I’m a huge fan of lotteries. It is one of the few taxes that citizens pay willingly. Spending a dollar for the prospect of winning a hundred million is kind of fun. And the fact that the state’s provide the fig leaf of responsibility by suggesting all funds go to support education makes players feel like they are doing their part to support the kids… Imagine, a way of taxing people that is actually voluntary!

Unfortunately however, most taxes are anything but voluntary, particularly those levied by the federal government. In 2011 the federal government took in $2.3 trillion in taxes. Not only did all of that get spent, but about $1.4 trillion more. And now Barack Obama is in charge of the spending machine. In the three years he has been President, Obama has spent over $11 trillion. That includes not only the $6.6 trillion Uncle Sam took in in taxes, but an additional $4.6 trillion that has been borrowed on your behalf, or at least for which you have the responsibility to repay. If we split that sum up amongst every one of the 310 million people in the country that would mean that Barack Obama has racked up $15,300 in debt on behalf of every American… in a mere three years.

I’d like to give that $4.6 trillion sinkhole a little perspective. Imagine that instead of that money going to failed green jobs scam companies like Solyndra or to university research departments to play World of Warcraft, something completely different happened. Imagine that on January 20, 2009 Barack Obama had knocked on your door, teleprompter in hand, and said “(Insert taxpayer’s name here) I’d like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to be your President. And to show my gratitude I’d like to give you $5,000 a year each of the next three years. Now, you’ll have to pay it back of course, but I’ll spread the payments over 30 years and give you an interest rate of about zero.” You think to yourself “If I don’t take the deal he’s just going to barrow it in my name and spend it on poetry readings or some such thing.” Deciding you could come up with much better places to spend the money, you respond “Thank you Mr. President. I’ll take the checks.”

Wow. He gives you the check. Now you have a $5,000 you didn’t have the day before. You start dreaming…”What am I going to spend my new found money on?” Well, if you were an average driver, who uses approximately 700 gallons of gas a year, you could pay for gasoline for the year and still have about $3,000 left over. You could then spend $720 on clothes, $1,000 on entertainment and still have enough left over to cover half of your healthcare expenditures. “Not bad” you think.

Now of course, that is just one $5,000 check. Given that the average American home has 2.6 people in it, the President quickly takes the $5,000 check back and gives you a $13,000 family sized check instead. You think “Wow, almost $40,000 over three years! Now that’s some serious cash!” At $13,000 the government just covered more than 80% of the total cost of what the average American family spends on housing. That’s pretty nice. At a rate that is lower than your mortgage as well. “This is going to be great” you tell yourself.

Then, suddenly, just as the President is about to leave you stop dreaming and start thinking about the big picture. “Mr. President! Wait! $13,000 a year for my family would be nice, God knows we could use it, but I don’t want to bankrupt the country or close down the government or endanger the national defense.” “Good citizen” President Obama calls you, “Don’t worry about that, we’ll make do with the just the $2.2 trillion or so we take in in taxes annually, which is, exactly what we spent way back in the ancient period known as 2004.” – remember this is a dream.

The wheels start turning in your mind… How different is your life in 2009 relative to 2004, and how much did a bigger government have to do with making it better or worse? Recognizing that the growth in government didn’t do much to make life any better over that time, you decide you can indeed live with a government budget circa 2004. “Ok, Mr. President, never mind, I’ll keep the money! Thank you!”

Of course, that was all a dream. Unfortunately for you – and the rest of America – you are apparently too stupid to know what to do with your own money, or in this case, the money the government borrows but forces you to pay back. As such, no mortgage payments for you. No gas money, movie money, no check to cover your family’s annual food and insurance bills combined. No, unfortunately, while you are indeed on the hook for the money, guys like Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Barney Frank get to decide where all that money (and much more) goes…

Fundamentally that is the problem. And it’s not just money. Nor is it just the federal government. Increasingly it’s all levels of government and it’s seemingly about everything. Rather than parents being responsible for their kid’s fitness, schools have to ban burgers and pizza. Rather than drivers being able to purchase the kinds of vehicles they want, the government mandates auto companies sell cars no one wants and forces drivers to put inflation spurring ethanol into them. Rather than consumers and markets deciding what banks, and energy companies and health insurance companies should succeed, the government sticks its nose in virtually everywhere at almost every turn.

At the end of the day, few people could or would run their lives the same way the government runs the country – and unfortunately running the country is exactly what governments try and do. Fantasy budgeting and accounting, a distinct lack of accountability, a nonexistent correlation between success and continued funding, and a Pollyanna notion that all human problems and foibles can be obviated by government fiat.

Whether we get another four years of Barack Obama (God help us…) or a first term of one of the big government “conservatives” currently vying for the GOP nomination, voters should understand that the deficits and the regulation creep and the basic suffocation of the capitalist system that made America great will not be put asunder until we nominate and elect a President who:

1. Recognizes that the power of the federal government is constrained by the Constitution, particularly the 10th Amendment;
2. Understands that role of government is to do only those things which citizens cannot do themselves and nothing more;
3. Has the intelligence to know where the line between the two is;
4. Has the courage to tell voters to begin acting accordingly.

That doesn’t sound like too difficult a task. One wonders why the GOP can’t seem to figure it out.

Because that will be the end result if you see where this line of thinking is going…Didn’t stupid “intellectuals” already try this once already when they tried communism? And in the end everyone was poor.

En­vi­ron­men­tal dam­age caused by rich na­t­ions dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly harms poor ones— and costs them more than their to­tal for­eign debt of $1.8 tril­lion, re­search­ers say.

So con­cludes a study billed as the first glob­al ac­count­ing in dol­lar terms of na­t­ions’ toll on the en­vi­ron­ment.

