Minor Thoughts from me to you

These are words that make me want to vote for Rick Perry. Today, if possible.

And I’ll promise you this: I’ll work every day to make Washington, D.C. as inconsequential in your life as I can.

These are the concerns that make me worry about having Governor Perry become President Perry.

I’d like to hear some of the more thoughtful conservatives lining up behind Perry weigh in on this. Here’s how I see it: A state government has no more awesome, complete, or solemn power than the power to execute its own citizens. If you’re going to claim to loathe big government, this is one area where you ought to be more skeptical of government than any other. Hell, if for no other reason than that it can’t be undone.

The problem here isn’t necessarily that Perry presided over the execution of a man who was likely innocent. If Perry had shown some concern about what happened in the Willingham case, maybe set up an investigation into what went wrong, perhaps even attempted to suspend executions in Texas until he could be sure checks were in place to prevent the execution of an innocent, the way George Ryan did in Illinois—if he’d done any of that, he’d at least have shown some appropriate skepticism. He’d have shown that he’s at least cognizant of the fact that government employees in law enforcement and criminal justice are just as fallible and subject to the trappings of power, bureaucracy, and public choice theory as government employees in, say, tax collection or the regulation of business.

Instead, Perry couldn’t even acknowledge the possibility of doubt about Willingham’s guilt.

There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle lately, about a new Florida law that prevents pediatricians from asking parents about guns in the home.

There’s one customary question, though, that I’m no longer allowed to ask. In June, Gov. Rick Scott signed a law barring Florida doctors from routinely asking patients if they own a gun. The law also authorizes patients to report doctors for “unnecessarily harassing” them about gun ownership and makes it illegal to routinely document firearm ownership information in a patient’s medical record. Other state legislatures have considered similar proposals, but Florida is the first to enact such a law…

The measure was introduced in the state Legislature after a pediatrician in Central Florida dismissed a mother from his practice when she angrily refused to answer a routine question about whether she kept a gun in her house. The doctor, Chris Okonkwo, said at the time that he asked so he could offer appropriate safety advice, just as he customarily asks parents if they have a swimming pool and teenagers if they use their cellphones when they drive. He said that he dismissed the mother because he felt they could not establish a trusting doctor-patient relationship.

Aaron Carroll, a pediatrician, explains why he’s asking these questions.

I ask parents regularly if they have a gun in the home. If they tell me they do, I ask how it’s stored. I recommend that they think about not having a gun around children. If they must, I recommend that they keep it unloaded, locked up, with the bullets stored separately.

Why? Because in 2005, guns were were in involved in almost 85% of homicides and more than 45% of suicides in children aged 5-19 years, not to mention many accidents. I ask about guns because they are a major mechanism of childhood death. I’m trying to prevent that from happening.

I’m not judging my patients or harassing them, any more than when I ask them whether they use bike helmets, or whether they use car seats, or whether they let their kids cross the street unaccompanied by an adult. I’m trying to keep them from getting killed. That’s my job.

Dr. Carroll says that it’s his job to keep my children from being killed. That it’s his job to ask questions about how I instruct my children and what precautions I take. That it’s his job to oversee the general safety and security of my home and possessions.

I think that, in effect, makes him my parent. It puts me in a position of being answerable to him, of needing his approval of how I live and act. It takes away the responsibility that I have, for my children. He’s making them his responsibility.

This reminds me of the “Oath of Responsibility” that Residents of Grainne take, in the book Freehold.

I,, before witness, declare myself an adult, responsible for my actions, and able to enter contract. I accept my debts and duties as a Resident of the Freehold of Grainne.

It’s a simple oath, but a very deep one. Simply, it declares that I’m responsible for my own actions. Deeply, it means that I agree to accept any and all consequences for my actions—good or bad. There’s no one I can blame if things go disastrously wrong. There’s no one backstopping me if I start to veer into a ditch. There’s no one hovering over me, waiting to snatch me back from the brink of disaster.

It’s a sobering oath. If I take it seriously, it would mean that I have to slow down and carefully think through all of the potential consequences for the decisions I make. It means that I need to be sure, quite sure, before I act.

