Commentary: Crony Communism

by Ralph R. Reiland
December 5, 2011

It's not like the old days in China when the top guys in the Communist Party at least pretended to be pro-equality.

Back then, "poor peasants" were encouraged to denounce and kill "rich peasants" for the crime of being too productive, too individualistic or insufficiently enthusiastic about self-sacrifice.

Today in Australia, there's a mansion overlooking Sydney Harbor that recently sold for $32.4 million. Its new owner is Zeng Wei, 43, the son of Zeng Qinghong, once one of the most powerful men in the Chinese Communist Party.

"Nestled high on a hill," the 100-year-old mansion "boasts some of the best views in the Emerald City," reports The Wall Street Journal. "The street, Wolseley Road, was ranked the ninth most expensive in the world in a survey by Financial News."

Wolseley Road is, as they say, a Great Leap Forward from the pro-redistribution days of Mao when a poor peasant who dared to hide a few grains of his own output from the government collectors in order to make it through the winter without starving faced a penalty of being killed, cooked, butchered and ceremoniously fed to his neighbors (sort of a communion service to celebrate a particularly vicious form of altruism, i.e., eat this in memory of the death of individual liberty) -- or, worse, being force-fed to members of his own family.

All told, an estimated 65 million Chinese were killed by way of murder, massacres, terrorism, executions, imprisonment, torture, civil war, man-made famine, forced labor and hunger in China's long and bloodstained march to collectivism.

Mao's economic incompetence and political fanaticism in implementing the forced collectivization of farming, a ruthless and protracted war against the peasantry, produced the most deadly and murderous famine in history.

There were "banquets at which the families had swapped children in order to eat them," wrote Wei Jingsheng, an 18-year-old Red Guard. "I could see the worried faces of the families as they chewed the flesh of other people's children."

Others, to avoid starvation, were reduced to "searching through horse manure for undigested grains and eating the worms they found in cowpats," reported Jean Pasqualini in "Prisoner of Mao."

Not long after his luxury home purchase in Australia, the younger Mr. Zeng applied to local authorities for permission to tear down the old mansion and build a new, multimillion-dollar house with an upper swimming pool with water cascading into a lower pool, forming a waterfall along the new mansion's front.

Within the Communist Party hierarchy, the elder Mr. Zeng, a former vice president of China, was the equivalent of a top fixer on K Street, a key insider who called the shots when it came to directing the flow of money and jobs.

"The elder Mr. Zeng, long the right-hand man to former President Jiang Zemin, was a member of China's peak political body, the Politburo Standing Committee, for five years until 2007," reports The Wall Street Journal. "Before that, he headed the powerful Organization Department, which is responsible for deciding who gets which political posts."

Earlier this year, reported The Journal, "a red Ferrari pulled up at the U.S. ambassador's residence in Beijing, and the son of one of China's top leaders stepped out, dressed in a tuxedo."

The fancy guy in the Ferrari was Bo Guagua, 23, a Harvard graduate student, son of communist politburo member Bo Xilai and grandson of Bo Yibo, a revolutionary leader who helped Mao shoot his way into a position of tyrannical control.

The price of a Ferrari 599 is $410,000. The average household income in China is $64 a week -- often with two or more workers.

Where's the Occupy Beijing gang, outraged at the riches and hypocrisy of those at the top?

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Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics and the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.

Commentary: First Cigarettes, Now Bacon and Eggs

by Ralph R. Reiland

October 24, 2011

You knew it was coming.

First they came for the cigarettes, then Hank Williams Jr. got knocked off Monday Night Football for being politically incorrect, and now they’re coming for the butter.

Denmark, on October 1, put a $1.29 per pound tax on all foods that hit 2.3 percent in saturated fats. That’s on top of a 25 percent surcharge imposed last year by Denmark’s food police on all ice cream, candy, sugar, soft drinks and chocolate.

So now it’s cupcakes being added to Denmark’s targets for hiked taxes, plus bacon, whole milk, shortening, avocados, whipped cream, sausages, sardine oil, nuts, egg yolks, meat drippings, hydrogenated oils, seeds, cheese, dried coconut, cod liver oil and skin-on ducks.

