I don't know quite what it is about this post, but it struck me at the time and it keeps coming back into my head, so I post...
What stuck out here was you saying you "only" drink two glasses a night. Which (assuming these are 175ml glasses because a 125ml glass of wine doesn't even get the back of your throat wet) =
2.3 x 2 x 7 = 32 units per week when the recommended limit is
21.
I recognise here that I'm not your mother and I'm not telling you how much to drink. Just that your use of the word "only" gives the impression that you're holding some view about "not drinking that much" whereas the numbers suggest that you are.
Are you able to share the advice you've been sending to your president? Hey, if it's useful for the Big Man, I'm sure some of us lesser mortals could benefit from it too! If it doesn't feel appropriate to publish it here then I'd be happy to host it with my collection of writings. Or are you maintaining your own blog somewhere that could be linked to?
Best Wishes,
Peter
Hi Peter: As for the wine issue, I don't drink two glasses of wine EVERY day; it's more like two glasses of wine three or four days a week. Even so, the current amount of alcohol that is now considered permissible, and even healthy, is two glasses per day for men (one glass for women--sorry, ladies). It used to be one glass a day for men, but they raised the limit about a year ago as a result of some long-term health studies.
As for my presidential advice, here is the short list, but I intend to add many more items before sending it:
1. Re-instate Glass-Steagall. This law was enacted after the Great Depression to prevent investment banks from operating as regular banks. It prevented them from gambling with people’s deposits in the investment world. It was revoked during the Clinton Administration, and the revocation contributed to the ensuing recession.
2. Re-institute the “uptick rule.” The uptick rule was in effect for many years, but was ended a few years before the recession. It prevents people from shorting a stock continuously. It means that a stock can only be shorted after an uptick in trading.
3. Break up any banks or institutions that are “too big to fail.” The big banks are now bigger than before the recession. The argument against breaking them up is that big money would leave New York and flow to London, the other large financial center. I think it is more important to eliminate the “too big to fail” institutions than to worry about where the money will go.
4. Create a clearing house for derivatives and set up an institution to insure that derivatives are adequately capitalized. The Dodd-Frank legislation partially dealt with this, but there are too many loopholes in it, and it doesn’t go far enough. IOW, set up a system that would prevent what AIG did. AIG issued credit default swaps far in excess of what it could pay off if the bet went wrong. We need a system in place that would have required AIG to put up capital in direct relation to the amount of money they were risking when they sold swaps. We also need to know, quickly, when an institution’s derivative position is passing into the realm of “too big to fail.”
5. Support term limits for Congress.
6. Support a law that will prevent a congressperson from becoming a lobbyist after leaving Congress.
7. Support laws that make Congress abide by the same laws that affect other citizens.
8. Support the elimination of congressional pensions and special healthcare programs.
9. Veto any attempt by Congress to over-ride sequestration—the automatic spending cuts that will go into effect now that the “super-committee” has failed to act.
10. Keep pressing for the same tax rates that existed under the Clinton Administration. Those rates were far more reasonable and beneficial than what we have now.
11. Support the elimination of the tax loophole that allows hedge fund managers to pay only a 15% capital gains tax on massive income (often gained in a very short-term trade).
12. Keep up the good work in foreign affairs. (During the last three years the US has developed a much more sophisticated foreign policy than in the past and is no longer using “cowboy-shoot-from-the-hip-diplomacy”).
13. Keep up the SEC enforcement efforts. (This has improved dramatically in the last three years)
14. Use your presidential powers to over-ride Congress whenever possible (they have become partisan morons who only serve the interests of big money).
15. Continue efforts to make the federal bureaucracy more efficient and effective. Ask all departments to cut their expenditures by some specified amount.
16. Push for more infrastructure spending because it will put more people back to work doing work that will have long-lasting value.
17. The gap between rich and poor has grown enormous in the last thirty years. Support any policies, programs, or tax structures that will help narrow this gap.
18. Present a simple narrative that will give people a vision of where the country should go, why it should go there, and what it will take to get there.
19. Support any policies that will increase people’s trust in the government and in each other.
20. Do not engage in partisan politics or rhetoric. Take the high road, and develop a new way of talking about the country’s problems that is inclusive rather than divisive. For example, rather than talking about how the rich should pay “their fair share,” ask people if they can see why it would be more advantageous to have a strong middle class rather than a country divided between extremely rich and extremely poor?
Some of the issues listed above are complex and require considerable elaboration and explanation. This is why any letter with this kind of advice and these kinds of views requires a lot of thought and careful explication.
A TV reporter recently stated that Obama is continuing a tradition started by President Kennedy. His aides, who read his mail, select ten or twenty of the best letters each day for the president to personally read. My goal is to write letters that are good enough to get to him.
I always send letters by snail mail because they are taken more seriously. Many years ago one of my senators told a reporter than on a particular issue (the sale of a particular jet to Saudi Arabia) he had no opinion, but he received 92 letters from his Tennessee constituents. 89 letters supported the sale and 3 were opposed. He assumed that the 89 people were representative of the entire electorate. This means that 89 people out of more than three million people in his state determined his vote on that issue. After I heard that, I became a very active letter writer. Cheers.
