening to hurt Americans on purpose. They can rationalize the need for the threat, and perhaps even justify to themselves why the threat has merit, but that doesn't change the basic fact that GOP officials know the debt ceiling must be raised, they know failing to do so would trash the full faith and credit of the United States and likely cause catastrophic harm to the economy, they know lawmakers in both parties routinely raised the debt ceiling 89 times without precondition between 1939 and 2010, and yet, they're going through with this anyway. There's nothing normal about this, and if the political establishment treats it as yet another partisan dispute, it will get this story wrong. In 2011, when Republicans created a brutal debt-ceiling, it not only damaged the country, it was the first time since the Civil War when an entire political party threatened, en masse, to do deliberate harm to the nation. And now, even after faring poorly in national elections, Republicans are poised to commit an act of political violence all over again.

Reagan On Social Security

Stroke Changes Republican Senator's Views On Health Care

Click herefor an article on Daily Kos entitled Senator Kirk suffers stroke, grows heart.

Mark Kirk, Republican Senator from Illinois, said:

"... most Illinois residents insured through the low-income health program would be eligible for just 11 rehabilitation sessions following a stroke. "Had I been limited to that I would have had no chance to recover like I did. So unlike before suffering the stroke, I’m much more focused on Medicaid and what my fellow citizens face," Kirk told the Chicago Sun Times.

Skyrocketing Medicare Costs Will Bankrupt Us All! (Well, Maybe Not.)

Medicare is a huge driver of the federal debt and is looking worse and worse into the future, where it will swallow up the federal budget completely -- right?

Not so much.

For one thing, we all know that the overhead costs of Medicare are much less than the costs of the private system, which has profit margin, advertising expenses and duplicative bureaucratic costs. But here's more.

Twice a year Standard & Poor's does an in-depth study of health care costs. Click here for an article at businessinsider.com by Peter Orszag, former budget director, entitled Peter Orszag's Chart Of The Year Could Change Everything You Think About Healthcare And The Federal Budget.

Click on the graph to enlarge. It shows year-over-year costs of medical care from January '05 to January '013, and it's an eye-opener. The Professional Services Index, Hospital Index, and Commercial Index are all substantially higher than the Medicare Index -- and the trend is accelerating dramatically.

Says Orszag: “This graph from S&P illustrates two key facts: health-care costs have decelerated over the past few years, and Medicare costs have decelerated more than other health costs ... If this slower growth continues, the impact on our long-term fiscal gap will be much more meaningful than any plausible outcome of the fiscal cliff negotiations.”

Plunge Off The Cliff -- Crash Into The Debt Ceiling

I've long maintained that the fiscal cliff hullabaloo is insignificant kabuki theater compared to the potential for disaster if Teapublicans refuse to raise the debt ceiling. Click here for an article on Politico: Enjoy the fiscal cliff debate? Just wait for the debt ceiling. Here are some excerpts:

The fiscal cliff has consumed Washington for months, but it may end up being the long opening act for a fiscal drama with even higher stakes: the debt ceiling.

So while popular attention has been fixed on the fiscal cliff’s tax hikes and spending cuts — which economists said could lead to a recession — it’s the debt ceiling debate that is keeping investors awake at night, and that could tarnish the United States’ sterling reputation among creditors.

“Of all the so-called cliffs, only the debt ceiling is a real cliff because once you go off it you will plunge to your death,” said Jaret Seiberg, a policy analyst at Guggenheim Securities. “All of the other cliffs can be fixed retroactively, but once you default on the debt there is no taking that back.”

The 2011 debt-ceiling standoff cost the United States its perfect credit standing with rating agency Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch Ratings warned earlier this month [December 2012] that it would consider a downgrade of its own if lawmakers again flirt with default.

Treasury hit the debt ceiling Monday and Geithner began employing “extraordinary measures” — like postponing payments to government pension funds and suspending a securities program popular with cities and municipalities — to ward off default for about two months.

Democrats have complained that Republicans’ decision to draw a harder line over the debt limit last year went beyond the usual Washington power play and irresponsibly called into question the once unquestionable: whether the U.S. would pay its debts.

Even if Congress steers clear of default, another round of debt-ceiling brinkmanship could do further damage to the U.S. credit rating, analysts said.

