Some are saying that in “these times” of economic challenges and “inequality” the country cannot and will not tolerate a “rich” man as President. We of course never hear in these same analyses and arguments anything about our past presidents and whether the wealth of any one of them – or the wealth of the many presidents who were clearly rich - helps us predict today the suitability of Mr. Romney simply due to his being a wealthy man.

Recently the Atlantic Monthly (and the NY Times) published a study of the wealth of our first 44 U.S. Presidents. Interestingly, here are the five wealthiest presidents:

1. John F. Kennedy (estimated $1 billion; Democrat; Source: inherited largely from his father who was a bootlegger during Prohibition)
2. George Washington (estimated $525 million; no party; Source: wealthy Virginia farmer and land owner – including perhaps largest owner of slaves in the U.S. at the time)
3. Thomas Jefferson: $212 million; Democrat; Source: wealthy Virginia farmer, land owner and investor – large owner of slaves)
4. Theodore Roosevelt: $125 million; Progressive/Republican; Source: inherited from family)
5. Andrew Jackson: $119 million; Democrat; Source: wealthy Tennessee cotton farmer, land owner, large owner of slaves)

Many who are the most vocal critics of Mr. Romney’s wealth would surely put John F. Kennedy at or near the top of their list of greatest presidents. Everyone would put George Washington and Thomas Jefferson at or near the top of the same list. While the list has both Republicans and Democrats on it, interestingly Democrats certainly have been fond of – and more importantly very able to nominate as their candidate – men who were very, very wealthy.

So I don’t get it. Mr. Romney earned his wealth. There has been no shred of evidence that he achieved his wealth in any illegal manner (unlike President Kennedy’s father, for instance). History would seem to indicate that his being wealthy should not disqualify him for president and that his wealth would not neccessarily lead him to be a poor president if elected.

It is envy. Pure and simple. And the Democrat/Progressive machine in this country is doing all it can to leverage that unsavory human trait to its politcal advantage.

In the middle stages of President Obama’s  run for the Presidency in 2008, he said during a speech in Powder Springs, GA:

“Look, let me talk about the broader issue, this whole notion that I am shifting to the center. The people who say this apparently haven’t been listening to me. I am someone who is no doubt progressive.  I believe in universal health care and that government has a strong role to play in overseeing financial institutions and cracking down on abuses in bankruptcies and the like.”

No doubt, though, this is at least partly in response to his opponent for the nomination, his own Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, saying during a debate in 2007 that she is not a liberal but protesting that “I am a Progressive.” Speaking highly of Woodrow Wilson and others, she educates the audience on these founders and leaders of the Progressive cause in the early 20th century.

By their own reckoning, there are more than 80 declared members of congress, who are Progressives.

Just picking on Secretary Clinton’s debate words, the problem seems clear: she, like most modern Progressives doesn’t know the difference between Liberal in the classical sense (which is better equated with modern Libertarianism) and Modern Liberalism a.k.a. Socialism… Progressive is just a relabeling and is nothing more than marketing. If today’s Democrats were progressive, they should be progressing, moving towards something, but they’re only anti anything that is Capitalism, Libertarian or Conservative, seeing these as wrong-headed paths or ideologies.

President Obama, Secretary Clinton and other Democrat leaders of today were all educated in some of the most left-leaning of our country’s universities (Wellesley, Yale, Columbia and the like). Their knowledge of Wilson and other Progressive founders is bereft of historical context and full of anecdotes that merely cherry-pick facts and ideas to fit the left-leaning institutions and their teachers’ points of view.

They were unlikely to have learned about the basic disdain that Woodrow Wilson and other Progressives had for the U.S. constitution and our way of life. At liberal educational institutions they don’t bother teaching the context of history, why it’s useful to know the context and how to make it relevant to your thinking. They don’t prepare their students to defend our liberties against what Mark Levin calls “a movement to restore tyranny.” (Gotta love Levin’s willingness to choose provocative words).

