ANN ALTHOUSE ON WEALTH AND POVERTY:

The 2-income family gives a shocking amount of the extra money they scramble to earn to the government. I’m no tax expert, but my suspicion is that this happens because liberals like more taxes and conservatives like subsidizing the traditional family with a stay-at-home parent. Put those 2 forces together and we get the (perverse?) burdening of the 2-earner family.

Why don’t more couples do the math and figure out that they should not do all that extra work for the government? Life is so much simpler with the 1-earner family, and the spouse who doesn’t bring in the dollars can provide great economic benefits by directly performing work that would otherwise have to be paid for, most notably child care. Since this economic benefit isn’t taxed, it’s a double benefit. Instead of buying inferior childcare (or other services) with after-tax dollars, you perform the work that is worth that much money, and you’re not paid, so you don’t pay taxes on the value it represents.

When I went to junior high school, we girls were required to take a course called “Home Economics,” but it was just learning to cook and sew. I think young people should be taught a course called “Home Economics,” which teaches a sophisticated analysis of the economics of living together and sharing money and work. But perhaps the government, through its schools, does not want to reveal the amazing secrets of legal tax avoidance. How much better to indoctrinate kids to seek the highest incomes they possibly can achieve! That is the government’s strategy for raking in the most most taxes. And it works so well.

Know the truth and the truth will set you free.

AT AMAZON, markdowns on Outdoor Decor.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Behind The DC Slugfest. “The agenda of the poorer and lower-middle classes is championed mostly by an affluent elite located on the two coasts, who find power and influence in representing “the people,” and are themselves either affluent enough, or enjoy enough top government salaries and subsidies, to be largely exempt from any hardship that would result from their own advocacy of much higher taxes and larger government expenditures.”

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: A four-artificial-neuron network from 112 DNA strands.

NEW YORK POST: So Who’s Playing Politics With The Debt?

The president went to great pains yesterday to stress that raising the $14.3 trillion debt limit “is not a vote that allows Congress to spend more money. . . . [It] simply gives our country the ability to pay the bills that Congress has already racked up.”

Bushwa.

Washington spends more than it takes in — and that can’t continue.

Indeed, it was reported yesterday that the US Treasury now has an operating cash balance of $73.8 billion — $2.4 billion less than the cash that Apple, the computer giant, has on its books.

The reason is simple: Apple collects more cash than it spends. With Washington, it’s the other way around. And increasing Washington’s revenues via higher taxes does nothing to rein in spending.

Something that can’t go on forever, won’t. Debt that can’t be repaid, won’t.

THEY’VE LOST THAT LOVIN’ FEELING: Obama still has supporters, but theirs is a grim support. “It is that nobody loves Obama. This is amazing because every president has people who love him, who feel deep personal affection or connection, who have a stubborn, even beautiful refusal to let what they know are just criticisms affect their feelings of regard. At the height of Bill Clinton’s troubles there were always people who’d say, “Look, I love the guy.” They’d often be smiling—a wry smile, a shrugging smile. Nobody smiles when they talk about Mr. Obama. There were people who loved George W. Bush when he was at his most unpopular, and they meant it and would say it. But people aren’t that way about Mr. Obama. He has supporters and bundlers and contributors, he has voters, he may win. But his support is grim support. And surely this has implications.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Baltimore Dean Resigns Over University Keeping 45% of Law School Revenue. Law schools are cash cows. But this goes beyond milking . . . .

INCREASING HUMAN RUN-INS WITH BEARS:

Griffin W. Smith has some practical advice to offer about bears. As a cross-country trail runner, he has seen them in the woods many times in southern Colorado. “But when a bear is in your kitchen, it seems bigger,” said Mr. Smith, 21, a biology major who was at home last week from college when he came downstairs for breakfast and found a black bear by the refrigerator, slurping from the dog’s dish.

Bears — dangerous and unpredictable always — are prowling broader areas of the West in closer contact with people than ever. “It’s raising the question of how tolerant we are willing to be as humans — where we will allow bears to live and where we won’t,” said Steve Gehman, a wildlife biologist in Bozeman, Mont., and co-founder of a nonprofit research group, Wild Things Unlimited.

The intensified level of conflict is also spurring new research that is challenging some long-held assumptions about bears, notably the idea that bear population is the key variable. As solitary and often nocturnal creatures — unlike, say, elk, which herd together and can be easily counted — bear numbers are guesses at best, scientists say, especially for poorly studied species like the black bear. And shifting patterns of bear behavior, they say, like bears’ learning new feeding habits, could be even more important than population trends.

More evidence of just how ahead of the curve David Baron was.

BYRON YORK LOOKS AT HISTORY: For Reid, Durbin, and Obama, a (very) partisan record on debt ceiling. “The pattern of Reid’s and Durbin’s voting is difficult to miss: If Republicans control the Senate, they vote against raising the debt ceiling. If Democrats control the Senate, they vote in favor of raising the debt ceiling. It is a fact of life on Capitol Hill that the party in control of Congress bears the responsibility of raising the debt ceiling. That can become a difficult task when control of the House and Senate is split between Republicans and Democrats, as it is now. One might think it would make leaders who have voted along strictly partisan lines think twice before denouncing the other party as partisan. But it has not prevented Reid, Durbin, and Obama from doing just that.”

Well, they know the press will cover for them.

DEMONIZING THE OTHER: “Normal citizens! Because — in the Madison hive mind — the people who vote for Republicans are not normal.”

