Is the Flat Tax All They Can Come Up With?

What better time for reform than when a nation finds that the ship of state has run aground, when we are wracked by joblessness and foreclosures, when 69% of the public in a recent poll says the U.S. is in decline (only 15% thought not).

Not much can be done to right the economy in the short term, and Congress is seeing to it that not even that is done, so why not at least get to work laying the groundwork for a healthier future while waiting hopefully for the economy to recuperate.

There is much to reform, but the tax system, which underpins so much else, is where to start. Unfortunately, those in the White House and Congress, the ones who are in a position to do something about revolutionizing the tax code, are stuck in permanent neutral. All the action comes from the Republican candidates who are vying to be the one to take the keys from Obama.

But what do we get? The resurrection of the flat tax, that irrepressible scheme for the rich getting richer that masquerades as crowd-pleasing simplification.

First came Herman Cain’s peculiar 9-9-9 plan, which would drop the maximum tax on the wealthiest to 18% (one of the 9% is for corporations). Less than 18%, actually, because another of the 9%s is a national sales tax, which would add a second large regressive tax to the social security payroll tax. It is regressive because, while lower income folks spend all their income on taxed goods and services, the rich do not. The more the wealth, the less of their income is spent on consumption, the less that is subject to Cain’s sales tax.

To compete, Rick Perry was coached by twice-failed presidential candidate Steve Forbes, who campaigned on the flat tax in 1996 and 2000. Perry came forth with a more elaborate plan, a mixture designed to please middle class folks while slipping in his own flat tax to keep those campaign contributions flowing from the wealthy. His plan — a tax cap, really — chops no less than four brackets from the current tax schedule by making the maximum tax rate 20%.

Households making less than $500,000 would have the option of continuing to use the current tax schedule, which we can only view as a ruse to make the 20% seem to pertain to only a few. In fact, anyone making $145,000 or more of taxable income would go for the 20% rate. That’s where the the current tax schedule crosses the 20% threshold. Millions would pay less. Someone with taxable income of $1 million would pay $120,000 less. Above that the savings really soar.

Into the trash would go the elephantine tax code — 72,000 pages Perry tells us — with your tax return reduced to the postcard he pulls from his pocket. Never mind that he just added a new layer which will cause us to compute our taxes two ways — three, if the unmentioned alternative minimum tax didn’t make it to the Perry dustbin.

For that under-$500,000 group, Perry would do away with the estate tax and taxes on dividends and capital gains while retaining deductions for mortgage interest, state and local taxes and gifts to charity. He would even boost the birth rate by handing out a $12,500 exemption for every member of a family.

Incredibly, in announcing a tax plan with these features that would hugely reduce government revenues — a low maximum tax rate at one end and even fatter deductions at the other — Perry said “America is under a crushing burden of debt”. So let’s make it worse?

Government revenues, currently at just 14.8% of gross domestic product, are the lowest in about 50 years. Whereas conservatives want to reduce the size of government by cutting its funding — the “starve the beast” strategy — Perry’s plan would speed the process by strangling it.

How about Mitt Romney? Is he likely to wedge a flat tax feature into his 59-point plan in order to compete? Even he, whose views adapt to whatever fits the moment, would have difficulty pulling that off, having years ago called the flat tax “a tax cut for fat cats”.

but it will be so much simpler

The promise of simplification has always been the lure that flat tax crusaders use to seduce a public that was driven years ago to use tax software, a tax service, or an accountant to avoid the tax code’s thickets of complexity. It’s been so long since people have been near the 179-page (and that’s without forms) 1040 instruction booklet that they are unaware that the tax rate schedule is simple — just a few lines long (and only one of those lines pertains to you).

That schedule has no need of flattening. It’s the page after page of worksheets in the instructions, with their inscrutable step-by-step calculations, their barnacles of special exemptions, exceptions and dependencies on other calculations that are the cause of the complexity. (And don’t blame the IRS. These tangles are the mare’s nest handed to the revenooers by the folks we sent to Congress, who tacked some amendment to some bill to pay off some campaign contributor and left it to the hapless IRS to figure out how to express the math.)

what happened to tax reform, mr. president?

But what about actual tax reform by those who pull the levers?

