Over the past year or so, Gil Smart has come to combine scholarship with opinion, popularizing complicated subjects so that all with an open mind can understand them. What used to often come across as midnight rants baiting conservatives, now are learned columns worthy of syndication.
Here is an example from today’s “It’s all Greek to all of us”:
“It’s amazing, and instructive, to see it play out this way, to see huge financial institutions that took the risk of financing Greek debt now scramble to avoid ‘haircuts,’ i.e., losses on what they invested.
“That’s a great little game, isn’t it? Imagine if it worked that way for you. You invest your hard-earned money in a mutual fund, despite the clear assertion in the prospectus that you could lose some money. Then, when equities fall, you call up the folks at the mutual fund and say: I ain’t taking no loss. Make me whole. They’d laugh you off the phone.
“But if you represented a ‘systemically important’ financial institution, the game would be quite different.”
He then quotes from an article in the Atlantic Monthly by Felix Salmon who predicts further financial meltdowns, growing in their disastrous consequences. Salmon also points out that 30% of profits from US businesses flow to the financial industry.
This helps explain how the top ½ of 1% of the population have become so fabulously wealthy while the earnings of the balance have remained the same in real terms over the past three decades, actually dropping if we take into consideration longer hours worked and contributions spouses who have joined the work force. It also indicates why, along with the exorbitant cost of health care and discretionary wars, there are inadequate funds for the nation to invest in maintenance and improvement of infrastructure, education, research and modernization of our economy. Unless corrective measures are taken (which seems unlikely), within another two decades, the USA economically will be second class …one giant ‘rust belt.’
Despite taxation of the rich is the lowest rate in over a half a century, all we hear is the wining of many of the wealthy and the efforts of their elected officials to cut back on social programs and essential education efforts. President Barack Obama set forth a clear program to turn around our economy but his political adversaries have thwarted his efforts. Greed has been substituted for patriotism.
No columnist can be the fount of wisdom each week or even each month. But through humility and research, they can provide their readers who are otherwise distracted with information and insight.
Three wags of the tail for Gil Smart!