In the WSJ today there were several articles about the turmoil in Europe and the so called Euro Zone. One was an editorial lamenting that when the EC states got together, there were two basic paths chosen by the member countries. Some, like Germany, used it as a time to clean up their fiscal house and ready themselves for a more open – and more competitive – Europe.

Indeed, in somewhat uniquely German fashion they prepared with a good level of cooperation between workers/unions and management in the private sector, showing it is possible for labor to both cooperate with – and benefit from – management of free and private enterprises. Today Germany, along with a few other EU countries such as Finland and the Netherlands are being called upon, due to their relative economic strength, to bail out the other member nations who chose a different path (Greece, Italy, Spain, perhaps even France). A second path that took advantage of the roaring times of the late 90′s and through the first 2/3′s of the first decade of the 21st century and ramped up already unsustainable spending, beyond their government revenues, on public sector provided social welfare largesse – financed with relatively low cost sovereign debt. We now know where those decisions on the second path have led. And yet the people and leaders of these second path countries clamor for more spending, digging the hole deeper, begging the “rich” member states to spread their wealth around to keep the lesser (wealthy, and less wise) states and their welfare states afloat.

Sounds all-too-familiar to the debate about to rage in 2012 when the election for President gets into full swing.

As mentioned above, our Progressive leaders today lack a true and textured understanding of history. As a small token to redress this, read this from “Notes on the State of Virginia”, in which Thomas Jefferson wrote:

But of all the views of this law, none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty. For this purpose the reading in the first stage, where they will receive their whole education, is proposed, as has been said, to be chiefly historical. History, by apprising them of the past, will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times, and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume: and knowing it, to defeat its views. In every Government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate, and improve. Every Government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree. This, indeed, is not all that is necessary, though it be essentially necessary. An amendment of our Constitution must here come in aid of the public education. The influence over Government must be shared among all the people. If every individual which composes their mass participates of the ultimate authority, the Government will be safe; because the corrupting the whole mass will exceed any private resources of wealth: and public ones cannot be provided but by levies on the people.”

First, to give this young woman a probably weak and standardized public school education.

Then to support her naive decision to major in History while taking on $22,000 in taxpayer supported student loans.

Finally, to pay for the extra police and public sanitation services required by the “Occupy <city or place name here>” groups squatting across the country in public places.

At the Washington “occupation,” NPR’s Claudio Sanchez  speaks with a young lady who is angry about her situation:

Sanchez: What did you get a degree in?

Legers: History, from Ohio University.

Sanchez: What do you do with a degree in history?

Legers: With a Bachelor’s? Nothing. I can’t do anything with this.

Sanchez: Kate is over $22,000 in debt, which is close to the average debt burden nationally for graduates with a four-year degree from a public institution. But are Wall Street, the banks and corporate greed the blame for your not having a job, I ask. Yes, says Kate, and lots more. The way she and [her friend] Greg see it, colleges are nothing more than training and recruiting grounds for the Wall Street banks and hedge funds that caused the financial crisis and are to blame for the growing inequality in the United States. And that, says Kate, is why she’s here demonstrating.

 

 

I could take these people seriously if they didn’t have such a laugh-out-loud list of demands posted on their website.

I have demands too:

- a law that requires “buy one get one free” at all bars selling beer

- free dark chocolate on Wednesday’s at Trader Joe’s

- free golf lessons for anyone who wants them, until you can regularly break 80 for 18 holes

As with most utopian-minded people – usually young, inexperienced, and easily influenced or just simply not well grounded in the real world – they fail to identify how their demands could be implemented (read # 11 for probably the single best howler on the list).

Proposed List Of Demands For Occupy Wall St Movement!

