My Opinions on Voting

I usually don't blog politics, but since it comes up with my opinions on Fedora lack of voters and some other items... I figured I should just go ahead and do it. Today I received a couple of emails from relatives and such trying to explain how bad the US budget is, and why it should be explained easier as that of a family. One set went to blame the politicians, another set blamed the special interests (tax and spend liberals, cut and spend conservatives). In the end, they both neglected to point out who the real culprits are.. the absentee landlord of the United States, the voter.

Look at the following revenue amounts.

1. Tax Revenue:    $2,170,000,000,000
2. Fed Budget:     $3,820,000,000,000
3. New Debt:       $1,650,000,000,000
4. National Debt: $14,271,000,000,000 

Now some people will cut off the zeros and then compare it to a family budget... or some will go on long screeds blaming the politicians or special interest groups. That misses the important part of democracy. In the end, the politicians are a proxy. They may be influenced by "monied" interests but the special interest they are mostly interested in is the voters who every 2-6 years say whether or not they will get to serve again.

To make this fair, let us change out the regular blamees to the people who actually are supposed to be responsible whether they like it or not.

1. Amount majority of US Voters Want to be taxed.
2. Amount majority of US Voters Want to spend.
3. Amount they are happy to borrow.
4. Amount the taxpayers has to pay back plus a lot of interest we didn't calculate.

Notice, I don't put in voters in the bottom. People who don't vote and most non-citizens in this country pay taxes so they get stuck with the bill whether or not they vote.


If you are outraged about the amount spent versus the amount taxed.. you need to do the following:

1. Register to Vote.
2. Research the candidates who will either up the amount taxed, lower the amount spent, or a combination of the two.
3. When the election occurs, vote for the candidate that fits your needs best. Remember always that there is no perfect candidate, you will have to make do with what you can get.
4. Watch whoever gets elected and ask why they voted for this or that. Keep them on their toes. People who know that they are watched are psychologically more likely to be honest and dependable. They are also more likely to follow the social norms of the people watching them. Most politicians get in trouble because the only people watching them are other politicians.
5. If you don't like how things occurred, vote for someone else the next time.
6. Talk to your neighbours and find out why they don't vote. Get them to register and vote too. They don't have to vote for the person you voted for, but they need to watch the elected just the same as you.
7. Keep at it. It took 20+ years to dig this whole, it will take 20+ years to dig out of it.

If you aren't registering to vote, you have lost any right to be taken seriously.

You can sit in a park, you can show up at the IRS office with bags of tea at the IRS office, or you can email me pithy statements about how horrible everyone else is, but you have given up your most important voice.. and the only one I will give credence to, the vote.

[PS Take the above as my opinion and my default answer when you email, blog, facepoke, etc about the dire straights of a nation. In my limited and very biased view, the above can be used for most nations.. the amount that people will happily borrow because they want it and don't want to save for it will always be larger than it should be. I don't have much sympathy for a bond market that doesn't take that into account in the interest rates and fees they initially charge.]

Monday 2011-11-21

Most of the weekend turned into a blur of things I can't remember exactly what I was doing. I thought I was going to read some comic collections of Schlock Mercenary and Sheldon the Kid. Instead they were quickly taken by my son to his room where giggles and saying of gag-lines kept echoing out of. I thought he was done with them yesterday as they had reappeared on the coffee table, but they quickly went back as "I wanted to read them again." Since I have not seen our Calvin and Hobbes in years.. I expect I will have to order another set. [On the other hand, for all the other comic collections we have that don't get boggarted like that.. it is a fine complement.]

Oh look this was in my drafts for some reason.. getting published.

Thank you Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs passed away today and I want to thank him for one important things he did. While I enjoyed the NeXT cube in my office in the 1990's and playing with the Lisa in the 1980's.. the most important thing doesn't deal Apple or Next. He kept Pixar going when most other CEO's and investors would have canned the company. That foresight brought my family many movies that have made us laugh, cry and think over the years.


Anyway thanks.

Updating to rawhide (part trois)

The title turns out to be an unintentional pun. I spent the weekend at my first comic convention ever, the Albuquerque Comic Expo, and met Marina Sirtis who played Deana Troi on Star Trek: The Next Generation. But I digress.

After spending a lot of Friday and some of Monday trying to figure out how to capture the boot problem with kernel-3.0, I finally got lucky and saw that the watchdog occurred right as systemd mentioned that smartd was starting. Aha Data (who wasn't at the comic expo). Turning off smartd with a systemctl --disable smartd.service was able to allow for a boot to occur. Now I need to figure out how to capture the oops correctly and we should be go for opening a bugzilla report.

The other issues dealing with gdm etc are still being worked on by Adam Williamson's blog so I will wait to move out of runlevel 3 to runlevel 5. [Then again I am wondering.. why did I really ever stop using startx?]

[On a side note, the comic expo was fun. I got to meet my favourite Ghostbuster, Ernie Hudson, and geeked out speechless at meeting Jill Thompson (of various Endless comics and Scary Godmother). I also got to buy a comic I had been looking for 36 years... Thanks to all the people who were there. ]

Silly Idea: Balanced Budget Tax

When I was in my teens and twenties, I was a Reagan Republican. I watched Family Ties and never understood that Alex P Keaton of Family Ties was meant to be a joke. I looked at certain things and said "Its simple and thus makes sense." and with the blinders of youth went my way. One of those things was that if you lowered taxes continuously eventually you would starve the Government beast and have a smaller government. Well 30 years later, we have found that when you untie spending from taxes.. "We the People" will just treat it like a Credit Card and spend spend spend because we are sure that we will somehow be richer in 2 weeks and be able to pay it all off.

I could blame Congress for this, but well Congress is just people that "We the People" have the responsibility of voting into and out of office and keeping track of what they do. And basically as long as they gave us stuff and billed us later we have been over-all happy with them. So anyway, as an experiment in a great line of experiments that the American democracy has had, I would say that "Starving the Beast" has been a flop. So its time to come up with something radical from the other side of the coin. If "we" will spend like crazy when Taxes are down.. then lets raise see about the other route. Thus a call for the Balanced Budget Tax:

All taxes are raised per year to make sure that the United States Budget is balanced, and any outstanding debt will paid off in no more than 20 years. Congress may not put off costs to future years but make sure that any program is paid for with current funds. (Basically treat the current debt as a traditional fixed rate mortgage that we will pay off in 20 years.)


I have the feeling that this might have a stronger incentive to get people to understand what is being spent and what for. If a super majority of people want more government programs it is paid for now versus future generations.

Yes this idea is too simple and would fall over badly in the real world... however this seems to be the year of silly idea.