I used to think I was a reasonably cool guy. Now that I’ve taken an astounding 20 math classes since I started college, though, it’s all been going downhill. The Tolstoy and Marquez that I used to have on my bookshelf are replaced by (seriously) “Mathematical Programming with Equilibrium Constraints” and “Optimal Control Theory: An Introduction”.

But yesterday was truly the coup de grace. I come home to a call from a friend of mine from back in high school. “Hey Kev,” he says, “have you seen King of Kong yet? You have to watch it.”

Now, King of Kong is a hilarious documentary about this middle school science teacher who tries to break Billy Mitchell’s record on the arcade game Donkey Kong. We’ve actually met Billy a few times - he is ridiculous. Back in the early 80s, when he was a teenager, he set the record in a ton of arcade games like Pac-Man, and was featured on TV and in magazines like Life. Incredibly, he actually had groupies. He now sells his brand of hot sauce, but still comes to famous arcades now and again to show off his skills, never showing up in anything but a full suit, long hair, a beard and a patriotic tie.

(Subnote: A few years back, I actually knew quite a few people involved in the early days of videogames. A few of us went to an event in San Jose maybe three years ago, and I was checking out the original Pong arcade game that they had on display. By “original”, I mean, actually the very first cabinet built by the guys who went on to found Atari. While I was there, an older guy with a big white beard comes over and wants to know if I want to play a game. Holy moly, it’s Al Alcorn, founder of Atari! I got up 9-7 on him (Pong goes to 11) when he started cheating by taking advantage of a glitch he knew about that made the ball disappear. He won 11-9! The rat!)

Kev vs. AlToday a copy of King of Kong arrived in the mail and I threw it in the DVD player. About 5 minutes in, hey!, that’s us! Yep, two friends and I are watching Mitchell play an arcade game, and the shot made the movie.

I’m pretty sure that there’s no hope of ever being cool again once you’ve appeared in the Donkey Kong documentary, though. Screenshot to follow.

So it’s my least favorite time of the year. No, not “How did my beloved Patriots, led by man among men Tom Brady, manage to lose to the chump Giants with 30 seconds left?” OK, it might be that. But it’s also the time of year where, right after paying my taxes, the Federal Government releases their annual budget where I find out how much of their money they’re wasting again.

You often here, “But Kev, without government, we’d be savages in a jungle! Don’t you like courts and roads?” Well, yeah, I do. But first, the most useful things tend to be provided at the local or state level (ah, Principle of Subsidiarity, you are my truest friend). Let’s take a gander at the Federal Budget and see if we can do better.

The budget this year is 3 trillion dollars. In inflation-adjusted dollars, our 1996 budget was 2.2 trillion dollars. Now population has grown since then, but not nearly enough to make up for the substantial growth in government. So I’m fairly convinced that, if Seniors weren’t Starving on the Streets, and Orphans weren’t Forced to Eat Garbage, back then, they won’t be now if we trim the budget a bit.

Of that 3 trillion, almost 300bn goes to debt interest, which we wouldn’t have to pay if earlier generations hadn’t shafted us with the bill. We could pay this off within a generation, as many other countries have done. You should note that, as the deficit grows, the current older generation is sticking our generation with the bill. Hey, if you’re elderly, deficit spending is a credit card you never have to pay off!

The military will suck up almost 800bn next year. I’m fine with a military only four times as strong as China’s, who are next in military spending, so let’s spend 200bn instead of 800bn, and use much of this money to train a true National Guard (i.e., civilians trained to defend the homeland) rather than a backup foreign war fighting base. This change could come over 20 years. You might say, “But Kevin, we barely have enough troops and funds to fight two wars halfway around the world, simultaneously, while also basing over 200,000 troops in places like Japan and the UK, and building completely redundant massive new ships and airplanes.” And I say, exactly.

