Have things really gotten that bad? → U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people → robbing the public and spending irresponsibly → bloated military budget → money for the absurd

But perhaps your tax dollars didn’t go to bullets or guns or shells or missiles. Perhaps yours went “to study psychic teleportation.”

The Air Force Research Lab’s “Teleportation Physics Report,” posted earlier this week on the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Web site, struck a raw nerve with physicists and critics of wasteful military spending.

In the report, author Eric Davis says psychic teleportation, moving yourself from location to location through mind powers, is “quite real and can be controlled.”…

In support of the idea, the report cites UFO reports, Soviet and Chinese studies of psychics and U.S. military studies of spoon-bending phenomena.…

Some experts have long criticized what they see as a military sweet tooth for junk science. A “remote viewing” project, for example, undertaken by defense intelligence services and declassified in , sought to see whether psychic powers could be employed to spy on the Soviet Union. The teleportation report “raises questions of scientific quality control at the Air Force,” the FAS’ Steven Aftergood says.

Davis, a physicist with Warp Drive Metrics of Las Vegas, couldn’t be reached for comment. The Air Force paid $25,000 for the report, part of a $20.5 million advanced rocket and missile design contract. The report calls for $7.5 million to conduct psychic teleportation experiments.

is approaching, and so you’re probably starting to get those W2s and 1099s and such in the mail, showing any money you brought in in the above-ground economy, and how much taxes were withheld.

And so you can probably get started in making some back-of-the-envelope calculations of how much you gave Uncle Sam last year, how much you still owe (or maybe you overpaid like so many do and you’re looking forward to getting some back). At least you’ve got a ballpark figure, right?

Wouldn’t it be nice to know what that money went for? You worked hard for it. Those dollars represent hours of your time.

Did you send in enough, do you think, that you can take credit for the $46,790 the Defense Department spent to have a portrait painted of the former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld? Maybe not the whole thing, but you can certainly claim to have put in your hours for a brushstroke or two. The nation thanks you.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

  • Obama said he plans to slowly withdraw the “surge” boost of U.S. troops from Afghanistan over the next year, as he’d hinted he would when he promoted the surge idea in . That will still leave tens of thousands of U.S. troops behind (more than twice as many as were occupying the country when Obama became Commander-in-Chief), with no end in sight. To give you some idea of what sized hole the U.S. has dug themselves there, read this quote from a recent Associated Press report: “The World Bank found that a whopping 97 percent of the gross domestic product in Afghanistan is linked to spending by the international military and donor community.”
  • Edward Gresser, of Progressive Economy, takes a look at U.S. tariffs on imported goods and hopes for a rebirth of progressive free-trade populism, noting that these tariffs are “America’s most regressive tax”: imported leather dress shoes are taxed at 8.5% while cheap sneakers are taxed at 48%; fancy cashmere sweaters are taxed at 4% while their acrylic cousins are taxed at 32%; and the same down the line for shirts, bras, handbags, bedware, dinnerware, jewelry, etc. — luxury items have tiny tariffs, while inexpensive mass-market items are hit with huge rates. These tariffs raised about $26 billion for the U.S. government last year. This seems like an area where the Grover Norquist anti-tax conservatives, the aid-the-poor progressives, and the free-trade libertarians could and should come together.
  • Speaking of free trade, here’s another reason why you can’t trust governments to bring it about. Check out this crazy story: The U.S. props up its cotton industry with subsidies. Brazil complained that this violates international free trade agreements. So the World Trade Organization ruled that the U.S. must stop these subsidies. The U.S. refused. So the WTO said Brazil was entitled to penalize the U.S. by disregarding U.S. intellectual property rights (in other words, they could pirate or duplicate things that were copyrighted or patented by U.S. people or companies without penalty). Did this make the U.S. back down? Not quite. Instead of ending subsidies to U.S. cotton, the U.S. government decided to extend these subsidies to Brazilian cotton manufacturers to mollify the Brazilians! So American taxpayers are paying Brazilian cotton manufacturers so that American politicians don’t have to cut off illegal subsidies to American cotton manufacturers.