The big faux debate in Washington these days is whether or not the federal debt limit should be raised. Congress needs to pass a new law each time the government reaches its previous limit on how much money it can borrow. Over the past 70 years, they have raised it more than once a year on average.

In other words, the debt limit is not a limit at all. It’s just a formality. It’s as if you set yourself a goal to have a balance of less than $3,000 on your credit card bills. Then, after reaching $3,000, you adjust your goal to $3,500, then $4,000, and so on. You will eventually reach the credit card’s externally imposed limit. But what’s the external limit on America’s debt capacity?

The federal government has 2 million employees. Across all states, there are 4 million more state government employees and 11 million more local government employees. (Connecticut has 57,117 state government employees and 108,972 local government employees.) That means there is a grand total of 17 million people whose wages are paid by our taxes.

In the meantime, unemployment is now a big problem, largely yet ironically due to the regulations, laws, and management of these 17 million people in grinding our economy to a halt. There are about 9 million people collecting unemployment checks right now, with about half of those from temporary emergency measures and half on more conventional unemployment. There are another 6 million or so who are unemployed but not receiving any money from the government.

In 1978, researcher Thomas J. Coates published a cute, three-page case study on a 30-year-old college senior. Now, this is before our time, and perhaps college seniors were older back then, or perhaps this was just one particular guy. I don’t know. But this guy had been overweight, by 15 to 40 percent, for his entire life. Three years prior to Coates’ study, he had started to straighten up. He went from 225 pounds to 145 and was then 10-percent underweight.

At the time of the research, the guy was taking finals and stressing out. (Perhaps he was worried about next year being a 31-year-old college senior.) He would often wake up and drink some water or diet soda from the fridge.

“One night,” the paper ominously observes, “he noticed some pastry in the refrigerator and ate it.”

The recent leaking of correspondence between the U.S. Department of State and its missions abroad shows that we seem to treat our diplomats as spies, encouraging them to root around and report the secrets they find. One can imagine other countries do the same or even more; diplomacy and espionage have gone hand-in-hand for centuries.

Henry Kissinger defined diplomacy in many ways but perhaps most usefully as “the art of relating states to each other by agreement rather than by the exercise of force.” Sounds reasonable, right?

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett wrote a “thank you” note to “Uncle Sam” in the Nov. 16 issue of The New York Times, sincerely defending the $700 billion “bailout” of the economy passed in September 2008. This is a response.

My dearest nephew Warren,

Thank you for your kind note. I especially appreciate your delivery method. Most people use my postal service to send me mail, but that never works. My employees just throw all that stuff in with the letters to Santa.

I like that you put your letter to me in The New York Times. It is one of my favorites. I am even thinking of nationalizing it if need be. After all, we can’t sully quality journalism with such crass concerns as profit. And who better to maintain standards of truth and accuracy than me?

If you are old and wealthy and want to pass as much on to your kids as you can, you better kick the bucket this year. If you pass away after Dec. 31, the government will seize more than half of your estate as the temporary death tax exemption expires.

This enormous incentive could cause people to die earlier in ways as direct and conscious as a planned suicide or as subtle and subconscious as a skipped medication. How many people? We don’t know. But tax laws are designed to change people’s behaviors and at least some people respond to some incentives some of the time. So, some people will die earlier than they otherwise would, solely because of taxes.

Imagine a world without any privacy whatsoever. Some military nanotechnology gone wrong releases trillions of tiny particle-sized recorders and rebroadcasters. These little guys are so small they can penetrate walls and clothing and are invisible even up to enormous magnification. And all they do is record a little snippet of all the wavelengths in their immediate vicinity — audio, video, infrared, ultraviolet, etc.— and rebroadcast them. The rebroadcasts get bounced around just like the chunks of data that send email all over the world. There is no way to shut them down or stop them. Perhaps they even spawn new versions of themselves.

Albert Einstein was one of the smartest scientists ever. But when it came time for him to convince others of his socialist views, he essentially rejected all of the foundations of science.

Glenn Beck is a polarizing person among libertarians. Some laud him for being one of the few voices on television to criticize both Democrats and Republicans as being equally complicit in growing the size of government and pointing out that there is no significant difference between them. Others view him as a phony usurper of the freedom movement.

This raises even more interesting questions than just about Beck himself: what makes a person a phony? At what point can a person with formerly statist views be considered to have had an authentic change of heart?

The funny thing is that those who think he is a true libertarian tend to watch him; those that think he is a fake do not. I was one of those who did not, and it caused a lot of debate with those who did. Why not watch him? He is interesting, he raises good questions, and so on.

President Barack Obama announced this week the largest arms deal in American history, selling $60 billion of military equipment to Saudi Arabia. Apparently a primary consideration in this deal was that an estimated 75,000 jobs would be created.

Job creation seems to be a common goal for both government parties. Politicians seem to all be job creationists. Biological creationists believe a single creator made all the variety of life we see today. Job creationists believe a single entity created all the variety of jobs we see today.