This evening couldn’t have been any better.  We took a short drive to Pistazzios Pizza, then over to the bookstore for a new Car magazine.  We made our way back home, then spent the rest of the evening down on Fun Street.  Our street music tonight was by Goga, a guy K really likes.  (She likes to watch him dance to some of the hot Latin tunes he does.)  A cool front came through late this afternoon and tonight it’s probably 80 degrees…incredibly mild for a July in Texas.  We were back home by 11 after listening to Goga sing Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing”.  

And, I saw one of my most favorite cars tonight, too:

A Maserati Quattroporte.  Doesn’t that sound sexy in Italian?…Quattroporte.  It’s kind of a let-down to learn it only means “four-door”.  

Y’all have a nice evening….

S

In an email from K:

Ralph and Edna were both patients at a mental hospital.  One day while they were walking past the hospital swimming pool, Ralph suddenly jumped into the deep end.  He sank to the bottom of the pool and stayed there.

Edna promptly jumped in to save him.  She swam to the bottom, pulled him out, and gave him CPR.  When the Head Nurse became aware of Edna’s heroic act she immediately ordered her to be discharged from the hospital, as she was now considered to be mentally stable.

When she went to tell Edna the news she said, “Edna, I have some good news and some bad news.  The good news is you’re being discharged, since you were able to rationally respond to a crisis by jumping in and saving the life of the person you love.  I have concluded that your act displays sound mind and logic.

The bad news is, Ralph hung himself in the bathroom with his bathrobe belt right after you saved him.  I’m so sorry, but he’s dead.

Edna replied, “He didn’t hang himself, I put him there to dry.  How soon can I go home?”

S

A century ago France was the pre-eminent Continental power, and the Royal Navy ruled the world’s oceans.  But the first half of the 20th century was not kind to Europe.  Two world wars robbed them of their youth and left their countries in ruin, and a world-wide depression robbed them of their wealth.  At the conclusion of WWII their people told their leaders, “We’re exhausted.  We can’t stand by ourselves.  We want you to help us.”  This is where the roots of (western) European socialism really took hold.  Generous retirement plans, job security, unemployment benefits, child care, and universal health coverage to one degree or another became widespread from Scandinavia to the heal of Italy.

How could they afford all this?  They borrowed a little and looked to America for some rebuilding aid, but basically they did two big things:  they dramatically raised taxes and they forfeited their military power.  ”Everyman” benefited from the new social safety net, so they didn’t quibble (?) over paying higher taxes.  (In the US one class pays taxes, and another class gets the benefits, a recipe which breeds much resentment.)  And they were much too busy just digging for turnips to worry about maintaining worldwide empires.  ”Spheres of influence” were realistically out of reach.  

Meanwhile America emerged from WWII by far the strongest economic and military power, and readily took over leadership of the non-communist world.  We established American “spheres of influence”.  That’s why to this day the world does business in dollars, and not in pounds sterling or francs, or more recently euros.  (I can just see many of you squirming, conjuring up images of the arrogant world power telling others how they should be behaving, rigging things to our benefit.  Like it or not, that’s the way the world works, and has worked for centuries.  Today the emerging power China is doing exactly the same thing.)

One source I checked showed national defense expenditures something like this:  USA, $713B; France, $67B; UK, $64B; Japan, $48B; Germany, $45B, etc.  They spend their money on social progarms, and expect the US to provide for their ultimate military security.  And we do.  Look to the current US-built missile defense shield now being set up to protect Europe from….?….as proof.

Now our people are telling our leaders, “We’re exhausted.  We can’t stand by ourselves. We want you to help us.” Our social safety net is costing us much more than we can currently afford, and now health care “reform” is coming.   (It’s not a matter of if it’s coming, but to what degree is it coming?)  The world is tiring of us swiping our Visa card through their terminals.  There is talk now of downgrading our national credit rating, and using some other currency as the world’s standard.  How are we going to pay for this enhanced social welfare?

I see that we have essentially three options:

1.  Raise taxes…a lot!  (Remember the class resentment that already exists?)

2.  Scale back our social safety net expectations.  (Not gonna happen.  That train has already left the station.)

or, 3.  Cut our defense budget by hundreds of billions of dollars, allowing other emerging nations (mainly China) to expand their spheres of influence at our expense.  Understand, over time, this will make us a second-tier world player, just like it did the UK and France in the 20th century.  Our standard of living will likely begin a long, slow decline, too.

So what are you willing to give up?  Your money, your expectations, or your standard of living?

Your turn.   Fire away.

S