Steven L. Goldstein The Sun-Sentinel

June 18, 2010

Steven L. Goldstein
The Sun-Sentinel
200 E. Las Olas Blvd
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33316

RE: Congratulations on your plan for combining your “shovel ready” unicorn farm projects with plans for culturally sensitive groves of organically grown, as opposed to the inorganically grown Bush era “rainbow soup” trees, and the novel idea of people taxing themselves if we can’t borrow any more money from the Chinese to do this.

My dear Professor,

Your column in this morning’s Sun-Sentinel calls for an advanced lesson in History and Economics.

Let’s begin with John Maynard Keynes.

He was one of the 20th Century’s most influential and fascinating characters. Alas, like any great man engaged in obfuscatory endeavors – money supply, accelerated demand, fractional reserves, fiscal v monetary policy, inter alia – “he is more quoted than read”. How many people really know what Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking are talking about?

Since “all History is biography and all biography is anecdote” some things about him should be noted.

#1 – Until he turned 30 he was a predatory homosexual. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles. Their main extracurricular intramural activity was buggering the young lads who worked “below stairs”. He did a 180 when he was 30. As he was later to write, “I met a woman and she has changed everything”.
#2 – He was, in English terms, a hugely successful “punter”. He was a savvy stock market speculator. He was also a big sports gambler who eschewed betting “chalk”.
#3 – He predicted World War 2 a year after World War 1 ended. His book, “The Economic Consequences of Peace”, was oft-times cited by Churchill in the 1930s.
#4 – At no time, in no place, in none of his books, tracts, letters, or public addresses did he ever recommend, suggest, hint, infer, or wish for an increased tax rate, particularly an increased personal income tax rate, when an economy was in decline.
#5 – When asked why he changed his mind on a specific policy, he responded in a tone of absolute incredulity, “The facts changed. What would you have me do?”
#6 – Before he died he was convinced that Hayek, the author of “The Road to Serfdom”, was right on the Big Things and that he was wrong.






Your claim…

“Florida needs a massive infusion of dollars to jump-start a
dying economy. And that can only come from a state income tax.”

is astonishing in its anti-gravity implications. “Stones are hard. Water is wet” seems to have never entered your consciousness. It is possible that you have no idea how the world works. You may be beyond redemption. If you are it won’t be because I didn’t try.

A – There is no instance in recorded History, none whatsoever anywhere, where a civilization taxed itself into prosperity. The great reign of the 5 Emperors showed almost a century of continuous tax cuts. Harding in 1921, Kennedy in 1962, and the great Reagan in 1983 are inconvenient truths that not only do tax cuts work but that they work superbly well.
B – “When you subsidize something you have more of it. When you tax something you have less of it.”

Pay attention. I’ll write slowly.

We borrow gazillions of dollars from the Chinese, a practice that Hillary Clinton condemned about twice a week for the 8 years that she was in the Senate, to fill the public teat with “Mother’s Milk”. We then wet nursed the states and cities to meet their payrolls. That’s why the public payrolls went up while the private payrolls were going down. Those borrowed funds will not be available next year. Your solution is to raise the personal income tax rates to meet next year’s payroll. That is breathtaking even for an economic mooncalf like you.

My Uncle Adam, a canny Scot from Edinburgh said, “What is prudence in running the affairs of a household can scarce be folly in running the affairs of an empire”.
In the world run by Goldstein the Juggling Wizard, a world where water isn’t wet and stones are not hard, a world where “the comic inversion of old certitudes” is mandated, says naught.

Your paradigmatic template is Lord Barack the Beneficent. You may recall that he promised us he would heal the world and make the oceans recede. He can’t even plug a hole in the “vasty deep”. Soon his sycophantic satraps will carry him to the water’s edge where his commands will be fruitless.

Yours and his Plan B solution is simple.

Raise Taxes


Samuel Johnson, another of those oddly magnificent Englishmen, responded when asked how he could confuse the bones in a horse’s leg, “Ignorance madam, pure ignorance.”

Send a SASE and I will fill it with my reading lists for adults who are lost in “the dark wood of error” and don’t even know it.


Kevin Smith
Board Certified Life Coach