Fun with Dick and blame

It was really thoughtful of former Vice President Dick Cheney to step forward and offer constructive criticism about the speed with which President Barack Obama publicly responded to the failed airliner attack.

“As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war,” Cheney said on Tuesday, four days after the incident.

Josh Gerstein of Politico.com has helpfully reconstructed events surrounding “shoe bomber” Richard Reid’s failed attempt to blow up an airliner on Dec. 22, 2001. Judging from how the White House responded back then, we can deduce that six days is the amount of time that should pass before a president publicly addresses the problem.

President George W. Bush was in Camp David on Dec. 22. He didn’t spotlight the attack until he arrived at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on Dec. 28.

Obama took three days.

So, according to this elder statesman’s logic, the next time something like this happens, Obama should wait twice as long so we can be assured that he takes it seriously.

Ready, fire, aim. In all seriousness, what is Dick Cheney’s beef? Is he worried that suspected collaborators aren’t being tortured, or that a non sequitur invasion isn’t being planned? Were the color-coded alert levels not changed and then hyped? Did the vice president fail to retreat to an undisclosed location?

What next? Denouncing himself for aiding the enemy by criticizing a wartime president?

The MARDI GRAS DECADE. A Wall Street Journal column by Allysia Finley takes the results of a study on the relative happiness of people and supposes that the level of taxation might explain it. Louisiana is deemed the state with the happiest people. Other low-tax states also rate high. So, the theory goes, whatever misery is brought on by hurricanes and poverty is blown away by low taxes.

In short, correlation is cause to party.

The surest path to low taxes is lower rates and declining income and property values. The past decade has brought all three, so why the long faces? You should be thankful for layoffs, pay cuts and furloughs, especially when they drop you into a lower tax bracket. You should rejoice at the housing meltdown, because it lowered property taxes.

The numbers don’t lie: The nation’s tax receipts this year are headed for the single biggest decline since the Great Depression. Collection from individuals will be down 22 percent from last year. Social Security and Medicare taxes are headed for a rare decline. Corporate taxes are expected to drop by 57 percent.

The Tax Foundation each year declares Tax Freedom Day, which is when average taxpayers stop sending income to the government and begin keeping it for themselves. This year it arrived on April 13, which is three weeks earlier than in 2000, which is the last time we had one of those misery-inducing federal budget surpluses. (History buffs, take note: The happiest year on record was 1910.)

And yet despite all of this uplifting low-tax news, I’m sensing that the nation’s response is one of ingratitude. I’ve even heard some call it the worst decade since the 1930s.

Come on! It was The Big Easy.