Ward on Words

Way back in 1976, the Bicentennial year of our nation, when we celebrated 200 years of American independence, Ronald Reagan introduced a very popular character into the national lexicon. The Welfare Queen. Reagan was one of the best raconteurs on the American political stage, perhaps rivaled only by Lincoln. When he spun his tale of fraud and waste, Reagan described "a woman in Chicago. She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans' benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands.... Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000."* People were outraged! Outraged that one woman could do such harm to the system. According a February 14, 1976 NY Times article, Reagan's story was a bit of a stretch. The Queen in question was prosecuted by the Cook County State's Attorney's office for defrauding the system of about $8,000. But never mind. Reagan continued on for years with this story of destructive fraud, paintin...

Summer is here and the time is right to slash and burn jobs. At least that's the conclusion we can reach when we see that almost 500,000 people lost their jobs in June, making the jobless rate - 9.5 percent - the highest its been since Reagan was in office. That was back in 1983, when the Rust Belt cleared out all those jobs in steel and other manufacturing industries. Back in the early 1980s, Reagan promised he would bring "morning in America!" And we got a nasty recession and unemployment and states across the country dumped the mentally ill from asylums they could no longer afford to keep open. Reagan also promised the benefits of "the trickle down" theory - all those tax cuts for the rich would enhance the lives of everyone else. That "trickle down" boat seems to have sailed out to sea with just the very rich on board. Since Reagan, with rising prices and stagnant salaries, the middle class seems to be sinking, not rising, as promised, w...

The nation seems all a twitter about Obama's move to impose salary caps on the people who work at firms receiving substantial financial assistance from the federal government. In fact, reading some articles, one would think that the pay limits will ruin the free market as we know it. Dave Krasne, a partner at a private equity firm, says in today's NY Times that "it would be a bad thing if Congress sets the precedent of passing legislation that caps compensation, and consequently productivity." Evan Newmark, in yesterday's Wall Street Journal , goes to great lengths to explain why this strategy won't work. In his mind, "it's bound to end in disaster...because the Treasury pay guidelines run counter to the fundamental human truth that people act in their self-interest." Newmark continues to explain that "the split on Wall Street between the good banks and the bad banks, the shareholder-owned winners and the taxpayer owned losers, will...