Sorry Bob. Not cool ideas at all. They sound nice but...

"Back to Work" hinges on a seemingly radical premise, as you write: "Government doesn't always mess everything up. It can be worth what you pay for it." How do we combat the popular notion that 'government is not the solution to the problem, it IS the problem', as Ronald Reagan declared.

What almost no one says concerning Civil Service employees is this: It’s almost impossible to fire anyone. How many times have we all heard from parents, relatives or friends, go into civil service, you have great job security and great bene’s just not very exciting work. You become a faceless bureaucrat. The reason government IS the problem is no accountability. They can do whatever they want, screw up terribly and no one gets fired for it. We all know when working for private sector bosses, screw up too much and you’re gone. That’s it.

Setting up some way to accelerate the resolution of the home mortgage crisis should be low-hanging fruit. If we don't do it it's going to be hard to return to a full-employment economy.

Right, this is what they all say. “Setting up some way…”. The problem is there IS NO WAY other than forcing the banks to simply write down the pricinple balance of all those loans to reflect the reality of current market prices. That means unbelievably huge losses that could easily throw them into bankruptcy. That in turn means a several trillion yes trillion, not billion dollar government bailout. THAT is the true 800 pound gorilla and there is no “some way” to fix it. He’s making it sound like oh, just get together, pass some new legislation and it’s all good. No, we’re not all good. Take it down to one house, one mortgage. The house is worth 250K and the mortgage is 350K. The owner can’t make the payments unless the bank simply writes off the 100K and rewrites the mortgage. Just lowering the interest rate a couple points won’t cut it. Multiply that by several million homes and do the math.

Secondly, the only way to get out of it is if we have shared prosperity. You can't have all income gains going to top 1% of us. He's not trying to be anti-wealth. He wants more millionaires and billionaires but he wants a growing middle class most of all and poor people able to work their way into it.

This is another simplistic statement not based in the real world. Great, make poor people have a bigger piece of the pie. There’s no free lunch, the only way to get a bigger piece of the pie is to earn it, actually make the pie. Otherwise what he’s saying here is somehow tax the rich and what, simply give money to the poor? Isn’t that called welfare and isn’t that one of Clinton’s biggest accomplishments, the lowering of welfare payments, setting up work-for-welfare programs to help people get off of it? The question never answered by the tax the rich crowd is precisely what are they going to do with the money and how does that help the poor? Without that answer it’s must another slogan.

It boils down to what is any individual poor person qualified to do? If they have a 8th grade education, no training, what can they do? Maybe work a call center for ten bucks an hour, work at Micky D’s, even be an assistant with me doing basic simple data entry. All that is worth about ten bucks an hour. How is taxing the rich going to change that reality? lets say a highly educated person is forced to work the call center for that ten bucks and we all feel sorry for them, understand that’s a very tough road to go on but somehow taxing the rich is going to open up a better job? Maybe the answer is to raise the wage at the call center to twenty bucks? Ok, what does that do to the costs for the company running the call center or Micky D’s or anyplace else that uses low qualified people? It raises those cost a whole lot so the prices for the final product goes way up and what does that do? Remember Nixon and price controls and Jimmy Carter and 18% inflation?

This is all crap.

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