I drew a version of this one in 2006, anticipating the 2010 underwear bomb. With a slight caption revision, it’s as good today as it was then.  As Mark Twain once observed, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

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Congress, as usual, is paralyzed. It can’t figure out how to extend the low-cost student loan program. Without Congressional action, the interest rate will double, from 3.4 percent to 6.8, on July 1. The cost of extending the program for a year is estimated to be $6 billion. With the economy still weak and with the states having already made massive cuts to higher education, with more pending, tuitions at state colleges and universities are soaring. Raising the student loan interest rate likely will put college out of reach for many. Republicans call the program irresponsible and seem willing to let it die, unless it is paid for with  further cuts to the safety net. In an economy that increasingly favors the wealthy and disadvantages everyone else, college is fast becoming a luxury of the wealthy. I guess the rest of us will be sending our children to Hamburger U, where they can learn the valuable skill of asking the children of bankers if they want fries with their Happy Meal.

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I’ve grown to hate presidential campaigns. No matter what either candidate does, the other guy, and the  echo chamber of his supporters in Congress and the media, will attack it. Obama may be guilty of over-celebrating the anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, but one has to ask how the Republicans would be handling the same event had one of theirs knocked him off. I don’t seem to recall too many complaints from the Right when Dubya whooped it in his premature celebration over the invasion of Iraq. And, oh, the outrage over Obama’s midnight visit to Afghanistan! Has the man no shame? Practicing politics during an election year! It just isn’t done!

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The big tech companies are spending billions to stockpile patents. Earlier this month Microsoft paid more than $1 million each for 925 AOL patents, Microsoft then sold 650 of them to Facebook for $550 million. Google and Apple have aggressively hoarded patents, as well. The reason? Yes, these companies still create amazing new products, but the game has shifted. In Silicon Valley, companies spend their fortunes protecting market turf through the aggressive defense of the intellectual property acquired by buying up existing patents. Microsoft is worried about Google’s Android operating system, Facebook is worried about Google Plus encroaching on its social networking dominance. Apple and Google fight for dominance in smartphones. And so the companies buy more and more patents, and keep armies of lawyers employed suing each other for infringement. How would the great inventors of the past century have fared in this environment? Edison accumulated 2332 patents of his own, and was frequently involved in lawsuits over them. He might have been the richest man on earth had Microsoft and Google been around to take them off his hands a hundred years ago.

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As usual, this completely dysfunctional Congress can’t seem to find the fix for Social Security. The trust fund is now estimated to run out of money in 2033, three years earlier than previously anticipated. After that, taxes will cover only about 75 percent of promised benefits. It’s still not all that hard to fix it. Right now, Social Security taxes are paid on income only up to $110,100. Congress can raise that level, but of course that would mean asking high earners to pay more, something Republicans absolutely refuse to do. The other alternatives are to raise the retirement age and/or reduce benefits, choices Democrats oppose.  A combination of all three is probably the most politically palatable, but don’t look for this current bunch in Washington to arrive at anything remotely resembling a sane solution. Expect them to continue blaming each other, an outcome that’s a lot more likely than either side taking the heat for making even the modest adjustments needed to make the trust fund solvent again.

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It’s sad to see the space shuttle Discovery being flown to the Smithsonian. Not that the shuttle hadn’t outlived its usefulness, but there’s no replacement for it, meaning that manned space exploration, at least by Americans, is over for now and likely for a long time to come. The space program, for me and millions of other space geeks who grew up when Americans were orbiting the earth, landing on the moon, and making regular jaunts into space,  was the most exciting example of this nation’s ambition and confidence. Yes, it was fabulously expensive, and yes, NASA made some catastrophic errors, but we dared to spend and dared to send Americans into space despite the risks.. Nothing tells the tale of our declining ambitions and our increasing self-doubt as eloquently as the contraction of NASA’s mission.

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Another Titanic cartoon. Hey, we only get the centennial of the sinking once. The Ryan budget, now the official budget of the Republican Party and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, is certainly bold. It’s also radical. Over time, it would essentially limit the federal government’s spending to defense, Medicare and Social Security, and it would drastically  cut the latter two. It would further reduce tax rates, especially for the wealthy (big surprise), paying for the loss of revenue with the social safety net. The wingnuts who now dominate the Republican Party long for a fictional past where American flourished with the citizenry fending for themselves without government help, businesses and Wall Street enriched us all without any pesky regulation, and all was right with the world. The only problem with this scenario is that this country became a stable economic power only when government stepped in during the Great Depression and put in place the social safety net, regulated the financial sector and promoted a progressive tax code. After the Depression, the income inequality that created so many economic imbalances declined, the middle class grew, and  the nation boomed. Now we are back to pre-depression levels of income disparity, the deregulated banks that almost destroyed the economy are still at it, and the middle class has suffered an unprecedented loss of wealth. None of these facts, however, matters to the economic quacks of the Right, who persist in peddling the same prescription that almost killed us.

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Sunday, April 15 is the hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Why is it that this event still grips the imagination today. Other ships have sunk, with greater loss of life, over the years, but none seem to fascinate like the Titanic. Perhaps it’s the colossal name, or the fact that it was the maiden voyage of the latest and greatest in technological advances, loaded with celebrities. Or perhaps it’s the reminder of man’s hubris–that the ship that was deemed unsinkable was lost so easily and so soon–that makes that moment so long ago resonate still. A hundred years later, we had come to believe that the economic cycles had finally been tamed by the enlightened application of modern economic principles. Inflation was a thing of the past,  stocks were soaring to new highs, and markets could operate without risk. Then the iceberg appeared, too large and too close to steer around.

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