Posted 8 days ago by LloydJHart (Vineyard Haven, MA)

The real shame is the damage these job training programs do. They divert people’s attention from getting real jobs – often starting at the bottom like I did as a kid working sweeping floors or doing menial low paying tasks. Real jobs that teach you a work ethic – get to work on time, do a good job, be a good employee and get along with management and fellow employees – not fake government ones where the government as employer has all incentives necessary to just keep you coming back so they can count you as “employed” and justifying the tax dollars they got to employ you building butterfly habitats, or handing out flyers about food stamps at unemployment lines.

And frankly, the long decades of waste on these programs are exactly why we don’t want to spend anymore on them regardless of the President and his Progressive allies pleas and shameful parading of supposed beneficiaries of these progams at political and reelection pep rallies around the country. We are not racists. We are not the rich looking down on the poor. We are P.O.’d citizens saying we’ve had enough: “Don’t Tread On Me!”

The Job Training Fiasco #2 is our President. His type of training is typically called “on the job traning” – given to those without experience but expected to be able to pick up the requisite skills while doing the job itself. This might work fine in non-critical areas of employment (see: floor sweeping, above). The job of President of the United States is a wholly different thing. President Obama did not come into the office with any understanding, in practical terms, of how the private sector works. If he held any of these “start at the bottom” jobs that many in the private sector worked at as young people or in their first jobs after high school, that has never been made evident. And certainly since he went to college and law school, his entire adult career has been spent in the public sector with no executive leadership experience, little formal interaction with the private sector and even in his lone job where he would have regular contact with the overall economy – as a U.S. Senator – he didnt’ even serve his entire term and spent a majority of it running for President.

In summary: can you say “the blind leading the blind”?

I watched the Replublican debate last night (most of it at least) and was not satisfied fully with any of the candidates but I saw eight people who would each be better than our current President on the economy and fundamentally understanding the travesty of things like spending more tax dollars (and borrowing even more) on federal job training. I don’t want us to go from bad to mediocre (or to just as bad but in different ways) but even with the current choices, I am looking forward to a change that I can believe in for 2012.

What Job ‘Training’ Teaches? Bad Work Habits

A 1969 government study warned that teens in federal jobs
programs ‘regressed in their conception of what should reasonably be required in return for wages paid.’

By James Bovard

Last Thursday, President Obama proposed new federal jobs and job-training programs for youth and the long-term unemployed. The federal government has experimented with these programs for almost a half century. The record is one of failure and scandal.

In 1962, Congress passed the Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA) to provide training for workers who lost their jobs due to automation or other technological developments. Two years later, the General Accounting Office (GAO) discovered that any trainee in this program who held a job for a single day was counted as “permanently employed”—a statistical charade by the Department of Labor to camouflage its lack of results. A decade after MDTA’s inception, GAO reported that it was failing to teach valuable job skills or place trainees in private jobs and was marred by an “overriding concern with filling available slots for a particular program,” regardless of what trainees actually needed.

Congress responded in 1973 by enacting the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). The preface to the new law noted that “it has been impossible to develop rational priorities” in job training. So instead of setting priorities, CETA spent vastly more money, especially on job creation. Notorious examples reported in the press in those years included paying to build an artificial rock for rock climbers, providing nude sculpture classes (where, as the Pharos-Tribune of Logansport, Ind., explained, “aspiring artists pawed each others bodies to recognize that they had ‘both male and female characteristics’”), and conducting door-to-door food-stamp recruiting campaigns.

Between 1961 and 1980, the feds spent tens of billions on federal job-training and employment programs. To what effect? A 1979 Washington Post investigation concluded, “Incredibly, the government has kept no meaningful statistics on the effectiveness of these programs—making the past 15 years’ effort almost worthless in terms of learning what works.” CETA hirees were often assigned to do whatever benefited the government agency or nonprofit that put them on the payroll, with no concern for the trainees’ development. An Urban Institute study of the mid-1980s concluded that participation in CETA programs resulted in “significant earnings losses for young men of all races and no significant effects for young women.”

