April 12, 2107--Free Tuition

In cost-benefit terms the best social policy investment the United States could make would not be to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure (though we need to do that too) but to deploy that $1.0 trillion to wipe out all outstanding student loans.

There are 44 million who borrowed money to help pay the cost of their college educations and they owe on average about $37,000. Of these borrowers, more than nine million are in default.

Those in default and those struggling to pay back what they owe are trapped in a tsunami of debt and collapsed FICO scores at a time when it is difficult for young people to find employment that pays enough to make repaying manageable. As a result record numbers continue to live with their parents well into their 30s or are reluctant to take chances to switch career paths or start their own businesses. This in turn, in macroeconomic terms, dampens growth and interferes with the traditional churn of the free market.

There are no direct correlates, no lessons from history that we can turn to as models of federal fiscal policy that would be helpful in making the case for this radical suggestion. And, to balance the debate, there are no large-scale examples on the other side of the argument that have credibility.

That is except for those times in America's history when the government stepped in to prop up or even bail out imperiled institutions. We did this in the 1930s during the Great Depression to help rescue the country from a a precarious economy and dramatically, more recently, when we did a version of the same thing to help get us through the Great Recession.

On a less dire note there was the GI Bill that was passed in 1944, toward the end of the Second World War, to provide various sorts of assistance to men and women who volunteered or were drafted to serve in the military.

The GI bill is best known for the support it provided to veterans who enrolled in various forms of education, from vocational training to college and university studies. It paid the full cost of tuition and even offered a monthly subside to help offset living expenses.

It was a massive program: 8.8 million GIs used the educational benefits with a full quarter of them (2.2 million) enrolling in post-secondary education. This not only benefitted those attending but contributed to the dramatic expansion of educational opportunities and facilities that served the nation well in subsequent decades, even after veterans completed their studies. By 1960, only 15 years after the end of the war, a new community college was founded each week, fully 50 a year for over a decade. Now there are 1,200 two-year colleges serving 7.4 million degree-seeking students.

Even those fiscal conservatives who resisted the federal government's involvement in education funding could not help but be impressed. The die was cast--higher education became a virtual right as a result of the GI Bill and its longer-term reverberations. For the first time in world history higher education became fully democratized. Not perfect, but impressive.

And those who study these matters have retrospectively found that the accrued benefits to the nation, in monetary terms, more than offset the direct costs of subsidizing this expansion of educational opportunities. There was unprecedented economic growth between 1947 and 1975 and a significant narrowing of economic inequality. The poorest 20 percent of the population saw their incomes rise at a rate higher than that of any other population cohort.

In other words there was no better engine for economic growth than offsetting the cost of offering these higher-educational opportunities.

To put it simply--better educated people, college graduates especially, earn more over their lifetimes than people with only a high school education and as a result pay more in taxes. Enough in taxes to more than cover the subsidized costs of tuition and even the monthly stipends.

Thus it is exciting to note that the New York State Legislature, pressed by 2020 presidential candidate Governor Andrew Cuomo, just this past week passed a bill to make all public colleges in the state for families earning less than $250,000 a year tuition free.

"Tuition free" is a wonderful oxymoron and one can expect to see over time some of the same economic benefits that were the result of the GI Bill.

Think, then, what a positive jolt to the nation's economy would result from wiping out all accrued student debt. This obviously would be complicated to do (forget for the moment what conservatives would say!) but it is worth thinking about and running the numbers to quantify what a benefit it would be. Increased tax revenues, among other things, would be sufficient to pay for the renewal of much of out failing infrastructure.

Governor Andrew Cuomo

May 27, 2016--World War III

In their now daily barrage of anti-Trump articles, the New York Times, on Tuesday finally went all the way--

After helping for months to fuel the belief that a Trump presidency would lead to fascism, one of their columnists, Eduardo Porter, more than implied that if Trump is elected World War III will be one possible result.

In, "We've Seen the Trump Phenomenon Before," he suggests in a subtle way that social and economic conditions are now similar to those that pertained during the years leading up to the outbreak of global warfare in 1914 and 1941. World Wars I and II.

