Okay, I'm over my Cubs angst, I think.

I watched a little of the debate. I don't want to get into too many of the issues here, suffice it to say I like Obama's positions more than McCain's. (I'm not satisfied with where this country is today, and I think McCain represents a continuation of the policies that got us here, and isn't one of the definitions of insanity doing the same thing and expecting different results?) I would have watched more but I had to run out and pick up a prescription that was ready at the pharmacy before bedtime.

I was getting a kick out of some of (both of) their pronouncements. Does this make any sense to anyone? Specifically, Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and other public entitlements make up about 40% of federal spending TODAY. (That percentage is certain to go up in the future.) Then there is national defense. I think that makes up another 40%, if I recall the percentages mentioned in Money Magazine. That leaves 20%. That's EVERYTHING ELSE. Fix roads? Infrastructure repairs and renovations and new projects? Education? Foreign aid? Public aid and unemployment insurance? National parks? Forest Service? It all comes out of that 20%.

Then there's "pork". I hate pork as much as the next person. There is no reason that our tax dollars should be going to pay for Alaska's bridge to nowhere (I know, it's killed...but a lot of pork went there for the preparatory work before it got killed), or for the Lawrence Welk Museum, or even for that projector at Chicago's Adler Planetarium (a museum that McCain clearly knows nothing about, and of which I am a member). Not to mention peanut and sugar cane subsidies, and whatever else agricultural pork is out there.

But it's 18 billion dollars that McCain and Palin keep harping about. Now that's a lot to you and me, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the federal expenditures. Heck, it's dwarved by the amount they are giving to AIG. What is cutting that really going to do for federal expenditures?

Answer: Not a thing!

So when either of them talk about cutting waste in government, it's just talk. Neither one of them is going to be able to cut expenses AT ALL, really, without addressing Social Security and Medicare, and defense. Not in any meaningful way at least.

There are two ways to narrow the gap between spending and revenues. Lower spending, or raise revenues. That means either making serious cuts to social entitlements or raising taxes. Or a combination of both. Yet every time either one of these candidates talks, the main words out of their mouths are "tax cuts". And then they spend time ripping on the other about who's cutting taxes and who's raising them, and both of them claim to be cutting taxes. So how do they expect to get us out of this mess? Neither really has any answers.