September 18, 2013
Letter to the Editor
The Star Ledger
Star Ledger Plaza
Newark, NJ 07102-1200

RE: Will Happy Days ever be here again? – Some comments on your non-thought provoking editorial of 9/17 on the unfairness of it all.

Sirs,

If you believe that the only way to make poor people richer is to make rich people poorer, stop reading.

On the other hand the joy, the tumescent schadenfreude, of watching the Kennedys having to make it sans benefit of Poppa Joe’s ill-gotten gains is very tempting.

Alas, it is not to be.

Nobody is more protective of their loot – theirs, not mine, not yours – than modern American Liberals. The Kennedys, the paradigmatic template of that gang of poltroons, would be like the hoplites at Thermopylae defending their loot. The difference here is that they would win. They always do, don’t they? “Under the Lion’s Paw” was written for them before their name was known. Their distraction, one of caring for the poor, has worked for 8 decades. Why stop now?

As an Irish-Catholic born and raised in Bayonne, NJ and thus, genetically, a Democrat it is my sacred duty to tell you that the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, and talk about a lack of exit strategies, the 50 year old and counting War on Poverty haven’t worked. Any economic policy predicated on growing trees that give 12 crops a year of “rainbow soup” – Soup from a tree? Maybe next year’s Summer of Recovery will have them – plus a never ending gaggle of constantly copulating golden geese is, to be charitable, stupid. Strike that. Brobdanaglian, Homerically stupid. It is so stupid that we try it over and over and over and over. At the end of each attempt we are at the bottom of the hill with that God Damn big rock on top of us.

And yet we expect this time it will be different

You mention Occupy Wall Street and the striking McDonald’s worker as if they were heaven sent.

They weren’t.

At least the guys flipping burgers have the chance to become great burger flippers. The other ones were goons.
Raising the minimum wage means that inner city youth will be unemployed at a higher wage. To Hell with being unemployed at $15 an hour! How about $37.50? It will do wonders for their self esteem. That’s what I call a plan.

Say what you will about the Gilded Age it forged the magnet that drew 30,000,000 people to this country. They went about the business of making a better life for themselves. And yes, they created the wealth that saved the world, fed the world, and then recreated the world.

I left Bayonne in 1965.

The Kennedys were doing what they always did best.

No one but no one had ever heard of Warren Buffet. Bill Gates was in grammar school.

Which is why my dear friend, Big Mike from Bayonne, legendary sportsman, gifted restaurateur, and now a noble public servant, surely soon to be compared to Cicero, always says “That’s why you never see anybody swimming TO Cuba”.

“Any public policy that is predicated on robbing Peter to pay Paul will always have Paul’s support.” That was from Samuel Johnson. His good friend Edmund Burke said, “Unfortunately experience is the only school where some men will learn.

Uncle Adam said “What is prudence in running the affairs of a household can scarce be folly in running the affairs of an empire”.

Don’t you think the Newhouse family has too much money? Don’t you think some of it should go to minimum wage Ledger employees?






Kevin Smith