Good Morning America, as you head off to your day, it is sad to report that America remained dysfunctional over the weekend.
It’s ok to be stressed out on Mondays. However, it was said better by the Bangles, who had a hit in 1984 with “Manic Monday“. The song was written by Prince. Here they are in 2010:
Consider these examples of our dysfunction:
Dysfunction #1: Bibi has a Boehner: Can you name another point in American history where the Speaker of the House of Representatives invited a foreign leader to speak to Congress as a rebuke to the US president? Probably not, although Sam Rayburn, the Democratic Speaker during the Truman Administration invited General Douglas Macarthur, who had recently been fired by Truman, to address a joint session in 1951.
Speaker Boehner’s idea is that Netanyahu’s speaking to Congress on Iran will help the Republicans pass increased Iranian sanctions. This could undermine Mr. Obama’s current negotiations of a game-changing deal on nuclear weapons with Iran. Would the Republicans want to do that? Yes, they would. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) a member of the Senate Armed Services and Select Committee on Intelligence acknowledged last week that ending negotiations with Iran was “very much an intended consequence” of a new sanctions bill. Surprise, surprise!
Dysfunction #2: Hedge Fund guy Steven Schwarzman says more money is not necessarily a fix for ailing American public schools, instead he touts using unemployed to help defray school costs:
If you can get unemployed people that cost nothing, that can have this dramatic difference, that costs nothing. I love things that cost nothing that have great results. Imagine if you laid on technology and other types of things, you could really set the world on fire with this type of stuff.
Doesn’t this sound suspiciously like another way to say, “Let them eat cake?” And this guy is investing in a private education company. And more than a third of his firm’s investment pool is money from public pension plans — that is, the retirement money of people like public school teachers.
Dysfunction #3: The Deep South has the country’s highest death rate of newly diagnosed AIDS cases, according to new research. Researchers at the University of North Carolina, Duke University, and the Centers for Disease Control analyzed the diagnosis and death rates of HIV and AIDS patients in nine states in the Deep South, including: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. They account for 49% of America’s AIDS deaths, despite comprising 37% of US population.
Why is the South on the wrong side of every social policy issue?
Dysfunction #4: Bob Dylan is giving away 50,000 copies of his new album to AARP Magazine readers. There may have been no better songwriter in the history of rock and roll, but does this mean that Dylan’s fans are really, really old? Now that the AARP is his target market, should Dylan retire?
Dysfunction #5: Your Thought for the Week:
Someone, somewhere, sometime, somehow, needs to address the dysfunctional myth that we shouldn’t tax the “job creators”. The myth is that a profitable company takes its profits and decides to hire some folks because, you know, they have this extra money just sitting there.
This is not reality. If a company needs or wants to hire people, then they do it during the year, in hopes that the new hire will contribute to the company and to its success. The owner/employer then pays that person a salary, gives them a desk, and a computer, or whatever they need to perform in their new job. By paying those newly incurred expenses the company reduces its taxable income, since these are fully deductible business expenses.
And if the person (or persons) hired are successful, they may help increase the firm’s profits and taxes by more than was spent in the hiring process. Is it so horrible to think that a company may have hired people and, together, they were so successful that now, profits have grown so much that the taxes due actually rise?
How did it become un-American to pay the taxes that keep America running?