“It's hard to predict when the global investing community might lose confidence in the United States but courting that possibility doesn't make sense,” said Rob Nichols, president of the Financial Services Forum, a group that represents the CEOs of large banks and other financial services companies.

Click here for an article at barbarians-at-the-gates site breitbart.com for another view, entitled Fiscal Cliff Deal Sets Table for Conservative Debt Ceiling Win. Here's a quote from that one:

So is this fiscal cliff deal a loser for Republicans? Only if they play their cards wrong on the debt ceiling debate. But Obama has no cards on that debate. Is he going to hold America’s credit rating hostage to preserve this level of government spending?

"Hold America's credit rating hostage"? Defending the validity of the world's reserve currency against attacks from fanatic ideologues within the government is breitbart.com's idea of hostage-taking?

Click here for Think Progress bringing us a nice flashback from Mitch McConnell, Republican leader of the Senate, after the debt ceiling debacle in the summer of 2011:

“I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” he said. “Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming."

Click here for Standard & Poor's view of the situation, according to Singapore's channelnewsasia.com:

The brinksmanship over the ceiling last year led to Standard & Poor's cutting the US's top-level AAA credit rating for the first time in history, putting it at AA+ with a "negative" outlook.

On Friday S&P said that any deal to fix the fiscal cliff package of economy-crunching tax hikes and spending cuts would not help the country's credit rating.

In 2011, S&P said, its downgrade was rooted in "the political brinkmanship of recent months (that) highlights what we see as America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable".

"We believe that this characterization still holds," it said Friday.

Click here for the full explanation -- it's not too long or difficult -- at standardandpoors.com.

Maybe it won't be that bad? Click here for an article in The Atlantic by Megan McCardle entitled What Happens If We Don't Raise The Debt Ceiling? It's from the last time around, summer of 2011, but the principle is the same:

Here's what I think I know about what will happen:

We will almost certainly pay the interest on our national debt, military payrolls, VA benefits, and Social Security. That is going to leave precious little money for anything else.

Standard & Poor will downgrade our bonds [NOTE: They did that anyway]. Fitch and Moody's, however, are not going to downgrade us unless we actually default--which, as I've said, I don't think we'll do.

Economics of Contempt argues that this will actually have less impact on markets than people are predicting, because most contracts and regulations that require institutions to buy AAA rated securities do not force those institutions to sell unless two out of three of the agencies have downgraded. As long as Fitch and Moody's hold the line, we won't see the absolute chaos that would follow a downgrade of the US short-term credit rating from all three.

Nonetheless, there will be considerable disruption in markets, less because of the direct regulatory problem, than because markets--like the rest of us--like to believe that there is some sheriff in town. The level of political instability implied by a congress that does not raise the debt ceiling is a level of political instability that makes all financial transactions riskier. The willingness of people--foreigners especially, but also Americans--to hold our debt will be permanently impaired. That will be expensive. Also, voters are going to be unhappy when their 401(k) portfolios start behaving like a manic depressive coke addict in detox.

We also don't know if Fitch and Moody's will hold the line. They're telling reporters they will--but how will they feel in a month? Who knows? If they downgraded us significantly, the resulting sell-off just from money market funds could feel a lot like a replay of 2008. Only this time, it's not clear that anyone in the government has the authority to step in and stop a run on the money markets; the issue was left conspicuously unaddressed by Dodd-Frank.

[The author discusses what Geithner may have up his sleeve.] If he does not have these tricks up his sleeve, many things people like--a lot!--will probably stop.

Whatever happens will not last long. The constituencies which make up the tea party do not necessarily understand how much of their life is underwritten by the government. But they will. When the market starts convulsing, and checks stop coming, and states have to do emergency property tax hikes to make up for lost federal revenue, angry constituents are going to mob their congressmen. About five minutes after the first doctor tells a senior citizen that he can't treat any more Medicare patients until he gets paid, the tea party caucus is going to crawl back to Capitol Hill and beg to pass whatever will make it stop.

In the aftermath, we will, over the long term, pay more to borrow money. At least some of that is going to be paid for with higher taxes.

Everyone else is probably going to pay more to borrow money, too. The US is a net borrower, and this sort of instability means paying more to attract capital. And a whole lot of debt, including fixed-rate debt, is priced off of treasuries.

Consumer confidence, already shaky, will take a blow. It's hard to say how much this matters, but it certainly matters some; like markets, consumers want to think that there's someone in charge.

