SEN. RICK SANTORUM V. SEN. BOB CASEY JR. – NOT MUCH DIFFERENCE ON WOMEN’S ISSUES AT ALL

Rather than engaging in ad hominem attacks on Sen. Santorum’s religion or on the Catholic Church, it behooves all of us to instead analyze the politics and electorate of Pennsylvania.  Ad hominem attacks are an abusive form of argument; proper arguments should address the merits of an opponent’s position, and refute the merits thereof, rather than attacking either the person, or a straw man, e.g. a caricature of the person.  Abusive argumentation has long been recognized, since the time of Aristotle, as a form of FALLACY, not entitled to serious logical consideration by rational minds.  Consequently, let us engage in some rational discourse on the merits of the question at hand and cease from ABUSIVE and FALLACIOUS ARGUMENTATION techniques such as ad hominem attacks and attacking a straw man.

Sen. Arlen Specter of PA

Let us turn, then, to the Politics of Pennsylvania (“PA”), and why it produces such conservative politics and politicians, especially conservative male politicians, and particularly conservative male catholic politicians recently.  It was for many years a bastion of moderate Republicanism, and indeed, until the 1930s, Philadelphia and the Union League were synonymous with the post-Civil War consensus that the Republican Party was the proper party for all educated persons to vote for in the Northeast.  Indeed, the city was so identified with core national Republican values that the Athletics even adopted an elephant as their team logo in the early 1900s, a symbol retained to this day by the Oakland Athletics, though it is dubious they know what Connie Mack was thinking when he adopted the symbol 111 years ago.

This consensus began to break down after the Great Depression and FDR, though it lingered on for many years as the so-called “Rockefeller-Eisenhower-Nixon” wing of the party, which was Northeast and moderate, and bipartisan with the Democrats on foreign policy, social security, fiscal & monetary policy and many other fundamental issues.  This consensus of course began to break down with the emergence of the Goldwater faction in 1964, which was opposed by the Scranton faction in 1964 (again led from PA), leading to Nixon re-assuming the reigns in 1968 and 1972.  With Nixon’s resignation in 1974, Ford took over and Rockefeller became VP, leading to a bitter fight between the Reagan and Ford wings of the party in 1976, and another bitter fight between the Bush and Reagan wings in 1980, finally emerging in victory both in nomination and election for the conservative wing of the Republican Party in 1980 for Reagan and the conservatives.  A new day had dawned in America.  But to some degree, the bipartisan consensus which had existed since FDR between the Democrats and the moderate Republicans was now endangered.

Nowhere was this tension more dramatically played out the past forty years than in PA.  PA was represented until 1991 by two stalwart moderate Republicans–Sen. Arlen Specter, a bipartisan member of the Warren Commission, and Sen. John Heinz, a moderate Republican loyal to the elderly and to Social Security.  These two Senators were cornerstones of what was, up to that point, a still very strong Northeastern moderate wing of the Republican party.  Both were solidly dedicated to bipartisanship, courtesy, gentlemanly behavior and getting things done on the Senate floor notwithstanding partisan differences.

This began to unravel slowly with the sudden airplane death in 1991 of Sen. John Heinz.

The Late Sen. John Heinz of PA

A sudden election was called in 1991 and an unknown political consultant was brought in from the South named James Carville to manage the campaign of an enormous

PA Sen. Harris Wofford with President John F. Kennedy in early 1960s

underdog, former University President and JFK kitchen cabinet member Harris Wofford, who was to stand election against former Governor Richard “Dick” Thornburgh.  At

Gov. Dick Thornburgh visits Centralia PA to inspect its ongoing Mine Fires in the 1980s

the time, Thornburgh had something like a fifty point lead in the polls, and tons of money.

James Carville - Wofford's 1991 PA Political Consultant

Sen. Heinz’ widow Teresa Heinz, now heiress in part to the Heinz catsup fortune, would then go on to marry Mass. Sen. John Kerry, in effect making him an instant near-billionaire and projecting him to the front rank of presidential contenders for 2004.  This nearly changed U.S. history, but Kerry’s bid failed.  Looking back, it is all too likely that a John Heinz bid for President would ultimately have succeeded in the long run just where Kerry failed–he had the looks, the charm and the moderate views to win.

Sen & Mrs. John & Teresa Heinz prior to his untimely death in 1991

This might have changed the entire course of the Republican Party and US History.

Sen & Mrs. John Kerry & Teresa Heinz Kerry; Her Money Inherited from John Heinz's Death in 1991 Nearly Made Kerry President in 2004

Returning to the 1991 election, Carville made universal health care an issue, and Wofford shocked the nation by defeating Thornburgh, becoming the first Democratic Senator from PA in decades.  At the same time, Carville’s work came to the attention of a bright young Governor from Arkansas with Presidential aspirations–one William Jefferson Clinton.  Carville’s conjunction with Clinton, and with George Stephanopoulos, on the 1992 campaign, documented in THE WAR ROOM documentary film, is now legendary, but all of this began in PA with Carville and Wofford.

It was during the Wofford campaign in 1991 that Carville legendarily quipped that “between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was Alabama in between,” referring to the fact that Pennsylvanians in all portions of the state except for Philadelphia & Allegheny county regions were pro-gun, pro-life, pro-death penalty, exceptionally elderly (the oldest voting population in the USA outside of Florida) and very church-going, as well as being one of the most demographically Catholic and ethnic voting populations.  In addition, PA has the lowest % of college educated persons of any state in the Northeast corridor–it is the prototypical location of high school educated union card carrying labor, and many of those voters were either Nixon Republicans or Reagan Democrats, but definitely not liberal Democrats.  Except of course for the two large cities, and even there, most of the male voters care more about football than about politics.

In 2008 Hilary Clinton carried nearly every county of PA v. Obama and won the PA Primary by running to the right of Obama

Fast forward to 1994.  The Clinton Administration has badly failed on its health care initiative, and Sen. Wofford has to stand re-election in his own right.  This time, he is the heavy favorite to win, but Carville is not working on the campaign.  Wofford is facing an unknown challenger–Congressman Rick Santorum.  No one, absolutely no one, is giving Santorum a chance of winning.  In fact, Santorum is given less chance of winning than Wofford was given in 1991.

What happens next shocks not only the nation, but PA as a whole.  Not only does the Republican Party and the Contract with America sweep the midterm elections in 1994, but Santorum runs unexpectedly strongly and defeats Wofford narrowly to win election to the United States Senate.

Part of the problem with Sen. Wofford is that he is intellectual, aloof and takes re-election for granted, whereas Santorum is hard-working, engaged, personable and likeable.  The rest of the problem is that Santorum is pro-life, pro-gun, pro-death penalty, and a church-going fellow, whereas Sen. Wofford is a Northeast liberal who is none of these things–consequently it is Santorum who fits the mold of what PA voters want in their candidate (except for Pittsburgh and Philadelphia).  However, since Santorum is FROM PITTSBURGH, the Western Part of the State votes for Santorum, especially as Wofford is from the Eastern Part of the State, thus negating any liberal sentiment emanating from Allegheny County.

Sen. Santorum wins re-election in 2000, and actually runs better in PA than does Pres. Bush, who loses the national popular vote as well as the popular vote and electoral vote in PA, while Santorum wins his election in PA, in effect demonstrating that Santorum as of 2000 is more popular than President Bush.

Now we fast forward to 2006, and to the election Santorum lost for Senate by a considerable margin, to Sen. Bob Casey, Jr.

Let’s examine why he lost this election.

First, Bob Casey, Jr. was and is the son of a popular, two term Governor of PA who was known throughout the state.  Second, Bob Casey, Jr. was from a prominent Irish-Catholic political family as well-known in PA as the Kennedys’ are known in Massachusetts and nationally.  According to wikipedia:

“Casey was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, one of eight children of Ellen (née Harding) and Bob Casey, the 42nd governor of Pennsylvania. He is of Irish descent on both his mother’s^{[citation needed]}and father’s side.  Casey played basketball and graduated from Scranton Preparatory School in 1978. Following in his father’s footsteps, he graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in 1982, and received a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from the Columbus School of Law at The Catholic University of America in 1988. Between both college and law school, Casey served as a member of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and spent a year teaching 5th grade and coaching basketball at the Gesu School in inner city Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Casey practiced law in Scranton from 1991 until 1996.”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Casey,_Jr.

This is the most perfect Jesuit, Irish-Catholic resume you could possibly have for running for office in PA–Scranton Prep, Holy Cross, Catholic University, the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and a year teaching at an inner city catholic mission school in Philadelphia.  Sen. Casey is just the most perfect catholic prepster ever.

Next, Casey is pro-gun, pro-life, pro-death penalty, and as we see above, a church-going catholic just like Santorum–in fact, he’s Irish-Catholic, as opposed to Italian-Catholic, which in PA, is a real advantage politically, just as it is in Massachusetts and nationally.