After CETA became a laughingstock, Congress replaced it in 1982 with the Job Training Partnership Act. JTPA spent lavishly—to expand an Indiana circus museum, teach Washington taxi drivers to smile, provide foreign junkets for state and local politicians, and bankroll business relocations. According to the Labor Department’s inspector general, young trainees were twice as likely to rely on food stamps after JTPA involvement than before since the “training” often included instructions on applying for an array of government benefits.

For years the Labor Department scorned the mandate in the 1982 legislation to speedily and thoroughly evaluate whether the rograms actually benefitted trainees. Finally, in 1993, it released a study that showed participation in JTPA “actually reduced the earnings of male out-of-school youths.” Young males enrolled in JTPA programs had 10% lower earnings than a control group that never participated.

The Workforce Investment Act (WIA) replaced JTPA in 1998. Congress required a thorough evaluation of the law’s impact on trainees by 2005. At last report, the Labor Department is promising it will be completed by 2015.

In his speech to Congress, Mr. Obama called for funding hundreds of thousands of summer jobs for teens, which he labeled “investing in low-income youth and adults.” Yet such programs have been blighting work ethics for decades.

The GAO warned in 1969 that many teens in federal summer jobs programs “regressed in their conception of what should reasonably be required in return for wages paid.” A decade later, it reported that most urban teens “were exposed to a worksite where good work habits were not learned or reinforced.” And in 1985, a National Academy of Science study found that government jobs and training programs isolated disadvantaged youth, thus making it harder for them to fit into the real job market.

More recently, Mr. Obama’s 2009 stimulus package expanded federally funded summer jobs. And so young men and women used puppets to greet aquarium visitors in Boston. Teens in Washington, D.C.’s Green Summer Jobs Corps maintained “school-yard butterfly habitats.” And summer workers in Florida, the Orlando Sentinel reported, “practiced firm handshakes to ensure that employers quickly understand their serious intent to work.”

Did any of this “investing” work? There’s no evidence it did.

Mr. Obama also wants a new federal initiative to be based on Georgia Work$, which the president describes as a program in which “people who collect unemployment insurance participate in temporary work as a way to build their skills while they look for a permanent job.” But Georgia Work$ has produced far more headlines than jobs—fewer than 200 this year, according to a recent article
in Politico.

Begun in 2003, Georgia Work$ gives people a chance to “train” at an employer for eight weeks. They receive no salary but continue collecting unemployment compensation and as well as a $240 weekly stipend from the state of Georgia. Last year, the stipend was increased to $600 a week and anyone who said they needed a job was allowed to participate. After costs exploded, Georgia Work$ was
scaled back early this year.

Mark Butler, Georgia’s current labor commissioner, stated that the program suffered from a “lack of oversight” before he took over in January. At last report, only 14% of trainees were hired by employers—a success rate akin to other unemployed Georgians who do not participate in the program.

Earlier this year, the Government Accountability Office reported that there were 47 different federal employment and training programs, costing taxpayers $18 billion a year. There is massive overlap and duplication, and few programs seriously evaluate their impact on trainees.

If federal job training efforts worked, Congress would not have thrown out the programs it has created every decade or so and enacted new ones. In reality, government training has always been driven by bureaucratic convenience, or politicians’ re-election considerations. There is no reason to believe the latest round of proposals will be any different.

Mr. Bovard, the author of “Attention Deficit Democracy” (Palgrave, 2006), is working on a memoir.

Of course, history has a habit of repeating itself. Too often because we do not learn from the past. So while we think things are bad now, all things in the world once seemed similarly to be going to hell in a handbasket. The year was 1980 and a little known Democrat had been elected President in a wave of voter “dissatisfaction” and a “hope for change”.

While specific events have changed, the chronology below seems an awful lot like history repeating itself in 2011 going into an election in 2012.

We recovered and prospered following the “malaise” of the Carter years. The same can happen again after 2012.

