Year: 2020

Certain things which are taken for granted at one time in history would be unthinkable at others.  I do not mean bad or obvious but literally unthinkable.   Do you imagine that it would have even occurred to Thomas Jefferson in 1776 to call out King George on his failure to allow gay marriage?   And yet, two plus centuries and a Supreme Court ruling later, all states now allow this practice. A hundred years from now, one can extrapolate that failing to allow gay marriage may well be viewed as barbaric as slavery.  Which brings me to the minimum wage.  The…

Everett Dirksen was the Republican Senate Majority Leader for virtually the entire 1960s.  Relative to the federal budget, he allegedly said:  A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon, you’re talking about real money.   The only thing that has changed is that a trillion is the new billion. A significant chunk of what the federal government spends is borrowed money.  Spending in excess of revenue is the annual deficit.  Each year, the deficit adds to the national debt.  The United States has not been free of debt since Andrew Jackson was president.  In a very real sense, we are…

This story is mostly true.  I had a conversation with an eighth-grader I have known since her first day on the planet.  She is the product of a very expensive and very progressive private-school education. It wasn’t exactly the Patrice Lumumba Day Care Center followed by the Che Guevara Elementary School followed by the Saul Alinsky Middle School but it might as well have been.  Jody and I share jokes.  She is very adept at the language and we both appreciate pun-based humor. Any joke is funnier when it includes the cleaver use of the language. There is a double payoff, assuming…

The nomenclature around economic philosophies can be confusing.   On the right, there are variations on the theme of free markets.  Adam Smith was the progenitor of classic liberalism which advocated for largely unencumbered markets as the principal means of producing goods and services.  Leftists, on the other hand, will debate the difference between communism and socialism, and, drilling down, between old-style socialism and democratic socialism.  Karl Marx is our chief progenitor here, advocating for a collectivist means of production run by a collectivist authority.  Obviously, this short paragraph does not adequately explain The Wealth of Nations and Das Capital.   …

The structural rules for haikus are quite simple: exactly three lines of poetry with the middle line fixed at seven syllables and the first and third lines fixed at five syllables each.  Rhyming is neither required nor expected but neither is it precluded.  The heart of the haiku is a bit more complicated.  The object of the exercise is to capture, within the constraints of the structure, the essence of something; almost anything.   The subject might be a vision, an emotion, a flower, an attitude, a political position or an experience.  A haiku might relay a message, offer a compliment…