In all three state of the union addresses President Obama has spoken of tax reform to some degree, and most forcibly in the most recent address. Along with a rising chorus on both sides of the aisle in Congress, he has come to agree that the corporate tax rate, at 35% the highest in the world, drives businesses offshore and jobs along with them.

”So tonight, I’m asking Democrats and Republicans to simplify the system. Get rid of the loopholes. Level the playing field. And use the savings to lower the corporate tax rate for the first time in 25 years — without adding to our deficit. It can be done.”

About individual taxes he said,

“The best thing we could do on taxes for all Americans is to simplify the individual tax code”.

That was January. It’s nearing year-end.

Instead of doing anything that fits his job description, Mr. Obama is instead touring the country campaigning to raise money over a year before the election. His vice-president isn’t on the job either. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”, Biden said his main job for the next year is to do everything he can to assist Obama to get re-elected.

Republicans in Congress have shown that they will block anything proposed by Obama in order to make him a failed president and are unperturbed that their roadblock to progress — with all movement stalled for yet another year — has won them the approval rating of bedbugs, as the Times’ Bill Keller put it.

strike while the economy is cold

If Obama would like to linger in the Oval Office, sending popular proposals to Congress to be struck down is actually a strategy for re-election. Presidents and their advisers, in the cocoon of D.C., have a strange belief that such setbacks are embarrassments —proof of weakness in the public’s eye. In fact, every “defeat” gives Obama a brush with which to tar Republicans as obstructionists out on the campaign trail, while at the same time giving an assist to Congressional candidates from his own party.

As for Republicans in Congress, it’s a wonder they have not advanced bills on their own so as to claim all credit for fixing what is broken. They express a strong wish to reduce the corporate tax rate in return for eliminating loopholes, yet nothing moves forward. Of course, so few large corporations pay anything close to the 35% rate, that we are left to wonder whether Congress is hearing from these campaign donors that they like things just as they are.

And so, while the right moment is at hand for a sensible, thoughtful approach to tax reform that solves some of the inequities in the system, the sort of reform that presidents and politicians have spoken of doing since forever ago, we get flat out gimcrack and gimmickry.

What Happened to Tax Reform, Mr. President?

What better time for reform than when a nation finds that the ship of state has run aground, when we are wracked by joblessness and foreclosures, when 69% of the public in a recent poll says the U.S. is in decline (only 15% thought not). Not much can be done to right the economy in the short term, and Congress is seeing to it that not even that is done, so why not at least get to work laying the groundwork for a healthier future while waiting hopefully for the economy to recuperate.

There is much to reform, but the tax system, which underpins so much else, is where to start. In all three state of the union addresses President Obama has spoken of tax reforms to some degree, and most forcibly in the most recent address. Along with a rising chorus on both sides of the aisle in Congress, he has come to agree that the corporate tax rate, at 35% the highest in the world, drives businesses offshore and jobs along with them.

”So tonight, I’m asking Democrats and Republicans to simplify the system. Get rid of the loopholes. Level the playing field. And use the savings to lower the corporate tax rate for the first time in 25 years — without adding to our deficit. It can be done.”

About individual taxes he said,

“The best thing we could do on taxes for all Americans is to simplify the individual tax code”.

That was January. It’s nearing year-end.

Instead of doing anything that fits his job description, Mr. Obama is instead touring the country campaigning to raise money over a year before the election. His vice-president isn’t on the job either. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”, Biden said his main job for the next year was to do everything he could to assist Obama to get reelected.

strike while the economy is cold

The right moment is at hand for the tax reform for which presidents and politicians have called for since forever ago. But nothing happens. Just more talk.

Republicans in Congress have shown that they will block anything proposed by Obama in order to make him a failed president and are unperturbed that their roadblock to progress — with all movement stalled for yet another year &#0151: has won them the approval rating of bedbugs, as the Times’Bill Keller put it.

If Obama would like to linger in the Oval Office, sending popular proposals to Congress to be struck down is actually a strategy for reelection. Presidents and their advisers, in the cocoon of DC, have a strange belief that such setbacks are embarrassments — proof of weakness in the public’s eye. Instead, the President could take these “defeats” out on the campaign trail to show that Republicans in Congress are the enemy of the people, and he would at the same time be giving an assist to Congressional candidates from his own party who are striving to replace the enemy.