• August 31, 1979
  Soviet troops reported in Cuba
• October 17, 1979
  Department of Education established
• November 4, 1979
  American Embassy in Teheran overrun
• December 27, 1979
  Soviet invasion of Afghanistan begins
• January 4, 1980
  Address to the Nation on Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; sanctions announced
• February 20, 1980
  Decision to boycott 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow
• March 14, 1980
  Anti-inflation program announced
• April 11, 1980
  Decision to attempt hostage rescue mission
• April 21, 1980
  Vance resigns as Secretary of State in response to decision to attempt the rescue
• April 24, 1980
  Rescue Mission fails
• May 18, 1980
  Mount St. Helens erupts
• July 22, 1980
  Carter makes statement on his brother Billy Carter’s relations with Libya
• September 22, 1980
  Iraq invades Iran 
• November 4, 1980
  Reagan defeats Carter

Yippee. I have bought into, though, the logic that the deal is a move forward and about as good as can be expected at this time. And a far distance from where we were with the President’s first pass at addressing our fiscal challenges (see previous post on President Obama’s 2012 budget), and where the conventional wisdom was just a couple months ago.

The direction of the debate has shifted markedly toward how much less we should be spending and how much smaller the scope of the federal government should be. In May, at the Economic Club of New York, Speaker Boehner clearly called out what he described as “the arrogant habits of Washington”:

“[L]et me be as clear as I can be. Without significant spending cuts and reforms to reduce our debt, there will be no debt limit increase. And the cuts should be greater than the accompanying increase in debt authority the president is given. . . .

“And with the exception of tax hikes—which will destroy jobs—everything is on the table.”

There are too many speeches, press conferences, and campaign events disguised as town halls by the President since that date (and before) where he essentially rejected this and staked out a position far away from Mr. Boehner’s.

It is clear from this who took this first round. It is time now to press ahead and not let up — all the way to, and beyond the 2012 election — as whatever victory was eked out today, it is only a small step in the right direction.

Given that fact, we are to take seriously that President Obama is actually concerned about deficits and the debt? What turned him around?

Could it be that he didn’t understand the severity of the problem? If so, he’s incompetent.

Could it be that he realized that invoking yet another crisis such as sitting back and letting the debt ceiling and budget battle reach a boiling point would create opportunity for him to take advantage of it politically? If so, he’s no leader but merely a “politics as usual” politician that he claimed he was not in his campaign for President in 2008.

You choose which one. Either way, we as Americans are gonna lose.

It is not just that this is funny, but a more serious consideration unveils the false premise of “fairness” (or “balanced approach”, the focus group and poll tested phrase that is the favorite of President Obama) in the debt and budget debate. Fairness, of course is a subjective concept. Someone has to decide what is “fair”. The underlying debate that is actually going on is whether we should have the government — or anybody — decide what is fair for the rest of us. Liberty requires that no one decides this but each individual, for themselves. The Progressives, led by President Obama, reject this requirement.

The Tea Party and other libertarian-minded citizens are only strengthened and emboldened by this rejection.

Below is Scott Adam’s essay, which is currently the most popular essay on the Wall Street Journal Online.

The Saturday Essay    JANUARY 29, 2011

How to Tax the Rich

Try giving them perks and privileges (an extra vote?) in return, says ‘Dilbert’ creator Scott Adams.

Likely outcome: Your next home will be the box that your laser printer came in. I hope that you kept it.

Whenever I feel as if I’m on a path toward certain doom, which happens every time I pay attention to the news, I like to imagine that some lonely genius will come up with a clever solution to save the world. Imagination is a wonderful thing. I don’t have much control over the big realities, such as the economy, but I’m an expert at programming my own delusions. I make no apology for that. A well-crafted delusion can be a delicious guilty pleasure. And best of all, it’s totally free. As a public service, today I will teach you how to wrap yourself in a warm blanket of imagined solutions for the government’s fiscal dilemma.

To begin, assume that as the fiscal meltdown becomes more perilous, everyone will become more flexible and perhaps a bit more open-minded. That seems reasonable enough. A good crisis has a way of changing people. Now imagine that the world needs just one great idea to put things back on the right track. Great ideas have often changed history. It’s not hard to imagine it can happen again.

