"Give People Money" and "The War on Normal People"--Two Books on Avoiding Dystopia

          Annie Lowrey’s Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World does not really demonstrate how a universal basic income (UBI) would do any of the things listed in its subtitle. This may well not be Ms. Lowrey’s fault, since my experience is publishers will take liberties with titles. My book, The Simple Life, for example was initially titled The New Frugality Anthology, but the publisher decided frugality was too downscale. One contributor dropped out of the project as a result of the title change. If you’ve ever read an issue of Real Simple, you can see why. “Simple” these days can be quite expensive.

          Anyway, back to Ms. Lowrey’s book. It gives a good definition of UBI: “It is universal, in the sense that every resident of a given community or country receives it. It is basic in that it is just enough to live on and not more. And it is income.”

          Ms. Lowrey goes into the history of the UBI, which I found one of the more interesting parts of the book. The Romans had a form of it; Elizabethan England discussed it as a means to alleviate the poverty caused by the enclosure of the commons and the resultant migration to cities. Bismarck proposed a version for Germany. Richard Nixon, Milton Friedman, and other conservatives considered it in the 1970s. Alas, in this country the idea has so far come to naught. It’s like Will Rogers’ comment on the weather—everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything. Maybe this time will be different.

          The book is good when it stays on track. It describes a family of six living in a studio apartment. All have low paying jobs, and some have two jobs. One person contacted her employer (a fast food chain) about how to make ends meet and was told how to apply for food stamps, housing assistance, etc. Ms. Lowrey visits Maine and encounters a woman who has fallen through the holes in the safety net. Ms. Lowrey says the holes are there on purpose—to punish the poor--and points out that with a UBI the bureaucracy could go away (maybe then learning what it is like to be poor themselves—my observation). She points out that many of the benefits the poor have to jump through hoops to get—housing assistance, for example, are readily available to the middle class—the mortgage deduction, for example.

          Unfortunately, the book goes off the track. Ms. Lowrey begins the book with a visit to the DMZ between North and South Korea, goes to Kenya to see how a nonprofit’s $20 a month contribution to everyone in a village has made a difference, and travels to India to see how screwed up a bureaucracy can get—as if she couldn’t find examples in this country. (I could suggest one where local infrastructure is going to hell while subsidized apartments for the rich and a streetcar that duplicates existing bus routes are priorities.) I couldn’t help but wonder if these foreign adventures were not just padding for a 208-page book that could well have been better if it had been shorter.

          Toward the end of the book Ms. Lowrey examines the cost of the program and recognizes that it will be expensive. She then says it may have to be means tested, which means it would not, by definition, be universal, and those who would pay most for the program would not benefit.

          I began the next book on the UBI, The War on Normal People, by Andrew Yang reluctantly. Robert B. Reich had reviewed both in a single review and said, “The two books cover so much of the same terrain that I’m tempted to wonder whether they were written by the same robot… .” After reading both books, I’m tempted to wonder whether Mr. Reich did the same.

          Mr. Yang’s background is orders of magnitude different from Ms. Lowrey’s, as is his book. Yes, they describe many of the same issues, but Mr. Yang has started many companies and has seen the effects of automation from both sides. His book didn’t need padding.

          If you’re in a hurry and can accept that we have major issues of income disparity and that automation will lead to mass unemployment, you can skip to page 165, which is where Mr. Yang proposes solutions. One of which is, of course, a UBI (paid for by a value-added tax). But there are others, including a “Social Credits” program whereby those unemployed and living in areas where there are few if any jobs can earn these credits by helping their neighbors—sort of a barter program that would enable social engagement as well as trading time for services or items of value. Mr. Yang says there are already such programs in nearly 200 communities. He also proposes what he calls Human Capitalism, or investing in activities that are undervalued but necessary, such as teaching, caretaking, and so on. He also proposes that those who adopt practices that put capital over human interests be held personally accountable. He gives the example of Purdue Pharma, which introduced and falsely promoted OxyContin as “nonaddictive and tamper-proof,” leading to the opioid crisis we have now. The company was fined $635 million in 2007, but it made $35 billion since releasing OxyContin in 1995, so the fine amounted to 2%. I also question what good these fines do. The government gets the money. The public gets screwed. At any rate, in Mr. Yang’s world, the Sackler family (who owns Purdue Pharma) would spend time in jail. He also discusses how the same script played out during and after the financial crisis.