This also raises the regulatory risk that the GOP says they care about. A mildly bad rule that's stable is better for business than a good rule that changes every two years.

The political situation in DC will get even worse. The last two decades have been marked by one party doing something kind of raw to the other party, who then goes even further because after all, look what they did . . . If the Tea Party, and the GOP, precipitate a crisis, then the GOP, and the Tea Party, will pay for it eventually.

So the world is not actually going to end, and I am not buying canned goods and ammunition for my portfolio.

However.

Convulsions in the market, lives disrupted by, say, an inability to actually close on the house you need to sell in order to move cross country and start your new job, higher interest rates, an even more poisonous partisanship . . . these are bad things.

The U.S. economy is in a shaky recovery: Can it handle the pain that would result from even a less-than-worst-case scenario?

Click here for an article from The Washington Post entitled What's the debt ceiling, and why is everyone in Washington talking about it? It uses some 2011 numbers, but again, the principle is the same now as it was then. Here it answers the question: What happens if we don’t raise the debt ceiling but continue to pay interest on our bonds?

This is an option known as “prioritization.” The Bipartisan Policy Center released a report attempting to think through how this would work in practice, as it has never been attempted before. The raw numbers are chilling: In August, the federal government would have to cut expenditures by about $134 billion, or 10 percent of the month’s GDP. If it chose, for instance, to fund Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, supplies for the troops and interest on our bonds, it would have to stop funding every other part of the federal government. The drop in demand, when coupled with the turmoil in the markets and the general financial uncertainty, would undoubtedly throw the economy back into a recession. Also keep in mind that we have to roll over $500 billion in debt that month, and if there was uncertainty about how we were going to pay our bills, it is not clear we could find buyers for our debt at anything less than an exorbitant rate. In this way, “prioritization” could actually increase the deficit.

As if that's not bad enough, here's the Post's answer to the question, What happens if we stop paying the interest on our debt?

This is too scary to consider for any serious length of time. Treasury securities sit at the base of the global financial system. They are considered so safe that the interest rate on Treasuries is called the “riskless rate of return,” as the market assumes there is no chance of default under any circumstances. Almost all other types of debt — mortgages, credit card, auto loans, business loans, hospital bonds, etc. — are yoked to Treasuries. Almost all major financial players hold substantial portfolios of Treasuries or Treasury-related debt in order to buffer themselves against financial shocks. Consider that the 2007 financial crisis was caused by the market realizing it had to reassess the risk of bonds based on subprime mortgages. If the market has to reassess the risk of Treasuries, the resulting financial crisis will be beyond anything we’ve ever seen in this country.

Click here for a view opposite to mine, also from 2011. It's an article on The Hill blog entitled The real debt-ceiling 'Catastrophe.' Here is what I take to be the important quote from that article:

Along come White House chief economist Austan Goolsbee and Treasury Secretary Geithner crying “catastrophe” in an effort to pressure Congress to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. But the real debt ceiling catastrophe lies not in the predictable fear-mongering of a profligate Administration trying to get its way, but in the fact that the United States is already in the position of having to raise a $14.3 trillion debt limit that is almost as large as America’s GDP. And the other related debt ceiling crisis is making sure that the Republican Party can fulfill its election mandate of bringing the federal spending binge to an end without a suicidal 1990s-style government shutdown that could guarantee a fiscally ruinous Obama re-election in 2012.

Or, as I would put it: "The debt is far too high! And the tea partiers were elected in 2010 to block everything and make Obama a one-term president!"

Now, the U.S. debt is far too high. I don't dispute that. That's what happens when you elect a "0" like "W" as president. Click here for an article from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center entitled The Great Debt Shift: Drivers of Federal Debt.

In January 2001, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected under a current law baseline that the federal government would erase its debt in 2006. By 2011, the U.S. government would be 2.3 trillion in the black.

The Bush administration decided that rather than paying down the deficit with projected government surpluses, a better alternative would be huge tax cuts -- especially for the rich -- to put the surplus money in the hands of the "job creators" instead of the federal treasury. The resulting shortfall in projected tax revenues, supply-siders claimed, would be more than offset by the explosive economic growth that would result from the tax cuts. Then Bush launched two needless wars that dragged on for a decade, costing trillions. In the last 70 years, every other major war the U.S. had waged -- WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf I, for example -- had been paid for by increased taxes. No president before Bush had cut taxes in wartime (although one after him has).