Consequently, the same wedge issues that HELPED Santorum win in 1994 and 2000–the issues that appealed to the “Alabama” parts of PA that are pro-gun, pro-life, pro-death penalty, and church-going and conservative on social issues–were of no use running against Bob Casey, Jr. because Casey, if anything, ran to the right of Santorum on all those issues.  As noted by Casey’s wiki bio:

“In the Democratic primary, Casey faced two Democrats with more liberal viewpoints: college professor Chuck Pennacchio and pension lawyer Alan Sandals. Both argued that Casey’s views on abortion and other social issues were too conservative for most Pennsylvania Democrats. However, Casey easily defeated both challengers in the May 16 primary, receiving 85% of the vote….Abortion….Casey, like his father did, identifies as pro-life. He has publicly stated his support for overturning Roe v. Wade.^[29] From Casey’s election until Specter’s party switch in April 2009, Pennsylvania had the distinction of being represented in the Senate by a self-identified pro-life Democrat and a pro-choice Republican (Arlen Specter).  He supports the Pregnant Women Support Act,^[30] legislation that grew out of Democrats for Life of America‘s 95-10 Initiative. The Initiative and the Pregnant Women Support Act seek to reduce the abortion rate by providing support to women in unplanned pregnancies. He expressed support for the confirmation of both John Roberts^[31] and Samuel Alito^[32] for seats on the Supreme Court of the United States; these judges are believed to be in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade. Casey also opposes the funding of embryonic stem-cell research.^[33]   However, Casey voted against barring HHS grants to organizations that provide abortion services, though such services may often not be central to the organization’s chief purpose.^[34] Casey also supports over-the-counter sale of emergency contraception,^[35] and has voted to overturn the Mexico City policy, which bars the issuance of federal funds to overseas organizations that perform or refer for abortions.^[36] The authenticity of Casey’s pro-life commitment has been questioned by some prolife sources.^[36][37]  In January 2010, a writer for CBN wrote, “I wouldn’t want to be Senator Bob Casey right about now. He is coming under enormous pressure from pro-life groups because they say the ‘Pro-life’ Democratic Senator has not stood strong on the abortion issue during the current healthcare debate.” Casey, according to the CBN writer, had recently gotten “an earful and then some from pro-lifers during a press conference held at the Pennsylvania Capitol.”^{[38]  ….”}  

Id.  Clearly, Casey ran to the RIGHT of both of his Democratic primary opponents, and then ran to the RIGHT of Santorum in the general election on the social issues, not to the LEFT as his past opponents had done.  Casey was like the Democratic Santorum–only smarter, more conservative, more polished, and a better version, and even more socially conservative and catholic than Santorum was.  Casey ran to the RIGHT of Santorum on the social issues, but to the LEFT of Santorum on the bread and butter, economic and labor issues.

This makes Casey’s election to the US Senate in 2006 very unique among all of the elections in 2006, even though it is clear that 2006 generally trended Democratic and it is pretty likely that Santorum faced an uphill battle in any event even if Casey had run as a traditional liberal.  But Casey was no traditional liberal.  No one on the editorial staff of the Huffington Post or the New York Times would endorse him for national office if they truly understood either his positions, or the positions of the PA electorate.  In truth, the PA electorate holds positions at variance with the Northeast liberal elite and the West Coast elite, excepting Philadelphia, State College and Pittsburgh.

The results of Casey’s strategies were very clear; he ran well to the right of Santorum on social issues, but ran as a Democrat on union and bread and butter economic issues, while still remaining pro-gun, pro-death penalty, pro-life, pro-church, anti-abortion, anti-contraception, and pro-adoption.

In short, there isn’t a bucket’s worth of warm spit’s difference between these two candidates on women’s issues at all.  In fact, PA has NEVER elected a women to the United States Senate.  Ever.  Not even close to ever.

Only two women have even been nominated to run for US Senate in PA History and both have lost, one back in 1964, and more recently Lynn Yeakel, who lost a relatively close race to incumbent Sen. Arlen Specter following the Anita Hill hearings in the 1990s, but still she lost and then rapidly faded from sight and power.

PA is clearly not a state conducive either to women’s issues or to women running for office.  PA has never had a female governor, a female senator and only rarely has it had female congresspersons.   According to the Huffington Post, as of 2009, there were only two women in its entire Congressional Delegation.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/senate-guru/pa-sen-the-potential-demo_b_187357.html.   It is astonishing how limited women are in political power in PA.

PA is well to the right of NJ, NY, DE and all the other northeastern states with regards to women’s issues and specifically women’s reproductive health issues.  The state legislature is overwhelmingly dominated by men, especially religious and catholic men, and the men who serve there are openly sexist and demeaning towards women who serve in the legislature and create what is in effect a hostile work environment for women who are elected and choose to serve their constituents there.  Recently, one of the houses of the PA Legislature voted 2012 “The Year of the Bible” by nearly unanimous resolution, while also simultaneously voting to cut student financial aid and aid to all state universities by more than one-third in the very same session that they also authorized tens of millions of dollars to hire replacement football coaches to take over for Joe Paterno at Penn State.  Apparently male legislators have their priorities in PA.  And first rate Division I football in Happy Valley is really far higher of a priority than education for the poor or the middle class, apparently.

Sad to say, often the same holds true in many of the rural county courtrooms as well as many of the appellate courts, although there at least in the past few years, some progress has been made.  However, in the major law firms of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, men hold by far the reins of power and women simply do not have any share of either the partner proceeds or the political shares of power that lead to business and partner revenues.

In short, it is a boy’s club, and often, a man’s only club in PA, notwithstanding the lip service paid to equality and opportunity.  Things in PA are NOTHING like NYC or Boston or DC.  They are backwards by at least twenty to forty years.  Many of the female partners who do make it in Philly prefer working over in New Jersey or up in NYC whenever possible–they find PA courts and clients to be very stifling and sexist in the extreme, and in any case most of the business is elsewhere.

Perhaps the reader imagines this is exaggeration, or opinion?  Let us introduce some evidence!

This is an actual example of tactices used against a female candidate for office in Allentown PA reported in the Huffington Post which occurred in 2006 and again in 2008:

“When she ran for mayor of Allentown, PA in 2001, Siobhan “Sam” Bennett was already well-known in her hometown. A former PTA president, she was a pillar of the community, having founded, led, or served on the boards of various civic organizations. So she was completely taken aback by what happened during her first stump speech as a mayoral candidate. Standing before a room full of men, she began to deliver her remarks when the chair of the meeting interrupted her with a totally bizarre and inappropriate request: “Sam, I want to ask a question all the men in this room have been dying to ask you: Just what are your measurements?”

As Bennett wrote in the Huffington Post:

I was in disbelief. And if this wasn’t bad enough, a reporter who witnessed this unabashed display of sexism wrote an article about that stump speech–and didn’t even mention the incident.Unfortunately, that experience was only a hint of what would come my way….

The Opposition’s Vehemence

What came her way when she ran for Congress in 2008 was far worse. Bennett was facing a possible challenger in Pennsylvania State Senator Lisa Boscola, and Boscola’s chief of staff, Bernie Kieklak, was well known in political circles for posting no-holds-barred commentary in local blogs. The remarks he let fly about Bennett at one online site are indicative of the level of sexism and misogyny many women candidates face.

To convey the intensity of Kieklak’s over-the-top sexism regarding Bennett and his extreme vulgarity, his comments are reproduced in their entirety below with minimal censorship: Sammy Bennett is a phony political w_____e who gives good h_____d and makes cheap, blatant political opportunists look like Mother F***ing Teresa. Even her p___y is made of plastic.” [sic] [offensive language edited].”

http://womensissues.about.com/od/thepoliticalarena/a/Women-In-Politics-Sexist-Media-Sexist-Attacks-Hurt-Women-In-Politics.htm

Truly shocking, abusive behavior towards a female politician.  But run of the mill for PA, sad to say.  Welcome to the training grounds of Sens. Santorum, Casey et al.

In short, to be successful in politics as a female in PA, you have to be not twice as good, not three times as good, but about ten times as good as a man, and have a hide made of armor plated kevlar.   Morever, many notable male politicians (including a prominent past governor) are well-known for their womanizing and aggrandizing tactics towards females, which can most generously be characterized as “Clintonesque”.  Even though these matters have been reported, still they go on.

This is the environment from which both Sens. Santorum and Casey have emerged and from which they ran for office.

Here was the result of Sen. Casey’s running to the right of Sen. Santorum on Social Issues according to Sen. Casey’s wiki bio:

“On election night, Casey won the race with 59% of the vote, compared to 41% for incumbent Senator Rick Santorum. Casey’s margin of victory was the highest ever for a Democrat running for the United States Senate in Pennsylvania.^[11]Casey’s 17.4-point victory margin was the largest victory margin for a challenger to an incumbent Senator since James Abdnor unseated George McGovern by 18.8 points in 1980.”

Id.  However, the bio goes on to note that as Casey’s re-election approaches this year, he is beginning to distance himself openly from President Obama again in order to appeal to the conservative PA electorate, particularly with his blue-collar base in Wilkes-Barre and Scranton (Luzerne & Lackawanna Counties) who are very upset with the President’s performance on economic issues:

“Casey is up for re-election in 2012, and has stated that he intends to seek a second term in the Senate.^[12][13] His re-election prospects are uncertain. Observers have noted that as the election approaches, Casey, an early supporter of Obama, has “started to oppose the president outright or developed more nuanced responses to events that differentiate him from Mr. Obama. Analysts say Mr. Casey wants to put some distance between himself and a president whose job approval ratings in Pennsylvania are poor.”^[14] In October 2011, the National Journal noted that “the Scranton area is hugely important for 2012” for both Obama and Casey, but “the city has among the worst unemployment in the state, and it’s filled with the blue-collar Dems who weren’t very enthusiastic about Obama when he first ran for president. How Casey navigates his relationship with the president will speak volumes about his re-election prospects.”^[15]“

One cannot get away from one’s positions–a candidate is what a candidate espouses.  Sen. Santorum, like Sen. Casey, is a warm, charming and personable fellow.  Both are married with a number of kids–Casey has four kids, and Santorum has even more, and both their wives are full time stay at home moms.  Because that’s what they believe in, for the most part.  That moms and wives should stay at home and take care of the kids, that is.  And both of them are pro-gun, pro-second amendment, pro-death penalty, pro-life, pro-catholic, anti-abortion, anti-contraception, pro-adoption, and so on.  Indeed, it is very difficult to measure their differences on women’s issues or women’s health issues at all.

