WHAT A CRAZY DAY! TUESDAY, AUGUST 16, 2011

WHAT A CRAZY DAY! TUESDAY, AUGUST 16, 2011

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 17, 2011

Forty years ago, as wont is my way, I sat at my desk and wrote an essay, more or less for my own edification, titled “Time Out for Sanity!”  It was eventually published as a book in 2007 as, "A Look Back to See Ahead.” 

Again, I suspect I did it for my own sanity.  I thought of that essay and that book as I woke up early this morning and munched on the illogical play of yesterday.

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The Sarkozy-Merkel plan for “closer euro zone integration” called for more austerity of citizens, and greater pressure on the banks, as if there wasn't enough austerity or pressure already.  I am not an economist, but I read the published report and thought, this is madness. 

Europe is already at the incineration stage.    Not surprising, Wall Street was not impressed as stocks fell after a three-day rally.  One writer said, it was like pouring gasoline on an out-of-control fire.  In my lexicon, it is a non-plan plan.

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President Obama must not be able to identify with President Truman’s dictum that “the buck stops here,” as he’s on the road again, traveling through Minnesota and Iowa, two states with relatively low unemployment and healthy economies compared to elsewhere across the country.  It is not reassuring to picture the president traveling across the farm belt on a campaign bus while the economy continues to tank.

An Iowan confronted the president as he went through the line of the crowd separated by bales of hay.  He asked his president why people in Obama administration called Tea Party enthusiasts, terrorists.  Obama said it was untrue, but implied they were acting irresponsibly when it came to the debt ceiling debate. 

It is like 2007 and deja vu with the president touring the Midwest in a bus like a campaigner, not in fact the President of the United States.  Who is manning the store in DC?  Or does this tell us the president doesn’t actually run the country?

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Texas Governor Rick Perry announced his entry into the presidential race the same day as the Iowa Straw Poll was taking place, an event that some campaigners have spent the last five years cultivating a following. 

Perry isn’t penalized for this affront for only a week later polls show him to be leading Republican candidates with 26% to Romney’s 16%, and Michele Bachmann’s 14%, who, incidentally, won the Iowa Straw Poll.

Perry’s impertinence took a bizarre turn when he told an Iowa audience that if the Obama administration printed more money before the 2012 election it would be “almost treason” to do so.  If this were not insolent enough, the governor added that he didn’t know how Iowans would react to this, but he knew how ugly Texans would get. 

I cannot imagine a person being president with no more civility than that.

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I shed tears when I see the names of our men and women lost in Afghanistan and Iraq, as their pictures, names, rank, age, and hometown are presented on the News Hour on PBS when their deaths are confirmed.  

Then the Department of Defense announces it is considering cutting the entitlements and benefits of veterans to bring down defense costs.  Currently, veterans, after completing twenty years of military service, are entitled to 50 percent of their pay in retirement for the best three years of service. 

DoD wants this benefit reduced claiming it will save $ billions.  To my mind, it is a slap in the face of young men and women who make the sacrifice to serve their country in a voluntary military.  Don’t these DoD people have any idea of the psychological as well as economic impact that such consideration has on the military and their families? 

It reminded me of the private sector that does what is easiest by letting go those who can least afford to fight the action in redundancy exercises. 

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Multi-billionaire Warren Buffett, who must feel he has not been in the limelight enough lately, came on Charlie Rose’s show (August 16, 2011) after writing an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled “QUIT CODDLING US SUPER RICH." 

Buffett, worth more than $50 billion, heads up “Patriotic Millionaires,” which has the premise that those making $1 million or more should pay more taxes, and those making $10 million or more should pay even more taxes. 

It sounds magnanimous and enticing, but is simplistic and can actually be counterproductive.  Like everyone else, millionaires are not a homogeneous group nor are their circumstances precisely the same.  It proves you don’t necessarily have to be intelligent to be rich. 

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Segueing on this same subject, the economist on The News Hour (PBS), stood outside the David Letterman Show in New York City and showed New Yorkers three pie charts.  One showed an equal distribution between the poor (20%), the middle class (20%), the upper middle class (20%), the rich (20%) and the super rich (20%).  The second chart showed these percentages skewed considerably with the relatively well off (30-40%) dominating the pie chart.  The third chart showed the rich took up 80% of the chart with everyone else skewed into the remaining 20%.

The economist asked passersby to identify the chart that represented the United States.  Most chose the middle one, which was Sweden.  The US was the third one. 

On the News Hour, a statistician confirmed this.  He said, “80 percent of America’s wealth is controlled by the top 20 percent.”  More dramatic, “the top one-tenth of one percent received a ten percent increase in their wealth in 2010.”

The statistician compared the American economic pie to African dictators of the most callous kind. 

Before you let out a gasp, and reference the 50 percent of Americans who pay no taxes, chances are you are in this 80 percent “somewhere.”  Look it up!

Fifty (50) percent of Americans pay no taxes because they don’t make much money!  Has anyone thought of that?  The idea to get such people to pay taxes when they are living like Third World citizens in the richest country in the world should give pause.

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Then there was a man hanging on in a cell phone tower some sixty feet from the ground, being talked down by a negotiator, at the point when I left him, unsuccessfully.  The twenty-four-year-old young man had been so situated since last Thursday, or five days without food or water.  I pray he survives because I don’t know how he has survived to this point. 

Why is he up there?  I don’t know, but his irrationality or emotional difficulty had lots of company Tuesday, August 16, 2011.

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