As for Republicans in Congress, it’s a wonder they have not advanced bills on their own so as to claim all credit for fixing what is broken. They express a strong wish to reduce the corporate tax rate in return for eliminating loopholes, yet nothing moves forward. Of course, so few large corporations pay anything close to the 35% rate, that we are left to wonder whether Congress is hearing from these campaign donors that they like things just as they are.

So only the Republican presidential candidates have put tax specifics on the table — schemes such as Herman Cain’s peculiar 9-9-9 plan and now, from Rick Perry, after coaching by twice-failed presidential candidate Steve Forbes, a proposed flat tax of 20% (as part of a wider plan). Into the trash would go the elephantine tax code — 72,000 pages says Perry, with your tax return reduced to the postcard he pulls from his pocket.

The promise of simplification has always been the lure that flat tax crusaders use to seduce a public which was driven years ago to use tax software, a tax service, or an accountant to avoid the tax code’s thickets of complexity. It’s been so long since people have been near the 179-page (and that’s without forms) 1040 instruction booklet that they are unaware that the tax rate schedule is simple —just a few lines long, only one of which pertains to you. It has no need of flattening. It’s the page after page of worksheets in the instructions, with their inscrutable step-by-step calculations, their barnacles of special exemptions, exceptions and dependencies on other calculations that are the cause of the complexity. (And don’t blame the IRS. These tangles are the mare’s nest handed to the revenooers by the folks we sent to Congress, who tacked some amendment to a bill to reward to some constituent group and left it to the hapless IRS to figure out how to express the math.)

So beware the flat tax masquerading as the remedy for complexity. It is yet another ruse to rig the game still further by reducing taxes for the wealthy. Cain’s 9% plus 9% taxes on individuals would raise taxes on anyone with income less than about $140,000. For either Cain or Perry, anyone above that line would pay less taxes, measured against current rates. Perry’s plan allows anyone making $500,000 to keep their current tax rate. Is that meant to make it appear that the 20% rate applies to only a few at the top? In fact, current tax rates are higher than 20% for anyone making only $144,000 and above. Millions would pay less. Someone with taxable income of $1 million would save $120,000. Above that the savings really soar.

Instead of fully considered reform, we get the regressive gimmickry of a flat tax giveaway to the wealthiest among us who already control a wildly disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth. There is no question that the country must raise more revenue or go ever deeper into debt. If you think over-spending is the sole cause of the deficit, be aware that the sum of all the revenue collected by the federal government today totals just 14.8% of our gross domestic product, the lowest in about 50 years. And yet Perry announces a plan to cap taxes at 20% while in that same announcement says “America is under a crushing burden of debt”. Right. Let’s make it worse.

When are we going to get serious?

Do Environmental Rules Really Cost Jobs?

To the disbelief of environmentalists and the subdued anger of his Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, Lisa Jackson, President Obama postponed


for two years ozone emission restrictions, saying they could cost jobs. That he did so just days before his jobs speech before Congress says that he didn’t want to hand Republicans the rejoinder that he was destroying jobs at the same time as he was giving speeches about creating jobs. In other words, Obama’s decision was entirely political.

Pollutants — ozone, mercury, arsenic, chromium, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide emitted by power plants and certain heavy manufacturing such as cement — cost lives. No one disputes that. So Obama has decided that lives are to be lost. But our question is: do these environmental rules actually cost jobs? Republicans will tell you they do. Rick Perry says, “the EPA regulations are killing jobs all across America”. At a rally in Iowa, Michelle Bachman said, “I guarantee you the EPA will have doors locked and the lights turned off” if she is elected, calling it “the job-killing organization of America”.

Update: ProPublica followed us with similar conclusions at this link.

But the fact is that no one really knows if the rules cost jobs. Claims by the EPA versus those in industry are therefore wildly divergent. Republicans in Congress and business groups say that curtailing what is called ground-level ozone will cost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs. But neither industry nor the EPA can offer past results as proof. In a memo targeting 10 proposed clean air resolutions, House Republican Leader Eric Cantor claims the ozone rule alone will result in “an estimated cost of $1 trillion or more over a decade and millions of jobs”. A trillion dollars? Millions of jobs?