It is worth reading the entire piece, but here is a flavor of the analysis--

Mr. Trump perhaps can best be understood as the face of a broader global dynamic: the resistance to policies that encourage global competition and open borders to people who have lived too long on the losing side. 

The world's "golden age" of globalization around the turn of the 19th century into the 20th was capped by what came to be known as the Great War. [World War I] The discontent bred of the worldwide economic devastation of the 1930s ended in another war. [World War II]

Porter then cites Harold James, an expert on European history at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International affairs--

Backlashes against globalization promoted a zero-sum-game: To protect ourselves, we must do so at the expense of somebody else. It increases nationalism and the willingness to go to war.

Connecting these two dots to the current situation (third dot?) where Trump in his heated nationalism and critique of globalization appeals to "his" people who have lived too long on the losing side and are motivated to see in globalization a zero-sum-game that still has them losing to various somebodies. In Trump's view mainly illegal immigrants.

Porter concludes--

"We shouldn't try to stop globalization, even if we could. But if we don't do a better job managing a changing world economy, it seems clear that it will end badly again."

Should I say fro him, "in World War III"?

November 16, 2105--ISIS in Paris

I may have a different perspective after I, perhaps, cool down.

God knows there have been much worse cases of barbarism, evil during my lifetime. Even quite recently. By the numbers, ISIS's blowing the Russian plane out of the sky over the Sinai killed more innocent people than the seven or eight coordinated attacks in Paris.

Numerically, the terrorist bombings in Mumbai, Spain, Beirut, and of course on 9/11 killed and maimed more people, but there is something different about ISIS than al Qaeda. Something different for me about Paris than even New York.

That tells you how in a rage I am about what happened Friday night.

OK, I used the e-word. Evil.

All of these terrorist atrocities, including the pubic beheadings, are more than "cowardly acts." If there is such a thing as evil, this is it. Have there been worse examples? Of course. Including in France.

The French, among other "civilized" people, during the Second World War rounded up and shipped many thousands of their Jews to certain death in Nazi Germany.

A special definition of evil is necessary to categorize the various holocausts of the 20th century.

But what was perpetrated Friday still qualifies as dastardly. Unspeakable. All too human in its inhumanness.

Words fail.

French president Hollande says this was an act of "war." The Pope said we are in "World War III." Both may be right.

If we are, what then does that mean?

France is a linchpin of the NATO alliance. NATO's charter in effect says that "an attack on one is an attack on all." That includes us. The United States.

That charter was written well before al Qaeda and ISIS existed. It was for a time when there were credible threats of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. What does it mean now when the definition of war had shifted? Does it mean that the U.S. is also at war? That because France was "attacked," that it experienced more than an evil act of terrorism, we too have been attacked and thus are obligated to act accordingly? To join them in waging war?

I do not know how to think about this. What I do know is that this has struck me deeply. I have even been gathering information about going to France, Paris, this week. As an act of solidarity and defiance.

Rona thinks I'm crazy. She's right. I am.

Minimally I am trying to think about what France should do, more appropriately, as an American citizen what we should do because I do think we are at war.

Yes, I know how we got there. Not solely as the result of President Obama's weak leadership--though he has been weak and that hasn't helped, feeling that the "Arab Spring" would help bring about versions of democracy to the region. This just as naive in its own way as George W. Bush's delusion that toppling Saddam Hussein would do that for Iraq and surrounding dictatorships.

What matters now is what to do going forward.

Drone-guided bombings will not get the job done. Depending on lightly-armed Kurd forces on the ground will not defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Russia's involvement, even if it shifts to confront ISIS rather than Syrian rebels, will not get the job done.

Nothing this simple, this limited will work.

I can hardly believe I am thinking this, but only a massive, boots-on-the-ground force of American troops has any chance of succeeding. Perhaps 100,000 are required. Maybe more.

This would mean many casualties, even the beheading of captured U.S. soldiers. But does anyone have a better, more realistic idea?

I hate this. Hate all of it. But I am feeling radicalized.

