Politics: I'm Going Where There's No Depression

You'll forgive me if I'm a little depressed today. I had been entertaining blissful ideas that President Bush wasn't going to get what he wanted, just once. Of course, the lay people may think that the tax cut got cut in half. However, as this surprisingly strong Washington Post editorial explains, the real bottom line is much more -- along the lines of $660 million. The Post takes Ohio Senator George Voinovich (and former person with a spine) to task about how he took a stand before:

Mr. Voinovich argued that he had kept his word and limited the cost of the tax bill to $350 billion through 2013. But that number can't be taken seriously. It rests on a grab bag of flimsy accounting tricks designed to mask the real cost of the cut while wedging in some version of the dividend tax cut so avidly sought by the administration. The "compromise" concocted by Don Nickles (R-Okla.) makes the dividend cut look less expensive by phasing the cut in (only 50 percent of dividends will be tax-free this year), having the full exclusion take effect for three years, and then -- supposedly -- making it disappear in 2007. This cuts the supposed price tag to $124 billion, but if that artificial sunset were removed, the dividend cut would cost $380 billion through 2013 -- and the real price of the tax package would be $660 billion. Mr. Voinovich's colleague Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) had it right when she refused to go along with this "gimmick."

Yeah. I know, depressing.

I thought maybe I'd perk up after I read about the next thing the Senate did, which was pass a huge AIDS bill for Africa and the Caribbean. Unfortunately, I got to the part where conservatives inserted an amendment requiring 1/3 of all the money -- we're talking about a $15 billion bill here, so about 5 billion taxpayer dollars -- go to abstinence only education in Africa.

Now I think we all know that abstinence-only education has been a resounding failure in the United States, but continues to thrive because we live in such a morally reversed nation that conservatives consider it a victory when kids don't know how to protect themselves against disease and teenage pregnancy. That this huge bill is going to spend billions of dollars exhorting Africans to not have sex is just insane. Why not just set up huge television screens with images of white people asking them not to die--it would be equally effective.

I know, I know, I'm getting worked up. Alright, more later.