There is something akin to an oxymoron in this. How would all that money spent retrofitting industries with pollution controls not create jobs? Construction jobs at the plants, manufacturing jobs where controls are fabricated. The $10 billion to control mercury and other pollutants from coal-burning plants would create 31,000 short term construction jobs and 9,000 permanent jobs in the utilities sector, according to the EPA.

Yet the couplet that spending equals job loss is ritualistically recited by Republicans as a given. Where do they think the money goes?

Industry Doesn’t want to spend

Industry has regularly exaggerated both cost in money and cost in jobs in a fight to avoid the former. The job loss referred to comes from threatened plant closings. Utilities such as American Electric Power say it is not worth the money to upgrade old plants. AEP would instead shutter two dozen plants and fire hundreds of workers. What they do not say is that those units are an average of 55 years old, operate at way below capacity (explaining only “hundreds” of workers), and are due for closing anyway. In fact, AEP is required to close those plants under a settlement with the Bush administration over their violating the Clean Air Act.

An industry report of November 2010 said that hundreds of coal, gas and oil-powered plants with a collective capacity of 70,000 megawatts could be shuttered if new rules were implemented too quickly.

The cement industry says that sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide rules could force closure of 18 of 100 plants with a loss of 13,000 jobs. The EPA claims only 600 lost with 1,300 jobs gained at equipment makers. An industry-funded study says this rule will cost tens of thousands of jobs and cost customers a 20% rise in electricity rates. The EPA says society would benefit by as much as $120 to $240 billion from less hospitalization and work time lost to respiratory illness.

They Protest Too Much?

Back and forth go the threats and the counterclaims with little certainty as to how much is bluff and how much is guess. There is one example, though: When the original sulfur dioxide rules were announced, the power industry claimed that it would cost $7.5 billion to fit plants with scrubbers and filters to rid the air of acid rain caused by sulfur dioxide emissions — that or a loss of tens of thousands of jobs instead. In fact, it cost more like $1 billion with no evidence of extensive job loss.

The energy industry protests are not universal. Rather, they come from a rearguard of resisting companies. Close to half the country’s more than 400 coal-burning plants have already outfitted emission controls in varying degrees and a third of the states already have set their own standards for mercury.

Adding Some Context

Peel away industry’s latest attempts to ward off costs and you come upon some history. The Clean Air Act is 41 years old. Immensely popular amongst the citizenry, it was signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1970. Industry has been fighting it ever since.

Early on, the Act was relaxed, requiring energy companies to retrofit their plants with pollution controls only when significant modifications beyond “routine maintenance” were made. That was in deference to the great expense to energy companies that immediate and unconditional replacement would have caused.

But the energy industry chafed under even this accommodation, referred to as “new source review”, often disguising major construction as “routine”. The Reagan administration was, of course, averse to regulation whether law or not, so only in the Clinton years did the EPA take action against the industry’s subterfuge. It initiated investigations that led to lawsuits against 51 power plants for violating the Clean Air Act.

When George W Bush took office, Vice President Cheney huddled with energy executives in an infamously secret meeting (that excluded any environmental representatives) to set energy policy. One outcome was that the lawsuits were dropped. The energy companies had been some of the biggest Bush campaign contributors.

The Bush administration in 2005 set about revising sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide rules downward, but the courts in 2008 ruled the changes to be in violation of the Clean Air Act. Only now is the Obama administration putting the regulations back on track. Unless it doesn’t.

Stated simply, a large swath of the energy industry has successfully fought off installing pollution controls for decades.

Health Effects

The EPA regularly justifies its action by citing health benefits. They say that stricter sulfur dioxide/nitrogen oxide rule will save 34,000 premature deaths, 15,000 non-fatal heart attacks, asthma and respiratory ailments at an annual cost to industry of $1 billion a year. The agency says that mercury, lead, arsenic and chromium pollutants, addressed by that forthcoming rule, will save 17,000 lives a year. Mercury is especially hazardous for pregnant women and their fetuses. The EPA estimates the annual cost of compliance at $10 billion a year compared with $100 billion in alleged costs of hospital visits and lost time on the job. Again, hard to know how such accuracy can be known. But the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who stood with EPA chief Lisa Jackson in announcing the mercury rule said, “If you think it’s expensive to put a scrubber on a smokestack, you should see how much it costs to treat a child over a lifetime with a birth defect”.