And they’re not even that fat in Denmark. The obesity rate in Denmark is 13.4 percent, lower than the European average of 15.5 percent, and way lower than the obesity rate in United States -- 33.8 percent for adults and 17.5 percent for children and adolescents aged 2 through 19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Today, more than half the residents of New York City and nearly 40 percent of our public school students are overweight, many of them seriously so,” reports foodnavigator-USA.com.

There’s a Food Director at the Confederation of Industries in Denmark, a central planner named Ole Linnet Juul. Denmark’s across-the-board tax on saturated fat, he said, is the first of its kind in the world.

Ole Juul says the new tax will only add 15 cents to a hamburger. That’s a pretty skinny hamburger. A tax of $1.29 per pound adds 64.5 cents to a good half-pounder, plus whatever tax they stick on the cheese and bun.

What the tax is supposed to do is increase the average life expectancy of the Danes by three years in the next decade, explained Juul. He didn’t get into how longer life spans will add to Denmark’s already burgeoning pension costs, heighten the nation’s already high levels of red ink, and intensify Denmark’s debt crisis. That’s another department.

In any case, the Danes, seemingly more concerned about getting sufficient amounts of butter for their pancakes than living longer, are already stockpiling and talking about some surreptitious smuggling.

“Danes hoarded food before the tax went into effect Saturday, emptying grocery store shelves,” reported ABC News. “Some butter lovers may even resort to stocking up during trips abroad.”

That sounds like Denmark’s central planners might want to get some advice from America’s TSA agents on how to scan underwear for concealed butter sticks.

Romania and Finland are already talking about following Denmark’s lead, according to the Los Angeles Times.

And it's beginning to sound like we might be next. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that American health care costs due to weight-driven problems went up by $40 billion a year when obesity rates increased from 18 percent to 25 percent from 1998 to 2006.

Some are claiming we can get all that money back and more if we’d just raise taxes on sardines, ducks, sausages, Snickers and all the other bad stuff on the aforementioned lists.

“Conservatively estimated, a 10% tax levied on foods that would be defined as ‘less healthy’ by a national standard adopted recently in Great Britain could yield $240 billion in its first five years and $522 billion over 10 years of implementation,” advised Los Angeles Times health reporter Melissa Healy.

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Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics and the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.

Commentary: Legislature Should Adopt My Tough Balanced Budget That Brings Recurring Savings

by Steve Levy

Over the past eight years, I have made the tough decisions effectuating over a hundred million dollars in recurring savings that helped bring about eight consecutive years without a general fund tax increase. We saved millions by putting our health plan out to competitive bid, civilianizing the police department, replacing highly paid officers with lower paid sheriffs on the highways, requiring the use of generic rather than brand name drugs and shrinking the size of government by approximately 500 employees. My budgets were balanced, received the highest bond rating in our county’s history, and still our roads were plowed, our parks remained open and our bus routes were actually expanded.

Over the past several years, we’ve had crushing state mandates, including a doubling of our pension costs and the opening of a new mandated jail, which has made this 2012 budget the toughest of my tenure. Notwithstanding these state mandates and the sluggish economy, the budget still is balanced and once again holds the line on taxes.

Legislators have claimed that it’s the toughest budget they’ve faced. They are correct. They are going to have to bite the bullet and demand, as I have, that employees pick up a share of their health care costs. Yes, the budget is tough but it’s certainly not unbalanced.

At a recent meeting, some legislators derided my budget saying that layoffs in the public sector would actually hurt the economy. By that inane logic why don’t we just double the number of county employees and watch the economy grow? Quite to the contrary, the public sector is too big. Recoveries come about from private sector jobs.

Requesting that county employees contribute to their health care is not only the fair thing to do for our taxpayers, it also provides savings year after year. Rather than holding the unions’ feet to the fire and pressuring them to provide these concessions in lieu of the 450 layoffs that would otherwise come about, legislators are promoting one one-shot after another that not only will put the county’s finances in peril, but also sends a message to the unions that there is no need to negotiate because the legislature will bail them out with a quick fix.

