This is for all you Latin fans out there who remember the name of Charles Mingus’s 1959 album, Mingus Ah Um. Easily one of the great records in jazz, Ah Um brought a new exuberance and spontaneity to the music. It referenced Bird, Duke, Lester Young and Jelly Roll Morton and used them to create a new synthesis called Mingus.
The much debated stimulus package, absolutely nothing like Mingus, has generated little enthusiasm, no exuberance and an awful lot of stupid commentary. We have heard no new voices worth hearing, just old flatulizers like Lawrence Kudlow, whose only claim to fame was that he worked for OMB in the Reagan years and has a TV show. An inveterate supply-sider, Kudlow was still a strong Bush fan as late as last year (2008) when he denied there was a US recession.
I read one of his columns the other day and immediately thought of Orval Faubus the Arkansas governor, the guy who blocked the desegregation of Little Rock High School. “Fables of Faubus” from the Ah Um album was a biting ridicule of the governor, making him musically into a kind of Stepin Fetchit vaudeville clown.
I wish I had it in me to do that for Kudlow. As it is, we’ll have to let the man’s words speak for themselves. Here’s a guy who not only stands in the door of progress (think George Wallace) but has learned nothing over the past eight years.
Meanwhile, there's no shortage of alternative tax proposals that would truly re-ignite the economy. Former Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush economist Larry Lindsey criticized the Democrat package in Wednesday morning's Wall Street Journal, describing it as "heavily weighted toward direct government spending, transfers to state and local governments, and tax changes that have virtually no effect on marginal tax rates." Instead, Lindsey proposes a big payroll tax cut that would slice three points off the rate for both employer and employee.
Rush Limbaugh also made an appearance in the Journal. He has a clever idea to give Obama 54 percent of the $900 billion package -- equating that amount to the new president's electoral majority -- while 46 percent, which was John McCain's electoral tally, would go to a plan that would halve the U.S. corporate tax rate and provide a capital-gains tax holiday for one year, after which the investment tax would drop to 10 percent.
Lindsey, you may remember, helped create Bush’s $1.35 trillion tax cut plan. Limbaugh, like Gov. Faubus, is a buffoon whom some Republicans think is "clever." Kudlow, you'll note, will endorse anything as long as it’s a tax cut.
Comments