President Franklin Roosevelt

“There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations, much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”

-- President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democratic National Convention in 1936

Mr. Shirley adopted “Rendezvous with Destiny” for the title of his biography of Ronald Reagan, because Reagan was deeply affected by this speech and played off this theme for his own successful 1980 run for the White House.

Wednesday

Trash day. I took care of that section of hallway that mother decked out in cheap mirrors and that tacky "Blue Boy" pseudo-painting. I meant to take care of it on the last trash day, but that flu virus had me waylaid. This project started before illness swept us under. Lorie was spending her first week here. It was late, around midnight, I was spewing my saliva streams into the kitchen sink. Before the illness, this little problem was big on my mind. This was an everyday and everynight thing. I didn't really know what it was. I was thinking that it was another form of my old acid reflux problem, but I was not sure if popping my old Pepcid AC would help or hurt. On this night, as I was spitting out the saliva, it started to feel like my stomach wanted to spew out a lot more stuff. I thought I was starting to vomit, and I ran down the hall to the bathroom, and in my desperate flight, I knocked down a couple of mother's blocky, cheap mirrors. It caused enough of a noisy racket that Pop came out to see what happened. He and Lorie thought it was the cats. I took the opportunity to argue that it would be a good idea just to get rid of this schlocky junk. Pop immediately agreed. And now it is done. She has been dead for fifteen years, and it is still surprisingly difficult to undo what she did.

As for the saliva streams, the problem went away with the illness, and has yet to return. I suspect that it is all the sweets and sodas that drove the problem. I was kind of hoping that I might use the illness to assert more self-discipline over my diet. I was happily thinking that there might be one advantage to not being able to eat much for a few days. Maybe I would lose a good ten pounds, and maybe I would be able to keep those pounds off. And maybe I would not need to eat as much going forward. Maybe I could cut down on the sweets as well as keep down the soda count. It was a little dreamy, I suppose, but I am kind of trying.

Paul Krugman

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Ezra Klein: Have you seen plans from any politicians, or even any think tanks, for addressing income inequality that feel to you equal to the scale of the problem? I feel like you hear politicians rail on income inequality as a defining challenge of our time, and then they want to raise the top marginal tax rate by three percent or something. There's a real gap between the scale of the problem people are describing and the solutions they’re willing to embrace. Do you think this is a problem we actually know how to solve?

Paul Krugman: I think it is, but we know that it takes an extraordinary political environment to change it. The Great Compression took place under FDR. They took a society that was about as unequal as what we have now, maybe more so because of a weaker social safety net, and turned it into a broadly middle-class society that lasted for more than a generation. But that was done through a combination of a dramatic increase in unionization, extremely high rates of progressive taxation, and wage controls during the war that were used to compress the wage distribution.

So we can describe a set of policies that will restore a middle-class society, but they take FDR-sized majorities in Congress, and even then, it took a war to really bring those changes about. Which is why everybody, me included, talks about chipping away at the margins and hopes that, cumulatively, you're going to get something done.

-- Paul Krugman at Vox.com

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Commanders Club

Picking up the mail, I see that Pop got something from an outfit calling themselves the Commanders Club. I can only shake my head helplessly. They really know how to play him. I wonder how much money he pays to be called a commander.

The Natural World

King of Beasts by Penny Hyde on Flickr.

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