ISIS has to be shown to be a failure in order to stem the flow of young lunatics to its "cause." Disaffiliated youth from the Islamic world as well as from Europe and the United States are partly drawn to ISIS because it is perceived to be winning. This encourages those with distorted minds to believe that the apocalypse they seek is near at hand. Defeat ISIS, devastate it, and that belief system will crumble.

I am sorry. I wish I could believe in the effectiveness of diplomacy and financial warfare, including bombing the oil fields and petroleum distribution system in ISIS-controlled territory.

I don't.

As long as they feel they are winning, ISIS fighters can live on fumes. They are that motivated and tenacious.

So they have to be killed. All of them would be ideal. As many as possible is imperative.

Again, I can't believe these worlds are coming from me. I have up to now considered myself to be moderate, essentially pacifistic. Not any more.

Paris on Friday changed that.

When will we too again feel the pain and fear?

April 16, 2015: Germany, Japan, Cuba & Iran

They bombed Pearl Harbor and after we defeated them in World War II, with great loss of life and limb as American's invaded island after bloody island in the Pacific, after just few years of occupation, Japan became one of our closest allies.

They invaded and conquered most of Western Europe; exterminated more than 6.0 million Jews, homosexuals, and gypsies; and mercilessly bombed civilian populations in England and elsewhere. After we entered the war, they killed more than 300,000 U.S. soldiers. And yet, again, after the allies defeated them and after just a relatively few years of occupation, with our help Germany was rebuilt and became one of our closest allies.

As with Japan, this relationship endures.

So why is there such a big problem with Cuba and Iran?

We were versions of allies with both until 1959 when Fidel Castro seized power and quickly thereafter announced that Cuba was in fact a client state of our Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union. And, in Iran's case, we related well (perhaps too complicitously) until 1979 when the Islamic Revolution erupted and the new government, dominated by ayatollahs, captured and held hostage 66 American embassy workers.

Now, via his executive power, President Obama is moving rapidly to resume normal diplomatic relations with Cuba and there is evidence that Iran wants to make a deal with the West by agreeing to scale back its nuclear weapons program.

The former, normalized relations with Cuba, is long overdue and now all but certain to occur. The most significant resistance to such a deal is the demagogic posturing of presidential candidate Marco Rubio, whose parents were born in Cuba, and his pandering to the remnants of the Cuban-American community in the hope that they and other American Latinos will rally to support his ambitions.

There are also Cold-War-minded dead-enders who are still fighting the Soviets through its former proxy, Cuba.

Then of course there is the on-going resistance to anything Barack Obama wants to do, especially if it is potentially historic and would burnish his image as president.

Much more troubling is the widespread opposition among virtually all Republicans, and sadly many Democrats, who oppose the semblance of any deal with Iran, out of fear that they will be smitten politically by the Israeli lobby or yelled at by Benjamin Netanyahu.

If things were not to work out with Cuba, it would not be catastrophic. They are not strategic players and are no longer military allies of the Russians. No Soviet missiles with atomic warheads remain on the island and they are not in any way a threat to our security.

But unless the West is able to consummate a deal with Iran it is likely that we will be maneuvered into a war with them, siding with the Israelis and egged on by congressional hawks and passionate evangelical supporters of Israel. So this is quite serious and should not be a venue for political striving and demonologizing.

If we managed to overcome our hatred for the Japanese and Nazis and established sound and enduring relations with them, we should be able to do something similar with Cuba and especially Iran. But it is very much a we'll-see situation.

February 13, 2015--Best of Behind: The Middle East? Hands Off

This seemed pertinent in June 2014 when it originally appeared and feels even more so today as President Obama is asking Congress to retrospectively authorize military strikes against ISIS Islamists and many in the House and Senate are pushing back against what some feel is the next step to our getting more directly involved in Syria and northern Iraq where ISIS poses an existential threat--

As President Obama feels the pressure to provide military assistance to the collapsing regime in Iraq, he and we should step back and review the last 2,500 years of history. Just a few pertinent highlights!

