What this blog is about

No one who works should be poor.  This fundamental tenant of human decency and respect essence is under attack in too many places--and it's not just the shouting heads on Fox News or the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. It's everywhere.

It's in in the business section of the New York Times. It's practically standard fare at the University of Chicago School of Economics. It's a fixture of one major political party, a statute that another major party is too full of cowardice to challenge. And yes, it's  even on NPR and PBS. Every day.

I first saw this poster at a Bursar's Office. Only one of us got rich.

This blog exists because when I graduated from high school 10 years ago, I was told in no uncertain terms that a college degree was going to make me rich--and I needed that education to find out how to wisely spend all that money.

This last decade has been the decade that wasn't in terms of job growth. This country has just as many jobs in 2011 as it did in 2001. If we had adapted the economic policies we have now from the onset of when this country was founded, not a single American would have worked. That's worse than the Soviet Union!

Well I say no more. No more should Americans of both political stripes take an existentialist approach to our economic system. Stagnant job growth should be viewed as a failure of economic policy as apposed to the wheelings and deelings of "the invisible hand." No more should nonsensical abstract concepts like "innovation" take precedence over actual, measurable economic output. No more should politicians attack smokers and drinkers as the sole targets of "sin" taxes, as the sin of excessive greed causes more harm to our economic system and thus, should require heavier taxation. And no more should politicians and economists be fixated on providing economic growth to China and India. Nothing personal, we've got to take care of own first.

There will be plenty to blog about. It's pretty weird--to say the least--to hear Scott Walker attack public school teachers as a vestige of communism or listen to Barack Obama calmly explain that he intends to cut home heating oil subsidies for the poor. That's weird, all right. But when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Who knows, I might even end up on CNN--not that anybody watches that network anymore.

~The Connecticut Yankee.