When tobacco revenues were securitized five years ago, they were spread out over five years to provide recurring savings and to wean the county off of this money. The proposed use of the remaining $33 million tobacco revenues in one year will provide relief in 2012, but will leave the incoming county executive with a nightmare in 2013 when those monies are no longer available. The same logic applies to using one shots for selling our tax liens, and worse yet, selling the county office buildings and leasing them back from the new owner. These types of irresponsible recommendations should be rejected out of hand. Equally alarming is the call by some legislators to empty our remaining $60 million reserve fund as a one shot to fund recurring expenses. Those reserves are needed for natural disaster emergencies such as Hurricane Irene, as well as maintaining our historically high bond rating.

Ironically, had the executive branch adopted these easy fixes, legislators would have unquestionably blamed the county executive for taking the easy way out and setting up the new county executive to fail once these one-shots were exhausted. I rejected these irresponsible measures and instead balanced the budget with the recurring savings including the requirement that county employees contribute to their health care costs. If they do not, layoffs would ensue. Either way, we would see savings year after year, a major advantage for an incoming executive.

On the one hand the legislature does not want any recurring savings, yet they call for recurring savings. The legislature claims that they don’t want one-shots, yet all of their proposals to change the executive budget have been just that – one-shots.

Sooner or later, the tough decisions will have to be made. Delaying the inevitable will either lead to large tax hikes or the type of instability other counties are facing, but Suffolk has been able to avoid.

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Steve Levy is the Suffolk County Executive.

Commentary: Consequences of a Bankrupt Philosophy

by Ralph R. Reiland

July 29, 2011

In her essay "For the New Intellectual," Ayn Rand warned that the United States would go bankrupt -- financially and morally -- if we allowed intellectuals and political leaders to define commercial pursuits as inferior to noncommercial pursuits, if we permitted the productive and the creators of wealth to be defined as looters, and if we refused to see the unrestricted growth of government power as a threat to freedom.

To avoid national bankruptcy, Rand called for an intellectual defense of business and capitalism, a defense of productivity, success, individualism and wealth. She said we are fed instead a steady diet of "the whining injunctions that we must love everything, except virtue, and forgive everything, except greatness."

Said Austrian economist and social philosopher Ludwig von Mises, "Under capitalism, the common man enjoys amenities which in ages gone by were unknown and therefore inaccessible even to the richest people."

Those amenities weren't created by government. They were created by free enterprise and individual liberty. They were created by way of voluntary exchanges, not government coercion. They were created by a private sector and a way of thinking that's increasingly under attack by those who think that the state should be the primary vehicle for delivering material improvements to the populace.

Warned American revolutionary and pamphleteer Thomas Paine, "Beware the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry."

So now we're there with the government in "every corner and crevice," multiplying regulations and mandates, adding unprecedented trillions in new debt, and mismanaging a basically jobless non-recovery.

"The fall of a great nation is always a suicide," said British historian Arnold Toynbee.

Here's how Steve Wynn, CEO of Wynn Resorts, recently put it while reporting on his company's 2011 second-quarter performance:

“I'm saying it bluntly that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I can prove it and I could spend the next three hours giving you examples of all of us in this marketplace who are frightened to death about all the new regulations -- our health care costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right. A president that seems, that keeps using that word redistribution. And it makes you slow down and not invest your money. Everybody complains about how much money is on the side in America. You bet. And until we change the tempo and the conversation from Washington, it's not going to change. And those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the president. And a lot of people don't want to say that. They'll say, ‘Oh God, don't be attacking Obama.’ Well, this is Obama's deal, and it's Obama who's responsible for this fear in America. The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and (that) maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don't invest or hold too much money. We haven't heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody's afraid of the government, and there's no need to soft-pedal it. It's the truth. It is the truth. And that's true of Democratic businessmen and Republican businessmen, and I am a Democratic businessman and I support Harry Reid. I support Democrats and Republicans. And I'm telling you that the business community in this company is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the president of the United States.”

