I welcome Mr. Obama’s invitation to have a serious conversation about federal fiscal policy.  And like Wesley at In My Copious Free Time, I propose that we begin that serious conversation with the President abandoning the serial mendacity he’s heretofore exhibited on the topic.

If you’re going to describe something as a “torture memo,” it had better be describing sawing somebody in half, not angsting and dithering over the finer points of legal propriety vis-a-vis subjecting bad guys to hardships endured as a matter of course by American servicemen in SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training.  As such, I am not only not repelled by the contents of the torture memos; I’m not even particularly troubled by them.

Frankly, I would prefer a CIA that is sawing bad guys in half, if it helps provide useful intelligence (and former AG Mukasey and former CIA director Hayden have a few words to say about that — we’re talking about extracting information that’s then correlated and verified, not used in isolation like a confession might be).  Grabbing a bad guy by the lapels?  Locking him in a small room?  Depriving him of sleep?  Subjecting him to something akin to a carnival dunk-tank?  Sorry; none of it even tickles my Outrage-O-Meter.  What does tickle my Outrage-O-Meter is the terribly phony indignation from the political left over all this, along with the sense that we as a nation have gone horribly, horribly wrong to farm out supervision of a war against medieval death-cultists to a legal profession utterly bereft of institutional competence in the area of national security.

One of the great things about being in government is that when you’re mapping out a taxpayer-funded program, you never need to concern yourself with piddling things like economic viability.  Thus we have the spectre of President Obama unveiling a $13 billion high-speed rail proposal despite the fact that the existing government train service, Amtrak, is an unprofitable fiscal rathole into which the government is currently stuffing about $1.3 billion annually.

As Bruce McQuain points out, this is not a sound business plan which constitutes a wise investment of taxpayer dollars.  Rather, it’s a social engineering plan that imagines the principal obstacle to widespread embrace of passenger rail transporation in the United States (and the realization of public benefits that will allegedly flow from that embrace) is a simple lack of supply.  If this weren’t a faith-based initiative we’d already have private-sector entrepreneurs trying to make a buck at it.  And as invarably happens when communitarian good intentions hull on the reefs of market reality — when the rail system fails to attract sufficient passengers to cover its operating costs, and when the promised public benefits fail to materialize — the response will be that clearly we haven’t spend lavishly enough, and must throw yet more money at the (totally predictable) “problem.”  At no point will an actual grown-up stop and say, “Maybe businesspeople, who would actually be risking their own capital to invest in this sort of thing, know something that we in government don’t.”

Tax Day invariably reminds me of just how much I absolutely detest the federal and California governments (as opposed to the country and the state themselves; contra this gibbering imbecile, the sustainably-grown organic free-range sweetener in whose non-fat latte has caused him to mistake President Obama after just three months for “the first successful president in two generations,” a government is distinguishable from a political subdivision).  Every year when I add up the numbers I’m dismayed to find that somewhere north of a third of my income is being confiscated by creeps, allegedly to further some ill-defined common good, but in reality to feather a lot of nests and give handouts to a lot of deadbeats.  Let’s be clear: I have absolutely no problem paying a reasonable amount of money to fund the essential functions of government.  I’d chip in my share for police and fire services, for national defense, and for worthwhile public works like road maintenance.  But my tax burden is so far removed from “reasonable” (never mind fair), and most of what it funds so far removed from “essential” or even “worthwhile,” that it positively beggars the imagination.

I often imagine that the Founding Fathers are rolling over in their graves.  After yesterday’s Tea Party protests, though, I expect that Samuel Adams, wherever he is, has a fleeting smile on his face.

From the Irony Is Dead department: apparently the political left, all the way up to Madame Speaker’s office, is complaining — without any real evidence, mind! — that the Tea Party protests are astroturf.  This after the last eight years of George Soros playing Daddy Warbucks to prop up every lefty cause imaginable.

It’s telling, I think, that when confronted by populist anger over taxes and government spending, the political left and much of the mainstream media (to the extremely limited extent the two are distinguishable) reach into their collective quiver and come up with… “teabagging” jokes.  This is lame thrice over.  For one thing, the “teabag” tittering is approximately as predictable as the sun coming up in the east; it was never particularly clever or funny, except within the tee-hee-those-center-right-folks-are-so-ridiculous liberal-media circle-jerk.  For another thing, is it really such a hot idea to associate, however indirectly, crass sexual quasi-humor with one of the iconic episodes of American revolutionary history?  Were those guys who dumped tea into Boston Harbor in 1773 “teabaggers,” too?  For a third thing, dismissiveness and contempt isn’t a substantive response, and while you may not think the protestors deserve such, you are eventually going to have to answer for the staggering orgy of spending that the Obama administration has embarked on — as dreadful a steward of the public purse as George W. Bush was, Mr. Obama has in just three months proven himself even worse.

To my mind the single biggest obstacle to building a significant and lasting constituency for small government is the temporal distance between when we pay tax and when we hold our political leaders democratically accountable.  Because of withholding, most of us don’t feel the bite except around April when we have to add up the numbers to file our returns — and by the time Election Day rolls around, seven months later, most of us have forgotten just how thoroughly we were taken to the woodshed by our government.  Solution: end withholding, so that everybody has to save throughout the year and write a big check for the full amount on Tax Day, and then move Tax Day to the first Monday in November (i.e., the day before Election Day).

Unfortunately, we’re approaching the tipping point: currently 43.4% of single or jointly-filing taxpayers pay zero or negative federal income taxes (i.e., they either pay no income tax, or they get a government handout).  While many of these people still pay something in payroll taxes like Social Security or Medicare, we’re nonetheless inching towards a situation where a majority of the country has no skin in the federal income tax game, and can vote itself freebies out of other people’s wallets with impunity.

With respect to the whole “paying taxes is patriotic” rot, I give you Billy Beck, and note further that Paul Begala is one of the most loathsome pieces of human excrescence currently stealing valuable oxygen from the rest of us.

Evidently, according to the Department of Homeland Security, I am just such an individual, inasmuch as I am “antagonistic toward the new presidential administration and its perceived stance on a range of issues, including immigration and citizenship…and restrictions on firearms ownership and use” and am “mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority”.  So much for dissent being the highest form of patriotism, eh?

Despite her impressive legal credentials — J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, clerking for Judge Mary M. Schroeder of the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano is apparently unclear on the concept of protected political expression.  Somebody ought to provide the poor woman with a clue.  I hear that her boss was a professor of constitutional law; maybe he could be of some help.

For those of us with longer memories, this is nothing new.  The last Democratic administration was notorious for portraying political opponents as foaming-at-the-mouth radicals (remember liberals blaming conservative political leaders and radio talk-show hosts for the Oklahoma City bombings, and Hillary Clinton famously complaining that her husband’s ongoing legal difficulties were the product of a “vast right-wing conspiracy”).  Attempting to delegitimize their political opponents is what they do; it is who they are.

Though the spluttering outrage with which much of the dextrosphere has reacted to this nonsense is wholly justified, I think I prefer Legal Insurrection’s more bemused take: “Only in a highly politicized bureaucracy could the Constitution be viewed as a subversive manifesto.”

I anxiously await the urine-stained hysterics from the fair-weather civil libertarians who excoriated George W. Bush over his warrantless wiretapping and his expansive use of the state secrets privilege lo these last eight years.  Needless to say, though, I shall not be holding my breath.