Did you ever notice that whenever people provide examples of great communicators, they inevitably reach back half a century or more to the usual suspects:  FDR, Churchill, JFK, RFK, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hasn’t anybody said anything worth remembering in the last 50 years? With the exception of Ronald Reagan, we haven’t had a quotable President since Casey Stengel managed the Yankees.  Come to think of it, we haven’t had a quotable Yankee manager since then, either. Yes, … [Read more...]

Parents want two things of their newly minted college graduate offspring:  that they get a job, and that they don’t move back home.  Here’s a short list of books guaranteed to get them off your couch and into the working world.   As a bonus, these books will also help replace the nonsense your kids “learned” in college with a short course in reality. So here goes. We’ll start with a dose of reality about the economy.  Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics, by … [Read more...]

You are invited to join me on a special, unofficial 10K (6.2 mile) run from Grant Avenue and Commonwealth Avenue in Newton to the finish line of the Boston Marathon. I call it the Boston Marathon Unfinished Business 10K. The run will begin at 7 p.m. on Monday, June 17. Since we won’t have police escorts and there will be plenty of traffic and pedestrians, we should finish by around 8:15 p.m. So you don’t need to be a seasoned runner to keep up. Why am I doing this? As you may … [Read more...]

David Stockman is pissed. Seven hundred forty two pages worth of pissed. And he wants you to know it. If you’re under 30, Stockman was once famous for daring to criticize then-President Reagan’s economic policies.  Stockman was the budget director, and for his truth telling he received a one-way ticket to Reagan’s “woodshed,” where he was undressed and spanked for daring to share his contrarian views. Fast forward to the present moment. Stockman is angrier than ever—at Reagan, … [Read more...]

So I traded in my Mercedes and bought a Prius Plugin and was thus exempted from the Shmuck Tax. So what’s the Shmuck Tax?  And what does it have to do with automobiles? First, a definition. A shmuck, very loosely translated, is a dumbo.  A loser.  A fool. And now a joke. A wife is berating her husband.  “You’re a shmuck!  You were born a shmuck and you’ll die a shmuck!  In fact, you’re the second biggest shmuck in the world!” The husband, bemused, asks, “Why … [Read more...]