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Ralph R. Reiland is an Associate Professor of Economics and the B. Kenneth Simon Professor of Free Enterprise at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh

Commentary: Bankrupt Buses, Pricey Beer and Bad Wars

by Ralph R. Reiland

It’s not hard to see how we’re bankrupting ourselves. Not even a rich country can make it through this level of incompetence and corruption.

Locally, I drive home from work here in Pittsburgh listening to people calling the talk shows to complain about how the reduced bus schedules aren’t getting them to work on time.

The bus system is running critically in the red in spite of a 7% county tax on beer, wine and liquor that was imposed three years ago to bail out the transit system. On top of all the other local and state subsidies to the bus system, this new liquor tax transfers about $27 million a year from the county’s boozers to the buses and still the transit system is projected to be $60 million in the red next year. We just can’t drink enough to keep everything afloat.

“I’m paying more and getting less,” grumbled one caller. “With the nation’s highest parking taxes in Pittsburgh, I can’t afford to drive downtown and now my bus is gone. What am I supposed to do, sit home with the bus drivers who are milking early retirements?”

Then the bus drivers call in, saying, like Nixon, that they’re not crooks.

“I just went down there and applied for a job when I was 20 years old,” explained one driver. “So now I’m 47 and been retired for two years. That was the deal I was offered. Any of the callers who are complaining could have gone down there and got the same job for the same deal.”

True, but we’d still be broke no matter who went down back then and got the job because we can’t afford to pay people to do nothing for four decades just because they worked for two or three decades.

It’s like the Social Security problem. Starting out, there were plenty of workers per retiree. You worked your whole life and retired at 65 and died at 66, if you were lucky. Life expectancy in the U.S. was 61 years when Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, with the law providing monthly benefits to individuals age 65 and older and no longer working.

That was my grandfather’s story. He was in the coalmines for half a century and then retired in March and died in November. His biggest break in life was at the end when he got to drink his homemade cherry wine on the porch for one whole summer without having to go into the mines.

There was no red ink. The four-dozen workers chipping in to cover his retirement checks for eight months didn’t have to borrow the money from China.

But the bus driver on the radio was right. He didn’t hold a gun to anyone’s head in order to get his deal. Well, at least not as an individual. But have a union boss tell a politician that he has a bloc of votes that can de-rail the politician’s gravy train and it’s not much different than aiming an AK-47 at his forehead, as we’ve seen via many a bloated contract in the public sector.

And so we’ve ended up with no money, unhappy riders, unhappy drivers, pricey beer, a failed transit system and a partially completed and totally unnecessary mass transit tunnel under the Allegheny River that will stretch for a grand total of 1.2 miles and cost half a billion dollars when it’s all over.

No nation in the world has ever paid more per mile to move people from a shrinking downtown to watch their subsidized baseball team drop another game.

More globally but just as madly, we’re now fighting three mismanaged wars in the Middle East while we’re $14 trillion in the hole (more precisely, $14,223,405,410,454.55 as I’m writing this sentence), and shooting off missiles at $700,000 a pop with not one Arab sheik offering to pick up the tab.

The crazy part is that we don’t know if the rebels we’re helping in Libya are al-Qaida. You’d think we’d know that information, given that we spend an estimated $50 billion a year in 18 “intelligence” agencies (maybe it’s even higher – the spending totals are classified).

“Even after a month of demonstrations in Tunisia had brought about the downfall of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, on January 14th, some White House officials, along with American and Israeli intelligence experts, put the likelihood of a copycat revolution in Egypt at no more than twenty percent,” reported Wendell Steavenson in The New Yorker on March 14th. “The hundred and twenty-five million dollars’ worth of algorithmic computer modeling that American military and intelligence agencies had ordered over the previous three years to forecast global political unrest didn’t seem to be of much help, either.”

Doesn’t anything work anymore?

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Ralph R. Reiland is the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise and an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.

  

Hot Link: Nassau County’s Continuing Crisis

 

by Raymond J. Keating
February 1, 2011

When will the adults come home and clean up the mess left by Nassau County's political children? Are any responsible adults left in and around Nassau government? …

Read the entire article in the New York Post.
 