This addresses the issues, as opposed to attacking ad hominem or creating a straw man.  These candidates have espoused their positions and come to be what they are in large part, it is theorized and shown here, because of the electorate they spent a good deal of time cultivating–the uniquely conservative PA electorate.  Whether appealing to that electorate will work nationally in either Republican primaries or a National Presidential Election remains to be seen.  There has not been a President elected from PA since James Buchanan in 1856 (though Eisenhower famously took up residence near Gettysburg after he retired, and was considered an honorary PA resident, and his family still live in PA).  Perhaps with good reason.

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WHY THE DEMS DON’T GET IT

Unfortunately, in light of recent domestic policy directions, I think the Dems have it all wrong.

Health care reform is an idea left over from 1991. The only reason the Dems want to push it through now is because they have the votes to pass the bills they didn’t get passed in the first session of the first term of the Clinton Presidency.

But is this a good reason to pass a law, because you proposed it before and you’ve been trying to pass it for so long?

Universal Health Care is an idea born of POST-DEPRESSION affluence–it’s a fringe benefit to be offered to a population that’s already employed, that already has a guaranteed vacation, a guaranteed pension, and has guaranteed housing. In short, guaranteed health care is the LAST welfare benefit that should be federalized.

In addition, and this is a revision from my original post, according to a recent article posted in a respected publication, the health uninsured are not universally distributed throughout the United States.

In point of fact, less than 3% of Massachusetts residents lack health insurance, thanks to the state law health care coverage efforts of people like Gov. Mike Dukakis and his successors in office. The fact that Massachusetts has nearly universal health care coverage proves that this is a STATE problem and not a FEDERAL problem.

Looking more nationally, the Midwest and Northeast have fewer than ten per cent uninsured as to health care.

It is the South and the West that have 15-25% health uninsured rates; the highest being the state of Texas.

You don’t have to be a statistics major to know that Texas also is a non-union state, has a large number of illegal immigrant resident aliens, and that these conditions are pretty much true throughout the Sunbelt, where the problem of lack of health care coverage is an issue of non-union shops and illegal immigrants competing for jobs, which drives down the employers’ incentives to provide health care benefits.

Consequently, why is this a federal problem? This seems instead to be either an immigration problem, a union/labor law problem, or a combination of the two (as Janis Joplin and Big Brother used to sing). (She was from Texas, by the way, before she got out the San Francisco).

Moreover, if Texas wants to solve their own problems, why not let them experiment? They’ve already reformed tort law to make it much harder to sue MDs–welcome relief to the medical profession, which has flocked in droves to practice in Texas, now considered a medical mecca.

Obama wants to ruin all this. His health care proposal, according to reports, would result in a massive transfer of wealth from the largely democratic and already overtaxed midwest and northeast, and transfer it to the sunbelt states, the south and west, in order to mainly put on federal health coverage, non-union workers who are scabs (union busters) and illegal immigrants (also scabs and union busters).

Do we really want to spend our tax dollars paying for health benefits for strikebreaking scabs and unionbusting immigrant labor? And for illegal aliens to get health care?

Also, additionally, Obama’s health proposal will cause deep cuts in the current level of medicaid, medicare and drugs provided to the elderly under medicare.

In short, the proposal will triage the old and deprive them of expensive end of life care, and let them die more quickly, in order to provide basic health care to young, healthy labor that is non-union, largely hispanic, and living in the sunbelt.

The demographic implications of this over the long run will be a much younger, more hispanic united States, even more concentrated in the sunbelt than it already is, and will likely lead eventually to a bilingual nation that speaks Spanish and English, as well as to the ultimate downfall of unions, since one of the major arguments for unions is that they provide their members with health care and pension benefits during job and contract negotiations.

If unions are deprived of health care as a benefit to negotiate for, fewer workers will opt into unions. Obama and the democrats, paradoxically, are going to drive the death nail into the coffin of the union movement in this country. They haven’t thought through clearly the implications of what they are doing.

In short, this is a regional problem, and a union/immigration problem, and not a national problem. National mandates for the states would probably fix this, along with a public/private partnership with some insurance companies that could work with some of the southern and western states.

Part II

The REAL problem today is not health care at all.

The real problem today is that people don’t have jobs and they’re losing their houses. We have lawyers, bankers, traders who have blown up, car companies laying off, people all over America losing good jobs. Everywhere you go in this country, houses are for sale or being sold off by the sheriff.

I’ve never seen so many homes for sale in my own neighborhood. Twenty-Two years i’ve lived here, and three houses were a lot to be for sale here; now we have 25 and none are selling. There is a glut on the market where two years ago there was a boom in the market. The bottom has fallen out of the real estate market and no end of the downward spiral is in sight.

People’s equity in their homes, the main source of wealth for most Americans, has vanished, and the federal government has done NOTHING about it.

Except, of course, to bail out the rich fat cat bankers, and appoint a salary czar to oversee their million bazillion dollar bonuses.

Is this for real? Federally funded trickle down? If Reagan had done this, there would have been riots in the streets.

What we need precisely is a sort of FDIC, but instead of guaranteeing your banking deposits against banking failure, you would be guaranteed your home’s equity value, an FDIC for home equity, that will guarantee up to $1,000,000 of value in your home’s equity value against falling home prices, that is either automatic through fannie mae or freddie mac, or that you can purchase as insurance, for a small sum of money.

Now isn’t THAT a SENSIBLE idea?

Second, everyone with negative home equity should be forgiven their loans in excess of 80% of their debt loads immediately, and the banks commanded to write that debt off immediately.

Third, anyone who files for bankruptcy should be able to modify his or her mortgage under sections 1322 of the Code or anywhere else as pertinent, or under a Chapter 11 Plan, and cram it down the bank’s throat against their wishes if the bank’s loan exceed’s 80% of the value of the home and there is a negative equity spiral, the debtor should be able to eliminate all but 80% of the loan.

My point is, what good is free health care if you have no job and no house? It’s like serving gelato to a man who is homeless and has no money and hasn’t eaten in days–health care is like dessert.

Back in the 90s, when everyone had a job, it was ok to talk about health care–it was the LAST thing we needed. But now we’re back to square one–we need to talk about guaranteeing incomes, jobs and housing. We’re back to FDR and Truman and LBJ.

This administration just doesn’t get it.

Paradoxically, I think the right Republican approach might get it and win back the white house if it’s sufficiently populist in nature and goes after the big banks, which the democrats appear to be, pardon the expression, in bed with.

The Democrats need to examine an NRA-style national Jobs Program that will put everyone in the United States to work. Second, the Draft needs to be re-instituted. Kids that are in the army will be employed. Third, we need to nationalize the universities and make education free of charge. Fourth, we need to nationalize the cable companies and make the internet free of charge to the poor and to the rich equally, as well as making basic cable tv a free resource to everyone.

Fifth, for anyone that’s not employed, a Guranteed Annual Income or GAI must be mandated and paid by the Government, along with a negative income tax to avoid work related disincentives. The welfare reform measures of the Clinton era will have to be undone for the time being, because right now, middle class families are starving and in danger of homelessness, and THEY need welfare. The program needs to be federal, and the income level to be guaranteed needs to be large, around $15,000-20,000 annually, and adjusted for children and circumstances.

Sixth, the government has to embark on a massive program of propping up the housing market, investing in public housing, investing in Section 8, expanding the HUD budget, and so forth.

Seventh, we need to start investing in having one spouse stay home and take care of the kids. I know this is controversial, but two wage earners has destroyed many marriages and the american way of life.

Eighth, we need to reform the real estate brokerage business so that commissions from family homes are much less than for commission from commercial real estate. Instead of six points, let brokers earn only one point. This way, brokers won’t churn real estate and people won’t use their homes as profit tools.

Ninth, reform the tax code so that people have to pay MORE income tax on the sale of their primary homes, e.g. remove the exemption entirely, unless they stay in them a minimum of five years, unless they have to move for cause, such as a job-related transfer to another city, or medical reasons. This would stop people from buying and selling homes constantly and churning the market.

Tenth, more closely regulate lenders, brokers and sellers of real estate. Let people buy and sell and profiteer on second homes, commercial real estate and so forth, but those parcels will be taxed, etc.

I think this is the approach we need.

This is what the democrats are ignoring.

They’re going to raise taxes and bring down the house as it were on average joe while they raise up false idols like the bankers.

We badly need a new prophet in the land, and i’m not talking about Rush Limbaugh here.

–art kyriazis, philly/south jersey
home of the world champion philliesght

CAP AND TRADE – MARTIN FELDSTEIN WRITES OP-ED PIECE IN WSJ ATTACKING IT

Just in the event some of you think I’m just a cranky odd fellow, my former economics professor from Harvard University, and the former professor of Lawrence Summers, Jim Poterba, Steve Kaplan, Tim Geithner and just about any other famous economist of this generation who teaches economics or has worked at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Prof. Martin Feldstein, former economic adviser to Pres. Ronald Reagan (Larry Summers worked under Feldstein for Reagan as is well known)–

at any rate, Feldstein one day after I published my blog saying cap and trade would destroy the effect of the stimulus package, has written an elegant op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing that CAP AND TRADE WILL DESTROY THE POSITIVE EFFECTS OF THE STIMULUS PACKAGE and furthermore THE NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF CAP AND TRADE WILL FALL MOST HEAVILY ON THE POOR AND ON THE WORKING CLASS, BECAUSE THEY SPEND A MUCH LARGER PERCENTAGE OF THEIR INCOME ON CARBON-BASED EMISSIONS RELATED EXPENDITURES.

Prof. Feldstein makes an elegant argument–he points out that the rich spend less than five per cent of their income on energy-related costs, while poor, middle income and upper middle income folks, in order to run their cars, heat their houses and so forth, spend as much as 25-40% of their incomes on carbon-related expenses, depending on where they live, e.g. people living in the northeast and midwest pay even more since they have to heat their houses in winter and air condition in summer, etc.

He more fundamentally argues that cap and trade will destroy the stimulus effect of the stimulus package, just as surely as did Roosevelt’s tax raises in 1935 and 1937, and Japan’s tax hikes in 1997.