A graph­ic sum­ma­rizes find­ings of a new study on the en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pacts of rich, middle-income and poor na­tions on each oth­er. (Graph­ic cour­te­sy Tha­ra Sri­ni­va­san/UC Berke­ley)
At least to some ex­tent, “rich na­t­ions have de­vel­oped at the ex­pense of the poor… in ef­fect, there is a debt to the poor,” said Rich­ard B. Nor­gaard, an ec­o­log­i­cal econ­o­mist at the Uni­ver­s­ity of Ca­li­for­nia-Berkeley, one of the re­search­ers. “That, per­haps, is one rea­son that they are poor.”

There will be much “con­tro­ver­sy,” he ad­mit­ted, “about wheth­er you can even do this kind of study and wheth­er we did it right.” Nor­gaard said he’d like to of­fer a chal­lenge to any re­search­ers who may doubt its find­ings: “do [the stu­dy] your­self and do it bet­ter.” This first one, he added, is mainly meant to get peo­ple think­ing.

The cal­cula­t­ions drew on more than a dec­ade of as­sess­ments by en­vi­ron­men­tal econ­o­mists who have tried to at­tach mon­e­tary fig­ures to en­vi­ron­men­tal dam­age, plus da­ta from the re­cent U.N. Mil­len­ni­um Ec­o­sys­tem As­sess­ment and World Bank re­ports.

To sim­pli­fy the monumen­tal task, re­search­ers fo­cused on just six types of en­vi­ron­men­tal dam­age: farm­ing in­ten­sifica­t­ion and ex­pan­sion, de­for­esta­t­ion, over­fish­ing, loss of man­grove swamps and forests, ozone de­ple­tion and cli­mate change. Oth­er types of dam­age seen as harder to ap­praise were ig­nored, such as in­dus­t­ri­al pol­lu­tion and loss of hab­i­tat and bio­divers­ity.

Thus, the re­sult is a low-end es­ti­mate of costs, the in­vest­i­ga­tors said. Giv­en that, “the num­bers are very strik­ing,” said lead re­search­er Thara Sri­ni­va­san, of the Pa­cif­ic Eco­in­for­mat­ics and Com­puta­t­ional Ecol­o­gy Lab Berke­ley, Calif., an in­sti­tute that calls it­self by the ac­ro­nym PEaCE. The in­ves­ti­ga­tors re­ported the find­ings this week in the early on­line edi­tion of the re­search jour­nal Pro­ceed­ings of the Na­t­ional Acad­e­my of Sci­ences.

“Hu­man­ity has trans­formed our nat­u­ral en­vi­ron­ment at an un­prec­e­dent­ed speed and scale,” Srini­vasan said, not­ing that the Earth’s popula­t­ion dou­bled in the past 50 years to 6.5 bil­lion as the av­er­age per-capita gross world prod­uct al­so dou­bled. “What we don’t know is which na­t­ions around the world are really driv­ing the ec­o­log­i­cal dam­ages and which are pay­ing the price.”

Nor­gaard said the larg­est en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pact by far is from cli­mate change, which has been as­sessed in pre­vi­ous stud­ies. The new study broad­ens the as­sess­ment and thus pro­vides a con­text for the ear­li­er work, he added.

The study found, for ex­am­ple, that while de­for­esta­t­ion and farm­ing in­ten­sifica­t­ion pri­marily im­pact the host coun­try, the im­pacts from cli­mate change and ozone de­ple­tion are spread widely over all. “Low-in­come coun­tries will bear sig­nif­i­cant bur­dens from cli­mate change and ozone de­ple­tion. But these en­vi­ron­men­tal prob­lems have been overwhelmingly driv­en by emis­sion of green­house gas­es and ozone-depleting chem­i­cals by the rest of the world,” Sri­ni­va­san said.

Sci­en­tists pre­dict cli­mate change will in­crease the sev­er­ity of storms and ex­treme weath­er, in­clud­ing pro­longed droughts and flood­ing, with an in­crease in in­fec­tious dis­eases. Ozone de­ple­tion mostly im­pacts health, with in­creases ex­pected in can­cer rates, cataracts and blind­ness. Over­fish­ing and con­ver­sion of man­grove swamps to shrimp farm­ing were oth­er ar­eas in which rich na­t­ions were judged to be bur­den­ing poor ones.

“Seafood de­rived from de­plet­ed fish stocks in low-in­come coun­try wa­ters ul­ti­mately ends up on the plates of con­sumers in middle-in­come and rich coun­tries,” Sri­ni­va­san said. Man­grove de­struc­tion elim­i­nat­ed storm pro­tec­tions, the group added, which some say was a ma­jor fac­tor in the huge cas­u­al­ty foll from 2005’s South­east Asian tsu­na­mi.

When all the im­pacts are added up, the por­tion of the “foot­print” of high-in­come na­t­ions fall­ing on low-in­come coun­tries is great­er than the fi­nan­cial debt rec­og­nized for low-in­come coun­tries, with a net pre­s­ent val­ue of $1.8 tril­lion in 2005, Sri­ni­va­san said. (This was cal­cu­lated in in­terna­t­ional dol­lars, U.S. dol­lars ad­justed to ac­count for dif­fer­ent cur­ren­cies’ pur­chas­ing pow­er.) “The ec­o­log­i­cal debt could more than off­set the fi­nan­cial debt of low-in­come na­t­ions,” she said.

In­ter­est­ing­ly, middle-in­come na­t­ions may have an im­pact on poor na­t­ions equiv­a­lent to that of rich na­t­ions, the study con­cluded. While poor na­t­ions im­pact oth­er in­come tiers al­so, their ef­fect on rich na­t­ions was found to be less than a third of the im­pact in the op­po­site di­rec­tion.