Try to imagine that the idea that saves the country is an entirely new one. It’s too much of a stretch to imagine that a stale idea would suddenly become acceptable. In fact, that’s the dividing line between imagination and insanity. Only crazy people imagine that bad ideas can suddenly become good if you keep trying them. So let’s assume that our imagined solution is a brand new idea. That feels less crazy and more optimistic. Another advantage is that no one has an entrenched view about an idea that has never been heard.

For those of you with healthy egos—and that would be every reader of The Wall Street Journal—you can make this fantasy extra delicious by imagining that you are the person who comes up with the idea that saves the world. I’ll show you how to imagine that. I think you’ll be surprised at how easy it is.

I spent some time working in the television industry, and I learned a technique that writers use. It’s called “the bad version.” When you feel that a plot solution exists, but you can’t yet imagine it, you describe instead a bad version that has no purpose other than stimulating the other writers to imagine a better version.

For example, if your character is stuck on an island, the bad version of his escape might involve monkeys crafting a helicopter out of palm fronds and coconuts. That story idea is obviously bad, but it might stimulate you to think in terms of other engineering solutions, or other monkey-related solutions. The first step in thinking of an idea that will work is to stop fixating on ideas that won’t. The bad version of an idea moves your mind to a new vantage point.

With that technique in mind, I will describe some bad versions of how society might go about the job of convincing the rich to accept higher taxes on themselves. But first I need to address the illusion of fairness.

We like to think that fairness is an objective condition. If you and a friend simultaneously find a dollar on the street, fairness suggests that you split it. But what if your friend is a billionaire and you are starving? Is it still fair to split the dollar? And what if you and your friend noticed the dollar at the same time but your friend was quicker to pick it up? Does that count for anything?

In reality, fairness is not so much about the actual distribution of loot as it is about the psychology of how you feel about it. That’s important to understand because the rich won’t give up their cash unless they feel they are getting something in return. And so far, saving the country doesn’t seem to be enough of a payoff.

If we accept that the rich can be taxed at a different rate than everyone else, we can also imagine that there could be other differences in how the rich are taxed. That’s the part we can tinker with, and that’s where the bad version comes in. In a minute, I’ll float some bad ideas about how the rich can feel good while the rest of society is rifling through their pockets.

I can think of five benefits that the country could offer to the rich in return for higher taxes: time, gratitude, incentives, shared pain and power.

Time. It’s useful to keep in mind how the rich are different. When you are poor, you are willing to trade your time to earn money. When you are rich, you trade your money to get more time. For example, the rich hire people to clean their homes, and they don’t waste time shopping for bargains. In business school I learned that when people have different preferences, you can usually find a way to engineer a deal.

Suppose we change the tax code so that in return for higher taxes on the rich, we figure out a way to give the rich some form of extra time. The bad version is that anyone who pays taxes at a rate above some set amount gets to use the car pool lane without a passenger. Or perhaps the rich are allowed to park in handicapped-only spaces.

Ridiculous, you cry! Remember, this is the bad version. And if the rich are only a tiny percentage of the population, they would have almost no impact on the traffic in car pool lanes or the availability of parking spaces for the handicapped. You wouldn’t even notice the difference.

You could imagine a host of ways the government could trade time for money. Suppose all government agencies had a mandate to handle the affairs of the rich before everyone else. You wouldn’t even notice that your wait at the Department of Motor Vehicles was 2% longer.

As a bonus, what happens to the economy when the people who are most skilled at making money suddenly have extra time? My bet is that they stimulate the economy by spending more or by earning more.

Gratitude. Imagine that the government arranges to provide genuine person-to-person gratitude to the rich in exchange for higher tax rates. Suppose (bad idea alert) the government makes it a condition that anyone applying for social services has to write a personal thank-you note to a nearby rich person who, according to a central database, hasn’t lately received one. Gratitude goes a long way. It’s easy to hate the generic overspending of the government. It’s harder to begrudge medical care to someone who thanks you personally. It’s a bad idea, I know. Don’t judge it. Just let it nudge your imagination to someplace better.

