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Via Crooks and Liars, Conan O’Brien shows us Meet the Press for Idiots:

I took an economics class many years ago. I didn’t learn much.

One thing I do remember is the concept of opportunity costs. The cost of any economic decision can be measured not only in dollars and cents, but in the things you must forego to pay for that choice: buying the giant-screen plasma TV means you can’t remodel the bathroom — and vice versa. Every choice is a trade-off.

Via Daily Kos, Matt Taibbi takes note of some Bush administration trade-offs (Warning: strong profanity in the linked article):

On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush’s proposed 2008 budget, which was unveiled two weeks ago and received relatively little press, mainly because of the controversy over the Iraq war resolution. All the same, the Bush budget is an amazing document. It would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly articulates the priorities of our current political elite.

Not only does it make many of Bush’s tax cuts permanent, but it envisions a complete repeal of the Estate Tax, which mainly affects only those who are in the top two-tenths of the top one percent of the richest people in this country. The proposed savings from the cuts over the next decade are about $442 billion, or just slightly less than the amount of the annual defense budget (minus Iraq war expenses). But what’s interesting about these cuts are how Bush plans to pay for them.

Sanders’s office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family — the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune — would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

Oh, we definitely need a better Decider.