          He has some interesting proposals on health care as well. By the way, have you noticed a resounding silence on the part of Republican candidates about the “progress” made dismantling Obamacare?

          I don’t want to steal all of Mr. Yang’s thunder, but one of the closing chapters, “Building People,” has some great ideas on, well, building people. He recommends keeping parents together, an idea conservatives should cheer, and enabling families to have time to spend together, and time is one thing the new world Mr. Yang sees coming will give us.

          Whether we make people spend this extra time in poverty or guarantee a basic level of comfort is yet to be seen. 

         

          Before you say UBI will never happen, consider this: Mr. Yang’s circle is comprised of the very wealthy. He and many of his friends see the following scenario:

          “There will be a shrinking number of affluent people in a handful of megacities and those who cut their hair and take care of their children. There will also be enormous numbers of increasingly destitute and displaced people in decaying towns around the country that trucks drive past without stopping. Some of my friends project a violent revolution if this picture comes to pass. History would suggest this is exactly what will happen.”

          Many of his friends are buying secure properties. I suggest it would be cheaper to recognize the probable future and avoid the revolution.

© 2018 Larry Roth

Cambria, California: A Town Without Chain Stores and Fast Food Restaurants,or the Downside of "A Stop in Willoughby"

One of the main reasons for our trip to California was to see the Hearst Castle. It is definitely worth the price of admission.

Our hotel reservations were in Cambria. We had spent a couple of days in Monterey before driving to Cambria. When we arrived I was in the mood for some coffee. We checked in, and I asked if there was a McDonald’s or something similar nearby. The clerk looked shocked. He said, “We don’t allow fast food restaurants in Cambria. We also don’t allow big box stores or chain stores of any kind.”

We wound up getting $5 coffees ($6 with tip) at one of the stores they do allow.

A few years ago we had an abandoned school in our neighborhood. The city wanted to sell the land and accepted some proposals for the sale. One was for a grocery store that was considering relocating. That proposal would have required tax incentives and was greeted with great enthusiasm from many in the neighborhood. As it turned out, that proposal was just a ploy to get the store’s landlord to the negotiating table to lower its lease. The other proposal was from Walmart, which wanted to put one of its neighborhood markets on the land. The store Walmart proposed would have been smaller than the grocery store, and Walmart asked for no incentives. Walmart would even have taken the school building down. The shit hit the fan. After the smoke cleared, Walmart withdrew its proposal. A few years later the city took the building down at taxpayer expense, and the property remains unsold.

The anti-Walmart people won.

I wish everyone who opposes chains could spend some time in Cambria. At first glance, the town is charming. But it’s also expensive. It’s all well and good to limit competition, I suppose, if you’re a shop or restaurant owner, but it’s not too great when you’re on the paying end of the equation. Our afternoon meal the first day cost $30. I had fish and chips (with coleslaw instead of the chips); Dan had a taco salad. We both had water.

I told myself this was a vacation and we should enjoy it, but the final straw was breakfast, which was nothing special and cost $38. We decided to find a grocery store, which was not as easy as you’d think. We finally asked a guy who was working on recycling bins. He directed us to the store, which did not face the street. We bought some groceries and deli food and made do for that evening and the next morning.

We left Cambria and headed to our next stop, Pismo Beach. Along the way I spotted a McDonald’s and a Burger King at Morro Bay. We stopped and had lunch at Burger King with coupons I’d brought along for an emergency. It cost $12.36 for both of us, and we had soft drinks. We hadn’t planned to stop at Morro Bay, but while we were there, we drove around and spent some time on the piers watching fish being cleaned on the boats they came in on and the seagulls feeding on the waste tossed overboard. It was a charming afternoon.

To bring our total trip costs down, we ate at Burger King (using coupons) three more times on the trip. Breakfast cost close to $8, which I found much more palatable than $38.

          I’ve read and written about some of the “back to a golden era” books, and I doubt there ever really was a “golden era.” Even during the “golden era,” people complained that the (now bankrupt) A&P stores were driving mom and pop grocery stores out of business (as documented by Marc Levinson in his 2012 book, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America). Before that people complained about catalog companies like (the now troubled) Sears and (the now bankrupt) Montgomery Ward, and before that door-to-door peddlers. It seems people like to complain about things—even things that make their lives easier and cheaper.