The major lesson is that no outside power, from Alexander the Great of Macedonia to the French and British imperialists, from the Soviet Union and now the United States, no one has been able to impose their will on the region.

All interventions, all attempts to subjugate proud and defiant peoples have failed. And worse--have reverberated back disastrously on the invaders, colonizers, and occupiers.

After 330 BC Alexander never recovered; the British and French colonial powers after the First World War never recovered; the Soviet Union collapsed and never recovered; and the United States lost treasure, power, and influence in the region and I suspect will also not recover.

So what to do now?

The right answer is nothing.

We should get out of the way and allow the people living there figure out their own futures, very much including their own borders.

If we could impose a sane and just plan of our own that would endure, I would consider supporting it. But the long reach of history teaches that any attempt to do so is doomed to fail and, worse, will only make things worse.

Look at the current situation in Iraq. The Sunni jihadists have already overrun a third of the country, a country that was arbitrarily constructed at the end of WW I. From the videos showing ISIS's triumphant advance, while the so-called Iraqi army discards its uniforms and attempts to blend in with the benighted civilian population, we see the invaders already in possession of American military equipment that also was abandoned by the Iraqi army.

This was reminiscent of the experience in Afghanistan where the U.S., still entangled in the Cold War, armed the Mujahideen who were fighting the invading Soviets and, after defeating them (which contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union), morphed into the Taliban which proceeded to overthrow the Afghan government and then turned its weapons, the ones we supplied, on us when we invaded at the end of 2001. And does anyone doubt that as soon as we finish leaving Afghanistan the Taliban will once again take over?

Sounds like current-day Iraq to me.

Seven years ago, presidential candidate Joe Biden was ridiculed when he said that Iraq should be allowed to devolve into three countries--Shiite in the south, Sunni in the middle, and Turkistan in the north.

He was right.

In fact, he could have advocated similar things for the rest of the region, from at least Tunisia in the west to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east.

Few of the countries in that geographic span have cultural borders--Iran (formerly Persia) and Egypt are perhaps the exceptions--but rather ones drawn for them by various conquerers and occupiers.

For centuries, for their own strategic and economic purposes, dominant Western powers have attempted to contain and control the essentially tribal people who live in this vast region. Since the end of the Second World War, country-by-country this has been unraveling. And at an accelerated pace for the past four or five years. Recall the Arab Spring of 2010.

The emergence of jihadist and terrorist groups--ISIS is just the most recent example--feels especially threatening to our national interest. But it may be more dangerous to attempt to continue to contain these aspirations and energies than let to them play out.

The genie of various forms of liberation cannot be stuffed back in the bottle. It is much too late for that.

It may be less risky to step back and allow these contesting forces to work things out. We may not like this idea or the potential outcomes; but, in reality, do we realistically have the ability and resources to impose an alternative scenario?

Do we see ourselves intervening on the side of the Shia-dominated government in Iraq allied with Iran's Revolutionary Guard? As unlikely, even as preposterous as this may sound, it is being seriously discussed.

Frightening as that prospect is--very much including the blow to our national ego--it represents another reason to back off. If there is to be fighting, and of course there is and will be, at least it will be focused within the region, internecine, and less directed toward us. That could be truly in our national interest.

January 21, 2015--Heroes

I half agree with Michael Moore.

He stepped in it over the weekend when he tweeted, in reference to the Clint Eastwood movie, American Sniper, that snipers are "cowards" and not "heroes."

He wrote--

My uncle killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shot you in the back. Snipers aren't heroes.

I haven't as yet seen the film so I am not sure if Chris Kyle, a real-life Navy SEAL who was credited with more than 160 "kills," shot anyone in the back or if the movie even made that distinction.

Shooting someone in the back to me wouldn't make someone a coward any more than a solider killing someone during a war with an explosive grenade or with a rocket launched from a drone guided to its target remotely from the security of an operations bunkers thousands of miles from the field of battle is a coward.

War in all its forms is evil--though it may at rare times be a necessary evil (WWII comes to mind), and so applying "rules" to war to me has always had the tincture of an oxymoron about it.

