Krauthammer's Gas Tax

I agree with the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer most of the time. I have to laugh, though, when he proposes a massive tax on gasoline and says, "If the price drops to $2 [and so leaves the government with surplus tax revenues on its hands - db], plow that $1 tax right back into the American economy by immediately reducing, say, Social Security or income taxes."

I think it's much more likely, should the government reap a windfall from this proposed tax, that it would be plowed into bridges to miniscule Alaskan islands and maybe, in a final gesture to Robert Byrd, putting the White House on rollers and towing it to some obscure corner of West Virginia. (Actually, come to think of it, I like that idea).

I also have to ask, "How would this new tax disproportionately impact certain citizens, such as independent truckers (and farmers, who burn a lot of oil operating the machinery that makes them so efficient), and how many subsidiary laws would we have to pass, further complicating the tax code, in order to ameliorate that impact?"

Bush, Veto, Torture, Supreme Court

George W. Bush, who's been in the White House for over 5 years, has never vetoed a bill sent to him by Congress.

Now he's threatening to veto any bill which comes before him with language prohibiting the "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of people in American custody, which is exactly the language in the recent "McCain ammendment" which has passed the Senate but not the House.

I can't help thinking that this shows something unsettling about the man's priorities. Nothing in five years worth a veto, except protecting the right to torture foreigners?

I also can't help wondering if his #1 concern in all three of his Supreme Court nominations has been to propose candidates he felt confident would not challenge his authority to authorize human rights abuses. It would explain his failure to nominate the obvious candidates who would have fulfilled his campaign promise to nominate justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas - because many (perhaps all) of the obvious pro-life conservative candidates (for instance, Janice Rogers Brown) have shown a strong libertarian streak, suspicious of unrestricted executive power.

Without a doubt, Bush is the purest example yet of something new on the American scene - "big government conservatism". (There were elements of "big government" in the anti-communist, pro-law-enforcement right of the 60's and 70's, culminating in Reagan, but those were always coupled with a more traditional "let's get the government off the backs of law-abiding workers" appeal which seems utterly missing from the politics of this child of the governing class.) The more he bares his vision to the public, the less I like it.

I regard some amount of big government as a necessary counterpart to big business, believing that if corporations were unrivalled in their power, many of their behaviors would inflict harm on most people - not because corporate executives are malevolent, but because the harmful acts would be profitable to the only people to whom corporate policymakers must answer. But I haven't lost the old conservative belief that the group of people most likely to exploit others in ways that individuals are most powerless to resist is government. And I most certainly do not want a government empowered to hold people in jail indefinitely without recourse to a court, let alone a government empowered to torture such people.