Well, I just heard President Obama’s press conference on the negotiations about debt and deficit control.
I can forget my post Obama Plays The Republicans Like A Fiddle. That was pretty short lived. It was too much to expect that the President was any kind of a musician.
He summed up the press conference with abysmal closing remarks. The point is not, as he claimed, to solve our long term fiscal problems so that we can get back to the issue of jobs. The point is to solve our long term fiscal problems in a way that will be supportive of economic growth – right now and in the future.
As many people in my business career liked to point out, long term solutions are of no value if you can’t make it through tomorrow. There has to be a long term for long term plans to be of any value.
Obama talked about all the things he has tried to do to get job growth in this country. He seems to have run out of ideas once he gets passed that point. He states that he has looked at the whole menu of steps that can be taken, but he seems to have missed the page about raising taxes on the wealthy as one of those steps. He still doesn’t seem to understand that raising the taxes on high income earners is absolutely essential to getting job growth in this country. He does not see that any alternative plan takes more money out of the hands of the middle class and shifts it to the wealthy.
He missed countless opportunities in his press conference to make the point. This is probably the very strongest point he can make, and yet he fails every time to make it. Skewed income distribution is the largest problem this country is facing. It is larger than health care costs. It is larger than long term funding of Medicare. It is certainly a larger issue than the fiscal health of Social Security 75 years from now.
If we don’t solve the issue of skewed income distribution in this country, there won’t be a country like the USA in this location in the world in 75 years.
P.S. I consider a totally flat distribution of income to be skewed, too. It may be hard to define a “proper” income distribution, but that doesn’t mean we can’t recognize a bad distribution when we see one.
It’s like tuning in a radio station on your old dial radio, if anyone remembers one of those. I don’t know exactly on the dial where I will get the best reception of a particular station. I have an indication of a pretty likely spot to start my search. As I turn the dial in the vicinity of that starting point it becomes more and more obvious where the best point is.