          “A Stop at Willoughby,” a 1960 Twilight Zone episode, tells the tale of a man, harried by modern life (nearly 60 years ago), who visits Willoughby, a stop on his commuter train ride home. Willoughby is a town that evokes the good old days (as seen from 1960—an era some folks nowadays look back on as the good old days). Eventually the man decides to stay in Willoughby. Spoiler alert: It turns out Willoughby exists only in the harried commuter’s mind. His stop in Willoughby is a fatal exit from the moving train.

          I wonder if the people who complain about how degraded America has become because of fast food chains, Walmart, and all the modern (competitive) businesses that are available today and long for their own personal Willoughbys ever think what life would really be like if everything were local and expensive.

          Perhaps they should be required to spend some time in Cambria.

© 2018 Larry Roth

California Real Estate: Sustainable or Just Another Example of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds?

Silicon Valley is in a real estate frenzy. Frankly, I think the market is slowing down, but that’s just based on my observation, which lasted a whole weekend. That’s not saying prices will come down—just that they may not go up as fast as they have been.

The real estate market out there is and has always been, in my experience, different. The first time I moved there, in 1976, I wanted to offer less than the listing price. The agent was shocked. “Oh, you don’t want to insult the seller,” she said. And this attitude has prevailed (except for the early 1990s when a recession hit the area—I wasn’t there during the last crash, so I don’t know how prices were affected then). As an example of how entitled Silicon Valley sellers are, there was a letter to a real estate columnist in the July 15 San Jose Mercury News complaining that it had taken their agent three weeks to bring them a full-price offer when their neighbors had several offers over asking price in just a few days for an “inferior” house. Imagine! Complaining about a full-price offer. And about those prices.

Strawberry Square, a development of 350 townhouses, is my gauge. I sold my 4 bedroom 2½ bath 1,440 square foot unit there in 1994 for under $200K. A similar unit was for sale during our trip for $1.2 million. It appears to have sold. These units were built in the 1970s and priced around $30,000. They were built on slabs and without air conditioning, and while you can put air conditioning in the units, it has to be routed through the (hot) attic and is an expensive proposition. In spite of the fact that temperatures can get well over 100º, everyone assures buyers, “Oh, you don’t need air conditioning,” which might have seemed reasonable at $30,000, but for $1.2 mil?

          Our host lives in a townhouse she and her late husband bought in the 1980s for $150,000 that could bring well over $1.5 mil today because of its location. She assured us there’s nothing under $1 million in Silicon Valley, and I tend to believe her. Dan and I went to a couple of open houses—one is a 4 bedroom 2 bath house on a busy street priced at $1.7 mil. This house appears to have been redone by a flipper—on the surface it looked great, but it was redone on the cheap; it still has the original 1970s aluminum windows (and no air conditioning). The other open house we went to is a 3 bedroom 2½ bath townhouse priced at $1.398 mil. One reason I think the market is slowing down is this unit was reduced (gasp!!!) from $1.448 mil.

          These houses are in my old neighborhood, west San Jose. Prices are much higher in Sunnyvale, Mountain View, etc.

          High housing prices are not limited to Silicon Valley. We visited a 2 bedroom 1 bath in Pacific Grove, near Monterey, that is priced at $749,500. The house was built in 1909 and has no driveway, garage, or functional parking in front of the house. It also needs a new sewer line. And though there’s no air conditioning, you really don’t need it there.

          We saw high prices all over California, which begs the question—how do people manage to find a place to live there? That’s a tough one. Some people don’t. As we were driving on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles we saw a large homeless camp under a freeway overpass. Our host in San Jose and I talked to a guard at Airframe Supply while Dan was doing his business there. The guard drives two hours each way to his job and shares an apartment with his father.

          California has two classes of people—those with homes and everyone else, and those with homes don’t seem too interested in those without.

          Housing in California is complicated. Proposition 13 was passed in 1978. It limited property taxes to 1% of the sales price of the home. I believe taxes were allowed to escalate at something like 2% a year, but voters can (and have) approved add-ons (kind of like the streetcar add-ons we will soon have) and “special” taxes can be added as well. Nevertheless, tax rates are much lower for people who bought way back when, and those people are only going to let go of their houses when they die. For people in the market now, even without the add-ons and special taxes, the buyer of a million dollar house will have an annual $10,000 tax bill.

