"We want a plan to make America great again."

I agree completely with what Thomas Friedman, in the NY Times, Nov. 28, 2010, OpEd.  " . . most Americans don’t want a plan for deficit reduction. The Tea Party’s vision is narrow and uninspired. Americans want a plan to make America great again . ."


I disagree with his plan for getting there however.  He goes back to the same old saw, tax reductions and reduced government spending.  NO.  Bill Gates and his father on 60 minutes recently made the case for more taxes on the wealthy.  So did David Stockman, the Director of Management and Budget under President Reagan--in fact he wants tax increases across the board. Warren Buffet has many times made it clear that he thinks the wealthy should pay their fair share which they are not now doing. Those who have benefited the most from our form of system have the greatest obligation to it.


To make America great again, we need to get the deficit under control, demonstrate leadership in all matters, including foreign policy, civil rights, environment, energy consumption, oil independence, technical innovation and probably most importantly grow value added businesses. In short, to get our can-do attitude back.  Wall Street does not add value, it is necessary just as our water pipes are, but it does not alone make a sustainable economy. 


To get the deficit under control, we need to increase income to the Federal treasury - that is tax revenue. Spending reduction can be counter productive as it can reduce income to the Federal treasury so that has to be handled with expertise, competence and responsibility--capabilities our congress does not appear to have much of.


Revenue to the treasury comes from growth of the economy, and a more progressive tax policy. This includes revising the tax code to reduce the loop holes so that as Warren Buffet points out his secretary won't pay more tax than he does.  

Some Favorite Quotations

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."
    --George Bernard Shaw (1856-1930)

"Old age is the only disease you don't look forward to being cured of."
   --From the movie Citizen Kane, 1941

"We are what we pretend to be."
  --Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality."
  --T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand."
  --Josh Billings (1818-1885)

"Truth is more of a stranger than fiction."
  --Mark Twain (1835-1910)

"It's not what we don't know that hurts, it's what we know that ain't so."
  --Will Rogers (1879-1935)

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth ins't."
  --Mark Twain (1935-1910)

"Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
  --Mark Twain (1935-1910)

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."
  --Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

These quotations are from Robert Byrne's, "The 2548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said."

We must change our direction if our nation is to continue as we know it.

The policies followed during the past, starting with Ronald Reagan, are what led to our current situation. We have a self serving concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a small, less than 1%, of the population. Our revolution was to get away from that very concentration of power and our democratic system was designed to prevent its return. The powerful have found a way to subvert that system.  If we are to get back to a well balanced society and economy we must change the policies to ones that will empower more of the middle class.

Thomas Jefferson wrote to George Logan, Nov. 12, 1816:  "I hope we shall . . crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and to bid defiance to the laws of their country."


Hacker and Pierson in their book, "Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class," explain that the imbalance of power came about as a result of improved organization of the Republicans in the 70's at a time when the Democrats had become complacent. The organization focused on Republican becoming the party for powerful and wealthy. That focus brought money to the party in amounts many times greater than what the Democrats had to work with.

They show that the share of national income held by the richest 1% went from 8% of income in 1976 to 24% in 2007. Also that the U.S. in 2000 had the highest concentration of income in the top 1% of the 12 richest nations.  At the same time, the marginal tax rate for the top 1% income group went from 45% in 1976 to 31% in 2004. The marginal rate for the top .01% income group went from 70% in 1976 to 33% in 2004 (approximate numbers).

Our Disfunctional Congress--Like the Stanford Prision Experiment?

If there is anything that Americans agree on, it is that our Congress is dysfunctional. Senator McConnell, after the mid term elections, said that his agenda is to be sure that Obama does not remain President past 2011.  I thought his agenda was to fulfill the role of Senator as well stated in the Oath of Office that he took:   

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

The demeanor, body language, and tone McConnell showed when he stated his agenda told me that he was driven by emotions approaching sadism and hatred.  He seemed to not have any concern for, or awareness of, the consequences of Senate actions regards our economy, employment, respect for our nation by other nations or overall national strength. 


This dysfunction in our Congress brings to mind the phenomena demonstrated by the well known Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971  . In this experiment two groups of students were set up in a closed environment where one group were the guards and the other the prisoners.  It was planned to go two weeks but it had to be stopped after 6 days as the guards became sadistic and the prisoners become depressed.

Sound like our Congress? Could the political parties be falling into roles which don't really make sense and which neglect the very great issues that face our nation at this time? Could the psychology behind these roles be the same as that found in the Stanford Prison Experiment?


A 2007 book by the creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment, Philip Zimbardo, "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil,"could perhaps answer that question.

Some Facts on Tax Cuts and Jobs

1. During Clinton's 8 years, 22.7 Million Jobs were created and the deficit was reduced by budget surplus.
2. During Bush's 8 years, after the Tax Cuts, 1.1 Million Jobs were created and the deficit was increased about $7 trillion.

Which do you like better, 1 or 2?

To check this out,  get "Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class" by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson.  Hacker is a Professor of Political Science at Yale and Pierson Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley.

What are they thinking? Or are they?

"The Republican governors in Wisconsin and Ohio have pledged to return a total of more than $1.5 billion in federal money by canceling the train projects in their states."  This from the November 15, 2010, "Time" magazine, page 23. 

Such sentiments are almost beyond belief.  Assuming these newly elected governors are not inherently evil, they must be pathetically ignorant. These actions would not only hurt their own states, but the nation as a whole. They appear to be blindly following the right wing ideological script that serves only the wealthiest and the multinational corporations (Koch brothers and oil).

