What’s next? Now the Obama Adminstration wants to grade your new car. Dare you drive a C- vehicle?
If it were a new model, this car would get an F from Obama's car czars.
Attention, car shoppers: The Federal Government thinks you are too stupid to decide which kind of new car is best for you, so it proposes to grade them–like your 4th grade spelling test–so you will buy a vehicle it deems best for you.
Under this plan, Federal bureaucrats will assign letter grades, A+ down to D, starting with the 2012 new models, to help you make the right choice as they see it. The new rules were proposed this week by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department as part of the most sweeping change in 30 years to the familiar price-and-mileage labels found on the window stickers of new models.
“We think a new label is absolutely needed to help consumers make the right decision for their wallets and the environment,” said Gina McCarthy, the EPA’s assistant administrator for air and radiation. (Isn’t that a wonderful title? Aren’t these Obama Adminstration regulators helpful?)
Apparently it is not enough for the Obama car-czars that the government gives the citizen the relevant mileage-per-gallon and annual cost estimates that everyone ought to consider in deciding which vehicle to buy. No, they don’t trust you to make the right decision with that information. They want to advise you, perhaps to shame you, into selecting a vehicle that they consider the “right” choice. continue reading…
Thoughts while pondering the 43 cents of interest I earned on my savings
A few days ago I received my monthly statement from Fidelity Investments, where I keep some of my retirement savings. It told me that the cash I keep in a money market account there is earning an annual rate of interest of 0.01%. Yes, that is one one-hundredth of one percent.
I have enough cash in that account to buy a fancy new car or take a glorious long vacation but it earned me the grand sum of 43 cents in interest in the month of July. I might as well have the cash buried in a coffee can in my back yard.
What this tells me is that our economic policy-makers in Washington don’t give a damn about savers. The Federal Reserve is holding short-term interest rates to near zero in a monetary policy that could be reduced to a headline like one that became famous back in the 1970s: FED TO SAVERS: DROP DEAD.
The Fed’s policy is geared to making unlimited amounts of money available to banks and other lenders at almost no cost, to encourage lending and to swell bank profits. It is doing a marvelous job swelling big-bank profits and a lousy job of increasing bank lending–both because banks are still leery of taking on too much risk and because borrowers such as small business are scared to death that the economy is about to swoon again.
The current Fed policy fits nicely with the Obama Adminstration’s aim to increase spending (both consumer and Congressional) of all kinds–a policy which discourages any kind of saving and applauds any kind of spending.
Even though overspending and easy lending led to a housing bubble whose implosion triggered the 2008 financial crisis and the resulting Great Depression, the Fed and the Adminstration are desperately trying to pump up the real estate market with cheap money and government guarantees on 90% of the mortgage loans made in the U.S. today. Mortgage rates are at or near historic lows, and housing prices are at their most affordable level in years.
Yet none of this is working to revive the economy. Housing is sinking again; in July, existing home sales fell 27%, far more than expected. New unemployment claims are rising again, to nearly 500,000 a week, putting upward pressure on the nation’s 9.5% jobless rate, and the stock market is signaling a strong chance of a double-dip recession. continue reading…
How can a Jeep TV commercial make more sense than America’s economic policy?
I don’t usually pay much attention to television commercials–most of the time I just hit the mute button. But lately, an ad for the Jeep Grand Cherokee has literally commanded my attention, and when it comes on I turn up the volume and listen.
I think it was the rhythmic clapping and steely hammering at the opening of the ad that first caught my attention. It is reminiscent of that syncopated steel-driving beat that was made by gangs of gandy dancers as they laid down the railroad tracks across America decades ago.
Images of a train crossing a high trestle, a steel mill, a Manhattan skyscraper, a welder at work, World War II Jeeps helping liberate Paris and others flash across the screen as a masculine voice with a sound of authority spells out the message:
“The things that make us Americans are the things we make. This has always been a nation of builders–craftsmen–men and women for whom straight stitches and clean welds are matters of personal pride. They made the skyscrapers and the cotton gins, Colt revolvers, Jeep four-by-fours. These things make us who we are.”
“As a people, we do well when we make good things, and not so well when we don’t. The good news is, this can be put right. We just have to do it. And so we did.”
At this point, the viewer sees images of the 2011 Grand Cherokee splashing though a forest stream, followed by glimpses of auto plant scenes as the vehicle is built. The voice concludes:
“This, our newest son, was imagined, drawn, carved, stamped, and forged, here in America. It is well made and it is designed to work. This was once a country where people made things–beautiful things. And so it is again.”
It is a simple message backed by powerful images that evokes a blend of emotions–national pride, to be sure, but also a sense of loss. W hat we have lost lies not merely in the millions of manufacturing jobs that have disappeared in recent years but also the sense of pride in our work, and quality in our craftsmanship.
In a few words, the Jeep ad captures much of what I think is bothering many Americans–the sense that the nation is in decline, that our best days are behind us, and that we don’t have the will and the guts to do what needs to be done to right the ship. continue reading…
The Vietnam War revisits a small town, raising the same old questions
CROSBY, Minnesota–The Vietnam War came back to this peaceful corner of small-town America this week.