Obama’s Next Move?

Mr. Obama has set aside the ozone rule. The question now is whether he will again buy into only industry claims about job loss and jettison the sulfur dioxide/nitrogen oxide revisions and the first ever control of mercury, both due to be announced this fall.

Oct 10 2011 | Posted in Energy & Climate | Read More »

Banks Forcing You to Pay Exorbitant Debit Card Fees

Banks Cancel Fees: Nov 1: Bowing to the uproar, even Bank of America dropped its plan to charge $5 a month for its debit card. Other banks had already withdrawn. But the following still merits reading; it reveals how much the banks have been charging you all these years.

Back in June we reported in the article opposite that “something got fixed in this country”. The Senate had blocked an attempt to delay the section of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill that capped the fees paid to banks when you use a debit card.

Well, that sure was naïve of us. Here’s the gist: The banks tack on a fee every time you use your debit card. You don’t see it; to recover the added cost to everything they sell, the stores have to build the bank charge into the price of what you buy.

corporate cleptocracy

It’s only fair that the banks get a fee for the convenience of debit cards. But that assumes the fees are fair. To the contrary, the average fee added to every one of your debit card transactions is 44 cents, says the Federal Reserve. On a $50 purchase, it’s 63 cents.

Think of how much money that means you’ve been paying to the banks across a year of purchases, year after year. Yet the bank simply reached into your account and transferred the money to the retailer’s bank account. That’s it. Done. In a nanosecond. Entirely electronic, at miniscule cost (the scheme’s development investment was some 20 years ago). So what does it add up to? How much have the banks charged the public and siphoned out of the economy into their coffers? How about $16 billion a year.

The Dodd-Frank bill clamped down, allowing a maximum fee of 12 cents per transaction. If you are computer savvy about electronic transactions, you will be shaking your head in disbelief that the fee is still so high.

It then turns out that the 12 cents was only the law’s recommendation, because the Federal Reserve ultimately decides such banking matters. So what does the Federal Reserve do? If you have ever been in doubt that the banks have the Fed and the Treasury in their pockets, that doubt will be dispelled when you hear that the Fed stopped in, arbitrarily brushed aside Dodd-Frank and allowed the banks a whopping 22 cents a transaction.

But the banks just can’t stand it that half their $16 billion has still been taken away. They believe they are entitled to your money. We are now seeing that one after another bank is adding a $3 to $5 a month charge for the use of debit cards ؏ and that’s in addition to the fee your pay at the checkout counter.

Fight back. Use paper. Write checks where possible. That really does cost the banks money. Or resume using those green pieces of paper we once carried around with us.

Oct 10 2011 | Posted in Reform | Read More »

The Solyndra Syndrome

That the Solyndra bankruptcy and the loss of $528 million in government backed loan guarantees smacks of scandal there is no denying. A money “bundler”for Obama’s 2008 campaign who was linked to a venture capital fund invested in Solyndra made 16 visits to the White House since 2009, four of them the week before the loan guarantee was awarded. An award to the company that was rushed, say accusers, so that the President could turn the award announcement at a Solyndra plant into a publicity event. A deal that an analyst at the Office of Management and Budget had characterized just two months earlier as “NOT ready for prime time”. Company principals who appeared before a House investigative committee and pleaded the 5th amendment rather than answer questions. An FBI criminal investigation on “whether Solyndra executives knowlingly misled the government” according to the Wall Street Journal.

When does the movie open?

No question that this debacle has aspects that require investigations to go wherever they lead. But where the reaction went off course has been its use by Republicans to discredit the entire loan guarantee program. A hearing before a House committee led by Darrell Issa (R. Ca) used this one case of

Solyndra rooftop array with individual cylinder as inset.
failure — which represented only 1-1/3% of the $40 billion loan program — to say that money would be better spent on “domestic carbon-based resources” — that is, coal, oil and gas — than on the development of new non-polluting industries. A Michigan Republican named Fred Upton called it a “taxpayer rip-off”, he from a state that saw the entire auto industry set back on its feet by taxpayer money.