          With interest rates going up and interest and state and local tax deductions being limited, I wonder how sustainable this boom is, but it’s almost always wrong to bet against California real estate.

          Which brings me to the question almost everybody asks: Don’t you wish you’d stayed?

          In a word, no. As I mentioned in my previous post, we stayed with the widow of the man who wound up with my job after I left. I believe the job contributed in a major way to his death. He had diabetes, and as far as I know, Company L did nothing to accommodate his illness. He went on disability a couple of years after I left. I visited him in 2000. He eventually lost both legs. He told me, even in that condition, he was happier than he’d ever been at Company L. That’s how much that job sucked. He died in 2004. If I had stayed, I doubt I would have fared any better.

          My house is definitely not worth a million dollars, but it’s nicer than anything we looked at in California.

And I have a life.  

© 2018 Larry Roth

Legal Pot: California Turns a Liability into an Asset

          Dan and I just returned from our trip to California. I had some frequent flyer miles to use or lose, and Dan had never been south of San Francisco, so I decided to use some miles to revisit some of my old haunts.

          We started in San Jose, where I lived for ten years, and ended in Los Angeles, where I lived for two years.

          The part of our trip that people seem most interested in is our visit to a pot dispensary, so that’s the part of the trip I’ll write about first. I’m going to be honest here and admit I’m no expert on pot. I tried it once in 1976, and I felt… nothing. And yes, I inhaled.

          I knew Dan wanted to visit a dispensary, but I didn’t know it was such a priority. He wound up convincing our host, the widow of the man who wound up with my job after I left it, to take him to a dispensary the first day we were in San Jose. We wound up at Airfield Supply, which is right by the San Jose airport.

          We had to show our ID to get in the store. Once in the store, we had to sign a disclosure form releasing Airfield Supply from liability for anything we might say, do, or stand by as a result of any purchase we might make. Only after that were we allowed into the part of the store with the products.

          I was around in the 1960s, and this store is not what I was expecting, which was a bunch of stoned long-haired hippie types saying “Dude,” “Cool,” etc. The staff could have been mistaken for the younger folks I worked with at Company L (the Los Angeles Times ran an article in its July 15 Business section titled “From Tech to Toke” on how tech workers are migrating to jobs in the “cannabis sector.”) The folks at Airfield Supply were highly professional and seemed to know their stuff, which makes sense. This is, after all, a business, and the goal is to make a profit. Airfield Supply takes credit cards, which surprised me, but, again, their goal is to make a profit, and credit cards make for larger purchases.

          Dan bought oils to vape. One was “Afghan Elite” another was “Gorilla Glue.” His total before tax cost was $100.10. Taxes added $28.49 to the purchase, so various state government agencies collected 28% on Dan’s legal pot purchase.

          He also bought a package of ten small cookies “for me” (I have a well-known weakness for cookies). The cookies, “Big Pete’s Cannabis-Infused Chocolate Chip Mini Cookies,” are professionally packaged and even have a bar code—81156020633—if you saw them on a grocery store shelf, they’d look right at home. These cost $19, and the tax on that purchase, $6.32, was 33%. (Full disclosure, I ate 3½ cookies and not all at once; I think they did relax me, but that could well be psychosomatic.)

          California is making 28% to 33% on all pot purchases.

          If you consider the money California was spending on pot prohibition before pot was legalized, California is making a lot more than 28% to 33% on the deal.

Airfield Supply is just one dispensary. Dispensaries are just about everywhere (although some upscale and upscale wannabe neighborhoods prohibit them), and they advertise not only in the local Pitch-like papers, but also in the Los Angeles Daily News. (Newspapers have to take revenue where they can get it these days--while we were in California, the Daily News announced it would lay off half its staff.) Interestingly, medical marijuana dispensaries are urging their customers not to give up their cards, since a person who has a medical card can buy pot at age 18; recreational stores can only sell to those 21 and older.

          It’s a new world out there, and California has changed that new world from a liability into an asset.

          Perhaps the rest of the country should do the same.

           

© 2018 Larry Roth

Gigged: A Review of the Book by Sarah Kessler

          Sarah Kessler’s Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work is another of those books examining the current jobs situation. Ms. Kessler, a reporter for Quartz, has been observing the “gig economy” since 2011, and her research for this book has included actually taking on gig tasks to see first-hand how the economy works.