With unemployment in Ohio of 9.6% and Wisconsin of 7.0% (Sept. BLS) they need all the stimulus they can get.  Both are industrial states with labor skills that could be employed building these high speed trains. Creating jobs grows the economy and increases tax revenue. Every dollar of stimulus generates more than one dollar of economic activity-known as the multiplier. That is why stimulus works. It creates demand which multiplies and evenually generates enough tax revenue to pay for itself. Conversely, reductions of spending slow the economy and reduce tax revenue and in turn drive more reductions in spending in a declining spiral of depression.

With our nation a hostage of its energy dependence, the need for electric powered high speed trains to get people out of cars and airplanes is glaringly obvious. Anyone who does not agree must have never traveled abroad or read any of the mainstream news media. They must not understand the impact on our economy from importing 382,564,000 barrels of oil at $80 per barrel for $30 billion in a month (August 2010).

China has now developed and is operating 220 MPH trains and are the world's leader in that technology. They are thinking ahead and we are not.  When I was young, Kennedy was empowering us to go to the moon,. We did. If he were here now, we would likely be tooling up to build 250 MPH trains and export them to the world.  Now, we are sitting here with our collective heads in the sand being oblivious to the lost opportunities.

This brings to mind what President Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address " . . testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."  Will our democratic experiment  that is now only 224 years old endure? Will the voting public see through all the right wing media blather, grasp the truth about what needs to be done, and exercise their power at the polls to make it happen? 

James Madison said "The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of liberty." 

Thomas Jefferson wrote to George Logan, Nov. 12, 1816:  "I hope we shall . . crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and to bid defiance to the laws of their country."

We won't recapture the glory of the U.S. by regressing but only by a rebirth of the progressive spirit we had under FDR and JFK. We looked to Obama to lead this rebirth but so far he was not  forceful enough to make it happen. His motivational communication skills we saw on the campaign trail did not follow him into the White House. Lets hope he can change during the next two years.

The Paradox of the Right of Center Shift

David Brooks, in his New York Times Op-Ed of November 4, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/opinion/05brooks.html?_r=1&hp points out that America has not figured out how to build a decent future for the working class families of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and Arkansas. But that to remain a predominant power it must, and if it can't then it won't.

These regions were our base of our manufacturing economy which has now given way to a knowledge worker economy.  The knowledge worker economy demands college educated workers but the percentage of the population with college education in these depressed areas is the lowest in the country.So they are out of work.

The paradox is that those areas with lowest levels of education voted overwhelmingly for conservative, tea party and republican candidates who oppose increased funding for college educations.  In fact the chief benefactor of the tea party, Charles Koch (per August 30, 2010 New Yorker) would like to eliminate the Department of Education altogether. The Obama administration is pushing for ways to bring college education to a larger proportion of the population, but the victims of inadequate education rejected his policies. 

So, how do these folks think that their lot in life will be improved by supporting those who are against doing what is necessary to make it happen for them?  Sadly they grasped for help from anything that looked different and were duped. Clearly, the current administration failed to communicate and let the right wing dominate the message for their own interest at the expense of the well being of the people supporting them.

It was recently reported that our education system is now 10th among nations. We will not maintain our predominance unless that is fixed, and now. This was not true when we saw all the innovation in electronics in Silicon Valley back in the 60s.  At that time we had the best of everything and the future was very bright - except for the Vietnam war.  But over the last 4 decades we have steadily become complacent and yielded to the emerging economies.  40% of our GDP in recent years has come from Wall Street moving money around without adding any value.  Manufacturing and knowledge workers add value but we are letting that get away.

The Big Decision - Be Like Europe or Compete With Emerging Economies

Today is November 3, 2010, the day after the mid term elections which brought a wave of change into state governments, put Republicans in control of the House and weakened the Democrats in the Senate. This vote reflects a population that seeing its standard of living and security decrease. Many are grasping at anything that they think may return things to what they once knew. Many of those supported the upstart Tea Party.

The great irony of course, is that the agenda of the new Republicans and Tea Party will benefit the extremely wealthy elite who fund both but if unchecked will actually make the plight of the middle and lower socioeconomic classes worse. They were duped. This made possible by the elite's newly acquired (thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision)  power to spend unlimited amounts on campaigns, propaganda and media ads. 

The really big decision before us is one that is not spoken or written about much but is at the root of the ideological differences between the political parties.  That is the choice between being a 1st world developed nation with rights of citizenship including health care and  social security or devolving to something like the developing economies which don't have similar rights.  The latter choice would not require as much government as we now have but would mean a lower standard of living for the middle and lower classes. Either choice will reduce the deficit but in opposite ways.  The first choice calls for increasing revenue (taxes - particularly on the very wealthy) to pay for our current programs. The second choice calls for reducing taxes (primarily on the wealthy) and offsetting that with reduced the social and government services  (Social Security and Medicare).  The outcome either way is something different from what we as Americans have come to expect and different from how we view ourselves as a prosperous, fair, high achieving people of great military power and wealth. 

However, with the second choice debt reduction will only occur if the entitlements are actually reduced which has not happened. Proponents have been pursuing the policy of unlimited spending and borrowing with the hope that the nation will be put into a position where the only option to avoid default on the national dept would be to cut the entitlements. They call this "Stave the Beast." Many supporters of the previous Republican administrations (an newly elected congress) may not have realized that they were actually supporting that.



I was pleasantly surprised to hear David Stockman, Director of Office of Management and Budget for President Ronald Reagan who killed our rampant inflation of early 80s come out essentially for the first choice. Recently on 60 minutes he advocated not only eliminating the Bush tax cuts but increasing taxes more on the wealthy.  He pointed out that more of the nation's wealth has gravitated to the top 5% of population since 1980 than in history before then. See the link below for a full breakdown of the distribution of wealth.  The only country with a larger percentage of wealth in the top 10% than the U.S. is Switzerland. http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html