SO WHERE’S THE MONEY GOING? Treasury Cash Drops By $15 Billion Overnight. “At this burn rate there is precisely 3 days or so of cash, although this naturally does not include the bulk payment due to SSTN discussed previously. It is now officially time to panic, although those who so wish, can put their money in not just Apple ($76.2 billion), but GE ($136.4 billion) and Microsoft ($62.4 billion) all of which have more cash than Tim Geithner. Of course, as Gartman put it, in three days everyone will have more cash than the US Treasury.”

It’s a shame those crazed ideologues in the Senate voted down the House bill that would have raised the debt ceiling and prevented financial chaos.

JAZZ SHAW: Obama, Geithner Hold All the Face Cards in Debt Ceiling Fight: The administration will get to choose who gets government checks and who doesn’t.

UPDATE: The Politics Of The Debt Battle.

AFTER THE CRASH? Or before the deluge?

PETER WEHNER: “The most recent economic news is figuratively, if not quite literally, depressing.”

WISCONSIN UPDATE: “So the shocking outrages the touched of the protests don’t move the voters, and the recall elections are like normal elections, asking voters whether they’d like their next helping of legislation to be conservative or liberal. In which case, let’s relive what was, I think, the most trenchant commentary about the recall elections: ‘Isn’t that a crime?'”

ONCE AGAIN, thanks to everyone who shopped via the Amazon links on this site. By doing so you put a little money in my family’s pocket at no expense to you. It’s much appreciated. Thanks!

IOWAHAWK: Default, Dear Brutus, Is Not In Our Stars, But In Ourselves.

AND YET, PEOPLE SAY THE TEA PARTY IS CRAZY: Solving the Debt Crisis with a Trillion-Dollar Coin?

UPDATE: Kim du Toit emails:

This is what happens when your political philosophy deliberately ignores history.

First, we had Al Gore’s “carbon credit” scheme — which any Christian knows, used to be called “papal indulgences.” Now we have the “trillion-dollar” coin (made out of thin air) — which methodology (of creating gold from nothing) used to be called the “philosopher’s stone.”

So in the future, when someone talks about “going medieval,” we need to recognize that we’re going to see yet another policy proposal from the Democratic Party.

Heh.

THE LONELINESS EPIDEMIC. “We can talk about depression, anorexia, even bipolar disorder, but loneliness is a strange affliction that’s never mentioned. . . . One theory always stuck with me. It’s fairly straightforward: it says we stigmatise the things we’re most afraid of in order to create distance between ourselves and the stigmatised trait. . . . There is some evidence that the stigma against loneliness has increased in the past 50 years. If you read what is written about loneliness in the Forties, there’s not a lot of disdain and alarm. But in more recent decades, loneliness changes shape — it becomes a disease, a short-coming, a flaw.”

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Tea Party: Fix Your Gaze On 2012.

TWIT-IN-CHIEF: Obama Lost 10,000 Twitter Followers Today. Well, you take messaging advice from New York Times folks, you get the kind of circulation results that New York Times folks get.

UPDATE: Make that over 36,000 followers. “To put it another way, he lost twice as many followers today as jobs created last month.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails:

I notice a one word omission from your posting on Obama losing 36,000 twitter followers:

“Unexpectedly!”

Heh.

DEMOCRATS KILL BOEHNER BILL IN SENATE. The party of “no.”

UPDATE: Reader Gary Tranbarger emails: “I have a new idea. Republicans immediately pass a clean, no conditions, debt ceiling addition of 100 billion dollars. They also announce their willingness to vote for additional 100 billion dollars additions, as needed, one at a time, up to November 2012. Finally, they announce their willingness to engage in negotiations for a two-year addition to the debt ceiling once the CBO scores a 10-year financial plan for the country that is publicly endorsed by (a) the President; (b) a majority of Senate Democrats; and (c) a majority of House Democrats.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: “The Democrats have been telling us for weeks what disasters will ensue if the debt ceiling isn’t increased. Fine: the House has voted to raise the ceiling. Now it is the Senate’s turn.”

President Obama and Harry Reid keep saying they want to make a “deal.” But that isn’t how it works. The Senate needs to pass a bill. Next, leaders of each chamber appoint representatives who participate in a conference committee. The conference committee comes up with a compromise between the House bill and the Senate bill, and that conference bill goes back to each chamber for approval. It will be appropriate for Harry Reid to negotiate with Mitch McConnell over a Senate bill, but Boehner should go on vacation unless and until the Senate acts.

What the Democrats are trying to do, of course, is gain absolution for all of their fiscal sins by negotiating a cosmic deal with the GOP that, as I once put it, would put Republicans in the position of going over the waterfall holding hands with the Democrats. If Republicans are dumb enough to let that happen–which I doubt–then it will indeed be time for a third party. The Democratic Senate has now gone for more than two years without adopting a budget. That is not only poor practice, it violates federal law. Why won’t the Democrats adopt a budget? Because they don’t dare put down on paper, for the American people to see, what they really want: skyrocketing spending, higher taxes and spiraling deficits. Forever. The Democrats don’t want to commit to anything until they have bullied the Republicans into signing onto it.

Indeed.

MORE: Senate rejects Boehner plan, Reid won’t allow vote tonight on his own plan. It’s not a plan, it’s a talking point.

PETER INGEMI: Pam Geller And Relevance.

AT AMAZON, markdowns in health, personal care, and household supplies.

COOL: UK Engineers Print and Fly the World’s First Working 3-D Printed Aircraft. “So perhaps it’s no surprise that elsewhere in the UK a team of Airbus engineers is working on printing an entire aircraft wing–that is, a real jetliner aircraft wing, the kind that would carry people–with the ultimate goal of printing out most of the important components of an entire passenger aircraft.”