Incentives. Another approach, also a bad idea, might be to treat the rich more like venture capitalists than sources of free money. Suppose the tax code is redesigned so that the rich only pay taxes to fund social services, such as health care and social security. This gives the rich an incentive to find ways to reduce the need for those services, which would in turn keep their taxes under control. Perhaps you’d see an explosion of private investment in technologies that make it less expensive to provide health care. You might see rapid advances in bringing down the cost of housing for seniors.

Meanwhile, the middle class would be in charge of funding the military. That feels right. The country generally doesn’t go to war unless the middle-class majority is on board.

Shared Pain. Happiness is a relative thing. That’s how humans are wired. And we’re just screwed up enough to feel comfort when our pain is shared. So how can we make the overtaxed rich feel as if the rest of society is feeling a little extra pain?

I doubt that the rich will agree to higher taxes until some serious budget cutting is happening at the same time. That makes the sacrifice seem shared. The rich will feel unfairly singled out unless everyone is taking a hit. And budget cuts make the government seem better managed. That matters.

The bad idea here is to change the debate from arguing about which programs and how much to cut, and instead to do what the private sector has been doing for decades: Pull a random yet round number out of your ear, let’s say a 10% cut, just for argument’s sake, and apply it across the board. No exceptions. Everything from the military to welfare to federal pensions to government salaries would take the same hit. Managers in the private sector have been handling budget cuts this way for years. They know that their subordinates are all professional liars, so there is no reliable information for making cuts in a more reasoned way. They also know that any project can get by with 10% less money if there is no alternative.

Power. Everyone loves power. I’m guessing that the rich like it more than most people, on average. Another bad idea is to give the rich two votes apiece in any election. That’s double the power of other citizens. But don’t worry that it will distort election results. There aren’t that many rich people, and they are somewhat divided in their opinions, just like the rest of the world. And realistically, is the candidate who gets 51% of the vote always better than the one who gets only 49%? That’s a risk I’ll take.

I think I’ve given you enough bad ideas to prime your imagination. Now it’s your turn. If you think that solving the nation’s fiscal problems is the job of elected officials, you have to ask yourself how that’s working so far. The solution, if it exists, won’t be anything that looks like normal business. The rich have the money, and they aren’t going to give it up for nothing. I know because I am one, and yes, we do hold meetings.

The way our political system is designed, politicians are not free to float bad ideas. Doing so is a sure way to lose an election. Politicians aren’t even free to support good ideas if they are too far from the norm. But as citizens, we’re free to speculate all we want. And if some new and better idea gains popularity at the grassroots level, our elected leaders would then be able to embrace it. In other words, it’s literally your job to fix the budget problem because your government isn’t equipped to handle it. The ideas I’ve mentioned here are bad by design. But if a few million people start brainstorming their own ideas for solving the debt problem, someone might come up with a winner. And if that idea gains popular support on the Internet, it frees politicians to consider it. I have no problem imagining that something along those lines can happen, and the thought feels delightful.

He said that by not raising taxes on the so-called wealthy: “I’m able to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income that I don’t need.”

By barely veiled implication, he’s making a judgment that others who are wealthy like him also don’t need the additional income.

This is shocking. Think about what he’s saying:

- I know what the level of income is that citizens of the United States need.

- If I deem that some people are making more than they need, I have a right – as the leader of a federal government that has enforcement powers up to the point of arrest and physical incarceration – to forcibly take what I have deemed as excessive.

I have asked my Progressive friends this before and I’ll ask here of them – or anyone else that would like to comment and explain for me because I’d really, really like to know: what is the difference between the President’s public remarks noted above and this famous quote:

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!“

From  Critique of the Gotha Program by Karl Marx, developer of Marxism