I have news for you Mr. Saunders: property qualifications for suffrage were dismantled 180 years ago. There was a residue in Southern states for another 80 years to maintain the racial caste system, something we are well free of.

After the 2d World War, the President and Congress cut the share of domestic product allocated to the military by 80% and balanced the budget. This was accomplished in two years. (The New Deal alphabet soup agencies were all dismantled by the end of 1943). During the Eisenhower Administration, the President and Congress managed to wind-down military expenditures in Korea and ride out three recessions. They balanced the budget 3x in 8 years and the deficits were quite modest by subsequent standards. During the Kennedy-Johnson years, they did run deficits every years, but they were modest deficits and the budget for FY 1968-69 was balanced.

There is no iron law of political life that says it has to be the way it has been the last 60 years, whatever the public choice economists have been pushing notwithstanding.

Nailed it, huxley. We take him seriously but not literally. His detractors do the reverse.

Troll them unmercifully until they reveal their true vampirical nature to the marks?

Mary Poppins is the one who never explains anything.

Montage: I guess I’ve succumbed to Trump apologetics, but I take it for granted that everyone knows Trump has a P.T. Barnum persona and he’ll say silly exaggerated things for effect. “It’s strictly [show] business, Sonny.” Trump embraces that persona with “vigah.”

Warren, however, says she’s “got a plan for [everything]” and, as a Harvard professor must be, she is dead nerd serious about it. No foolin’ around. Or maybe a bit of corner-cutting to get it past the deplorables.

Of course, Warren is just the other brand of huckster — the one with a steely glare, and not a smile and a wink.

About CATO, cue Mandy Rice-Davies.

And so what? A one off surtax of 0.4% of personal income would pay for that.

Sorry, I meant the deficit [not the debt]. According to a recent WSJ article the deficit is 68 percent higher than when Trump took office. I’m willing to blame Congress but Trump claimed he would bring it down. And everyone knows a president gets blame or credit for what happens with the deficits and debts.

Re The Wall: The Cato Institute says new estimates by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) are $59.8 billion to construct. That’s fairly high. It’s also higher than estimated.
The new OMB estimate comes to about $24.4 million per mile. [Which] is 41 percent more costly than the approximately $17.3 million per mile construction costs that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimated just a few years ago, 2.7 times as expensive as Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan estimated, and 5 times as expensive as Trump’s lowest estimate.

Trump proposed between $8 and $21 billion cost. If $59 billion was modest I don’t think Trump would have proposed lower cost.

Right about the difference between WW2 and the Iraq / Afghan wars. I don’t mean a draft I meant taxation. Those wars cost money. Why not increase taxes? Let’s just have some honest politicians unafraid of telling Americans that security and healthcare cost money.

Because the scale was quite different. World War II was fought globally, required putting about 30% of the male population born between 1894 and 1928 in uniform, and consumed an average of 33% of gross national product over a six year period. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were fought by activating reserves and guardsman to increase manpower and required an annual expenditure of just shy of 1% of domestic product.