Frugal not the same as cheap

Not that my dad was ever a tightwad, but lots of things he bought cost the least. Clothes, infrequent restaurant meals and especially gasoline—he’d go out of his way to stop for cheap gas regardless of the station’s brand or status.

So on our trips I visited a lot of restrooms that were hardly nicer than the little shack out back.

Dining out always featured the blue plate special and never the steak or even a shake. And of course, as a youngster I never got to see one of his tax returns, which surely must have been quite imaginative.

Besides, aside from having a nice inheritance to thank him for, I agree with old Calvin Coolidge’s assertion that, "There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no independence so important, as living within your means."

Dad certainly did, and his frugality has affected my own adult behavior. I shop at Wal-Mart. I still buy cheap shoes, reminiscent of those thrifty Thom McAn’s of old. When possible, I fill up the tank down in Fredericksburg.

Frugality is also a major reason I have opposed measures to fight global warming. All of them seem terribly expensive, with not the least assurance of being the least bit effective. As noted climate skeptic Bjorn Lomborg has claimed, choosing the kind of future Al Gore advocates could cost, according to U.N. estimates, $553 trillion over this century—leaving in 2100 the average world inhabitant 30 percent poorer.

Frugality is why I also enjoy living in Virginia, which lately spends too freely, but at least still feels guilty about it. Our taxes are still low and we get a good bang for the buck, excepting of course our roads.

Closer to home, I hope the electric company can come up with a way to supply the needed extra power lines to assure we’ll continue to have very few blackouts here. If stringing their lines from new tall towers is the only way to keep my future electric bills from ballooning, so be it. I know the highlines are ungainly, but cheap is seldom pretty.

* Up in Washington, frugality be damned seems to be par for the course. I just wish they wouldn’t fritter away so many of our tax dollars. From representatives’ “earmarks” that fund pet projects to huge cost overruns such as in the Katrina recovery and the war in Iraq, spending is wildly out of control.

* And so glaringly ineffective. GAO recently reported that Homeland Security hasn’t even completed a risk assessment of our rail system, a preferred target of terrorists who have hit railroads in London and Madrid and India recently.

N And so dumb it’s beyond belief. Congress has just eased the repayment terms on students’ college loans and thus given our fat institutions of higher learning further reasons to keep hiking their outlandish tuition charges.

Come to think of it, government’s gross mismanagement may be one reason why billionaire Warren Buffett has already allocated much of his huge estate to favored charities. They surely will spend his money more prudently than the government, which otherwise would grab much of his wealth via estate taxes, but now won’t.

Now here come the Democrats and especially Jim Webb, our new senator so abundantly full of himself, wailing about how unfair it is that we aren’t all rich. If we were, don’t you see, then Congress could get lots more money through income taxes.

“The problem with political jokes is that they get elected.” –Will Rogers.

Webb carps about how a few rich CEOs make so much more than the rest of us. Make them all work for free? That wouldn’t cause even a wiggle in the gap between the rich and poor.

Speaking of which, Congress' Joint Economic Committee measures income inequality by something called the Gini Index.Today it’s the same as when Bush took office. (Hat tip to blogger Gerry Phelps.) But don’t take our word for it. E-mail me and I’ll send you a persuasive piece by hotshot analyst Alan Reynolds.

One final point: Frugal doesn’t mean cheap. Indeed, it’s claimed that conservative Americans give a lot more to charity and churches than liberals do.

We’re frugal, they’re cheap.

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Lollipop trumps gloom

Is the glass half full or half empty?

As an optimist about most things and especially the future of our Nation, I’d say it’s better than half full. Much better.

Right about now, though, I’ll bet somebody is already pecking out an email in response:--Don’t you know the turn-tail Democrats run Congress now?--What’s there to like about Iraq, or George Bush?--How bad must the Redskins get?--Been caught in I-95 traffic lately?

Well, since you put it that way, maybe my “much better” is a bit much.

Yet, as the tune “Put on a Happy Face”goes, we must remember some positive things. And we are still early in the new year. There are lots of possibilities.

Your correspondent has had on a happy personal face for some time now. Four stents inserted into my person in September have made a world of difference. I feel a lot better, and (ahem) weigh 25 pounds less.In this regard, my glass is filling as fast as I’m not.

And by the way, it’s time to take to heart the seasonal diet admonitions that flourish during every station break. Seriously, in honor of the Martin Luther King birthday, I recently sat through an Oprah show. She had on a diet guru, Bob Greene, author of “The Best Life Diet.” I went out and bought a copy, and in the process further enriched the Oprah enterprise and helped her educate those little girls in South Africa.

I’ll skip the part where he recommends organic foods. I don’t think they are any better than the rest, even if they cost much more for having been grown in cow doo-doo. (Incidentally, when I was a little kid, my mom taught me to say, not "number 2" like most kids back then, but "cah-cah." I wonder if she had read up on the word Macaca, also?)

Beyond his book and now to another subject rich with rhetorical fertilizer, consider our economy. Contrary to many politicians’ claims during the election campaign last fall, we haven’t gone to hell in a handbasket. Rather, as reflected recently in the stock market--which happily had its Santa Claus rally and then its “January-effect” gain to new alltime highs for the Dow-- the economy is perking along nicely. Just about everyone’s working and making pretty good money.

I know, it’s all been hugely unfair, according to a glowering Jim Webb, Virginia’s new smart-aleck senator (who's aparently taken facial scowling lessons from Jane Fonda). He ignores how much we’ve prospered since this brash guy graduated from college in the 1960s. As a Wall Street Journal piece noted, the percentage of home owners has increased from under 20 percent to 70 percent, stock ownership by Americans has jumped from 10 to 60 percent, and there are a lot more people now in the financial top tier (the upper middle class and above).

Yet, let us acknowledge that some politicians exist to whine. There was Barbara Boxer charging at a recent House “hearing” that she and Secretary of State Condi Rice had little stake in the outcome of the Iraq war, being without soldier-age offspring and all.

How cute and utterly beside the point. She did nonetheless bring to mind that the war, after all, has inconvenienced remarkably few of us. It’s a drop in the bucket compared with the Vietnam, Korean, or both world wars. How soon we forget what real sacrifice was. Seems like the less we have to lose the more we rave and rant.

Despite the loud chorus of the give-uppers on Iraq, and the many mistakes as acknowledged in the war’s conduct, we should prevail.

A good idea: “we might need to back away from the center of the conflict and let that fire burn, while keeping our troops in the north and perhaps on the southern border…and let conflict burn itself out," – Gen. Charles G. Boyd, in the National Interest.

Even better, we need to kill a whole bunch of the cut-throats and scare the rest of them silly and, yes, forget the niceties.

But enough! It’s time I honor the preferences of friend and neighbor Fran Milligan for the kind of stories I spin about more pleasant things, like my Yorkie pup Lollipop. I do have to admit that she (the pup) is getting old, nearing 10 years. But it seems only yesterday that I devoted a column here about her. Truth is, it was in January 2000, way before 9/11.

Regardless, Lollipop remains as serene as ever. Little does she know or care that other pooches of her breed are multiplying like crazy. After all, she’s fixed. More to the point, her fellow Yorkshire Terriers have become virtually the most popular purebred dogs in the USA, second only to those lumbering Labrador Retrievers.

Also, proving that fame can be fleeting, star dog Lassie and her Collie friends aren’t even among the 25 most popular breeds anymore.

So buck up, President Bush. Fleeting fame is the lot for many of God’s good creatures.