Here’s the link to the article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124217336075913063.html#

And here’s the actual editorial:

* OPINION
* MAY 14, 2009

Tax Increases Could Kill the Recovery
The cap-and trade levy would hit low-income earners especially hard.

By MARTIN FELDSTEIN

The barrage of tax increases proposed in President Barack Obama’s budget could, if enacted by Congress, kill any chance of an early and sustained recovery.

[Commentary] Martin Kozlowski

Historians and economists who’ve studied the 1930s conclude that the tax increases passed during that decade derailed the recovery and slowed the decline in unemployment. That was true of the 1935 tax on corporate earnings and of the 1937 introduction of the payroll tax. Japan did the same destructive thing by raising its value-added tax rate in 1997.

The current outlook for an economic recovery remains precarious. Although the stimulus package will give a temporary boost to growth in the current quarter, it will not be enough to offset the combined effect of lower consumer spending, the decline in residential construction, the weakness of exports, the limited availability of bank credit and the downward spiral of house prices. A sustained economic upturn is far from a sure thing. This is no time for tax increases that will reduce spending by households and businesses.

Even if the proposed tax increases are not scheduled to take effect until 2011, households will recognize the permanent reduction in their future incomes and will reduce current spending accordingly. Higher future tax rates on capital gains and dividends will depress share prices immediately and the resulting fall in wealth will cut consumer spending further. Lower share prices will also raise the cost of equity capital, depressing business investment in plant and equipment.

The Obama budget calls for tax increases of more than $1.1 trillion over the next decade. Official budget calculations disguise the resulting fiscal drag by treating Mr. Obama’s proposal to cancel the 2011 income tax increases for taxpayers with incomes below $250,000 as if they are real tax cuts. The plan to modify the Alternative Minimum Tax to avoid increases for some taxpayers is also treated as a tax cut.

But those are false tax cuts in which no one’s tax bill actually declines. In contrast, the proposed tax increases are very real. And despite the proposed tax increases, the government’s new spending and transfer programs would cause the annual budget deficit in 2019 to exceed $1 trillion, or 5.7% of GDP.

Mr. Obama’s biggest proposed tax increase is the cap-and-trade system of requiring businesses to buy carbon dioxide emission permits. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the proposed permit auctions would raise about $80 billion a year and that these extra taxes would be passed along in higher prices to consumers. Anyone who drives a car, uses public transportation, consumes electricity or buys any product that involves creating CO2 in its production would face higher prices.

CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf testified before the Senate Finance Committee on May 7 that the cap-and-trade price increases resulting from a 15% cut in CO2 emissions would cost the average household roughly $1,600 a year, ranging from $700 in the lowest-income quintile to $2,200 in the highest-income quintile. Since the amount of cap-and-trade tax rises with income, the cap-and-trade tax has the same kind of adverse work incentives as the income tax. And since the purpose of the cap-and-trade plan is to discourage the consumption of CO2-intensive products, energy or means of transportation by raising their cost to consumers, the consumer-price increases would be the same for a 15% reduction in C02 even if the government decides to give away some of the CO2 emissions permits.

But while the cap-and-trade tax rises with income, the relative burden is greatest for low-income households. According to the CBO, households in the lowest-income quintile spend more than 20% of their income on energy intensive items (primarily fuels and electricity), while those in the highest-income quintile spend less than 5% on those products.

The CBO warns that the estimate of an $80 billion-a-year tax increase could be significantly higher or lower, depending on how the program is designed. The Waxman-Markey bill currently before Congress calls for reducing greenhouse gasses 20% by 2020 and by an incredible 83% by 2050. As the government reduces the amount of CO2 that is allowed, the price of the CO2 permits would rise and the pass-through to consumer prices would also increase.

The next-largest tax increase — with a projected rise in revenue of more than $300 billion between 2011 and 2019 — comes from increasing the tax rates on the very small number of taxpayers with incomes over $250,000. Because this revenue estimate doesn’t take into account the extent to which the higher marginal tax rates would cause those taxpayers to reduce their taxable incomes — by changing the way they are compensated, increasing deductible expenditures, or simply earning less — it overstates the resulting increase in revenue.

Since the projected revenue from this source is already designated to be used for Mr. Obama’s health plan, some other tax increases will be needed. Moreover, Mr. Obama’s budget characterizes the projected $634 billion outlay for health-care reform as just a down payment on the program. The budget notes that there would be “additional resources and new benefits to be determined with Congress.” Those additional resources would no doubt be even higher taxes.

The third major tax increase is the plan to raise $220 billion over the next nine years by changing the taxation of foreign-source income. While some extra revenue could no doubt come from ending the tax avoidance gimmicks that use dummy corporations in the Caribbean, most of the projected revenue comes from disallowing corporations to pay lower tax rates on their earnings in countries like Germany, Britain and Ireland. The purpose of the tax change is not just to raise revenue but also to shift overseas production by American firms back to the U.S. by reducing the tax advantage of earning profits abroad.

The administration is likely to be disappointed about its ability to achieve both goals. Bringing production back to be taxed at the higher U.S. tax rate would raise the cost of capital and make the products less competitive in global markets. American corporations would therefore have an incentive to sell their overseas subsidiaries to foreign firms. That would leave future profits overseas, denying the Treasury Department any claim on the resulting tax revenue. And new foreign owners would be more likely to use overseas suppliers than to rely on inputs from the U.S. The net result would be less revenue to the Treasury and fewer jobs in America.

It’s not too late for Mr. Obama to put these tax increases on hold. If he doesn’t, Congress should protect the recovery and the longer-term health of the U.S. economy by voting down this enormous round of higher taxes.

Mr. Feldstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan, is a professor at Harvard and a member of The Wall Street Journal’s board of contributors.

(end of op-ed piece)

well, you have to admit, prof. Feldstein has stated the case far more elegantly than I did, but we both come to the precise same conclusion–

CAP AND TRADE IS A BAD IDEA THAT WILL KILL THE STIMULUS PACKAGE AND LEAD US BACK TO A RECESSION.

I think a logical corollary to what Prof. Feldstein is saying, is that my proposal, the one to make mass transit and AMTRAK rail travel, completely free to everyone, would substantially lessen the burden on the poor and the middle class of a carbon-based tax, in that everyone could stop spending money on their automobiles.

That would be half the problem. The other half would be heating and air-conditioning, and here again, I’ve proposed that the US organize a national TVA style superfederal project to complete go nuclear on electricity generation within the next ten years as an alternative to cap and trade taxes on electricity generation altogether.

I think a combination of these approaches would do away with the need for cap and trade–eliminate autos, put the grid on nukes, upgrade the grid, and spend a huge amount of federal money on upgrading the grid, building light rail and trolley everywhere, and stop spending money on roads and other wasteful spending.

After all, there used to be trolleys running from Santa Monica to Los Feliz through Hollywood; in Philly, the trolley used to run all the way from downtown philly to West Chester, PA until the 1950s, when they rolled up the track due to the automobile, in fact, you can’t count how many miles of trolley track idiotic city planners have rolled up or paved over in Philadelphia, while city planners in other cities are spending billions to lay down trolley and light rail track.

In cities like New York and Boston, you don’t need a car, and neither do you need a car in downtown Philadelphia or Washington DC.

We should be exploring making one or more cities car-free and making them into pilot projects for the future.

–art kyriazis, philly/south jersey
Home of the World Champion Phillies

Cap and Trade – A Horrible Idea – Let’s Abolish Cars and Build a Real Rail System Instead

Cap and Trade Is a very bad idea, right now.

First, a history lesson. President Clinton’s first term was a disaster, in large part, because he spent most of his first two years pursuing three very liberal ideas—gays in the military, universal health care, and a federal tax on BTU usage.

These three ideas were, at the time, in 1993-1995, so controversial, that they not only threatened to sink President Clinton after only one term, but resulted in 1994 in the largest shift in a mid-term election in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate in United States History.

The House lost more than fifty Democratic seats and went Republican for the first time in a long time; and the Senate also suffered huge democratic losses; all due to Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America, which was a direct and overwhelming refutation of Clinton’s liberal agenda.

Much the same thing happened in the first two years of Jimmy Carter’s term; Carter pardoned all of the draft-dodging Vietnam protesters hiding out in Canada, and virtually declared war on the CIA and all of the US military operations around the world, which led to terror operations and revolutions around the world intensifying, culminating in the Iranianian Revolution and the taking of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and the holding of 52 U.S. hostages for over a year, a spectacle so embarassing to the United States, repeated night after night on national TV as it was, that virtually every Democrat in office lost his seat by 1980, and the Republicans and Ronald Reagan were swept into power, with a whole new agenda of re-arming America and restoring her lost prestige abroad.

Getting back to Clinton, the BTU Tax was an idea very similar to the current notion of Cap and Trade. Cap and Trade, like the BTU Tax, is essentially a tax on carbon usage. The idea is, if we tax carbon-based fossil fuels enough, and make them costly enough, it will force everyone, including consumers and energy companies, to seek non-carbon based alternatives.

There are three basic problems with cap and trade (actually, there are many more, but I will discuss three here) that make it a bad idea for now. First, we are in a recession that is actually more of a depression. Cap and Trade is a large TAX INCREASE that will suck spending power out of the hands of consumers. Consequently, it will kill the marginal propensity of consumer demand, and attack the very object of the Stimulus Bill.

I don’t have to be a doctor to know, that you don’t give a man a sleeping pill, just when you’ve given him a shot to wake him up, while he’s still groggy and coming around.

Right now, the American economy is like a man who can’t wake up. Cap and Trade would be like a sleeping pill to that man. The Stimulus Bill was like a cup of coffee or a shot of epinephrine—a stimulant to wake him.

Cap and Trade is like a sleeping pill that would suck away his vital energy.

