slicing the pie

I just finished my latest copy of the Atlantic and I didn't find either article.  Once before Old Dog was talking about articles he read in the Atlantic and it wasn't until a couple weeks later that I got that issue so maybe it  goes online before hardcopy which sounds peculiar,but this is a cockamamie world.  The issue I just finished was the December one.

I'm not that crazy about the Atlantic, a little stodgy if you ask me.  I prefer the New Yorker which is more sarcastic, or Harpers which is more out there, but sometimes it seems too intelligent for me.

I've been reading about those money guys for some time and I have always cast a fish eye on the assumption that what they are doing is some kind of lubricating of the economy so that it runs like the fine-tuned Mercedes engines that they all have like a dozen idling in their well appointed marble-floored garages.  I'm pretty sure that they are skimming oceans out of the economy in some kind of complicated manner that my eyes glaze over after a couple paragraphs of their explanation.  They have succeeded in making money, one of the most interesting things on God's green Earth, boring so they can stuff their pockets while we nod drowsily and reach for our coffees.



The thing about the weather is that there are just so many air molecules bumping into each other and each bump influences all the subsequent bumps, that they can only be calculated roughly, and the best thing you can do is make a calculated guess.  I read somewhere that to get accurate forecasts they would need to have a weather sensor for like every cubic foot of air.  There are not near as many people as molecules of air, but people are way more complicated than molecules of air and worse still, they are not as logical.

Another thing about the economy is that it is political.  Democrats want to spend money to create jobs which would be good for the economy.  Republicans want to cut taxes and give business a free hand to create jobs which would be good for the economy.  Generally they want to do what they want to do, and then claim that this will help the economy, and economists, fresh out of economy school see which side their bread is buttered on and join one or the other of the two sides.

Yes, what I want to do is redistribute income, and yes preferably from folks richer than me, but I am well off enough, I could contribute a slice of my pie to help out people poorer than me.  Right now the State of Illinois and worse, the city of Chicago, are drowning in debt, the result of not funding pensions.  It would seem like the reasonable thing to do would be raise taxes to pay that off, but there is no talk of that from our elected officials.  There are cranes all over downtown putting up new skyscapers and we have splendid new parks and my heart swells with joy walking through them, but I worry what is to come of all this when we have no cops to walk beats, and no teachers to beat the three Rs into the kids.  I would gladly pay more taxes if it would pay for the things that would make the city more secure.

Ideally I like the ideal of the zero gini where we are all equal, and I think it is worth aiming for, but I don't think we will ever get there, and probably for reasons of human nature it is not even desirable.  If we had control over it there could be a discussion on where we wanted to set it. Maybe the reps would like .9 and the dems like .25 and then they could haggle between them.

The question I have been asking though is, if the gummint could do something about it, should it?  Is this in the range of things the gummint should be doing?  Probably a stupid question though, if the parties thought this was something the voters wanted they would both propose to do something about it, the dems by spending on social programs and the reps by tax breaks for the rich.