Last Week's Leftovers

Some weekends I get to these loose ends. Other weekends I don't.

This past Saturday I devoted to catching up on my scifi reviews, and yesterday was worship in the morning, baseball playoffs in the afternoon, and Seahawk football in the evening. What you gonna do, eh?

So here, with no further ado, are those points to ponder....

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-More Nukes!

And now nuclear power is set to rise again. Against all odds, more and more public figures are calling for its revival. There are several reasons, among them the rising price of oil and natural gas; the realization that windmills and solar are unable to provide anything more than piddle-power; and the reluctance of policymakers to keep sending billions to Saudi Arabia. But most importantly, we have seen a replay of the environmental concern that launched nuclear power in 1954. Anything other than nuclear energy causes too much pollution.

Environmentalists, once united in their opposition to all things nuclear, are today increasingly on its side. For this we have "global warming" to thank - a scare that the greens themselves created. Some years back they decided that carbon dioxide is a bad thing. In fact, it is an essential gas, without which plants would not grow. But let us not second-guess the ins and outs of green phobias and fashions. The point is that greens have the politicians' ears, they have decided that when carbon dioxide rises into the upper atmosphere it is a "greenhouse gas" and hazardous to the planet. It is emitted by the combustion of fossil fuels, but not by the fission of uranium. So, like a flock of birds veering in mid-flight, enviro-leaders turned pro-nuke almost overnight.

Make no mistake about it, it's the price of gasoline that is driving this development. Greenstremists could demagogue fossil fuels all they wanted as long as they remained comparatively affordable because there was no political cost to doing so. But to do so now, with the price spiralling ever upward (although still less, adjusted for inflation, than gas prices were a generation ago), would be a different story altogether.

I guess this answers the question of what happens when the irresistable force meets the immovable object - suddenly the object sprouts legs and runs like hell.

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Bird Flu as Biological Weapon

We are essentially in a life-and-death race with the bird flu. Can we figure out how to pre-empt it before it figures out how to evolve into a transmittable form with 1918 lethality that will decimate humanity? To run that race we need the genetic sequence universally known - not just to inform and guide but to galvanize new research.

On the other hand, resurrection of the virus and publication of its structure opens the gates of hell. Anybody, bad guys included, can now create it. Biological knowledge is far easier to acquire for Osama and friends than nuclear knowledge. And if you can't make this stuff yourself, you can simply order up DNA sequences from commercial laboratories around the world that will make it and ship it to you on demand. Taubenberger himself admits that "the technology is available.''

Damned if we do, damned if we don't. We've always been in a race between the better and lower sides of human nature, but we live in a time when technology is outrunning them both.

It's a pity - and perhaps a lethal one - that spacefaring technology isn't at the head of that pack.

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The Road to (Tax) Hell

The tax code, all nine million words of it, is annually encrusted with new complications arising from Congress's endless effort to achieve this or that social goal, usually under the rubric of "fairness." The Mack-Breaux panel is following in this tradition. The other day it sent up some trial balloons. Worried that mortgage interest deductions without a ceiling were prompting affluent taxpayers to build bigger and bigger homes, they said they might recommend "capping" the amount one can deduct. They also talked of capping the amount-per-employee an employer can deduct for health care premiums.

With a little over two weeks to go before it is to submit its final recommendations, the panel sent up some other trial balloons. Its members like the idea of expanding deductions for charitable donations and getting rid of the odious and misnamed Alternative Minimum Tax (actually it is the Alternative Maximum Tax) which traps more middle-class earners each year. Mindful, however, that its recommendations should be "revenue-neutral," the panel also is tinkering with the idea of recommending a Value Added Tax. These are popular with some European governments because consumers are inured to them and they are relatively easy to increase. The VAT would be a brand new source of revenue for the U.S. Treasury.

Panels and commissions (all of them adorned, for some strange reason, with blue ribbons) are presidents' way of punting nettlesome, controversial issues down the road so they don't have to deal with them in the here and now. Given that President Bush has already cut income tax rates twice, I'm puzzled by why he'd want to punt on further reductions (or "simplification").

But by the same token, panels and commissions are, in their essence, bureaucratic entities charged with tinkering with other bureaucratic entities, and that sort of tinkering never, E-E-EVER leads to simplification of anything. Not for nothing goes the axiom that a brontosaurus is a mouse designed by a committee. If God had used the same process to design the male urinary tract, our penises would look like English horns.

If tax simplication is what we truly want, there's one simple, straightforward way to get there: a flat tax. And (if you'll pardon the grammar), it don't take no panel or commission to figure that out.

Unless, of course, simplification isn't Mack-Breaux's - or the President's - real objective.

As points to ponder go, that's a real hum-dinger.