Wednesday Thoughts

Yep, this election is over. And, if this is the Democratic platform for the next two years, we're screwed...

Military-"Force an immediate drawdown of troops in Iraq" pretty much is a code word for "abandon the Iraqis". And doing oversight during a war would be like dragging the people that worked on Enigma and Magic in front of the cameras during World War II...

Intellegence-More "oversight" makes it sound like the Church Committee all over again... Which means that our intellegence services will most likely be even more nerfed.

Minimum Wage-Great, if this goes up, you've just eliminated everybody that an employer thinks costs less than $7.25/hour for labor, legally. So, either you have a lot of people being hired under the table (without any protections), or fewer people being hired. And, this means that the cost of everything goes up.

Worse yet? If it goes up to this, my salary will be only (barely) more than twice minimum wage.

Taxes-You want people to pay more taxes? You want more people to pay taxes? Make it easy to handle the paperwork, make it fair, and make it simple.

Energy and Enviroment-I see a lot of things that make great soundbites, but not good policy. Biodiesel is interesting but not quite ready for prime time yet. Ethanol is pretty much a payoff to big agribuisness. Solar and other "alternate energy" is restricted by time, location, and/or sheer power. If they had mentioned nuclear power, I might have been impressed. Maybe. And, industrial carbon dioxide emissions caps are pretty much a subsidy to overseas production companies (since they won't have to enforce clean-air laws...), add to that the fact that the enviromentalists contradict each other on what's going on with the enviroment every twenty years or so...

It'll be a manic and crazy next two years. Fun to watch, if a bit crazy.