Second, in order to invest in, and build, energy alternatives, there has to be a venture capital and investment banking, and regular banking systems, in place. Today, those systems are impaired, crippled or functioning at about half capacity. Consequently, Cap and Trade can’t work under today’s economic conditions. Consequently, no infrastructure would develop under Cap and Trade to produce renewable energy alternatives until the banking and lending systems come back on line.

All we’ll have is a tax that makes oil and gas and coal more expensive, but no alternatives will develop for many years yet, due to the impairments of the banking, VC and R & D systems.

Third, even if the banking, VC and R & D systems were perfect, there is no energy alternative that could come on line sooner than ten years from today to replace current oil, gas and coal based consumption.

Wind and solar currently provide less than 1% of current energy needs; energy needs keep GROWING at an exponential rate, if you include the third world, and none of the so-called renewable energy forms are anywhere close to being ready to assume more than a micro-share of the energy load, whether we’re talking about wind, solar, geothermal, capturing energy from ocean waves, and so forth.

It’s been fifty plus years since the hydrogen bomb, but no one has yet developed and sustained a fusion reaction that can last and power an energy generating plant. That technology seems as remote as the so-called “WARP” engines on the starship Enterprise on STAR TREK.

That leaves us with one, and only one realistic alternative, and that is nuclear power plants. They are tanned, rested and ready, and the newest generation of nukes have much higher capacity factors and higher safety factors than ever before.

The problem with nukes is, you still need about two billion dollars to build a single plant, about 3-4 years to get the necessary permits to build a plant in the U.S. and another 3-4 years to build the plant and get it on line.

That’s 6-8 years and two billion dollars to get each plant on line, and most of the two billion dollars will have to be absorbed by the consumer in electricity costs. Let’s figure that we build fifty of those plants—that’s a hundred billion dollars in construction costs alone that have to be absorbed back again by means of utility bills to the consumer over the next ten-twenty years. That’s on top of the cap and trade tax costs.

In short, it’s a very expensive proposition to jettison oil, gas and coal.

It’s too bad that the United States didn’t commit to a nukes policy back in 1955, when nuclear power was cheap and we could have covered the US with nuclear power plants for a fraction of the cost of today.

If we had committed to such a policy then, we could have been completely independent of Middle Eastern Oil as of 1970.

Even as late as 1975, we still could have committed to nukes for a fraction of today’s costs, and been independent of Middle Eastern Oil by the 1990s.

However, the wacky left and particularly eco-wacky californians, continuously opposed nuclear power in this country for decades. Nuclear power could have given us full independence from the Middle East a long, long time ago, and spared us these last two wars in Iraq and Kuwait.

The problems we face today are a consequence of our leaders living life as if we can’t shape the future. But we can and must shape the future.

The future is not shaped by dice rolling or by random events. The future is shaped by decisions we make and by policies we need to hew to in order to shape the probabilities and likelihoods of the future outcomes to be.

A responsible United States Government would have made us one hundred percent reliant on nuclear energy for our power production as soon as humanly possible, once we unlocked the secrets of the atom, back in the 1950s.

Our failures to do so may have been the result of many causes, and I won’t speculate here on the role of the oil and gas companies, the so-called, Seven Sisters, and their multinational interests linked to Middle Eastern oil producing states, but clearly nuclear energy would have a lot cheaper over the last sixty years than two wars fought directly by the US in the Middle East, and five wars fought by proxy between Israel and the oil-producing states.

Had we eliminated oil dependence early by committing to the atom, we would have changed history decisively and for the better.

Cap and Trade is not the answer.

A federally-sponsored program of accelerated conversion to Nuclear Powered electric generation, followed by a fifty to one hundred year phase in of solar, wind and fusion power, is the answer.

All electric companies should be abolished in favor of one company modeled and based on the Tennessee Valley Authority, that will erect Nukes until the United States is 100% nuclear based electric power, and zero percent coal or oil.

Combing this with a program of converting all cars to electric power would also solve another problem as well. This is clearly doable in the next five-ten years.

This is the kind of program that would involve spending money on a specific problem, creating jobs, and stimulating the economy. It’s better than cap and trade because it puts dollars into the economy instead of taking them out. Also, it federalizes the utilities, which do a horrible job.

Finally, the electric grid needs to be updated using superconductors and the latest electric technologies, including quantum conductors and new metals to conduct electricity. With superconductors, electricity can be sent from location to location without any loss of power or current. This would eliminate the need for transformers and high voltage lines, etc. Again, a vast federal program committed to upgrading the grid is needed.

These steps would be much better than cap and trade.

A final note about cars–Why do Obama and the Democrats want to prop up the car industry if they are truly worried about Global Warming? Cars contribute more than 50% of the hydrocarbon emissions in the US that contribute to global warming.

Instead of paying consumers a $4,000 tax credit to buy new cars with high gas mileage, wouldn’t it make more sense to get people to STOP DRIVING CARS AND TAKE MASS TRANSIT?

In short,

1) Let the U.S. Auto Industry DIE.

2) Put an enormous carbon tax on all car purchases. Make any new car cost around $50,000 to buy.

3) Apply that tax backwards to used cars as well.

4) Massively subsidize AMTRAK and all local mass transit across the nation, and let people ride the trains and Mass Transit free for the next five years. Yes, I said it, FREE OF CHARGE for the next five years. Why? To get them used to doing it. The massive federal stimulus bill to build rail, subway, light rail throughout the US would be in the TRILLIONS of dollars, as well as to subsidize AMTRAK everywhere so it’s FREE OF CHARGE. That would be a net STIMULUS to the economy and create the world’s finest light and heavy rail systems. We could also finally build HIGH SPEED RAIL SYSTEMS modeled on France, England and Japan to cover longer distances that could go 300-400 miles per hour, that could eliminate many shorter airplane routes, unclogging the skies of needless plane flight. This is a win, win, win plan. We get rid of filthy autos and planes and replace them with electric trains. And net net net create jobs.

5) Starting in 2014, you can slowly re-introduce fees again for Mass Transit and AMTRAK once we’ve started to eliminate all of the automobiles.

6) Start reclaiming the inner cities by closing roads and creating pedestrian zones and mass-transit zones, and creating more and more parks in which no cars can come into the city, until finally, all cities will have no cars or trucks at all.

7) The goal would be to eliminate cars and trucks by 2025, and convert everyone to mass transit and rail.

8) Electric cars only would be allowed eventually, powered by the nuclear grid. These would be cheap and affordable.

This is a far reaching and thoughtful plan. Abolish the internal combustion engine as we know it and force all americans out of their cars and onto trains, buses, subways and light rail.

This is the true path to ending global warming and reaching a green economy.

Art Kyriazis
Philly/South Jersey
Home of the World Champion Phillies
up

REPLY TO BLOG BY PROF. KARLAN ON BRIAN LEITER’S BLOG

I read with interest the following post by Prof. Pamela Karlan to Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports Blog at

http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2006/04/high_gpas_at_to.html:

April 19, 2006
High Undergraduate GPAs at Top Law Schools: What Do They Mean and What Are Their Consequences for Legal Education?

Pamela Karlan, a distinguished expert on voting rights and civil procedure at Stanford Law School, writes:

I read, with both interest and a fair amount of distress, the 75th percentile LSAT rankings. The distress came from seeing the staggering 75th percentile GPAs.

These could reflect at least three states of the world, two of them unfortunate. First, and most optimistically, the 40 schools on your list could all be admitting kids with amazing undergraduate academic achievements. (A 3.96 means, for example a student with 34A’s and 2 B+’s as an undergraduate; a 3.85 could mean half A’s and half A-’s.)

Second, the GPA’s could reflect rampant grade inflation at undergraduate institutions. Leave aside the abstract debate over whether the current generation of students is so much abler than its predecessors that good students should never see a grade below A- or B+. Most law schools have mandatory means or curves, and I’m aware of none where that mean is over around 3.4. (Even at the schools that don’t have official means, I would guess the actual mean is no higher than that.) Thus, virtually all law students will have lower, substantially lower, GPA’s in law school than they had in college. (E.g., at my own institution, 25% of the students had GPAs equivalent to what the number 1 student in the normal graduating class is likely to have.) This drop has a number of unfortunate consequences. Many of us are familiar with a huge demoralization effect the day first-semester grades come out and people who’ve been told all their lives that they are “A’s” at everything that’s measured hear for the first time that they’re “B’s.” They give up, and simply float through the remaining five semesters. Many have a self-protective defensive reaction: if the law doesn’t love them, then they distance themselves from it. In addition, at law schools where there are course-selection strategies that allow students to manipulate their GPA’s, students are then drawn not to taking what’s good or useful for them, but rather what’s most likely to boost their GPAs back toward the range they’ve internalized as normal. The high UGPAs mean that many of our students have never really learned to bounce back from academic disappointment (the “C” I got my first semester of college is one of the best things that ever happened to me) and like learning to ride a bicycle, it’s harder to learn that the older you get.

Third, to get those astronomical UGPA’s, students necessarily had to be either (a) extraordinary across the board for their entire undergraduate career (the student who bombs the first year of college because she wasn’t yet ready for the work or who was planning to be a physicist before he realized he didn’t have the mathematical ability can’t get one of these sky-high GPAs) or (b) strategic and risk-averse, taking only the kinds of courses in which they’d get A’s, from the time they were 17 or 18 years old. I’d bet it’s more the latter than the former. One of the things I always though the U.S. had over many other advanced countries was that we didn’t expect students to specialize in only what they were good at when they were still teenagers. But in order to get a 3.9 UGPA, students really can’t take things well outside their comparative advantages. Many of us see the consequences of this in what our students do: they’re passive and non-entrepreneurial in their job choices, going to large firms not because that practice particularly attracts them, but because it seems less “risky” right out of law school than going to smaller firms or government jobs. Many of them haven’t exercised their intellectual imaginations in years. Many are in fact not particularly well educated, since the science majors took few writing courses, the humanities people took perhaps one semester of economics and flee any quantitative subject, and the social and hard scientists know no American (let alone world) history at all.

