Iraq is pretty bad, but the long term consequences of our lawmakers' poor economic choices and blatantly self-serving pork schemes is what will sink the Republicans for a long time.

Take, for starters, the news that New York City and Washington D.C. will enjoy cuts of about 40% in their homeland security funding while places like Nebraska and Kentucky, those landlocked states with nothing to attack but cornfields and horse farms, will enjoy vast spending increases.

Tell me how this map doesn't represent pork.



And that was with data from before these cuts.

Source: Homeland Security Department 2005 estimated total allocations to the individual states divided by the U.S. Census Bureau's 2004 state population estimates.

Anyway, then we have Harold Meyerson writing for the post about more irresponsible tax cuts, in particular estate tax cuts.

A decades-long campaign by right-wing activists (brilliantly documented by Yale professors Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro in their book "Death by a Thousand Cuts") has convinced many Americans that the estate tax poses a threat to countless hardworking families. That was always nonsense, and under the estate tax revisions that almost all Democrats support -- raising the threshold for eligibility to $3.5 million for an individual and $7 million for a couple -- it becomes more nonsensical still. Under the $3.5 million exemption, the number of family-owned small businesses required to pay any taxes in the year 2000 would have been just 94, according to a study by the Congressional Budget Office. The number of family farms that would have had to sell any assets to pay that tax would have been 13.

On the other hand, an estate tax repeal would save the estate of Vice President Cheney between $13 million and $61 million, according to the publicly available data on his net worth. It would save the estate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld between $32 million and $101 million. The estate of retired Exxon Mobil chairman Lee Raymond would pocket a cozy $164 million. As for the late Sam Walton's kids, whose company already makes taxpayers foot the bill for the medical expenses of thousands of its employees, the cost to the government for not taxing their estates would run into the multiple billions.

Wow, so we lose trillions in taxes for a tiny number of people who refuse to accept that the government taxes money whenever it changes hands. Sorry, that's the way it is you pussies. Deal with it. If you don't like it, why don't you just leave the damn country you sissies. Anyway, because rich people don't feel like they should be taxed on income they get from no work of their own, a tax that prevents the kind of awful class system that infected places like Britain for decades, they've managed to put together a PR campaign to change public opinion in their favor. Yes, public opinion is now against the estate tax, even though the tax doesn't even apply to the public. For that, we'll lose trillions in revenue, so the rich can make themselves a bunch of permanent, non-working, upper-class twits. I personally love the Jeeves and Wooster books, and Hugh Laurie is just a blast, but I really don't feel like we need to increase the numbers of Woosters in this country.

They call it the death tax, if liberals were smart, they'd call it what it is, the Paris Hilton tax. Personally, I'd like to avoid increasing the number of Paris Hiltons in the country.