Click here for an article in that pinko lefty hippie rag, Forbes, entitled Republican Deficit Hypocrisy. Here's a quote:

The human capacity for self-delusion never ceases to amaze me, so it shouldn't surprise me that so many Republicans seem to genuinely believe that they are the party of fiscal responsibility. Perhaps at one time they were, but those days are long gone.

This fact became blindingly obvious to me six years ago this month when a Republican president and a Republican Congress enacted the Medicare drug benefit, which former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker has called "the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1960s."

Tack on a huge unfunded prescription drug plan (a gift to Bush's wealthy buddies in Big Pharma), and the projected surplus is completely exhausted. So when a huge subprime housing bubble blows up in 2008, bankrupting American icons like Merrill Lynch, there is no cushion above the balanced-budget baseline to absorb the shock; the drop is from an economic position much, much worse than it would have been in the projected Clinton scenario.

So that's why the national debt is so high. When Obama was inaugurated, the economy was in freefall, losing 750,00 jobs a month. Obama's deficits have not been because of profligate new spending, but because of huge expenditures made necessary by the financial crash and the impossibility of easing the debt situation with increased taxes.

Let's talk about U.S. tax rates. Click here for an article in the September/October edition of the highly respected magazine Foreign Affairs entitled America the Undertaxed. It has a pretty incredible graph, showing total tax revenues as a percentage of GDP in the industrialized world in 2009. (I tried to copy it in but failed; click on the link and have a look!)

It shows a bar graph for 32 countries. The lowest of the 32 is Mexico, at 17.4%. Second-lowest is Chile at 18.4%. Third place, at 24.1%, is -- ta-da! The U.S.! (We're Number 3! We're Number 3!)

So there are 2 countries in the developed world where tax revenues are lower, as a percentage of GDP, than the U.S. -- and there are 29 where the tax rate is higher.

And not just a little bit higher: 8 other countries have a percentage in the 20s, with Greece at 30.0%; 15 countries have a percentage in the 30s (including the 18th lowest, Canada at 32.0%), with Hungary at 39.9%; and 8 are in the 40s, with Denmark topping the list at 48.1%. Those 8 are third-world basket cases Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Belgium, Norway, Austria, Finland, and France.

But it is important to look at pre-recession data, which better reflect long-term trends. In 2006, before the financial crisis struck, OECD tax statistics showed that total taxes in the United States -- at all levels of government: federal, state, and local -- were 27.9 percent of GDP, three-quarters the percentages in Germany and the United Kingdom and about half of those in Denmark and Sweden. Among the rich democracies in 2006, only South Korea had lower taxes.

The article goes into six pages of wonky explanations as to why -- and it isn't mostly because of personal income tax levels, which are actually just a tad higher than the average of the rest of the developed world.

G.W. Bush did immeasurable harm to the U.S., and in ways other than economic -- moral leadership from the guys in the white hats running Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, for instance -- but sticking to economics, let's not forget to push some blame onto Mr. Andrea Mitchell (otherwise known as Alan Greenspan, the 18-year head of the Federal Reserve), a devoted follower of Ayn Rand, long thought to be a financial wizard until exposed in 2008 for the chucklehead he is. Click here for an article in the U.K. newspaper The Guardian entitled Greenspan - I Was Wrong About The Economy. Sort Of.

Testifying before congress in October of 2008, Greenspan said

...he had been "partially wrong" in his hands-off approach towards the banking industry and that the credit crunch had left him in a state of shocked disbelief. "I have found a flaw," said Greenspan, referring to his economic philosophy. "I don't know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact."

"I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms," said Greenspan.

In prepared remarks before the House of Representatives, Greenspan, 82, who retired in 2006, called the financial crisis a "once-in-a-century credit tsunami" and said it had "turned out to be much broader than anything I could have imagined".

He suggested his trust in the responsibility of banks had been misplaced: "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief."

The congressional committee's Democratic chairman, Henry Waxman, pressed him: "You found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working?" Greenspan agreed: "That's precisely the reason I was shocked because I'd been going for 40 years or so with considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well."

Yeah, Al, your house of cards "was working exceptionally well" right up until it collapsed.