My laugh of the morning definitely comes from
Matthew Yglesias, who writes about the Republicans' bizarre "April Fool’s Budget" released yesterday. Riffing off of
Josh Marshall's snarky comment that "GOP scoring appears to have us on track for the government owning about 90% of the economy in the early-mid-22nd second, which if I remember is about the time period of the invention of the warp drive," Yglesias writes:
Fortunately, this is my area of expertise. Thus, we can say conclusively that Marshall has this wrong. According to the Gene Roddenberry Budget Office, Zephram Cochrane is projected to develop warp drive in the mid-21st century and the Phoenix will become the first manned human spacecraft to travel faster than the speed of light on April 5, 2063. Indeed, it’s probably no coincidence that this is about when Ryan stops doing Obama projections altogether because First Contact with the Vulcans creates a lot of hard-to-project immigration issues.
What does happen in the mid-to-late 22nd century is the rise of the New World Economy and the elimination of money from the Earth economy, presumably as part of the roughly-contemporaneous formation of the United Federation of Planets.
In short, I think the appropriate response to the proposed GOP budget is to get on your communicator and order Scotty to "Beam me up, there's no intelligent life in the House Republican caucus!" :)