Now, of course, we’re talking here only about the 75th percentile. Perhaps we could find the students who are comfortable with risk, entrepreneurial, academically and intellectually adventurous, and resilient among the other three-quarters of the class. But even the 25th percentile at top 20 schools have staggering UGPAs. And that sets the tone for the student body.

I’m not sure, as long as US News drives so much of the world, that there’s anything to be done. But it’s frustrating if what we’re trying to do is to train imaginative, entrepreneurial, courageous, resilient lawyers with broad perspectives that one of the central criteria for admitting students undermines our chances of doing that.

(end of Prof. Karlan’s comments).

Now I actually knew Pam growing up–she was one of a circle of debaters I knew who grew up debating in connecticut (she went to Hopkins Grammar School and then to Yale) and she’s enjoyed a great deal of success as a law school academic, although she’s way too liberal for my tastes (what law school academic isn’t liberal?).

On the plus side, I don’t think she’s a communist, but if she is, i’m not down with that at all.

My father fought those jerks in the greek civil war, and they were rat bastards, the communists. I can’t believe the democrats are actually meeting with castro in cuba right now.

Anyway, here were my comments in reply to her post:

An addendum to the comment above on grade inflation and test scores.

1) it is well-known that the ETS re-normed the SATS, LSATs, GREs and MCATs at least one standard deviation approximately sixteen years ago. Consequently, our generation of the 1970s and 1980s had a mean on the SAT and other standardized tests that was one standardized deviation higher than the current generation of students–our IQ in short, averaged around 100, while theirs literally averages 85. If you pin the bell curve tail on the donkey, that makes the top 1/2 % of the current generation dumber than the top five % of the previous generation.

So the students aren’t getting smarter, they’re getting dumber. That’s what renorming the test means.

I worked teaching all of the standardized tests for more than twenty years and wrote the pilot materials for the LSAT for Princeton Review in the early 1990s.

2) Grade inflation ain’t so except in the courses where professors are giving easy grades. At colleges that are conservative like Drexel, William and Mary, Hamilton, and so forth, grades are given out fairly and with rigor. It’s at some of the humanities departments that standards have fallen, and as certain classics and history professors have noted, along with scholarship–you can hardly find an actual greek, latin or byzantine professor today in a major ivy league university. When I visited Harvard, Prof. Finley was lecturing on Ancient Athens. Today, you’re more likely to hear some humanities teacher deconstructing gender based issues in some unknown text from last week, or worse still, deconstructing something from the internet.

3) TV, the internet, cellphones and laptops have definitively made current law students stupider. They don’t know how to write, they don’t know how to read books, and their research skills are shallow and poor. Most important, they lack the skill of memorization. I used to know where every single book was in certain law libraries, just as I knew where they were in huge undergrad libraries for years. That was a lot more useful skill than Boolean searches, which are not a thorough method of seeking out facts unless you already know the subject matter at hand.

4) Westlaw and Lexis led us to the horror that is Google.

5) Google is driving the book and newspaper out of existence, leading us to a famous Asimov short story of science fiction in which (in the near future) everyone forgets how to read and do math because computers do it for us–until a nuclear war destroys the machines and we become helpless, until one day a boy re-discovers how to do math by hand, and is proclaimed a genius.

This is the orwellian place we are all headed.

In addition to the foregoing comments, I would have also pointed out that Prof. Karlan’s basic point is wrong.

She assumes that students get high grades in college, and then come to Stanford Law and get lower grades because the competition is tougher.

This is actually ass backwards. I know Pam from when she was 18 and kicking back beers at college debate tournaments, so I know she likes to pontificate without factual basis from time to time, so here are some facts;

1) except for the top ten law schools, most law school applicants don’t have a 3.90 GPA or a very high LSAT. The vast majority of law students and lawyers are trained at 2d, 3d and 4th quartile schools as rated by US News and World Report rankings, or at local state law schools. Those students make up the vast majority of the bar.

2) students who go to Stanford, Yale, Harvard law schools only rarely practice law in the “real”world. They usually become law professors, judges, politicians etc. or work for rarified law firms. It’s unusual to see these folks work with actual clients or appear in actual courtrooms. Pam is a perfect example of this. She’s spent her life in the classroom, not in the real world.

3) Pam admits to getting a C or two at Yale, and I admit to that with Harvard. Because those schools were hard, back in the day. They were not easy, there was no grade inflation and the competition was brutal in most of the classes. Plus I was a premed on the side. So my GPA in college was nothing pretty, although it was definitely higher than a B average and i was recommended for honors, had a cum laude on my thesis and a summa on my general exam.

4) When I went to law school, after working a while, I thought it was MUCH EASIER than college. To be honest, I barely cracked a book open, worked forty hours a week at law firms collecting cold hard cash, and found the work at law school to be trivial. It was in law school that i got racks of As and only a couple of Bs. It was funny how many As I got. I won Am Jur Awards and Best Paper Awards (best grade in my class) every single semester I was in law school. It became like a joke how smart I was in law school, and yet, I really wasn’t working 1/8th as hard as I did in college.

Consequently, I don’t really know what Pam is talking about, not at all. My grades were disappointing to me in college but I worked my ass off to get them; but my grades in law school were terrific, and I hardly broke a sweat.

Next, as far as training law students to be imaginative, entrepreneurial or creative, I think that’s a deeply flawed and dangerous thing to do.

The last thing I as a businessman want my lawyer to be is creative, imaginative or entrepreneurial. I want my lawyer to be a lawyer, that is, an unimaginative little nebbish who grinds out papers and hands them to my enemy at 5pm on friday afternoon, or gets deals done by smiling and being at peace and harmony with everyone in the bar.

Creativity, imagination and entrepreneurship, I’m afraid, is reserved for the Schumpeterians of the world, that is to say, the guys at Business School, and that’s why Wharton has a Center for Entrepreneurship, and why I and my colleagues at various Business Schools teach Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Creativity at Business Schools around the North east directly, rather than teaching the stultifying subject of law. Law by its nature cannot be innovative, because it is precedential and must be followed to the letter of the law; whereas an inventor or entrepreneur is not bound by precedent and can be innovative.

I actually find Pam’s notion of what a good lawyer is to be incomprehensible. A good lawyer should be boring, ethical and should be able to repeat a statute from front to back thirty times in a row. Not creative, not innovative, not entrepreneurial, but efficient like a swiss army knife or a swiss watch. Efficiency and practice make for good lawyering. Also long hours spent learning how to write briefs exactly like everyone else writes them. The last thing you want to do in a brief is to introduce anything new, creative or innovative. Judges hate that. They just want you to follow the 8,000 appellate rules they’ve set forth for how to write the brief.

Good lawyers, then, are basically automatons. Clever and hard working automatons, but robots, essentially. In another century, they will in fact be replaced by AI possessing machines for many of their tasks, I predict. They’re already being outsourced to India for much of their robotic work such as document discovery, which was once thought to require intelligence and training. See my point?

Whereas good businessmen are creative, innovative and entrepreneurial.

5) A logic, rhetoric, oratory, philosophy background gets you through law school very easily; math and science make it trivial. All law problems are basically logic puzzles, and all law essays are basically debate/oratory speeches made in a philsophy manner of analyzing each question from both sides. This was perfectly normal to me. Undergrad teachers kept trying to make a marxist out of me, so they didn’t like my impartiality. Law professors loved it.

6) Law exams are graded without your name on the paper. No favoritism can creep into the grading. Undergrad is rife with favoritism and bias towards certain undergrads that the professors play favorites towards.

7) My friend NS who went to school with Pam at Yale thought Stanford Law was a joke after Yale undergrad; he thought it was a vacation. We used to get together frequently in Cali and hang out. He never seemed to work too hard.

8) My friend DB who went to harvard with me and then to Stanford Med thought Stanford Law was a joke after harvard undergrad and stanford med. He worked 40 hours at a top patent firm and saved all his money. Again, he had plenty of free time, he hardly worked at law school.

9) Law Schools should require all incoming students to study the following;

semester of logic, semster of intro to western philosophy
semester of oratory/rhetoric/speech
do two semesters of competitive speech/rhetoric/debate/parli
do two semesters of mock trial
spend a summer working at a law firm
spend a summer working at legal aid
spend a summer working for a judge
spend two years minimum working in business or somewhere between college and law school. The armed forces would be the best of all.
give preferential admission to army veterans, ROTC and reservists and end their anti-military culture.
sharply curtail the number of attorneys taking the bar nationally. End all state bars and apply one national bar, and only pass around 5,000 persons into it annually, and make them travel to one of three reginal centers nationally to take the exam, such as SF, CA, Chicago and New York, and only give the exam once a year.
Require proficiency in Spanish for ALL attorneys, since Spanish is required to speak to most clients on both coasts.

10) Science and business grad school were much more challenging and interesting than law school or undergrad. I would NEVER recommend to my own children to attend law school, maybe take a law class in business school, but not attend law school. The best combination out there today is the MD-MBA combined program, which I think is ideal in today’s economy.

These are some of the practical changes I would make to the legal eduction process.

I would probably close all but a handful of the existing law schools in the united states. Or, perhaps, people could obtain law degrees for reasons other than being a lawyer–for academic or scholarly purposes, as in europe, but not to be a lawyer or to make money. I’d convert a lot of the programs to MBA programs, actually.

we have way too many lawyers in this country and we need to reform the legal profession, reform tort law, and sharply regulate the profession before it drives all of the doctors, drug makers and other competent businessmen out of this country for good.

