Sunday Morning Musings

Lately I've been thinking about . . . Alexander Hamilton. Hasn't everyone?

Hamilton, whose handsome visage graces every ten dollar bill, was President George Washington's Secretary of the Treasury during the first formative years of Constitutional government here in the good old USA. His great contribution to the national fabric was a financial plan to get the new nation started.

Unlike Thomas Jefferson, who soon became his primary antagonist in the Washington cabinet, Hamilton believed that the future of America lay in manufacturing and commerce rather than agriculture. In this he saw the future more clearly than did Jefferson.

What makes me think of Hamilton, however, is another aspect of his plan, his idea of taking over the debt left by the Articles of Confederation government and the state debts. He would retire all the bonds issued by all of them by selling new bonds. Now, you might think this sounds like financial sleight-of-hand, or even some sort of Ponzi scheme, but Hamilton's rationale was very simple. The new government needed the support of wealthy people in the country if it was going to last. By issuing those new bonds and selling them to the richer folks the government would in effect be buying their support. They would have a vested interest in the success of the new government. In fact, Hamilton argued, a public debt was a necessity, and the bigger the debt the better.

Nowadays, no one would argue for a higher public debt. The debate in Washington right now is how to keep the debt from getting bigger. I submit, however, that we shouldn't lose sight of Hamilton's proposition: the government must have the support of wealthier people. And the way to make sure we have that support is to . . . tax them.

As it is now, neither corporations nor individuals in what has been called the "One Percent" are being taxed at anything like the rate they were even one generation ago. The result is a culture of cupidity and an irresponsibility on the part of many in this segment of the population that's just appalling and outrageous. A Sixty Minutes profile of a corporate CEO just last Sunday contained a straight-faced assertion that of course his company shifts its cash reserves to tax havens in the Bahamas and Switzerland. How many Americans, I wondered, remain unemployed because the money that could have been used to hire them has departed the country. And if anyone argues that we should reduce our income tax rates to keep that money here I'd just reply, "Who do you think has to fund the military, Medicare, and all the other things the government does if the people who have profited so much from America don't kick in a fair share?"

Instead, the money they don't ship overseas goes to fund political puppets who preach tax reduction as a panacea for all our national problems.

And now a quick note about the Red Sox. Can this team possibly be as bad as it has shown so far? They're getting almost no offense from Youkilis, Crawford, Ellsbury and Saltalamacchia. The pitching has just been awful.

I think the batters will straighten out. The pitching is much more troublesome. If it doesn't show a lot of improvement real soon it could be a long long summer in Red Sox nation.