This is what being responsible looks like. This is what it means to be an adult. And this is the oath that I implicitly took when I moved away from home and, especially, when I got married. I did both of those things years before I read Freehold and read this oath. But this oath resonated with me, the first time I read it. It explicitly stated what I’d always implicitly assumed and lived by.

That’s why I resent these pediatricians who think it’s their job to look out for my children and who think that it’s their job to question and second guess my decisions. I took responsibility for my children long before I had them. I retain responsibility for them now. And I am not going to outsource that responsibility to anyone, no matter how well intentioned they may be.

No, Dr. Carroll, keeping my children safe and alive isn’t your job. It’s mine. You are not responsible to monitor whether (or when) my children wear bike helmets, when they stop using car seats, or when I let them cross the street unaccompanied by an adult. It’s my responsibility.

I have a dual responsibility: to protect them from harm and to teach them how to live responsibly. I have a responsibility to teach them how to distinguish something that’s truly dangerous (riding a motercycle on the highway without a helmet) from something that’s merely occasionally a little risky (riding a toddler bike on the sidewalk without a helmet).

I have a responsibility to teach them how to safely cross the street. Eventually, that will result in me letting them walk to the park unaccompanied by an adult. In doing so, they’ll cross one or two streets, unaccompanied by an adult. I have to teach them how to do that. Invevitably, they’ll end up doing it sooner than I think, at a time when I’m not prepared for them to do so. When that happens, I want them to already know how to do it safely—not to be completely unprepared because their pediatrician thought it was reckless and dangerous.

Dr. Carroll, if I ever come into your office, it’s because I want you to do the job I cannot do: the job of knowing which medicines and treatments will heal my kids after they get hurt or after they get sick. If you can do that, we can have a good, strong, relationship. If you try to take responsibility for my household and try to take authority that I haven’t given you, we’re going to have problems.

Main Street had profits of $1 million in the second quarter and wrote off 1.25% of its loans as uncollectible. That is below the industry's charge-off rate of 1.82% in the FDIC's data for the first quarter, the latest available. The bank has earned nearly $11 million in the past year.

In July 2010, the FDIC slapped Main Street with a 25-page order to boost its capital, strengthen its controls and bring in a new top executive. Regulators also said the bank was putting too many eggs in one basket. Mr. Depping says regulators wanted the bank to shrink its small-business lending to about 25% of the total loan portfolio, down from about 90%.

There’s nothing quite like the arrogance of telling a successful business that it’s doing everything wrong and that it needs to change the cornerstone of it’s business model. The bank’s chairman is now planning on giving up the bank’s charter and selling the branches to other local banks.

This successful local business was killed by the too strict, cookie cutter, one-size fits all financial regulation coming out of Washington. Heckuva job guys.

For months, unions have told us that after their state-senate recall efforts in Wisconsin, lawmakers would learn not to scale back their collective-bargaining “rights.” The recalls would warn any state thinking about passing a law like Governor Walker’s to think again. Yet after Tuesday night’s recall elections, only one lesson is perfectly clear: It’s probably not a good idea to cheat on your wife.

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I was making exactly this point, while driving home last night.

For the Tea Party Republicans who make up a significant part of the House GOP caucus, Boehner's proposal is a significant retreat from "Cut, Cap and Balance." Those who support the Boehner proposal, which is formally known as the Budget Control Act, consider it a major compromise -- something they are backing only after being convinced that their first choice could never pass the Senate.

… While Obama preaches the virtues of compromise, his Democratic allies and surrogates are bashing Republicans for rejecting what the White House characterizes as earnest, good-faith efforts to find common ground. "I hope that Speaker Boehner and [Minority] Leader McConnell will reconsider their intransigence," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said a few days ago. "Their unwillingness to compromise is pushing us to the brink of a default." (At the same time, Reid has been issuing absolute, inflexible statements like, "I will not support any short-term agreement.")

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Temporary Duty by Ric Locke

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Personal Enthusiasm: I Shouldn’t Have Bothered

This is another book that I picked up because of a recommendation by Glenn Reynolds and his readers. Most of the recommendations I get that way are good. This book was the exception that proved the rule. Reading the reviews on Amazon, I wonder if I was reading the same book as everyone else.

