The business section of the St. Petersburg Times recently ran a forum, asking readers how they would fix the economy.
Here’s one letter – unsigned, but verbatim – that’s interesting.

Dear Mr. President, Please find below my suggestion for fixing America’s economy.

Instead of giving billions of dollars to companies that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan. You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan:

There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force. - Pay them $1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the following stipulations:

1) They MUST retire. Forty million job openings - Unemployment fixed.

2) They MUST buy a new American CAR. Forty million cars ordered - Auto Industry fixed.

3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage - Housing Crisis fixed.

It can't get any easier than that!

P.S. If more money is needed, have all members in Congress and their constituents Pay their taxes...

And Mr. President...while you're at it...make congress retire On Social Security and Medicare...I'll bet both programs would be Fixed...pronto!!






And then there’s economist Dr. Arthur Laffer’s idea, which makes perfect sense: Instead of handing out hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to everyone from banks and the auto industry down to the 50,000 residents in Detroit seeking “housing assistance” -- who today lined up trying to claim $3000 checks “from the President”, as they seem to think -- what the Community Organizer should have done was to call a ‘tax holiday’ on capital gains taxes for a year.

For one year, no one would be required to pay any capital gains taxes.

It would have cost the government just about the same amount as the (taxpayer) funds they gave away – and it would have created an economic surge that would have ended the depression. Money supply would be loosened, new businesses started, jobs of all kinds created by private industry.

But the Community Organizer decided to do exactly the opposite.

Instead of allowing the marketplace to recover, stimulating the economy, he hijacked decade’s worth of tax receipts – money our grandchildren will still be repaying – and thereby penalized the marketplace, stunting its growth, making an economic recovery even more difficult.

Sigh. When will liberals ever learn? Government does not and cannot create jobs. By increasing taxes, especially on the wealthy, what the Community Organizer is doing is penalizing those who are in the best economic position to create jobs and stimulate the economy.

“The power to tax is the power to destroy,” as Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in the case of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819).

Destroy the wealthy who create the jobs, and soon everyone becomes dependent on government for every need they might have.

Gee. You don’t suppose that’s what the Community Organizer had in mind, do you? Then, indeed, everyone would have to bow down to him, beg him for help.

Such a deal.