Sometimes even I take a really good picture;

This is the Cape Neddick Light that we visited with Jim and Lynne last month.  Beautiful

I had a discussion with a friend at the Temple the other day about Obama, taxes and helping the poor.  Both Obama and my friend want to increase taxes on the wealthy to pay for more help for the poor.  I disagreed not because I don’t want to help the poor but because I do want to help the poor.  I contend that history has shown that the best way to help the poor has always been to grow the economy.  I want to low tax pro growth policies that will stimulate growth.  Growth is the magic bullet that helps the poor the most.

There is a great line from the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” Christ addressing his disciples sings: “There will be poor always pathetically struggling.  Look at the good things you’ve got.”  There are going to be some poor people.  How can we manage the number to minimize it without destroying the growth machine that has gone so far to end poverty for so many?  England experimented with high tax socialism from the 1950′s to the 70′s and it didn’t work.  The US in the same period stayed with relatively low tax free market capitalism and our poverty rate dropped dramatically.

The question is no longer simply “should the government help the poor?”  We all agree it should.  The questions now are: How should we help?  How much can we afford?  And what level should the help come from?  These are political questions that are affected by peoples world views, self interest and experience.

Ramesh Ponnura the National Review columnist asked his uncle from India why he wanted to live in America.  The Uncle answered: “I want to live live in a country where even the poor people are fat.”

Redistribution doesn’t work.  It causes cheating. It saps the will to work and the will to take risk.  It causes capital and human flight. Any short term gains from redistribution will be lost by stunted future growth that starves the economy of capital and resources to feed the poor.

I’ll end with a quote from Winston Churchill:

“For a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”

We went to see the movie The Duchess over the weekend.  The most important thing I learned was that Duchess does not have a “T”.  I had always spelled it “Dutchess”.  Maybe it is the Dutch spelling.  in the same vein for at least 20 years I spelled warehouse: wharehouse as in whorehouse.  Finally somebody corrected me.

This link (courtesy of Joe S.) takes you to a test of spelling ability:

The 25 Most Commonly Misspelled Words

The test does not include wharehouse or dutchess.

I scored 52% (poor) and I thought I was a pretty good speler.

Let me know how you did.

One Question:

If the government is propping up the market ….

Who is propping up the government?

At the end of our trip East in September we went to visit Rebecca in Budd Lake. She has two lovely cats Belle and Evelyn.

Belle under the couch is shy

Evelyn

Rebecca took a day off work and we went for a drive and a hike. We crossed the Delaware River at Dingmans ferry that now has a classic truss bridge.  The toll is collected by a man standing in the middle of the road.

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“A modest garden contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library.”

Henri Frederic Amiel

Swiss Philosopher 1821 – 1881

Have the Pac Ten play one weekend against the Big Ten.  But finalize the match-ups the week before.  The top teams would play each other and the bottom two would play each other etc.  It would make for a lot of competitive games and overcome to some extent the problem of making up schedules years in advance.

I’m reading Trust by Marek Kohn.  I started it to try and understand why our financial system which is based on trust and a year or two ago had a trust surplus now has none.  The book covers much more ground than finance from Kosovo to migrants and is a very interesting read.

My favorite line is: “…those newspapers that have devoted themselves to the art of making the middle class afraid.”

These are scary times but I have hope and am anticipating change.

The postal service is in trouble.  I’ve written about it before. The internet and email have critically wounded their revenue stream.  The USPS will be the Amtrak of our children’s generation.  But they are trying to survive and this photo shows an example of there willingness to experiment:

A mobile post office on a downtown streeet in Los Angeles.  Good Idea!  But it won’t stop the decrease in mail.  Eventually there will be so little volume that even the media and the politicians will notice.  But you will be able to say “I knew that.” because you read it here first.

Last month the Weizmann Day School, where I am privileged to serve on the board, sponsored a concert to honor the memory of Daniel Pearl.

More Pictures

Pearl a WSJ reporter was beheaded by terrorists in the Middle East a few years ago and his very courageous parents have used this tragedy to build a world wide movement of Music for Peace. The Daniel Pearl Foundation Read the rest of this entry »