Commentary: Red Flags, Conspiracy Kooks, and Jared Loughner

by Ralph R. Reiland
January 17, 2011

“Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath,” said President Obama in his recent remarks at the memorial service in Tucson.

“For the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack,” Obama continued. “None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man's mind.”

That was good advice, especially after all the mud throwing in the previous five days, with both sides trying to put the other side’s jersey on the alleged shooter.

The pundits on the left pictured Jared Loughner sitting at a table in a red jersey with Sarah Palin, a little tea party, drawing crosshairs on the Congressional district of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

The other side pointed to President Obama’s inflammatory rhetoric, the labeling of his political opponents as “enemies,” his threat to escalate the vitriol – “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”

At the memorial service, the tone was different. “But what we can't do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another,” said President Obama, departing from the “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” advice from Ron Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s former chief of staff at the White House.

In fact, the initial “simple explanations” for Jared Loughner’s behavior were way off base.

As Zach Osler, former close friend of Loughner, explained on Good Morning America about the accused shooter: “He did not watch TV. He disliked the news. He didn’t listen to political radio. He didn’t take sides. He wasn’t on the left. He wasn’t on the right.”

What did, however, have “a profound impact on Jared Loughner’s mindset,” said Osler, was a “documentary called Zeitgeist,” a conspiracy-mined film that “poured gasoline on his fire.”

It a nutshell, the Zeitgeist film asserts that Jesus Christ did not historically exist, that elements in the American government had either planned the September 11 attack on the United States or allowed it to happen, and that crooked bankers are manipulating the world’s media and monetary systems.

In an Associated Press interview, Zach Osler’s father explained that Jared Loughner introduced the Osler family to Loose Change, a film that charges that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, not Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta, orchestrated the attacks of September 11.

A group called “Voices of Opposition to War, Racism and Oppression” showed the Loose Change film at the University of Arizona as part of its Fall 2010 film series, a program of steady doses of anti-American, anti-government propaganda.

The first film focused on the “assault on Gaza” by American-backed Israelis. Others focused on America ignoring the rights of Afghan women, America’s “brutal” immigration raids, the American government’s cover-up of oil spill damages by BP, and oppression in Central America by the American market system and U.S. military.

“We are centered here in Tucson, Arizona,” says the “Voices of Opposition …” website. “Hopefully, at some point we will branch out to reach Pima Community College and the rest of the community.”

At Pima Community College, Jared Loughner was the subject of numerous reports by the school’s Department of Public Safety.

Someone should check if Mr. Loughner was more touched by Sarah Palin’s Alaskan travelogue or by the anti-American outreach program put on by the “Voices of Opposition …,” a drumbeat of films and weekly meetings about the purportedly deadly evils of the federal government.

A cab ride away for Jared Loughner on that ill-fated Saturday morning in Tucson, Gabrielle Giffords was the most visible and accessible representative of that allegedly murderous government.

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Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.

Commentary: Predictions for 2011

by John LeBoutillier

January 4, 2011

• By the end of the year, the unemployment rate will still be unacceptably too high – in the 8 - 8.5% range. And that will turn the country even more sour about the economy, the future and the 2012 elections. 



• Articles will appear asking this question: Has any incumbent president ever been re-elected with unemployment north of 7% or 8%?



• While President Obama will not have a Democratic Party challenger, he will be viewed as beatable in November 2012. The Upper Mid-West – from Ohio to Minnesota – all states he won in 2008 – will now be against him and his Electoral College math will be difficult.



• Both parties are going to be viewed negatively by the end of 2011 precisely because the economy continues to flounder.



• GOP control of the House will cause a split inside the Republicans between Tea Party conservatives who want to address the National Debt and regular Republicans who want to cut more taxes to stimulate the economy.



• Sarah Palin will continue to dominate the talk of the GOP race for the presidential nomination. She will continue to prevent any other new “star” to emerge from the pack.