One final note, and this is about Pam’s constitutional law book, which she authored with Cass Sunstein, Mark & Rebecca Tushnet, Louis Seidman & Geoffrey Stone. This casebook has been ranked one out of five stars by nearly everyone who ranked it on Amazon dot com. I happen to be a fan of Pam, of Cass Sunstein (except for his dumping Martha Nussbaum, who I’m a bigger fan of, for that stupid Irish younger woman professor at Harvard who’s the big Obama fan) and I really am a big fan of Mark and Rebecca Tushnet–Rebecca was one of Harvard’s best debaters ever in the 1990s–and Mark is a very smart guy–but apparently brains doesn’t mean you can write a casebook as good as Larry Tribe’s.

Here’s a sample comment from Amazon dot com;

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Terrible Casebook, December 13, 2008
By kiki (Baltimore, MD) – See all my reviews
It’s a casebook, so it’s not supposed to be great reading, but this one is by far the worst casebook I’ve ever had. The only thing a casebook needs to do to achieve mediocrity is contain cases. This doesn’t, not really. It gives you the cliff’s notes of important cases. One sentence blurbs about others. And pages and pages of rambling, aimless, academic debate. It may be a good book for Con Law professors and others who have already read all of the cases discussed. For someone trying to learn con law, it is useless. It is also organized very poorly. Any class organized around this book is doomed from the start. If your professor uses this book, take another class. If you can’t take another class, buy the Chemerinsky treatise and rely on that instead. Professors: DO NOT USE THIS BOOK.

Constitutional Law (Casebook)

the website address is above, if you want to check out the remarks and the book yourself. Perhaps there will be a revised edition. I realize that Pam writes and talks a lot. As I said, part of her strength, and her weakness, is that she talks and writes too much, and perhaps she spreads herself a little thin.

When I was a litigator, I litigated civil rights matters in the trenches, and won them. It’s not as hard as it seems. You need to have a firm grasp of the history of the United States from 1776 through about 1900 to understand the reconstruction and civil war era, in order to make some sense of what the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments mean.

I actually think Justice Scalia had some pertinent remarks on US v. Cruikshank in the recent gun rights case. He noted that the US Supreme Court in that 1874 case took the right of bearing arms away from african american militia men under the second amendment, because of white supremacist views which were going on at the time. the dispute was that armed militias of african americans and republicans were fighting ku klux klansmen in Mississippi and elsewhere in the south, and the african american plaintiffs claimed a second amendment right to bear arms as a militia.

The US Supreme Court said no, that’s only a federal right against the federal government, not against the states, ignoring incorporation under the 14th amendment.

Scalia basically says now that Cruikshank was wrong, and that african americans had the right to arm themselves as a militia in 1874 and defend themselves against the Klan in the 1870s.

I think that’s an interesting point of view. Of course, an armchair liberal like Karlan would never consider that Scalia would have anything interesting to say.

But here at the Sophist, we think there are two sides to every question.

–art kyriazis
philly/nj home of the world champion phillies

–art kyriazis

NO MORE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO PRINT; THE END OF NEWSPAPERS IN AMERICA

It probably isn’t news to anyone currently breathing that every newspaper owning corporation in the United States is currently in bankruptcy Chapter 11 proceedings. Here in Philadelphia, after sinking more that 500 million bucks to take the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philly Daily News off the hands of the guys who bought them from Knight Ridder, the purchasing group headed by Brian Tierney et al. ended more than eleven months of negotiations with creditors by filing for Chapter 11 protection with the United States Bankruptcy Court, meaning reorganization and possible liquidation. There are serious rumors that only one of the two newspapers will survive, probably the Inquirer.

In a way, this is strange, because there was a time in Philadelphia, and I don’t mean going back to Ben Franklin, when it was obvious that the Inquirer was the worst and most pitiful newspaper in town. The Philadelphia Public Ledger was the newspaper of record (its building still stands at 6th & Chestnut) for many decades, while the Philadelphia Bulletin was clearly the better of the two papers while the Bulletin and Inquirer were the two main papers in the second half of the 20th century.

Of course, the Public Ledger went under in the Great Depression; it died in a court-ordered liquidation in 1941 or 1942. This may just be history repeating itself. The Public Ledger was owned jointly by the owners of the NY Times, incidentally.

For a complete list of ALL newspapers ever printed in Philadelphia, go to this website pdf of newspapers held by the free library of philadelphia;

http://libwww.freelibrary.org/faq/guides/FLP-NEWSPAPER-HOLDINGS-BY-DECADE.pdf

you’ll be shocked and amazed how many newspapers there have been and how many small ones there still are other than the inquirer and daily news even now.

But then again, the Philadelphia Athletics won five world series and too many pennants to count between 1901 and 1953, and were the main baseball team in Philadelphia for more than fifty years. No one gave a fig about the Phillies. It was only after Connie Mack died and the A’s moved away that the Phillies finally developed a fan base, and even then not really until the 1964 pennant run with Dick Allen and Jim Bunning did they really draw any fans. But who remembers the A’s today in Philly? Where are they today? No one in Philadelphia remembers them at all.

There’s a small museum in one of the counties, and a small bronze plaque at the new ballpark. That’s about it for the team that in the first half of the 20th century was the second best ballclub in the American League, and by far the best professional sports team in Philadelphia.

Getting back to newspapers, the point is that you can’t understand history by looking at it now. If you looked around now and saw humans, you’d never know that dinosaurs once ruled the earth. Likewise, looking around and seeing the Inquirer being the main newspaper, you’d never know that once there was a Public Ledger, a Bulletin, and probably a dozen other papers. Even the Saturday Evening Post, the nation’s number one women’s magazine, was published right here in Philadelphia, but it died too. That building is still around also. We have seen the end of magazines like Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and most recently, U.S. News & World Report, in the past forty years. Now newspapers are dying as well.

There were a lot of great movies about newspapers. The best movie of all time is about newspapers. Here I refer to Citizen Kane (1941), which is a thinly veiled biopic of William Randolph Hearst and his media empire.

There’s also Meet John Doe (1936) and let’s not forget All the President’s Men (1974).

I’d throw in Broadcast News (1980s) as well, even though it’s really a TV movie, just because it’s flat out hysterically funny and not at all dated, and because Brooks is one of my favorite comics in the world other than Mike Reiss. Just looking at Brooks makes you laugh.

But history does repeat itself. The Hearst media empire was bankrupted by the Great Depression—so much so that Hearst himself, so rich that he could build the Heart mansion—the famous “Xanadu” in the Kane movie—in San Simeon, California—now a famous museum—actually lost all his money to his creditors in bankruptcy proceedings and lost control of his newspaper holdings. No one today has heard of the New York newspapers that Hearst made his fortune from.

Now, we are going through another serious economic dislocation which is again severely affecting media badly. As badly as Hearst was affected by the Depression and War years, that’s how badly newspapers and old media will be affected this time around. Add to that the free news which is available on the internet, and on every persons’ telephone, and one would be silly to expend money for a newspaper.

It’s quite obvious that within another twenty years, there will be no more magazines or newspapers in print at all, that everything will be delivered right to your computer, tv or phone via internet. Maybe (and I often futurize about this) the convergence of nanotechnology and biotechnology will eventuate in a chip being implanted in your brain or neural net, so that you can visualize the images yourself without a machine mediating at all. Perhaps we’ll all be connected to the internet and to each other one day in such a fashion. It’s difficult to make radical predictions, but then again, in 1910, no one could have predicted that baseball, then a deadball sport based on bunting, stealing and pitching, would in the 1920s and thereafter become a sport of sitting around waiting for someone to hit a three run home run.

I will miss the Philadelphia Daily News. For the last forty years, it’s been the best sports paper in the country, and I’ve read all the other papers around, including the Boston Globe, the Chicago, the LA, the NY and SF papers. NY has tabloids basically and no good writing at all; the Boston Globe for a long time had great writers, but they’ve all gone to ESPN or national outlets where the money really is; and no other city really had good sports writing. Philly might be the last town in which there’s been good beat writing and sports writing for a long time now.

If the Daily News goes, that will probably be the end of it, though it may survive on line since there’s an online edition of the daily news that’s pretty good, and even better, available nationally to all former philly residents who follow their teams. So when they throw the last daily news into the fire and you see the sled burning with the name “rosebud,” remember you read it here—this was all a story about Charley Foster Kane, who wanted to be the world’s greatest newspaperman, and succeeded all too well.

By the way, I mentioned in a prior post that GE was way off about Jimmy Fallon? GE stock is now trading at five dollars a share. That’s right, five dollars a share. they made a big deal about this on one of the network news shows while i was working out on the elliptical at the gym. whoa nellie! The stock apparently has completely crashed.

Jack and Suzy Welch, would you buy this company’s stock? It was trading at $40 just last year. And now it’s down to $5 a share and dropping like a rock. Pretty soon it will be worth, say, 1923 German deutsche marks, which is to say, nothing.

Oh yes I would says the Wizard of OZ. You can get a thousand shares in this company now for the price of a song. Heck, the only place the stock can go is a little down, or a lot up.

I said they should have bumped Leno three years ago. While I recognize most of their problems are with GE Capital, entertainment is the division that’s always recession proof.

If you’re not sure about that, check out the fact that 1930s and 1970s are the greatest eras of film history.

Jimmy Fallon had another great show–Jon Bon Jovi did a duet with one of his fans, while Tina Fey sat and rooted the two of them on. I think it was the girls’ dream moment of her life, all caught on camera. You can bet that will be on youtube.

Art Kyriazis
Philly/South Jersey
Home of the World Champion Philadelphia Phillies
You can

SALARY LIMITS FOR BANKERS AND WALL STREET EXECS

In the recent legislation from DC, salary limits have been enacted limiting executive salaries for bankers and executives of companies taking federal aid from TARP and the other programs which will be propping up the banking, investment banking, business and auto communities.

