A page from the Roosevelt/Long playbook

I was looking at the website www.occupygeorge.com and I realized that if I was an opportunistic politician I would gather up some of the speeches of The Kingfish, Huey Long, and run for senate with the slogan of "Every Man a King." A speech where Long said, "...because in order to cure all of our woes it is necessary to scale down the big fortunes, that we may scatter the wealth to be shared by all of the people."

 You can read the speech for yourself here. 

But lets be honest, even if I believed that our nations problems could be solved by stealing from one and giving to another I couldn't win in Tennessee with that rhetoric. I would not be surprised if we heard it from states in which a person could. 

It is very difficult to legislate morality and when we do we get into lots of economic trouble. The problem with the occupy wall street logic is they are looking at the wrong pie. Taxes were increased throughout the 30's  in an effort to redistribute the wealth and Roosevelt turned a deep recession into a depression.  Our goal should be to increase the well being of the lowest productive members of our society not by taking from the most productive, but allowing them to invest their dollars back into the economy productively. 

I believe the best welfare program is a job, and jobs are created by cutting taxes and reducing regulation which ensures the growth of an economy and provides more tax revenues as well. We should be taking a page out of the smaller more efficient Kennedy and/or Reagan play book, not the big government Roosevelt and Long one. 

It would appear that Slovakia, a tiny country in Europe holds the key to either economic disaster or economic enslavement. The entire country of Slovakia has a population of a little over four million people and a workforce of maybe two million people. These two million people are now being asked to shoulder the debt burden of $5 billion as their share of the European recovery program. That does not seem fair to me. 

This tiny country has a better GDP growth rate than the United States. It also has a population that is 99% literate. And I heard this morning, their tax rate is 19% for individuals and 19% for corporations, and the country is thriving in relative terms. Maybe we can all learn something from how this country is run.

The vote in Slovakia is an example of what lies ahead for us in the US.  Many states have debt burdens that they will soon be unable to pay. This debt will then be shared by states who did not overspend. You think we have issues now....just wait.