The . . . The . . . The . . . February 5, 2007March 5, 2017 THE STUPOR BOWL Mike: ‘I started to watch, got bored and returned to an activity that has obsessed me for the past few weeks: listening to presidential phone and meeting tapes from FDR through Nixon. I discovered a website where ALL of them can be accessed. It’s operated by the Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia. This stuff is fascinating – the Cuban Missile Crisis tapes alone are absorbing. I’ve heard snippets and excerpts of these recordings before, but to hear them in their entirety is just riveting. I highly recommend it.’ ☞ Go Gators! THE OTHER BOX We’re in a horrific box in Iraq. But we’re also in a tightening fiscal box. We’re paying $406 billion in interest on the national debt (most of it racked up under Reagan, Bush, and Bush), which is more than 40% of all the $998 billion in personal income tax we pay. More than 40 percent! What if interest rates go up? The Republican solution is, of course, more tax cuts for the very wealthy. (They still want to abolish the state tax on billionheirs.) But will that really get us out of the box? A better solution may be to roll back the tax cuts on income above $100,000 or $200,000, so that everything you earned in excess of $100,000 or $200,000 each year would be taxed as it was in the Clinton/Gore era (aka ‘the good old days’) . . . and to spend somewhat less than we now do on the military, on the theory that we could make up for that simply by spending it more wisely. (Might we not be better off, for example, if we had spent hundreds of billions of dollars less by not invading Iraq?) Check out Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities for some ideas on that. THE STATE OF ISRAEL And if you think we face problems, take five minutes to read this affecting reflection from Israel.