You're not accounting for inflation. Also, your own source gives a 1990 budget of 1.2 trillion, not 1.1 (1.1 was for '88 and '89). Depending on how you calculate the value of the dollar over time, a dollar in 1990 is worth between $1.57 and $2.60 now, so that means to pay for 1990 equivalent spending, the gov't would require 1.884-3.12 trillion dollars in revenues to avoid a deficit (with the revenue figures you provide, we'd run a deficit of at least 0.7 trillion, or as much as 2 trillion; your source claims the 2012 deficit is 1.3 trillion.

Of course, this also assumes that all costs remain the same. We have a lot more people retired and retiring in the near future than we did in 1990, thanks to the baby boomers. Social security and Medicare (even without the post-1990 expansions to Medicare) are a huge part of the budget; the latter has significantly outpaced inflation. The only way to bring them back to 1990 era spending would be to dramatically cut benefits and/or reduce eligibility (e.g. by raising the eligibility age, refusing to cover specific treatments, etc.)

In summary:

1. If your only error was the spending from 1990, then there would be a deficit (albeit a small one)
2. Paying attention to inflation, dropping the income tax and magically rolling back the government 22 years would leave us with a deficit in roughly the same range as we have to day (0.7-2 trillion in your proposed scenario, 1.3 trillion being the actual figure)
3. And lastly, we address magical thinking. Unless you're suggesting we move to single payer, not-for-profit health care or apply strict rationing, we can't undo 22 years of increasing medical costs (even in those scenarios, I doubt we could undo all of it). And we can't magically undo the post-WWII population bulge at all. So returning to 1990 era spending would also mean turning Social Security into a program that provides no security at all, cutting Medicare to the bone, or raising the minimum retirement age into the 70s.

Yes, that all sounds like a perfectly rational solution that is eminently possible to sell to the American people...

Well, my point was that one socket could power multiple individual LEDs in a single "bulb." Not installing one LED per socket, but several LEDs powered off a single socket using a frame of roughly the same size as a regular bulb. Others have pointed out that they already do this to reach the power levels available now, and that it doesn't scale well in complexity and cost.

Why must a single LED provide all the light? Couldn't an array of, say, four LEDs, each equivalent to a 25W incandescent and using mirrors and/or lenses to even out the light distribution, get the same efficiency and substitute for a 100W bulb? Am I missing something obvious?

Not really. Incandescents (particularly ceiling mounted) don't distribute their heat well, so you rarely get a one-for-one watt exchange. And they heat the house in roughly the same way the emergency heat on a heat pump does; in a wildly inefficient and costly way. In North Dakota, you're probably not using a heat pump (which is at least as efficient as the incandescent at heating, but not much more efficient in truly frigid climates), and would probably be better off (at least monetarily) with CFL/LEDs and a heating oil/natural gas furnace working a little harder.

I don't know. Is your opponent promising to increase the size of the pipe?

So, something like this?

As others have noted, you're forgetting the cost to power the bulb. Standard incandescent lasts 1000 hours, the LEDs should last 10K (some claim 20K, but we'll go with the lower figure). So for a 100W equivalent, you buy 10 incandescents for 20 cents a piece, or $2. Let's say the LED costs $60.

Next up is the cost of power. Over 10K hours, the incandescents consume 100W * 10K hrs = 1Mwh (1000 Kwh). The LED consumes 23W * 10K hrs = 230 Kwh. At 10 cents per Kwh (I pay about 12 cents; prices in the U.S. range from 8-25 cents), that's $100 to power the incandescents. And $23 to power the LED.

• LED total cost = $60 to buy + $23 to power = $83 over total lifespan
• Incandescent total cost = $2 to buy + $100 to power = $102 over total lifespan (plus whatever cost you assign to the hassle of changing bulbs 10x as often)

That said, a fluorescent would get roughly the same power cost as the LED, and cost less than a tenth what the LED costs up front. But they're not well-suited to dimmable fixtures, they require special disposal, and they frequently have a delay before they reach full brightness (and some claim they get less "natural" light). If none of that bothers you, then go with fluorescents. But if it does, then your fallback option would be the LED, which is cheaper over its lifespan than even 20 cent incandescents.

If you RTFA, it points out:

1. This cow was never going to be sold for meat.
2. This was a single point case of BSE; it wasn't the result of a transmission vector like contaminated feed, it just arose naturally (like prion diseases do in most mammals on rare occasions)

Ever since we stopped feeding ground up cow parts to other cows, the rate of BSE has dropped to near zero; it's only when cow engage in cannibalism that the disease spreads to enough cattle to produce a measurable risk to any human.

Republican party platform: Life begins at conception and ends at birth.

Per Wikipedia, it was never green, and it may not have been actually called green:

The name Greenland comes from the early Scandinavian settlers. In the Icelandic sagas, it is said that Norwegian-born Erik the Red was exiled from Iceland for murder. He, along with his extended family and thralls, set out in ships to find a land rumoured to lie to the northwest. After settling there, he named the land Grønland ("Greenland"), supposedly in the hope that the pleasant name would attract settlers.

Greenland was also called Gruntland (English: "Ground land") on early maps. Whether green is an erroneous transcription of grunt ("ground"), which refers to shallow bays, or vice versa, is not known.

Your premise is wrong. Care to retract?

And because they're guilty of one type of bad act, they're guilty of all types of bad acts? Like when I shoplifted last week, got caught, and am now on death row for murder, because being guilty of shoplifting makes me guilty of all other crimes.

Let me know when you find the article that says MS sold access to their phones and operating systems to open up a lucrative market. Anti-trust is bad, but it's not remotely related to selling backdoors for market access.

At a certain point, and quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference. As long as a cop is required to tail someone, a surveillance society would require hiring everyone into the police force. By enabling cheap, unlimited surveillance, you've effectively allowed the police force to go on an infinite number of fishing expeditions.

Or block the particular js files that put up the blocking image.

Stallman wants people to provide software in the way he and his flock want it provided. How people use it is irrelevant. His point is that in an open ecosystem, people can choose to use software however they like, whether it's by connecting to monolithic vertically integrated software stacks or by striking out on their own. Apple didn't provide the choice; if you wanted Apple UI, you had to buy into Apple's whole product line, because you had no other options, particularly on their mobile devices.