“I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” ~ Groucho Marx Don’t you sometimes wish this were true with our elected officials? As in: ‘I refuse to run for any Congress that would have me as a Congressman/Senator!’ Groucho’s sentiment could apply to hundreds of candidates each and every year it seems. […]
We already have ‘free’ health insurance in America. For seniors, that is. With the elections right around the corner, it is a good time to evaluate whether anyone you vote for understands anything about solving the humongous problems facing us as a nation … And no, they do not include witchcraft, calling a female gubernatorial candidate […]
What Comes First…‘The Chicken’ of Consumer Demand or ‘The Egg’ of Job Creation? We have had some pretty interesting exchanges with people on both sides of the political philosophical spectrum since finding jobs for the nearly 20 million unemployed, under-employed or just plain ‘gave up looking for employment’ Americans is on everyone’s minds right now. […]
“Waiting for Superman” is a new documentary about public education in America that is already stimulating a lot of discussion about how to ‘fix’ the ailing education system. There’s no need to wait. It is already being fixed in hundreds, if not thousands of schools around the nation, such as the Durham Nativity School in […]
‘Would John Maynard Keynes himself even agree with all this perpetual deficit-spending that has been going on for the past 40 years in America?’ After all, it was his revolutionary economic ideas that America turned to in the 1930’s to try to get out of the Great Depression. Since his signature masterpiece, ‘The General Theory […]
On this Labor Day weekend, is there anything government can really do to “create” new jobs? “Go on a 4-year recess!” many people are saying right about now. At least that would be a four-year period that business people could make plans and know for sure that nothing would change, so they could make money […]
You know, sometimes the best answer is also the simplest answer. William of Ockham (Occam) was a 14th century English philosopher who came up with the ‘crazy’ notion that perhaps the simplest answer is the best one and it became known, oddly enough, as ‘Occam’s Razor’. Same with the idea that perhaps the United States […]
One thing we do know about economics and the effects on the federal budget: ‘If people ain’t working, they ain’t paying taxes! Income, corporate, payroll, excise, capital gains…nothing, nada, zippo!’ Any convoluted scheme to raise taxes on this group or another is doomed to abysmal failure if people are not able to find a job […]
“But with respect to future debt; would it not be wise and just for that nation to declare in the constitution they are forming that neither the legislature, nor the nation itself can validly contract more debt, than they may pay within their own age, or within the term of 19 years?” – Thomas Jefferson, […]
Here’s what happened the last time there was a Social Security ‘crisis’ in 1983, when incoming payroll tax receipts were just about to go below the amount of expected benefit payments going out: * Alan Greenspan was appointed to chair an august national commission to ‘Save Social Security!’. * Your payroll taxes went up. Way […]