Some commentators are already criticizing these limits, including noted professors, including this story in the Chicago Tribune dated February 17, 2009 by noted famous economics professor Steven Kaplan:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-oped0217payfeb17,0,3623866.story

On limits, I would argue twofold. First, wage and price controls were used successfully during the great depression, during World War II, and also during the Nixon era, all periods when we were having economic distress of the magnitude we are experiencing now.

This is not the time to argue for deregulation and laissez-faire. To the contrary, deregulation and laissez-faire are what got us into this quagmire. What is needed at this point is MORE regulation and plenty of it.

Second, Kaplan’s own studies on executive compensation, particularly a study he did on investment banking compensation, demonstrate that investment bankers have been pulling down way too much money compared to the rest of the working force in the United States. This is the paper he did with Rauh, “Wall Street and Main Street: What Contributes to the Rise in the Highest Incomes?” (july 2007) (cite below).

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=931280

This was an NBER paper and highly quantified, and if anything, is an elegant argument for limiting the compensation of well-paid investment bankers.

I’d probably go farther and say it’s an argument for enacting some kind of tax measure that would retroactively confiscate some of their ill-gotten gains from the last thirty years through some kind of tax on wealth or assessment taxation on all luxury goods, and accumulated wealth. That, along with a highly focused program of IRS audits targeted at persons who have filed returns of $1 million income and higher the last ten years or so, and re-assessing their tax due to much higher levels, should bring in a lot of extra revenue the government needs, which can then be redistributed to the consumer classes which need the money to spend on consumer goods in a keynesian sense.

Finally, I will say right now, if any executive is unwilling, unable or simply refuses to accept a limit on their salary, I am prepared to take over their position, effective immediately.

While not a WASP, I am a golf-playing prep school grad, a harvard and wharton product, and am willing to work mere bankers hours.

I promise to be aloof, boring and devoted to the interests of our depositors.

In addition, I promise to wear only blue, grey and dark suits, and white shirts. I only shop at brooks brothers and polo as it is, but with the recession, I’m willing to start going to Todays Man as necessary.

I drive an old car, I have a paid up house, and I lead a boring but highly satisfying family life with kids.

In short, i believe I’d make the ideal banker.

Moreover, whatever you’re paying the other guy, I’ll take 20% less.

And donate it to charities for the poor. Publicly and loudly. Think of the PR for your bank.

I want no raises and I don’t want any big offices. I’ll bring my beat-up harvard chair with me.

Everything I do will be for the bank.

Also, since I was a lawyer for fifteeen years (did I mention that?) doing corporate, banking and bankruptcy work, I will be able to be in full compliance with any and all Sarbanes-Oxley, Garn-St. Germain and consumer and general banking regulatory legislation that applies without skipping an eyelash–and also I am friends with a couple of super-lawyers who are experts at that stuff who will I’m sure cut their fees to meet new federal regs.

So you can fire your regulatory team as well, since I can cover that as well as do the banking job. Looks like some efficiency savings there.

Also, for what it’s worth, I actually know and have met Professors Elizabeth Warren and Lawrence Summers who are running TARP and the other bailout programs, so if there is a problem affecting your bank, my calls will get returned. We’re all harvard alums, part of the big club, dontcha’ know.

This is about getting your bank back on track. Not about me not about you and not about that greedy guy who won’t accept pay cuts.

Did I mention my house is paid for?

This offer is good for any and all banks needed top level or mid-level management in the united states that would be capped as to salary and have to face a lot of TARP and other regulation.

very truly yours,

Dr. Arthur Kyriazis, M.Sc.E. Penn Engineering (submatriculation Wharton)
philadelphia/south jersey
home of the world champion philadelphia phillies

http://www.linkedin.com/in/kyriazis

TIME’S “ITS NOW OR NEVER FOR LARRY SUMMERS”

In the Feb 9 2009 issue of Time Magazine, at pp. 29-32, there is a long article on Chief Economic Advisor Prof. Lawrence Summers, claiming that due to the poor state of the economy, “it’s now or never for Larry Summers.”

Let’s examine that statement for a moment. Let’s assume you, the reader have studied first and second year economics. This subject is commonly subdivided into two sections, microeconomics and macroeconomics.

Parenthetically, I would point out that much of this confusion raised by the Time Magazine article was well-answered by President Obama in his press conference last night regarding the economic stimulus package and the TARP I and TARP II packages.

Basically, this is where we are at economically: We are at a point in our economy where all of the major macroeconomic indicators suggest that we are going through a period of downward economic velocity equivalent to the downward spiral the United States experienced from 1929-1940, known as the Great Depression.

The policy responses should be the same as before. TARP is equivalent to the NRA of the 1930s; the NRA bailed out many banks and businesses and kept them from failing, TARP I and II will do the same. FDR used a package of programs to deficit spend and enhance a stimulus package guided by what were then novel Keynesian notions from his “brain trust”; we need to do the same now. Spending was down then; spending is down now. We need to increase the marginal propensity to consume. Banking and investment speculation became rampant and unregulated in the 1920s leading up to the crash of 1929; the same occurred leading up to 2009 due to interstate banking, poor SEC regulation and loose real estate lending (all similar to the 1920s, incidentally); the response of FDR were the Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934 and the Glass-Stegall Act. Similar legislation needs to be passed now reforming securities regulation and also reforming bank regulation. I personally would like to see us go back to banning interstate banking.

The President last nite was very clear that a great deal of legislation is still on the way, and that we are mired deep in a very bad economic crisis. the macroeconomic indicators suggest he is correct, and he cited Summers and Treasury Secretary Geithner by name during the press conference.

We will now discuss macroeconomics.

Consequently, as part of macroeconomics, we will now review and discuss the subject of fiscal and monetary policy LAG. As we all know, there is a LAG or DELAY between the time that fiscal and monetary policies are IMPLEMENTED and the time that the effects of such policies are actually SEEN or FELT in the economy at large, in terms of macroeconomic signs or indicators such as GDP, jobs, corporate earnings, and the like.

Generally speaking, the lag time for fiscal and monetary policy can be as long as eighteen months, or as short as six months. It takes a while for investment money to work its way into the economy in the case of monetary policy, and it takes even longer for the multiplier effect to work its way into the economy in the case of fiscal policy. Also, people’s marginal propensity to consume declines sharply during pronounced recession, so the fiscal stimulus must be greater than normal to get people to increase their marginal propensity to consume.

Now this brings us back to “now or never.” Assuming that President Obama and Chief Economic Adviser Summers and Treasury Secretary Geithner get EVERYTHING they want from the Congress in the way of a fiscal stimulus package, and also in the way of TARP II, III IV etc, and anything else they want, by June of 2009, it will still take up to eighteen months to see some viable difference, due to LAG effects of fiscal and economic policy implementation.

Therefore, the earliest we will see any results from the current round of government policies will be the summer of 2010 from the monetary policies of Bernanke, and the winter of 2010-2011 from the fiscal policies of Obama-Summers-Geithner.

This is, incidentally, completely consistent with the length of time it took the Regan administration under Paul Volcker to get results from their tax cuts and tight money policies; their fiscal and monetary policy implementations of early 1981 did not have real results until about eighteen (18) months later, in 1983, when the economy began to heat up in a hurry, and took off on the longest economic expansion in post-wwII history.

Again, the lesson is clear—fiscal and monetary policy have a pronounced lag period.

Now or never makes for good journalism, but lousy economics. Give Prof. Summers a couple of summers, and then we’ll give him his final grade.

I was not very enthusiastic about Obama during the campaign, but his transition team management and his actions since taking office, along with his masterful press conference last night, have really brought me around to seeing that Presidence Obama, as opposed to candidate Obama, is a force to be reckoned with. President Obama is knowledgeable and articulate, and is not interested in poll numbers, but in doing the right things to dig the country out of crisis.

Also, it is plainly evident that he listens to his economic and foreign policy advisers closely, and can repeat what they say verbatim. President Obama functions at a high intellectual level.

We are fortunate to have a leader that can lead in times of crisis. I say this as a non-partisan statement. For now, so long as the country is in crisis, I believe we should lay all partisanship aside and support the President in his efforts to bring the economy around. the us and world banking systems are on the brink of collapse unless we respond appropriately.

There is an old saying that “those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.” However, in the modern world, that has become, “those who can, do, and those who can’t, write bitter journalistic screeds about the smart guys that can tearing them to shreds (mainly because of jealousy over their ability to work hard and get results).”

What we have with the endless article about Professor and Chief Economic Adviser Lawrence Summers and the endless stream of articles about him, is just that–a stream of articles from journalists who are fascinated and somewhat jealous of the fact that Prof. Summers has a great deal of ability, and has worked hard all his life to capitalize on his ability.

With his service to President Obama, Prof. Summers has now served Presidents Reagan, Clinton and Obama–three different administrations from both parties–has served as president of the World Bank and president of Harvard University–as well as advanced economics professor at MIT and Harvard. Prof. Summers has also served as an economics advisers to several Presidential candidates as well. He seems unafraid of the press, unintimidated by the competition and jockeying of campaigns and administrations, and doesn’t mind taking paycuts to be in public service.

It’s time we thanked people like Prof. Summers who are willing to serve the public instead of putting them under the journalistic microscope.

I could name you ten economics professors that are at least as skilled and able as Prof. Summers, who have never ventured forth to serve their President or their country or their university in any capacity. Summers has given willingly of himself and his time to serve his nation over and over again when he has been called upon. Prof. Summers is morally suprerior to his colleagues in that he is willing to serve his country over and over and over again.

President Harry Truman said, if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Prof. Summers has been in the kitchen so long, he doesn’t know what the temperature is.

I say, god bless Larry Summers, and god bless the President, for being willing to tackle the difficult issues of the day. I’m certain they’re much too difficult for me, and I’m a fairly skilled individual who works hard, but I wouldn’t measure up to Prof. Summers or President Obama. I feel certain of that, and because of that, I feel that the country is in good hands.

–art kyriazis, philly/south jersey
home of the world champion phillies