• By the end of 2011 no Republican will have emerged as the favorite for the GOP presidential nomination. Sarah Palin will still be the most talked-about Republican candidate. She will have catchy one-liners at the TV debates, which begin in June. There will be eight white guys – and Palin – up on the stage – and she will dominate the news of these debates.



• Instead, there will – again – be a flavor du jour – a new, hot, favorite candidate, each of whom lasts for a week or two only to fade and be replaced by the next faddish wave.



• A Big Fight will be over the extension of the debt ceiling. This has to be voted on by the House and Senate. The establishment is already saying to the new Tea Party elected conservatives, “You have to vote to extend the debt ceiling!” And these Tea Party-backed new Senators and Congressmen are replying, “I did NOT come here to run up more debt!!!” So look out for an explosion over this by spring. 



• Cathleen Parker doesn’t make it to March 1 on CNN’s Parker/Spitzer. And the show itself – so dreadful you cannot watch it – doesn’t last past May 1. And if it does last longer it is only because everything on that network is unwatchable.



• The Big Scandal – written about in this space a few years ago – is still simmering. This is a scandal bigger than Watergate. It envelopes both major political parties. There will be progress in 2011 in blowing this open. And if it does blow, it will severely alter the 2012 presidential race.

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John LeBoutillier is a former member of Congress from Long Island, and is the author of Harvard Hates America.

  

Hot Link: Rich Folks for Class Warfare

by Raymond J. Keating
December 10, 2010

If you need proof that being wealthy does not mean that you necessarily understand economics and public policy, consider a letter to President Barack Obama signed by a group of rich folks urging him to hike their taxes…

Read the entire article at The Daily Caller.

Commentary: Obama – Over-Inflated, Ready to Burst

by Ralph R. Reiland
November 19, 2010

Inflated self-esteem can be decidedly counterproductive.

American students, for example, took first place in self-judged mathematical ability in a comparative study of eight countries, but last place in actual mathematical competency.

Korean students, in contrast, ranked themselves last in self-judged mathematical skills and took first place in actual mathematical performance.

The idea that self-esteem produces better performance, reversing the direction of better performance boosting self-esteem, is clearly a concept that’s been oversold. But we feel good -- whether it’s self-evaluations of leadership skills, looks, personality or math ability, it’s not unusual for 25 percent of American students to self-judge themselves to be in the top 1 percent.

The downside can be a declining nation that’s over-stocked with egotistical and incompetent narcissists.

That might be the problem at the White House.

Rep. Marion Berry (D, Ark.) made public President Obama’s answer to conservative Democrats, worried about the unpopularity of ObamaCare in their home districts, when they asked in a White House meeting why 2010 might resemble the negative backlash that greeted Bill Clinton’s 1994 flawed attempt at health care reform. “Well, the big difference here and in ‘94 was you’ve got me.” That’s what Sonny said to Cher, 1965.

The actual “big difference” turned out to be Obama losing even more seats than Clinton. “The Democratic Party under Barack Obama in 2010 suffered the greatest defeat for a newly elected president in a midterm since the Republican Party under Warren Gamaliel Harding in 1922,” reports James W. Ceaser, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and professor of politics at the University of Virginia.

Patrick Gaspard, former community organizer, ex-lobbyist for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and now Obama’s Director of the Office of Political Affairs, is quoted in a 2008 New Yorker article describing what Obama said to him during his job interview: “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

In his biography of Obama, “The Bridge,” David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, quotes White House senior adviser and longtime Obama friend Valerie Jarrett: “I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. … He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability -- the extraordinary, uncanny ability -- to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. … So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. … He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

Talk about a Yes-man -- or a Devotee-girl. The boss is so “extraordinary,” so above the “ordinary” man, that he’s been long-term bored to death -- untaxed, unhappy, uncanny and unchallenged.

And now unappreciated -- now simultaneously called “pathetic” and “tone-deaf,” respectively, by the left in The Progressive and the right in The Washington Times.

Turns out that Jarrett’s wrong -- there’s nothing “extraordinary” about Obama’s talent in reading people or understanding economics. She should’ve seen that Obama was, more than anything else, a self-inflated bubble that was bound to burst.

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Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh.