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Because once you vote, you are seen by present and future politicians as someone whose vote can be swayed by policies that you like.

For instance, people over the retirement age vote in huge numbers, while younger people vote in lesser numbers. This leads politicians to fall all over themselves to give younger peoples’ money to older people. If turnout among younger people skyrocketed, regardless of who they voted for, politicians might decide that it might be worthwhile to oppose giving younger peoples’ money to older people to get a piece of that action and win despite the opposition of the older people. They might also try repealing the current selective alcohol prohibition targeted at younger voters, in an effort to appeal to them.

This isn’t to say that people should vote randomly or without serious reflection. And there’s always the danger that the politicians will switch to giving older peoples’ money to younger people instead. But if the politicians abandon the idea that they can screw you over to satisfy their constituents that actually vote, this is all to the good. If you have good ideas that you want to see enacted, or bad ideas that you want to see repealed, voting for the “lesser of two evils”, while frustrating, at least puts you on their radar screen and encourages aspiring new politicians to look for ways to appeal to you. Staying home just leads them to think that you don’t care and won’t resist when your money is taken and used for the benefit of voters.

Answering telephone polls might also be a good idea.

And there’s plenty more where that came from.

This year, Social Security and Medicare are paying out more to their beneficiaries than they are collecting from FICA. The long-predicted shortfall has begun. It’s not off in some hazy future anymore, it’s starting right now.

Present value figures for the total shortfall over time are estimated between $40 trillion (yes, that’s “trillion” with a “T”) and $72 trillion. That’s 40-72 trillion over and above what what the law is already set to take from productive workers over the next few decades that’s been promised to current and future retirees.

Remember how Bush’s deficits were going to destroy the economy, according to some people? Better hope to God they’re wrong, because that’s chicken feed compared to this, although the extra spending it represents doesn’t exactly help matters.

(And Bush’s drug benefit program, which is characterized as “inadequate” by our friends on the left, contributes to the problem to the tune of $8 trillion to $12 trillion)

It would be nice if those “Rock the Vote” guys would point to these figures, especially the ones that mention a 32 percent FICA rate (over and above income taxes, which will have to be raised at some point to cover present non-Social Security and non-Medicare spending), and explain that their elders can take this kind of money from the younger generations because they vote in such huge numbers, and because younger people don’t. That should boost turnout among the intended victims more than lame attempts to use celebrities and rocks stars to paint voting as “cool”, whatever that means.

(Thanks to 101-280 for that second link, and Catallarchy.net for the first).

It is news to no one that George W. Bush has been a less than responsible steward of the people’s money. From the left and the right have come criticisms of the deficits that have been run up during his watch, some of it justified.

Our friends on the left, after talking sense for a while, then recoil in horror at what they’ve done and go back to talking out of their hats. They tell us that the solution is to replace George Bush with John Kerry, who will raise taxes and close the deficit, thus addressing our objections and solving our problems.

This would be amusing if not for the fact that some so-called “fiscal conservatives” have actually considered doing just that, rather than laughing out loud, which is the reaction this “solution” deserves.

Over the long-term, the total cost of government is overwhelmingly driven by one variable: spending. The national debt has interest, of course, but the effects of this are mostly discounted away by the simple fact that the debt and the interest will be paid with future dollars, which are worth less than today’s dollars. What it all boils down to is, higher spending means higher total taxes over the long term to pay for it, lower spending means lower total taxes over the long term to pay for it, and the current tax rate is not that much of a factor over the long haul. Taxes not collected today will have to be paid tomorrow, of course, but money not taxed today turns into more wealth tomorrow (assuming the spending isn’t being spent on stopping people from creating wealth!), making those extra future taxes easier to pay.

(This assumes, of course, that the perceived risk of loaning money to the government, which drives the part of the interest rate that is not discounted away, remains exceedingly low, as it has ever since Alexander Hamilton ran the Treasury Department. So deficits do matter, if they get so high that they spook potential bondholders and drive up real interest rates.)

So let’s look at spending. Every time George W. Bush proposed or allowed some outrageous piece of spending, the reaction from the left side of Congress, and usually from the Kerry campaign, was that this spending was hopelessly inadequate. We can easily infer from this that the expected spending level favored by Bush is less than the expected spending level favored by Kerry; thus, total long-term taxes needed to fund a Bush government is likely to be less than the total long-term taxes needed to fund a Kerry government.

(But what about gridlock? A contention between a Congress that wants more spending and a President that wants a lot more spending isn’t going to be resolved in our favor. The compromise position will be higher spending than what Congress would pass in the presence of a President that merely wants too much spending rather than outrageously too much spending. Or put another way, if a Republican had been in the White House in 1995, what do you think would have happened to the Congressional spending plan that year? I figure it would have gotten passed nearly unchanged and signed without a government shutdown.)

The United States of America went to war against a certain oil-rich state. That state had already declared itself an enemy of the United States, oppressed its own people, and lent support to a regional movement that did threaten the United States and had already attacked American territory. This state was not in and of itself much of a threat, but knocking it over did put the United States in a better strategic position to deal with the real, urgent threat facing it.

Fortunately this oil rich state was conquered with relative ease. Unfortunately, the aftermath didn’t go so well.

Not long after the occupation started, riots broke out. In the capitol and out in the boonies, those who favored the old order responded with violence against the occupiers, and against those who supported the occupiers. Shadowy terrorist groups started operating, causing mayhem wherever they could, and the American occupiers were powerless to stop them.

A new government was instituted, one that would give rights to the formerly oppressed people. A new constitution was written that would guarantee those rights. This new government came under attack almost immediately.

Sounds like the outcome of a real screwup, the kind of thing that would bring lasting infamy upon the President foolish or vicious enough to embark upon this insane course, at least if you listened to the Democrats during the war and the occupation.

But it gets worse.

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The age of the Earth is approximately five billion years. That’s an awfully long time. I see no evidence that the evolution of sentient creatures on this planet took place faster here than it possibly could anywhere else. We get more cosmic radiation than some other places, and much less than others. The course of biological evolution was drastically altered several times by catastrophic impacts with extraterrestrial bodies; I don’t see any reason to believe that these impacts were timed to minimize the time required to evolve sentient life.

Thus, if this galaxy were destined to develop one other sentient race in its entire history, I’d give at least even odds of it having occured already. If it were to develop many other sentient races over the course of its entire history, odds approach certainty that at least one of them evolved a long time ago.

“Long time” as in hundreds of millions or billions of years ago.

A race that evolved to spacefaring stage as recently as 100 million years ago anywhere in our galaxy would have to be spreading outward at less than 1/943 lightspeed; any faster, and they’d have settled our solar system by now. One hundred million years of technological advancement seems unlikely to end in drives that can only do a small fraction of lightspeed. Even at 1% of lightspeed, that other spacefaring race would have had to evolve and acquire spaceflight less than 10 million years ago, the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things.

So where is everybody? Why was this planet empty when we evolved? The most plausible (and most pessimistic) explanation I can think of is that the problem of maintaining a good government and a free society long enough to develop civilian spaceflight doesn’t have a workable solution.

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