But I suppose rules of war may keep people from using chemical, biological, or atomic weapons and require that POWs be held and treated humanely. I have always believed, though, that any restraints combatants apply while otherwise blowing each other to pieces (often including innocents) is because they do not want the same tortuous things done to them if the tables were turned, which often happens in all forms of warfare.

So almost all that occurs is not cowardice but more because soldiers are doing their awful job or get carried along in the flow of things. As a result, moral judgements need to be applied extra-judiciously.

On the other hand, again not having seen the movie, I doubt if director Eastwood or actor Bradley Cooper present Kyle as much of a hero.

If they do, this could be a good corrective by Moore as to what it means to be a hero and to all the overpraising we have become prone to in so many aspects of our lives--from calling all our troops heroes (politicians do this uncontrollably) to representing every poop or scribble one of our kids produces as if no one ever did anything that amazing and miraculous.

True heroism is a very special and rare quality. It should be reserved for acts of courage and sacrifice, not for anything and everything one of our soldiers does in the daily course of serving in the military.

I know this is not just a product of otherwise rampant cultural hyperbole. It is also a reaction to the ways in which soldiers who were drafted to fight in Vietnam were treated--shabbily at best--when they returned from fighting. Even genuine heroes were shamelessly spat upon.

We are being careful this time to show respect for our troop volunteers while they are fighting and when they return. But not all of them are heroes and almost none of them are cowards. Before Michael Moore uses that label maybe he should sign up and see how he does.

October 20, 2014--Operation Hesitation

I am pleased to report that I will now be able to sleep through the night because our current military operation in Iraq-Syria at last has an official name--Operation Inherent Resolve. 

Since Desert Shield (our war with Iraq to expel Saddam's army from Kuwait), Desert Storm (George H.W. Bush's war with Iraq), and Iraqi Freedom (George the Son's preemptive invasion of Iraq to finish the job he felt Daddy left unresolved)--I've been curious why our wars need names.

What's wrong with World War I, World War II, or the Korean War? Did our war in Vietnam have or need a name other than the Vietnam War? These seem descriptive enough.

Yes, various operations in wars since at least WW II had names--Overlord is perhaps best known. It was the code name for the allied invasion of Normandy, culminating on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

In truth the invasion didn't need a code name. Everyone who cared knew forces for a massive invasion were gathering in England. And no one was fooled by wondering what this Overlord was about. The Nazis knew the allies were coming. The most important thing they didn't know was where the cross-Channel invasion would occur, and having a code name didn't do anything to help hide the specifics of the plan. For some reason Eisenhower must have liked the feudal sound of Overlord. Perhaps that's how he regarded himself.

Come to think of it, why was June 6th called D-Day? Wiki says all invasion have d-days with the "d" standing for day or date. Get it? Nothing special.

But in regard to Operation Inherent Resolve, according to the New York Times, for three months the Pentagon has been hassled by the press to come up with a name for the bombings and drone attacks we have been inflicting on the Islamic State (or ISIS or ISIL).

Secrecy is not an issue otherwise the Pentagon wouldn't have shared the eventual code name with the waiting world--

The name Inherent Resolve is intended to reflect the unwavering resolve and deep commitment of the U.S. and partner nations in the region and around the globe to eliminate the terrorist group ISIL and the threat they pose to Iraq, the region and the wider international community.

There was no concurrent mention of the fact that one key "partner nation," Turkey, geographically in the middle of the fighting, has thus far not only refused to become involved but has impeded our efforts, in effect holding us up for ransom--there will be no Turkish involvement, they say, until the U.S. agrees to directly support rebels fighting to overthrow Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Under pressure from the press I can just imagine the high-level discussions that went on for three months in the Pentagon and White House Situation Room while struggling to come up with an appropriate name for the operation.

"How about Operation Isolation?" the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff offered, all puffed up.

"I like that sir," his adjunct chimed in. "It's clever. Even includes a pun. ISIL, isolation. If I may say so, sir, very clever."

