Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling for September 16, 2011

“Dissimilar in certain ways”, yet oddly alike in other, equally disastrous ones.

Ruben’s losing it again. He seems to go in streaks of genius then counter-genius. Check back in when our orbit has us in deep snow.

Apparently “s” stands for “surd.”

Yup, S, there are only two taxes for oil companies; nothing and 100%! So if you’re against them paying nothing, the only alternative is that we must want them to pay 100%—commies! I’d be thrilled and delighted if they paid a rate matching my own. And they would still be insanely profitably.

Would you like some more Kool-aid S?

U.S. demand for oil leaves us vulnerable to undue influence by backwards-looking religious extremists, oligarchs with a weird obession with capital punshment, xenophobes who hate our American freedoms and are out to destroy our democratic institutions.

I’m speaking, of course, about Texans.

fritz, just as there are muslims who aren’t extremists so theri are liberals in Texas. Hard to believe, but true.

Oh, I know that, walrus. Some of ‘em even post here. But you’ll rarely hear “Real Texans” acknowledge them, let alone embrace them. You can hear them sputtering when the name “Molly Ivins” comes up, and they have a singular distaste for the cartoons of Ben Sargent…

Should libraries be funded by a tax on reading glasses?

I don’t know if laser blasting of eyes — “radial keratotomy” — is any good. I’m sticking with corrective lenses. But suppose lasers were the bees’ knees, or the knees of just one bee, whichever is better. Eyeglass-revenue-funded librarians would then hate and fear laser eye surgeons.

So would all paid public servants if the loss of tax revenue, when the surgeons zap their lasers, were not — as it typically would not be — limited to the particular sector the cancelled tax supposedly had been supporting.

A little closer to topic now: should road building and maintenance be funded by taxes on motor fuels derived from petroleum and natural gas? Publically funded road builders and maintainers would then hate and fear developers of alternative car propulsion methods, unless those methods were obviously meant to be ineffective. Recall the Bush hydrogen-car initiative.

Without the huge subsidies from motor fuel users to government, we might not have had that boondoggle, and elected representatives might not now be so eager to slip a little of the take to the tradesmen who make it possible.

It is a little, right? The talk is of billions, but over a period of five or ten years, in which time those tradesmen facilitate the collection of half a trillion or a full trillion.

Bolling is decrying government’s failure to bind the mouths of the kine that tread the taxpayers.

Actually, they’re already subsidizing industrial solar – which is run by petroleum companies. It’s a two-fer. (Google “Solar Done Right” for details.)

Does anyone here even know how much oil companies pay in taxes? How much the subsidies are? Whether it is even possible to power the entire country with renewable resources. What will happen to our standard of living under any of the options? Or is everyone on both sides just spouting off on ideological lines with no idea what they are talking about as usual?

This strip is so disappointing. Every week I come along to see the dancing bug, and all these other blah characters appear instead. Where’s Tom? We want Tom!

I say we liberate the Chihuahuas of Mexico.