          The 250-page book is a fast read. It took me less than a day.

          In the book she interviews several people, including an ethically flexible young man here in Kansas City who worked for and then sued Uber. Uber is one of the few gig jobs that has endured, but Uber keeps changing its terms, which has resulted in drivers’ not being able to make a profit. I’ve talked to a couple of Uber drivers because I couldn’t understand how they could be making any money. One quit after coming to the same conclusion; the other built up a client base and left Uber, taking his clients with him.

          Other examples include a woman who gigged for Mechanical Turk (and wound up with carpal tunnel syndrome and no health insurance), a man who left a high paid but boring job for Gigster, where he did quite well, but in the end, he opted for a job with benefits.

          One of the more interesting stories is about Managed by Q, an office cleaning company. It began as a gig company that contracted with other gig companies to get the cheapest labor available. It turned out Managed by Q got what they paid for and lost clients hand over fist. In the end Managed by Q became a company that hired—gasp!—employees and found that approach, plus treating their employees fairly, worked much better than racing to the bottom of the labor pool.

          While the jury is still out on the gig economy, Ms. Kessler seems to conclude it’s not the answer for people who actually need their gigs to earn them enough to live on, and that the race for the cheapest labor is usually not the best route for gig companies as well.

© 2018 Larry Roth

Bullshit Jobs: A Review of the Book by David Graeber

          I read a blurb about David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs in the magazine In These Times. I read the book review sections in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, but so far I’ve not seen this book reviewed in either. Both are missing a good read.

          In the mid-1970s I had a job that required very little effort. The office was known to the outside world as a very busy one with a massive backlog. Every once in a while we’d be required to work overtime. In truth, there was no backlog. And when we had to work overtime it was not unusual to see anything but work being done. I remember once one of my coworkers gave another a haircut. Another guy sold insurance on “company time,” and no one cared. I once wondered if I could get a week’s worth of work done in a day. I could--with time left over. I’ve often wondered why I ever left such a cushy job.

          Dr. Graeber is an American anthropologist who teaches at the London School of Economics. This book grew out of a 2013 essay which went viral. Hundreds if not thousands of people wrote to tell about their bullshit jobs. As a result of his subsequent research, Graeber estimates that 40% of all jobs are bullshit jobs. If you think about it, his estimate may be conservative. How many jobs actually contribute to society? And Graeber points out the irony that how much jobs contribute to society is inversely proportional to the pay those who do those jobs receive. For example, teachers are paid far less than anyone in the finance industry. And yet we need teachers while the finance industry very nearly wrecked the world economy in 2008. Same with nurses, garbage collectors, bus drivers, and so on.

          He points out that when layoffs take place, it’s usually the hands-on people who are let go while administrative staff is added. And when it comes to education, well, Graeber is in that field and has seen the proliferation of many layers of administration, which brings with it additional reporting requirements to justify its existence.

          Graeber describes situations where people in bullshit jobs “share the wealth,” so to speak. In one case, government employees (in England) sent letters to pensioners that contained intentional errors designed to allow the pensioners to be billed for late payments. In another case, a French firm was hired by the British government to knock as many people as possible off disability rolls which resulted in more than two thousand people dying shortly after being found “fit to work.” In other cases forms for assistance are so purposefully confusing that 20% of the people who qualify for assistance simply give up. So we can see bullshit jobs are not necessarily harmless. In fact, one reason the U.S. does not yet have single-payer health insurance is Barack Obama did not favor it because even though we’d save money on insurance and paperwork, “[t]hat represents one million, two million, three million jobs [filled by] people who are working at Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places.”

          So we have our current health care system because we want the insurance industry to be a modern-day equivalent of the WPA.

         

          Graeber points out that John Maynard Keynes once predicted that by the end of the twentieth century, we’d have a fifteen-hour work week. Graeber says that’s actually possible if we eliminate the bullshit.

          As I was reading this book, I kept thinking this is an argument for a universal basic income, and, as it turns out, that is where the book goes. A universal basic income would replace several types of existing assistance programs, which would eliminate even more bullshit jobs taxpayers are currently paying for.