Memories returned to a small town today.
It was not the war itself, of course, but just the searing memory of the war, in the form of a traveling display called The Moving Wall. This half-scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the mall in Washington D.C. has been traveling the country since 1984, visiting mostly small towns and cities for four or five-day visits. It has allowed millions of Americans who have no opportunity to visit the nation’s capital to experience the emotional impact that the Memorial in Washington has upon nearly every American who visits the black granite wall that lists the names of over 58,000 American military fighters who died in that lost cause.
Fresh from visits in upstate New York and Michigan, The Moving Wall came to this town of 3,200 in northern Minnesota this week. Set up in a lakeside park on the shores of beautiful Serpent Lake, the display began attracting visitors Thursday afternoon even before the scheduled opening ceremonies. The presence of this replica wall, with its 58,000 names on aluminum panels painted with black reflective paint, transformed the park from a boisterous summer pleasure point with a noisy skateboard park and a swimming beach, into a reverent memorial where people spoke in hushed tones and walked softly in its shadow.
Finding a precious name on the wall.
A woman stood at the wall tracing the name of a relative. An old man in a wheelchair was pushed along the wall searching the names. A local TV reporter pointed her camera at pots of geraniums and other flowers, each adorned with an metal dog tag. The tags each bore the name of a young man who lost his life in Vietnam, along with dates of birth and death and home town. They were mostly 19- and 20-year old boys from small Minnesota towns–Little Falls, Brainerd, Crosby, others.
The Moving Wall is a project of a Vietnam veterans group called Vietnam Combat Veterans. Ltd. It was the inspiration of a vet named John Devitt of Stockton, California who attended the dedication of the Vietnam Memorial in 1982 and was moved to create a way to bring the experience to the masses of Americans who cannot visit the real thing. After more than 25 years of traveling, it has brought that powerful impact to probably tens of millions across the country. continue reading…
What it means to be a ‘Fiftiesguy,’ and why it is relevant now
When I launched this new blog a few weeks ago, I decided to subtitle it, “Home of the Fiftiesguy.” While this was a bit of a whim, there was something deeper to it, so perhaps it is time to explain.
The Fiftiesguy and his 50s ride
I was born on the eve of World War II. Thus I spent my boyhood in the 1940s and my adolescence and approach to adulthood in the 1950s. These, then, were my formative years. I reached the age of 21 in 1960–the last year of the Eisenhower era, before the election of John Kennedy, before Vietnam became a national crisis and preoccupation, before–most significantly–the beginning of the cultural revolution known now as The Sixties.
It is difficult to overstate how good it felt for an American boy to grow up in the years immediately after World War II. With pride and a sense of honor, we lived with the certainty that in defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, American forces had saved the world from tyranny. America was not only triumphant, it had saved democracy from evil, at enormous cost and sacrifice, and it earned the gratitude of much of the world for defeating might with right.
Post-war America was truly the land of the free and the home of the brave, and we boys of the 1940s played war in our backyards and went to Saturday matinees to see John Wayne in “Sands of Iwo Jima” and similar war films with a pride and a certainty that no nation had ever been as strong, as good, and as filled with promise as the United States of the late 1940s. continue reading…
Here’s the news from Serpent Lake
The news from Serpent Lake is that there is no news. This is entirely comforting in a year when nearly all of the news is bad. I am pleased to report all of the things that are not happening here in beautiful northern Minnesota.
Twilight on Serpent Lake
There is no crude oil gushing from the bottom of our lake. The water is sparkling and clear; the bottom of the lake can be seen to a depth of 20 feet. We have no oil-soaked pelicans or other birds here nor any oil booms or cleanup crews on the shore.
The loons on the lake beyond our dock are frolicking in a scene reminiscent of an old Hamm’s Beer commercial. (Note to young people: you have to be gray-haired to get this reference–just ask your parents or grandparents.) There are a pair of loons, male and female (they practice heterosexual monogamy, as good conservative birds do) which hang around our place, diving and remaining underwater for minutes, only to pop up where you least expect them. At night, they sing us to sleep with their mournful, trilling call.
The duck family in silhouette
We have a family of ducks here also. There’s a mother duck with eight or nine fluffy little ducklings (they never sit still and it’s hard to get a precise count) who mimic momma’s every move. They lurk in the shade under our dock and paddle along the shore under an overhang of tall shore grass and white-barked birch trees.
The news from the bottom of Serpent Lake is that the bass are biting. I can
Grandson Kevin landed a rock bass off the dock.
attest to this on personal experience, having caught a fine largemouth bass the other day; my friend Jim Shoop, much more the experienced fisherman than I am, estimated it was a three-pounder. He caught one nearly as large and we all enjoyed an evening fish-fry.
When we turn on the evening TV news, we are told that the economy is stalling, stocks are falling, hurricanes are boiling in the Gulf, Congress is paralyzed, the Afghan war is floundering, and Al Gore is wishing he’d never met a masseuse. But none of that seems highly relevant here, where a breeze off the lake cools our front porch where I sit writing and the blue sky is reflected on the lightly rippling waters. continue reading…