Various forms of redistribution are, incredibly, 1.5 trn, or half the budget; I’m just counting SocSec, Medicare, Medicaid, and Dept. of Labor outlays like unemployment and welfare (though I’m not including things like Dept. of Housing grants, etc.). I’m more than glad to means test that which is not already means tested, phasing out the current system slowly alongside a phaseout of payroll taxes. Let’s say we cut half of this with means testing, sometime over the next 20 years. (Aside: you might say, as do many Seniors, that the old folks today have paid in their money, so they should get it out. Not true. Your average retiree today gets something like 3 times as much money out of SS as he or she put in. All joking aside, SS and Medicare are funded as a pyramid scheme. It’s absurd.)

Aside from debt, cash redistribution, and the military, the entire federal budget is only 3% of GDP, or 440bn - that’s highways, space shuttles, diplomats, NIH, the Fed, and on and on. Of that, 50bn are Veteran’s Benefits that we’re obligated to provide. Of the other 390bn, let’s cut out a bit of the chaff here and there - we have 17 intelligence agencies and 5 federal bank regulators, for instance - to knock a conservative 10% out of this piece of the budget.

With just a few changes, the federal budget falls from 3 trn to 1.35trn. That is, we could entirely get rid of payroll taxes, and reduce income taxes by a third, and still balance the budget; you’ll note that the current government is 10% over budget even with that money. If you added in a Pigouvian tax on carbon, you would raise enough money to internalize the pollution problem and allow income taxes to be halved.

I’m wholly in favor of government helping the unlucky. I’m wholly in favor of public roads. I even think (unlike many libertarians) that most real government spending on things like NIH, NASA, overseas aid, etc. are worthwhile things that would be difficult to do without government. What I’m not in favor of is a government that serves as a mechanism to shuffle around money from the politically unconnected to the politically connected.

And yet the politicians act like they’re taking a brave stand when they oppose a million dollars in earmark spending somewhere. Get real. Stop wasting our money.

NOW I’M CERTAINLY NOT the type of guy who is rarely hurt - in the last 10 years, I’ve sprained an ankle seven times (once very severely - 12 weeks to recover!), broken my ankle once, pulled both hip flexors, pulled my right hamstring, suffered many calf spasms, tore my rotator cuff and sprained a toe. And took a pop to the face leaving me with a brutal black eye for good measure.On the other hand, I’ve used very little in the way of medical services: I wore an aircast and boot for my broken ankle, wore a number of ace bandages, took an ibuprofen one night for an ankle, rubbed a local anesthetic on my gums when I got my wisdom teeth out, and drank a saltwater packet when I got hit with traveler’s sickness. All told, I made two trips to the hospital for x-rays, one trip to a clinic overseas, and otherwise just standard physicals. No Advils, no Robotussins, no Nyquil, none of that.

I’ve never really believed in painkillers - medicine is incredibly useful in treating diseases your body can’t fight on its own, but pain is different. I don’t understand the people who pop a pill every time they have a headache. How do they ever expect to improve their tolerance for pain?

So you can imagine I was a bit disheartened when I got up Thursday with enough pain in my right foot that I walked with a limp/gangsta lean (call it what you will) at work all day. I don’t remember rolling on that ankle or twisting it or anything of that sort. By Friday, I physically could not put any weight on the front of my right foot, and was having a lot of trouble even walking. The pain was local to somewhere between the ankle and the fifth (outside) metatarsal. This is particularly worrying because, as anyone who follows sports knows, stress fractures on the fifth metatarsal are pretty common, can come on without any trigger, and often require surgery that puts you out of commission for 6-8 weeks.

I gave up and made a quick appointment to a local podiatrist who worked as the team doctor for a local college basketball team. I always like the athlete doctors the best - they won’t tell you things like “oh, and don’t do anything fun for the next month.” We got the X-rays and luckily nothing was broken. It turned out I’d sprained one of the ligaments between the cuboid and the third cuneiform bone, but since those bones move around so little, I hadn’t noticed until a few days after it happened.

“But, Doc, I have a soccer game tomorrow.”

No worries, he says; a quick jaunt to the cabinet for a needle filled with steroids (cortisone, in this case), and ten minutes later, I couldn’t feel the pain. The next day, I played a full soccer game at 90%. To go from unable to walk to near full strength in a half day? Maybe I shouldn’t put down modern medicine so much.

Then again, the anti-inflammatories the Doc gave me are still sitting unopened on my kitchen counter.  Only a wuss needs those, right?