I wouldn’t expect to see it anytime soon, but if, indeed, a fifteen-hour work week is possible, we could have a lot fewer people on the roads during rush hour, which would lead to cleaner air, less use of oil, and probably a population with far less stress

          As I was finishing this review I saw on what passes for TV news these days that our president was in Wisconsin celebrating the groundbreaking of a Foxconn plant that will supposedly bring 13,000 jobs to Wisconsin, which is subsidizing the project to the tune of $4 billion, which means each job will cost the state more than $307,000. In his book, Raising the Floor, Andy Stern proposed a universal basic income of $12,000 a year. The subsidies for these 13,000 Foxconn jobs alone (many of which will be bullshit jobs) would be enough to pay $12,000 a year to 13,000 people for more than 25 years.

          Those who say we can’t afford a universal basic income seem to be quite willing to overlook how much it is costing taxpayers to “create” jobs.

© 2018 Larry Roth

Gore Vidal's "United States: Essays 1952-1992:" Still Relevant After All these Years

          I picked up a copy of Gore Vidal’s 1,271-page tome, United States: Essays 1952-1992, for a dollar at a recent estate sale. I figured I might find a few interesting essays, and I did.

          First, let’s note that this August is the fiftieth anniversary of the famous (or infamous) debates between Vidal (1925-2012) and William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008) which culminated with Vidal calling Buckley a “crypto Nazi” and Buckley calling Vidal a queer and threatening to punch Vidal in his “Goddamned face.” And both of these men were World War II veterans. Ah, the joys of live broadcasting. By the way, this exchange is available on YouTube.

          I will have to confess here that I am a fan of both of these gentlemen. They were both highly intelligent and articulate, a combination not often seen these days, especially on television.

          I’ve read several of Vidal’s books including his historical series including Washington, D.C., Burr, 1876, Lincoln, Empire, Hollywood, and The Golden Age. I’ve often thought these books should be used to teach high schoolers history. True, there’s sex, but wouldn’t that appeal to teens more than the dry politically whitewashed pablum served in textbooks these days?

          What surprised me about this book is how relevant many of Vidal’s essays still are. For example, in a review of John Dos Passos’ 1961 book Mid-Century, Vidal says, of Dos Passos’ criticism of the youth, the labor movement, James Dean, and in general the civilization of the times as mistaking “the decline of his own flesh and talent for the world’s decline.” (Dos Passos would have been 65 at the time.) This brought to mind the books I recently discussed by Rod Dreher and Patrick J. Deneen, both of whom are in the “civilization today is going to hell in a handbasket” frame of mind.

          In a 1985 essay about Tennessee Williams, which morphs into a discussion of homosexuality, Vidal says, “In order for a ruling class to rule, there must be arbitrary prohibitions. Of all prohibitions, sexual taboo is the most useful because sex involves everyone. To be able to lock someone up or deprive him of employment because of his sex life is a very great power indeed… .” Indeed! And as we saw in Mr. Dreher’s book, in his world homosexuals can only get into heaven if they have no sex life.

          In a review of Robert A. Caro’s 1974 book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Vidal says, “The United States has always been a corrupt society. Periodically, ‘good’ citizens are presented to the public as non-politicians. Briefly things appear to be clean. But of course bribes are still given; taken. Nothing ever changes nor is there ever going to be any change until we summon up the courage to ask ourselves a simple if potentially dangerous question: Is the man who gives a bribe as guilty as the man who takes a bribe?” I guess we can ponder that one as we watch the latest corrupt limited vote on the rigged streetcar extension unfold.

          In a 1963 essay on Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), who discovered he was a tax dodger, Vidal says, “In public services we lag behind all the industrialized nations of the West, preferring that the public money go not to the people but to big business. The result is a unique society in which we have free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich. This dazzling inequity is reflected in our tax system where the man on salary pays more tax than the man who lives on dividends, who in turn pays more tax than the wheeler-dealer who makes a capital gains deal.” Warren Buffet has said the same thing for years, and this could have been written about who got financial assistance from the government in the recent crash (banks, not homeowners) as well as who benefitted most from the tax cut enacted last year.

          After finishing this book I felt so much better. It occurred to me we’ve been through the same old shit before. Many times. Between 1952 and 1992 we had the McCarthy era, Watergate, Iran-Contra, St. Ronald, the election of Slick Willy, and a whole host of characters and crises that threatened the Republic. And we’ve survived.

We can do it again.

© 2018 Larry Roth