Week of October 27, 2008

BY Nov. 4, more than $5 billion will have been spent trying to persuade voters to cast their presidential and congressional ballots one way or another. Despite all the money and the news media hysteria, and even with record numbers of Americans heading to the polls, the United States won’t even come close to the top nations in the world for voter turnout. We will be well behind — to name just a few — Iceland, Sweden and New Zealand.



What do those countries, among many others, have in common? Their citizens all vote on a weekend day. But in the United States, for more than 150 years, we’ve voted on Tuesday. Why? It’s not in the Constitution. It isn’t to avoid holidays. And it’s not because people hate Mondays.



The reason we vote on Tuesday makes perfect sense — at least it did in 1845.



To understand the decision Congress made that year, let’s imagine ourselves as members of early agrarian American society. Saturday was for farming, Sunday was the Lord’s day, Monday was required for travel to the county seat where the polling places were, Tuesday you voted, Wednesday you returned home, and Thursday it was back to work.

This past weekend the New York Times blogged about voting properly in the upcoming election. Except the upcoming election they were referring to was William Howard Taft vs. William Jennings Bryan. The post was from October 25, 1908. And so it goes on the Times new blog, TimesTraveler. Articles from 100 years ago are posted on the corresponding day, and readers get a glimpse of what was newsworthy a century ago.

We did not write this letter to scare you.[But] in the 5,769 years of our people, there has never been a more important time for us to take pro-active measures in order to stop a second Holocaust. Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake. Let's not make a similar one this year.

1928. When out-of-control federal spending runs smack into sluggish tax revenues, red ink splashes all over Washington. In September, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the deficit this year would be $407 billion, a sum that reflected the $168 billion economic stimulus package approved by President Bush in February and the estimated $188billion spent for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2008. Add to that the $700 billion financial bailout package passed in October, plus another economic stimulus package likely to take shape in the coming months that could cost as much as $175 billion, and you're talking about an all-inclusive fiscal 2008 deficit exceeding $1 trillion.