The story revolves around two enlisted sailors: Todd and Peters. They are assigned to “temporary duty”, as advance crew for a Navy detachment that will be touring the local solar systems as the guest of a space faring alien race. The appeal of the story is that it takes place entirely from the perspective of people who are fairly low on the totem pole.

It’s a good premise. What went wrong? The first problem is that the book is long. If it were a printed book instead of an eBook, it would be well over 500 pages. I stopped reading 54% of the way through the book and not much had happened in those 200-300 pages.

Todd and Peters spent a lot of time on the spaceship learning the language, interacting with the crew, cleaning, talking, exploring, escorting other sailors, eating, sleeping. I was getting quite bored. More than half way into the book and I couldn’t identify an antagonist or a central challenge or any kind of real conflict.

Second, the characters all felt stereotypical and fairly homogeneous. The enlisted were decent. The officers and NCOs were mostly jerks who should have spent more time listening to Todd and Peters. The trader aliens were friendly but clueless about anything related in any way to technology. The technological aliens were standoff-ish but got friendlier when they saw that the humans knew how to perform routine maintenance and were eager to learn about the workings of the ship. And so on. Each character fit neatly into a mold and didn’t deviate too far from the outlines of that mold.

Finally, the Kindle edition had problems. Italics would often start in one word or phrase and then continue across multiple pages. I could fiddle with the book and eventually get the text to rest to non-italics but it kept happening. If the story had been more interesting, I might have persevered. But the combination of a dull story and technical glitches was more than I was willing to put up with.

Overall, I felt like this book could have desperately used an editor and a copy editor. The concept wasn’t bad but it pleaded and begged for someone to shorten it and tighten it up. It also screamed for some proof reading of the Kindle edition to make sure that everything looked good. It’s true that the brave new world of self-publishing doesn’t require the services of a publisher. On the other hand, some of those services are still valuable and worth paying for.

Halting State by Charlie Stross

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Personal Enthusiasm: It Was Okay

Charles Stross is one of the best SF writers currently in the field. Hia books are deeply inventive and he has a gift both for imagining potential futures and for bringing them to life. Glenn Reynolds recommended his new book, Rule 34. It sounded interesting but I wasn’t interested in paying new book prices to read it. I noticed that it was preceeded by Halting State. Since it was selling for quite a reasonable price, I decided to buy it.

I enjoyed this book. Stross envisions a new future where network connectivity and augmented reality are ubiquitous. Most people wear glasses that give them information about where they are (virtual maps overlaid on top of streets), who they’re seeing (names and brief bios floating alongside the people you’re looking at), or even information about nearby businesses. Gaming is big business, with massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) running continuously on cell phones, available for play anytime.

And then a bank is robbed. But it’s a bank located in a game. A bank that should be completely unhackable. And the company running the bank seems strangely unwilling to assist the police in their investigation. The police, meanwhile, are baffled by the entire situation and the gaming scene. It’s up to a forensic accountant and a recently fired programmer to figure out what’s going on.

The book was recent in second person perspective, for 3 or 4 characters. It was nearly first person perspective but instead of the characters narrating their own viewpoint, Stross narrated it for them. (For example, “You stepped out into the street and hailed a passing taxi.”) That was odd but eventually, mostly, faded into the background.

The science and technology in the story was top notch, as you’d expect from an author who used to be a programmer. The characters were real and believable and each had their own voice and perspective.

It was a very good book. So why didn’t I enjoy it more? I think it was that the book wasn’t quite where my interests lay. I really enjoyed the world that Stross created but I’m just not that into gaming. Since the entire story revolved around gaming, I found it hard to really get into the spirit of the thing. For someone who does really enjoy gaming, this is an absolutely fantastic book.

Amazon is running a Big Deal sale on Kindle books. It includes about 970 books and ends today.

Like most sales, there is quite a lot of dreck in there. But I waded through it all and I did manage to find a few good bargains.

• Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, $2.99. This has received rave reviews from almost every fantasy fan. At this price, how could I not grab a copy to read?
• The Unincorporated Man, $2.99. I read this book last year and loved it. It’s a fantastic look at what would happen if people could raise money by selling “shares” of their future income, instead of taking out a loan.
• Zoo City, $0.99. I read an interview with the author and am intrigued enough to spend a dollar on her book.
• Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge (Anthology), $0.99. An anthology of science fiction stories. What’s not to like for a dollar?
• Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, $3.99. I’ve seen this book referenced several times. At this price, I’ll give it a read.
• The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith, $2.99. Written by Christopher Hitchens’ brother, Peter. Hitch is notoriously opposed to Christianity. I’m curious about what brought his brother to the opposite conclusion.
• Stuff Christians Like, $2.99. The website is occasionally funny and, at $3, I thought the book might be too.
• The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment, $2.99. I own the hard cover edition of this and have never read it. I might have better luck reading the eBook version.
• The Pursuit of Holiness, $2.99. A classic book, by Jerry Bridges. I’ll pick it up cheap now in the hope that I’ll read it one day.

Not a bad haul for $21.00.

If I was going to sum up my political philosophy as succinctly as possible, I think this is how I’d do it.

Perhaps the difference that most fundamentally separates true liberals and libertarians from others is that, to one degree or another, true liberals and libertarians are, unlike non-liberals and non-libertarians, dutiful sons and daughters of the Scottish Enlightenment. And one of the great lessons of that remarkable intellectual movement is the refinement of the understanding that state and society are not the same thing. Society is not created by the state, and the state’s activities not only do not define those of society but often diminish society’s activities.

Professor Don Boudreaux says this in the course of pointing out that FDR did much to destroy the private market for unemployment insurance. Prior to governments providing “free” unemployment insurance, many religious organizations, charities, businesses, and private societies provided it. People helping each other, reaching out, lending a hand to a neighbor in need. All of that was blown away and destroyed once the federal and state governments started providing unemployment insurance.

I found out today that it is possible to buy supplemental unemployment insurance to augment what the government provides. That’s welcome news but it’s a far cry from the vibrant assistance provided by society prior to the government’s take over.

Government has not brought us closer together by providing services that the private sector used to provide. Instead, it has pushed us further apart and made us less reliant on each other. That’s the exact opposite of the brotherly love and caring that President Obama constantly claims to want.

If you want a close knit society of caring people that look out for each other—slash government spending and get government out of the business of replacing society with bureaucracy.

Because many people reacted with anger to the Casey Anthony verdict, lots of state legislators saw a chance to be a hero to parents everywhere. More than 30 states have pending legislation to implement “Caylee’s Law”—an attempt to make sure that the next Casey Anthony gets punished as harshly as everyone thinks the real Casey Anthony should have been punished.

"Caylee's Law," a proposed federal bill that would charge parents with a felony if they fail to report a missing child within 24 hours, or if they fail to report the death of a child within an hour.

Radley Balko points out the many reasons that such a law would be a stupendously bad idea, verging on being evil itself.

In an interview with CNN, Crowder concedes that she didn't consult with a single law enforcement official before coming up with her 24-hour and 1-hour limits. This raises some questions. How did she come up with those cutoffs? Did she consult with any grief counselors to see if there may be innocuous reasons why an innocent person who just witnessed a child's death might not immediately report it, such as shock, passing out, or some other sort of mental breakdown? Did she consult with a forensic pathologist to see if it's even possible to pin down the time of death with the sort of precision you'd need to make Caylee's Law enforceable? Have any of the lawmakers who have proposed or are planning to propose this law actually consulted with anyone with some knowledge of these issues?

What if a child dies while sleeping? When would you start the clock on the parent's one-hour window to report? From the time the parent discovers the child is dead, or from the time the child actually dies? If it's the former, can you really believe what a parent tells you if he knows a felony charge hinges on his answer? What if a parent or babysitter missed the deadline because she fell asleep at the time the child was playing outside and suffered a fatal accident? You could argue this is evidence of bad parenting or inattentive babysitting, but under those circumstances, do you really want to charge a grieving parent or heartbroken babysitter with a felony?