Republicans were somehow unembarrassed by Eric Cantor’s jaw-dropping requirement for matching spending cuts to pay for disaster relief after a particularly ravaging year of weather and hardship. So what did they cut? The very program meant to create new industries leading to new jobs — $1.5 billion from the final $4 billion of the loan guarantee fund yet to be disbursed. After all, the fund “gave us the Solyndra scandal”, Mitch McConnell said.

Illuminating the hypocrisy of it all, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post reminded us that Republicans are decrying a program they originally authored. The loan guarantee measure was part of the 2005 energy bill of the Republican-controlled House. Bush’s energy secretary said in a press release:

> “Loan guarantees aim to stimulate investment and commercialization of clean energy technologies to reduce our nation’s reliance on foreign sources of energy.”

Solyndra itself was cleared to participate in the loan program by the Bush Energy Department. Its innovative technology wasn’t covered in the regulations, so they were altered to make Solyndra specially eligible.

Beyond Solyndra

All of which obscures the importance of the loan guarantee program. Having reversed field by disavowing a government initiative that they themselves put in place, Republicans now find it wasteful and somehow think that, in a free market, if an industry is viable, it should arise on its own. (At the same time refusing to end the billions of dollars in subsidies to the long ago matured oil, gas and coal industries.)

That is the posture that has allowed China, which subsidizes solar heavily, to take over the industry, rising from 6% of world market share a few years ago to 54% now. This is how we lose one after another industry, all the while proclaiming that the first priority is jobs. “The American solar industry employs more people than either steel or coal, and it’s a net exporter”, says New York Times financial columnist Joe Nocera, yet Republicans seem to want to snuff it out altogether.

So there was Bloomberg Business Week joining the chorus saying “Solyndra’s rapid rise and fall should have played out entirely in the private sector. Silicon Valley is thick with venture capitalists willing to finance risky, iconoclastic startups.” Half a billion? What nonsense. If all those venture capitalists were ready to step up, how to explain why China made off with our solar industry?

Development of transformational industries, involving science and engineering that may or may not work, entails risks the private sector won’t take. It requires a governmental energy policy or else we hand the win to China, which invested $30 billion in subsidies to just its solar industry last year alone.

Without a government assist, no new technology can compete with an American power industry that burns cheap coal in plants built up to 50 years ago. That is the technology we will find ourselves stranded with if we do not invest in the future. And those power plants additionally benefit from not having to pay a cent for consuming an irreplaceable Earth asset — the hydrocarbons that took millions of years to form — and then pay no cost for spewing millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when they burn those hydrocarbons. The result is to socialize the cost of pollution while privatizing the profits.

And yet no movement toward the obvious: some form of carbon tax to end that free ride. Making fossil-fuel power more expensive would give nascent green energy industries the chance to compete, which in turn would attract capital. Instead, the nation stumbles along, making no changes, developing no comprehensive energy policy, as we watch China take away another industry.

Immediately the cry goes up: “A carbon tax means we would have to pay more for electricity”. Of course we would! And we should. Our power is too cheap. We waste it in unconscionable amounts. Let’s make it cost more. We’ll use less.

Technology: Our Only way to get ahead

Solyndra’s technology was cutting edge. Rather than flat-panel photovoltaic cells using silicon, it arrayed cylindrical tubes coated with copper-indium-gallium-selenide, a design that picks up light from any direction. The loan went forth at a time when a worldwide shortage of silicon owing to the demand of the mushrooming solar panel industry had boosted prices 1000-fold. That made Solyndra’s silicon-free technology attractive. Then new silicon plants were built and the price plunged nearly 90 percent from the peak in 2008.

So in hindsight Solyndra’s ingenious technology was a risky bet, but a zero failure rate in a program that probes unknown and untried technologies defines a program that is too risk-averse. “If you place no bets, you lose every single time”, says Jennifer Granholm, former governor of Michigan. This is high stakes poker. The nation’s future is in the pot. It takes money to play against China.

Bloomberg Business Week later redeemed itself by labeling “heartening” that the Energy Department awarded just one day after Solyndra’s crash $145 million spread on 69 solar energy projects in universities, government research labs, and major corporations.

And that’s just solar. The loan guarantee program is funding dozens of other innovative projects such as crucial advanced automobile battery development — once again, in a race with China.

The right lesson? Wake up America. We’ve got to do this.