"This is a nasty business. No place for puns," growled the Chief of Naval Operations. "My boys are flying dangerous missions and--"

"Sorry to interrupt Chief," the Army Chief of Staff interjected, "But that's boys and girls." He sat back in his leather chair, self-satisfied, smiling.

"Correction accepted," conceded the Chief of Naval Operations. "We do have some wonderful gals flying those planes. Lives at risk. Just like the boys. Times have changed"

"How about Operation Hesitation," chuckled the Commandant of the Marine Corps. His colleagues glared at him. "You know, the CIC [Commander in Chief] was hesitant to get involved with those ISIS-ISIL folks. It's another quagmire. We all know that. he got beat up in the press pretty bad for indecision. Had to have those fellas' heads cut off before he got his ass in gear." No one made eye contact.

"Not that I blame him. Been there, done that. So maybe for once we should come up with one of these names--why we even need them I'll never know--that tells it like it is. Operation Hesitation could be the first." He puffed on his unlit pipe.

"Yeah, and we should have called Iraqi Freedom Operation Slam-Dunk," said the Vice Chair, all agitated.

"Or," offered the Commandant of the Coast Guard, "Operation Preemption," getting in on the act.

"Let's get serious guys. That's not going to fly," the Chairman admonished his colleagues, "We have to come up with something he'll go for. That suits him. You know, something academic sounding. A name with class." He rolled his eyes, feeling he had more important things to do.

"I have it," exclaimed the Chief of the National Guard, "How about Operation Enduring Resolve?"

"Huh?"

"I'm liking this," the naval commandant said, "The resolve part especially. Very Marine. Like Sempre Fi, but in English. Like it. Licking it."

"Your boys aren't even involved," the Chief of Naval Operations pointed, "No boots on the ground this time around. At least that's what he said. Just Mark's flyboys and my guys. And by guys I mean guys and gals of course." He winked.

"But I'm not liking the enduring business," the Chairman said, "Feels ominous to me. If I take your meaning it sounds like we'll be at this forever. I mean, if it's enduring. I'm not sure we'll be able to sell that."

"Good point. So how about inherent?" the Chief asked, "We want to indicate we're taking this seriously, that it's not going to be a slam-dunk. Going to take some time."

They all seemed to like that.

"I'll pass it along," the Chairman said, "Let's run it up the flagpole and see if it flies."

The rest is history. Or will be history.

June 24, 2014--Cousin Henry-Hank-Henri

Cousin Hank ran out of lives on Sunday and his funeral is this morning.

He faced death so many times, including over the years being placed in hospice care but then reviving, that we came to take for granted every time he was sent to the ICU that this was just another example of Hank being Henry.

When he first joined the family, marrying Cousin Nina, he was introduced to us as Hank, a familiar form of his real name, Henry. But years later, when I came to know he was in fact Henri, these name variations made perfect sense. They were just another iteration of Jewish immigrant life--get anglicized so one could try to "pass," avoid quotas, maybe get into college, attempt to slip through life unscathed, and, if possible, eek out some measure of happiness.

Henry-Hank-Henri managed to achieve all of this while growing more in love with Nina over nearly 65 years.

To me, coming of age in post-World War Two Brooklyn, he was the only family exotic.

There were members of the family who came from Europe--my mother included--but they were Middle-European shtetl Jews, and we lived in a neighborhood among so many others that neither their Yiddishkeit, foods, customs, nor consciousness seemed out of the ordinary. Indeed, they and the lives they led were the ordinary.

Henry-Hank-Henri was to me anything but ordinary.

His English was German inflected, not Polish-Russian-polyglot English. He was from Austria, not an obliterated village "near Warsaw." He drank espresso black, smoked unfiltered French cigarettes, and during the din of family gatherings remained non-judgementally detached, puffing and sipping, taking it all in as if we were the exotics.

For a kid dreaming of getting away, of making something different of my life, I was not thinking about wandering around in the Pale of Settlement searching for my Polish-village roots but wanted something cosmopolitan. Not that I at the time knew what cosmopolitan was, but Henry-Hank-Henri had the aura of that difference and I spent a lot of time studying him.