The portion of the bill that requires a parent to report a missing child within 24 hours is just as fraught with problems. When does that clock start? From the time the child actually gets abducted, gets lost, or is somehow killed, or at the time the parents noticed the child was missing? How do you pinpoint the time that they "noticed"? When teenager Rosie Larsen is abducted and murdered in the new AMC drama The Killing, it takes two days for her parents to notice she's missing. They thought she was spending the night at a friend's house, and she and her friends often rotated sleeping over at one another's homes on the weekends. The Killing is fiction, but this isn't an implausible scenario. Again, are we really so angry about the Casey Anthony verdict that we're prepared to charge grieving parents with a felony because it takes them longer than some arbitrary deadline to notice their child is missing?

The law and the attention it attracts could also cause problems of overcompliance. How many parents will notify the authorities with false reports within an hour or two, out of fear of becoming suspects? How many such calls and wasted police resources on false alarms will it take before police grow jaded and begin taking note of missing child reports, but don't bother investigating them until much later? How many legitimate abductions will then go uninvestigated during the critical first few hours because they were lost in the pile of false reports inspired by Caylee's Law?

It isn't difficult to come up with other scenarios where innocent people may get ensnared in Caylee's Law.

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How confident are you that Casey Anthony was guilty? Now, what if I told you that a key piece of prosecution evidence—that she searched for information about “chloroform” more than 80 times—was wrong?

Assertions by the prosecution that Casey Anthony conducted extensive computer searches on the word “chloroform” were based on inaccurate data, a software designer who testified at the trial said Monday.

The designer, John Bradley, said Ms. Anthony had visited what the prosecution said was a crucial Web site only once, not 84 times, as prosecutors had asserted. He came to that conclusion after redesigning his software, and immediately alerted prosecutors and the police about the mistake, he said.

The finding of 84 visits was used repeatedly during the trial to suggest that Ms. Anthony had planned to murder her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee, who was found dead in 2008. Ms. Anthony, who could have faced the death penalty, was acquitted of the killing on July 5.

The already weak circumstantial evidence for a “murder” verdict is now even weaker. I still think there’s plenty of evidence to convict Ms. Anthony of being a horrible parent. But that’s not the same thing as proving, beyond any reasonable doubt, that she acted with deliberate premeditation to commit murder. Losing this piece of evidence just makes those doubts all the more reasonable.

Gandolf’s words to Frodo, from the Fellowship of the Ring still ring hauntingly true.

Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends.

Kevin DeYoung posits an interesting question and a different way of thinking about Biblical “grey areas”.

I’ve learned over the years that the simplest way to judge gray areas in the Christian life like movies, television, and music is to ask one simple question: can I thank God for this? (We are to give thanks in all circumstances, right? )Not too long ago my wife and I went to the movie theater to watch one of the summer blockbusters. It was a fun PG-13 movie, and you’d probably say it didn’t really have any bad parts. But it was very sensual and suggestive in several places. I got done with the movie (yes, I watched the whole thing) and thought, “Can I really thank God for this?” Now, I’m not a total kill-joy. I like to laugh and enjoy life. I can thank God for the Chicago Bears, Hot N’ Readys, and Brian Regan. But I wonder if after most of our entertainment we could sincerely get down on our knees and say, “Thank you God for this good gift.” Something to think about.

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I did not realize this.

Like all other public officials, the Governor of Wisconsin is not eligible for recall until he or she has served at least one year in the current term of office. Recall petitions cannot be circulated until early November, 2011, and cannot be offered for filing until January 3, 2012.

The number of signatures required to trigger a recall election for Governor is 540,208, or one-quarter of the 2,160,832 votes cast for Governor in the November 2010 General Election.

Looks like recall season will continue through the rest of 2011. Oh, joy.

Another Poppy Seed-Based Child Abduction

For the second time in a year, Lawrence County Children and Youth Services has been accused in a federal lawsuit of removing a child from a mother’s custody after a positive test for opiates allegedly triggered by poppy seeds.

