According to a Wall Street Journal Poll, Democrats would vote for Charlie Sheen for President over Sarah Palin 44% to 24%.
Republicans would vote for Charle Sheen over President Barack Obama 37% to 28%.
Clearly, we as a political nation have a problem.
I also have a Charlie Sheen problem. Well, I’ve Sheen enough. No more posts on the guy.
The new Congress swept to power promising to cut $100 billion from this year’s budget.
Of course, since this year’s budget was already half done by the time they showed up, they reduced that estimate to $61 billion
After debate on the floor of Congress, the number was reduced to $39 billion.
Now, the Congressional budget office claims that this years savings is significantly less. More like $0.35 billion. That’s right, just 1% of what was claimed.
Meanwhile the deficit for the year is over $1,200 billion. We saved 0.025%. Hurrah!
I wish the IRS would let me pay a similar percentage of my tax bill.
The Friday budget decision in DC led to a 1% change in the total budget. Hurrah! Now, let me bring the bad news. The overall debt is still huge. Even Paul Ryan’s interesting $6 trillion in budget cuts over 10 years leaves $400 billion in yearly deficits for as far as the eye can see.
So let me try to help you understand why Friday’s budget compromise and even Paul Ryan’s more serious proposal still leave us in a bad place. Let’s visualize the size of the US debt. Try this:
The US debt ($20T by the end of 2020) EQUALS
Yep, not just one of those things. ALL of them.
Of course, if you don’t want to take all the money out of your pocket and bank plus sell the 500 largest companies in the US just to pay our debts, there is an alternative. You can just sell every home in the US to our debt holders:
The US debt ($20T by the end of 2020) EQUALS the value of all US Housing ($20 trillion)
With the current debt at $14 trillion, even if we immediately cut every discretionary program while cutting back social security and medicare/medicaid by 1/3rd, we’d still have to sell most of our stuff to pay things off.
We should all feel a little bit like country singer Willie Nelson:
In 1990, the IRS sent Willie Nelson a bill for $16.7 million dollars in back taxes. Faced with this rather large debt, Willie decided to try and pay the IRS back by releasing a double album entitled The IRS Tapes: Who’ll Buy My Memories?
The IRS, ever helpful, sped up the process by selling nearly everything he owned. (courtesy CNN)
I was doing some research for my upcoming book, using my tried and true “number of Google results as popularity” method, and I found some interesting results.
Who has more tongues wagging (well, fingers wagging) on the internet? Charlie Sheen and Lady Gaga or President Obama?
Obama has about 366 million Google results. Charlie Sheen and Lady Gaga have about 224 million and 242 million, respectively. Smackdown by the tag team of Sheen and Gaga.
And since I mentioned Charlie Sheen, he’s easily outdistancing fellow crazy people Hugo Chavez (who recently claimed the lack of life on Mars was due to capitalism) and Khadaffi/Gaddafi/Qaddafi combined (at about 40 million).
Justin Bieber is just trailing Charlie Sheen (185 million) but completely buries media darling Sarah Palin (38 million) and the always quotable Vice President, Joe Biden (16 million).
This is important for my friends inside the beltway in Washington, DC. In the city they almost affectionately call “Hollywood for ugly people”, where the stakes are far higher than at the Academy Awards (73 million Google hits), they miss one important point: most of the voters aren’t nearly as tuned in as beltway folk are. The details are lost, the vox populi is elsewhere.
Those populi aren’t really even focused on massive worldwide topics like Egypt (445 million) or Iraq (347 million). Or even America (1,410 million Google results).
Your very important political product, beltway friends, is losing eyeballs, clicks, and mindshare to one of the largest Google search results I could find: Facebook (8,810 million results).
This is a great idea to stimulate new business creation (including businesses like microfinance that both make money and solve a social problem). I don’t say “great idea” in response to legislative efforts very often.
It’s unlikely to pass, so if you have some political contacts, some pull, or just like writing emails and letters to senators and newspapers, now would be a great time.
Sen. Bill 256, known as “The American Opportunity Act,” will provide a 25% federal income tax credit for investing in qualified small businesses, including companies in the advanced manufacturing, aerospace, biotechnology, clean energy and transportation sectors. Qualified small businesses can receive up to $2 million per year in tax credit-eligible cash equity investment, of which no more than $1 million can come from a single investor. The funding is estimated to stimulate $2 billion per year of new capital formation.
More info here.
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