Kodos For President

So, one day Kodos and Kang ran for president on opposing tickets, one Republican and one Democrat. When they confronted the skeptical public, they reminded them that:
Kodos: " you can't win! It's a two party system, one us will be president"
Lenny: "What if we vote for a third party candidate?"
Kang: Go Ahead! Throw your vote away!

And this neatly summarizes the race for the white house as I see it. I don't often wax political, but since this is an election year, this blog is my forum to rant. Currently there is no candidate that I want in the white house. Romney is now out, though I thought he had integrity and economic know-how. Hillary is not my choice, thank you, I don't think that her brand of American socialism is a sustainable model for "universal" health care. Barack? I don't know. Again, the ugly spectre of "universal" care is present.
Who is going to pay for it? Health care costs are rising geometrically, which means that a corresponding portion of the governement budget allocated to pay for it (either now with Medicare and Medicaid or through some future single payer plan) will rise commensurately. Easy! you say. We'll just pay more taxes, or more elegantly, we'll re-allocate current tax dollars. Hmm. possibly. Say we do raise taxes to match the increase. My high school econ (which, I admit, is rusty) says that taxation and revenue are related to the old Laffer curve. Theoretically, in the limit of infinite (100%) taxation, government revenue would paradoxically be $0. Why? because people won't work if they don't have some take home income. DUH you say. Of course they won't, and the government won't tax 100%. Yes, obviously. But the point is, as tax rates increase, government revenues decreases, above a certain point. So, if the cost of health care is increasing geometrically, theoretically there will be a point at which 100% of the federal budget will be allocated to health care. Dire? yes. Inevitable? I don't know.
All this brings us back to presidential canditates and why I am loathe to choose either Democrat candidate. So that leaves us with: McCain, the septugenarian war hero, Huckabee the Evangelical Yokel, Ron Paul, who wants to defund the government and return us to the American republic familiar to Andrew Jackson in the 1830's (from a political standpoint, not socially or technologically obviously). Since I am officially not registered with either party, I have no party lines to cross, and am free to vote as I please. What will happen in November? I don't think that the electoral process should involve voting for one candidate only to keep his/her opponent from attaining office. I did just that in 2004, and I regret it. I will probably write in a candidate, perhaps Colin Powell. He doesn't want the office, which means he's qualified to hold it. I don't care that he won't get elected (unless the readership of my blog consists of 55% of the US population and I convince them tool), at least I will have voted for the best candidate.

KODOS AND KANG '08