A Newly Discovered Blog; Guns; and Butter

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New Blog (to me, at least)

Thanks to my "comments" function below I become acquainted with new blogs all the time. The latest is Molten Thought, added to my "Interesting Blogs" blogroll below. Well-selected topics, thoughtfully analyzed. Worth a visit from your eyeballs!

Guns

This morning NBC's "Today" show ran video today of Roy Hallums, an American being held hostage in Iraq. Mr. Hallums had a gun to his head and was mouthing anti-American statements. Do any of you ask yourselves, "Isn't NBC doing exactly what the murdering terrorists want them to do? Isn't NBC simply airing terrorist propaganda? Why?" I do.

UPDATE: Cheat Seeking Missiles reports a ghastly act of bad taste and insensitivity by a newspaper covering the Hallums story.

Butter

A commenter below asks me to comment on this L.A. Times article, entitled "$1.3 Trillion in Deficits Forecast Over Decade; Cumulative total is 60% more than the estimates of just four months ago." The lede:

The budget deficit is becoming a knottier problem in the short term and will be a potentially catastrophic one in the future, the Congressional Budget Office reported today.

I am not a budget wonk, but I can offer the following:

1. I am not happy about huge budget deficits. Very few conservatives are.
2. Nevertheless, we have heard this before. Ronald Reagan cut taxes and increased military spending to unprecedented levels. He was supposedly going to spend the country into oblivion. Democrats, the fathers and grandfathers of deficit spending, cried huge crocodile tears. (One wonders whether they would have been so appalled if the deficit spending had been for social entitlement programs.) The country then proceeded to have seven years of unprecedented growth, attributed to Reagan's tax cuts. Won't Bush's tax cuts have the same effect? If not, why not?
   
3. There's a war on that we simply must win. That costs lots of money. How well do you think the economy would react if islamofascists exploded a small nuclear bomb in New York City?
4. The Times article helpfully notes:

The near-term deficits pale beside the CBO's admittedly rough projections for 2030, when all the baby boom generation will have reached eligibility for Social Security and Medicare.

If they keep growing at current rates, those two programs plus Medicaid for the poor will be nearly as large a share of the national economy as the entire budget is now, the CBO said.

Hmm. Does that factoid perhaps prove too much? Maybe the Times is unwittingly making the argument for reform in those two programs so that we do not get to that point.

What do you all think? Comment away!