Eileen Ann Bower, a Lawrence County resident whose residence and age were not provided, gave birth to a son, Brandon, on July 13, 2009, according to a complaint filed late Friday. She was stunned, it said, when a blood test at Jameson Hospital came back positive for opiates.

Brandon was taken into foster care three days after his birth, it said, and only returned on Sept. 29. In the interim, Ms. Bower came to the conclusion that the test must have come back positive due to her ingestion, at her last meal before childbirth, of Salad Supreme dressing with poppy seeds . . .

As a repeatedly new parent, I have a hard time imagining a worse thing. This mother has had her right to due process of law violated rather blatantly. There was no evidence that chain of custody was preserved with her blood sample: do we know that the blood that was tested was actually hers? There was no evidence that the sample was collected appropriately: was it tainted somehow during the drawing process? There was no evidence presented that the traces in the blood were actually from opiates: could the traces have actually been from poppy seeds?

None of this evidence was presented, this mother was not convicted after receiving due process of law, and she wasn’t legally sentenced to losing custody of her child. No, the county agency took one look at one lab test and immediately assumed that they knew what was going on.

That’s wrong and it needs to stop. This is the second time that Pennsylvania county has done this. As Glenn Reynolds is apt to say: “Tar. Feathers.” That’s what will make this kind of abuse of power stop.

(Thanks to Radley Balko for the link.)

In the course of defending Robert Heinlein’s position on firearms from David Brin, Eric S. Raymond offers up a view on the staggering impact that RAH has had on the world we live in today.

(When time has given us perspective to write really good cultural histories of the 20th century, Heinlein is going to look implausibly gigantic. His achievements didn’t stop with co-inventing science fiction and all its consequences, framing post-1960s libertarianism, energizing the firearms-rights movement, or even merely inspiring me to become the kind of person who not only could write The Cathedral and the Bazaar but had to. No. Heinlein also invented much of zeitgeist of the 1960s counterculture through his novel Stranger In A Strange Land; it has been aptly noted that he was the only human being ever to become a culture hero both to the hippies of Woodstock and the U.S. Marine Corps. I am told that to this day most Marine noncoms carry a well-thumbed copy of Starship Troopers in their rucksacks.)

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I just realized that I really have a 6 star rating system, not a 5 star system like I’d always assumed. I realized that after seeing, and thinking about, Adam Volle’s review scale. This is his scale:

• 5 Stars: Breaks new ground in some fashion.
• 4 Stars: The people involved know what they're doing and have done it. A success.
• 3 Stars: Flawed, but still enjoyable.
• 2 Stars: A misfire. Major flaws preclude enjoying the work as a whole.
• 1 Star: Egregiously misguided, even evil. Fire someone.

I initially told Adam that his “4 stars” is roughly equivalent to my idea of what “3 stars” should be. When he told me that I was a tough audience, it caused me to think more about where I was going with my rating system.

I consider 3 stars to be my default rating. That is, I expect every book / movie to earn at least a 3 star rating. I reserve 4 stars for things that are unusually good and 5 stars for entertainment that is truly defining.

The more I thought about, there really isn’t anything I want to remove from Adam’s rating system. I just think my system needs 6 stars instead of just 5. Or, put another way, I’d like to give things 0 stars instead of always giving them at least 1 star.

Here’s how I’d put my own rating system:

• 5 Stars: Defines an entire class of entertainment.
• 4 Stars: Breaks new ground in some fashion.
• 3 Stars: The people involved know what they're doing and have done it. A success.
• 2 Stars: Flawed, but still enjoyable.
• 1 Stars: A misfire. Major flaws preclude enjoying the work as a whole.
• 0 Stars: Egregiously misguided, even evil. Fire someone.

Essentially then, my rating systems splits the 5 star category into two sections: something new in an established genre versus creating an entirely new genre. For instance, Lord of the Rings would definitely be a 5 star work. Almost by definition though, few things are going to earn 5 stars.