Secretly, I tried black coffee (hated it) and, with candy cigarettes, practiced holding them between my second and third fingers as Henri did. I also took to ordering Compari and Soda--or as he would ask for it, "Compari-Soda," as an homage to him.

Sad to say, the last time we were together, for the first time I asked him questions about his earlier life, a life up to then I had only imagined and shaped for my own transgressive purposes.

What he shared did not diminish my own version of his life and genealogy.

He indeed was Henri.

June 13, 2014--Guest-Blogger: Father's Day Treasure Hunt

On the Friday before Father's Day, guest-blogger Sharon reports about an interesting and emotional treasure hunt--

I don't particularly like Father's Day.

My dear grandfather died suddenly the day before in 1969.

We all watched from the living room window as someone we couldn't quite see lying on the sidewalk and was taken away. It never entered our mind it could be him. We thought he was at home downstairs in the apartment he shared with our grandmother. The next day, his present remained unopened and was returned.

Almost thirty years later, I was preparing to head up to New Jersey for Father’s Day 1998 when I got a call that my dad had a stroke and my family was at the the hospital. It didn't look good.

Another Father's Day funeral. Another unopened and returned gift.

After my grandfather died, I asked my mom for the few coins my grandfather carried in his pocket for a memento. I later found the pictures depicting my grandparents early life in Russia and later life in the U.S. disappeared somewhere along the way. So when my father died, I scooped up his papers stored in boxes from earlier Father's Day gifts and the recently cleaned Eisenhower style uniform jacket my dad had tried on for us the year before. It fit again.

A pack rat myself, I was curious what I'd find in the boxes. There were greeting cards, a few of our report cards, award certificates and programs from school events. Far more interesting were the papers from the years before he was a husband and father. Inside the aging boxes were various documents and correspondence and a few black and white pictures, which almost sixteen years later I would use to try to recreate a chronology for what my dad did during the war.

This year, the Monday before Father's Day I received a long list of questions from Steven about Joe's WWII service, inspired by the reporting around the 70th anniversary of D-Day. Like me, Steven had tried to ask my father these questions directly without much success. Over the years a few stories would leak out, often the same ones-but no real chronology.

Although I couldn't answer most of the questions off the top of my head, I offered a few things I remembered and then decided to get the box.

We all knew that during the war my dad had appendicitis after Thanksgiving. Initially thought to be indigestion, he ultimately remained in London while the rest of his unit moved on. When I found a program dated November 23, 1943, 106th Signal Corp I figured his illness was so significant that he kept the menu.

But it turned out that GI Joe got sick after Thanksgiving 1944 and found himself in a hospital in England. Meanwhile five days after they arrived on the continent, his fellow soldiers, who had trained together for over a year in South Carolina, Tennessee, and Indiana were to face a battle that would prove too much for inexperienced troops, the Battle of the Bulge.

Although ultimately credited with helping to slow down the Germans, over 500 soldiers from the 106th were killed, thousands were captured and became POWS. Many of these men ended up in Stalag IV-B. Kurt Vonnegut himself was with the 106th and was assigned to a work detail in Dresden. Housed in a former slaughterhouse, his experiences there inspired Slaughterhouse 5. Another site I found detailed the dead by unit. Five men from the 106th signal were listed as KIA.

I've sometimes joked with my siblings that we probably owe our existence to appendicitis. However, until this week, I never quite realized the extent of the horrors my dad narrowly escaped.

Noting that his separation papers in 1946 didn't note the 106th, but the 32nd armored regiment, it appears that the rest of his service was as a Sargent and Staff Sargent, including a platoon leader commanding a tank, which I do remember him saying caught fire on his first day. I found a map depicting the 32nd's route through the Ardennes, the Rhineland, and Central Europe. Two of the three campaigns were noted on my dads' separation papers along with note of a bronze star.

Also noted was a ten-week business course at Shrivenham American University. An article about Shrivenham noted that the business courses were most popular with GIs who, tired of taking orders, were looking forward to becoming independent businessmen after the war.