I’m not sure that this is the last word in my rating system though. For instance, what do I do with books or movies that I personally don’t enjoy all that much but that I recognize as having true excellence? In all fairness, they should probably earn 3 or 4 stars but I don’t like giving a high rating to something that I didn’t personally enjoy and might not always recommend. I’m considering adding an enthusiasm ranking to each review: Enthusiastic, Meh (Neutral), and Don’t Bother (negative).

What do you think? Am I over thinking things here?

Keith Hennessey explains what the McConnell debt limit proposal is, how it works, and what its political motivations are.

I still support “Cut, Cap, and Balance” as the best long-term plan. While I’d love to see it enacted, I don’t see it happening with this Senate and this President. I’d initially been disposed to strongly dislike the McConnell plan. I actually changed my mind after reading his explanation. I now, reluctantly, support it as the best plan that we’re likely to get past this President and this Congress.

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Keith Hennessey explains the “Cut, Cap, & Balance Act”.

The key to understanding this bill is that it focuses on government spending, rather than on taxes or deficits. The bill would achieve significant deficit reduction through cutting and limiting spending, and all of its mechanisms use spending rather than deficit targets.

Surprise, surprise: the bill consists of three parts.

1. Cut – The bill provides specific numbers to limit both discretionary and mandatory spending for FY12. These numbers would drive further Congressional action this year or else force a Presidential sequester. (I explain a sequester below.) The intent of this section is to force Congress and the President to cut spending immediately.
2. Cap – The bill would establish a new enforceable limit on total federal spending as a share of the economy. The new caps are designed to phase federal spending down to just below 20% of GDP by FY17 and then hold it there through the end of a 10-year budget window in FY21. Put more simply, this is a new enforceable aggregate spending cap.
3. Balance – The bill would increase the debt limit by $2.4 trillion after the House and Senate have passed a Balanced Budget Amendment (of a certain type).

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Reason columnist and Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy explains the truth behind some of the myths in the current debt ceiling debate.

1. If a deal is not reached by August 2, the U.S. will default on its debt.
2. If the debt ceiling isn’t raised the government won't be able to pay Social Security benefits.
3. The Treasury cannot use the Social Security Trust Fund to delay a default past August 2.

You can either read her explanations or watch her explanation on video.

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Zygi Wilf, Minnesota governor Mark Dayton discuss new Minnesota Vikings stadium - ESPN

When Gov. Mark Dayton and state lawmakers announced that the outlines of a new budget deal were in place, the Minnesota Vikings were hoping that the door was finally open to discuss their plan for a new $1 billion stadium in the Twin Cities suburbs.

It may not be quite that simple.

Vikings owner Zygi Wilf spoke with Dayton on Friday, telling him in a phone conversation that the team wants a stadium bill to be considered in a special legislative session expected to begin next week, according to Vikings vice president for stadium affairs Lester Bagley.

"He made the case that now is the time," Bagley said. "We've done everything that has been asked of us. It's time to do it. We're down to months left on our lease and every day that goes by, the cost of the project goes up."

… Arden Hills is about 10 miles north of the Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis. The new facility would be located at the site of a former Army ammunition plant with plans to open in spring 2015.

Wilf and the Vikings have pledged more than $400 million to the project, which also calls for a half-cent sales tax in Ramsey County that would contribute another $350 million and $300 million in state money.

This is just disgusting. Depending on where you Google, Zygi Wilf is worth somewhere around $300 million and the Vikings franchise itself is worth around $700 million. If he wants a new stadium, he has several options:

1. invest more of his own fortune and the team’s worth into the new facility
2. ask the team’s fans to invest into the facility in exchange for benefits (priority access to available tickets? special access to memorabilia?)
3. Get banks or investors to loan or invest the needed funds

The Vikings are a cash generating franchise. If a new stadium is a good investment, Wilf shouldn’t have any problems obtaining the funding he needs. If a new stadium isn’t a good investment, Wilf shouldn’t be demanding that the Minnesota taxpayers fund his boondoggle.

It’s disgusting the way that he’s demanding that a state that’s struggled to close a $5 billion budget hole turn around and give $300 million in state money and $350 million in county money to his privately owned business. I hope the state legislature smacks him down and shuts the door on his demands.