The other interesting discovery was the Cigarette Camps. On the back of an old black and white photo my dad inscribed, "Camp Pell Mell, Etretat France, October 1945.

Disgusting." A quick search uncovered not the old world classical building he posed before, but a camp of "ramshackle tents in a vast mudhole," where early on soldiers were staged on the way to the front and later the last stop for soldiers who had accumulated enough points to return home.

Why were the camps named after cigarette brands? In addition to obscuring their location from the enemy, it was thought to provide a psychological lift and the inference that cigarettes would be plentiful for soldiers who would soon be sent to the front.

So late Monday night, with still many holes in the chronology, some inconsistencies and with only a Thanksgiving menu for the 106th Signal Corp, I did another search and found images of uniform patches depicting a lion for the 106th and Spearhead for the 32nd Armored. I remembered my father’s Ike-style uniform in the upstairs closet. I removed the cleaning bag and there they were--on one sleeve the Lion patch and on the other the Spearhead patch. They were there when he tried on the uniform, but at the time didn't really mean anything to me. I didn't think to ask.

Now they were confirmation of a narrative I had to piece together from documents and scraps of memorabilia because, in life, like so many others, my dad didn’t want to talk about these life-altering experiences.

So as the world appears to be coming apart again, this Father's Day my gift is the gift of remembrance for my dad and for all the people who sacrificed so much over 70 years ago.

March 20, 2014--The Rich Get Richer, The Poor Get . . .

The intellectual firepower in economic theory that claimed that economic growth over time reduces inequality was provided during the 1950s and 60s by Simon Keznets.

Most starkly, he put forth the Kuznets Curve that graphically illustrated what he argued was a natural curve, a natural cycle that begins with widening inequality while an economy grows but then decreases, again naturally, over time until a "certain average income is attained." In other words, after overall economic growth, inequality, if we are patient, is reduced.

His work was derived by his assembling reams of data primarily from tax returns. He argued that between 1913 when the income tax was introduced in the United States until the end of World War II in 1948, the portion of the national income earned by the richest 10 percent of Americans declined from a little under half that total income to "only" about a third.

In other words, Karl Marx and more benign progressives were wrong--the free market was a self-correcting system and governments should get out of the way and allow economic justice over time to express itself.

Now there is a new, massively data-rich study by Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, Capital in the 21st Century, that looks at even more data. Much more data. He studied income and wealth disparity over hundreds of years in dozens of countries and comes to very different conclusions than Kuznets.

In brief, Piketty found that the rate of return on capital investment (machinery, real estate, land, financial instruments) is much higher that the rate of economic growth.

This means that wages cannot keep up with capital formation, inequality therefore increases rather than decreases over time, and it is not self-correcting. That is, if markets are left to themselves. But when governments intervene through, say, progressive taxation, the gaps between the haves and have-nots can be narrowed.

From his data Piketty cites numerous examples of how the unfettered market increases inequality but how with shifts in public policy it has been and can be reduced.

He shows that inequality today is reaching and exceeding the upper limits of the Gilded Age. According to a essay in the New York Times from data mined by Piketty, investment profits account for the largest share of national income since the 1930s and as a result, the richest 10 percent of Americans control a larger share of the economic pie than at any time since 1913.

In regard to Kuznets, Piketty demonstrates that the data that underlie the Curve were amassed from an idiosyncratic period in one country's history--the years in the United States when the Depression destroyed a large portion of the richest people's wealth while at the other end of the period Kuznets studied, the economy benefitted disproportionately by the spending and government investments required to arm the country to fight the Second World War.

Ironically, the forces that ultimately led to the end of the Depression and an era in which income equality was reduced were more the result of government taxation and spending policies than the Invisible Hand of the free market.

The free market brought about the Depression while government intervention and a world war were essential to ending it.

Piketty argues that unless we amend current fiscal policy--especially taxation--the concentration of wealth will continue and inequality will worsen. There are no examples in history since the Industrial Revolution that the market will in and of itself make a difference. Not even expanded investments in education, which to many is the best way to proceed.