Speaking for myself and most practical progressives, I hereby and heartily endorse and embrace all those values in the Boy Scout Law. We all must endeavor to be be "trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, THRIFTY (see below),
brave, clean, and reverent,'' and hard-working and kind to animals.
If everybody tried harder to live those qualities every day, we'd need less taxes and government, less business regulation and fewer bailouts. Conservatives are essentially right about better behavior being one path to a more evenly shared prosperity. (First-class schools and public transit sytems and economic security programs also help, and progressives are right about that.)
In an effort to find more common ground, and inspired by the life of the late John Brandl, a disparate range of policy groups launched an annual event in his honor last year. Those groups include Growth & Justice, the Center of the American Experiment, the Citizens League, the Caux Roundtable and the Humphrey Institute. The second in the series features an author of national note, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, who has written eloquently about how Americans need to re-establish thrift as a value.
I like what she had to say in this essay, taking corporations to task and lamenting the growing economic inequality in America, not just blaming the poor and working stiffs in debt-plauged middle-income households.
"The institutions that encourage thrift have moved uptown, catering to upper-income Americans with an ever-expanding array of tax-advantaged opportunities to invest and build wealth. The potential “small saver” has been left behind as prey to new, highly profitable financial institutions: subprime credit card issuers and mortgage brokers, rent-to-own merchants, payday lenders, auto title lenders, tax refund lenders, private student-loan companies, franchise tax preparers, check cashing outlets and the state lottery. Once existing on society’s margins, these institutions now constitute a large and aggressively expanding anti-thrift sector that is dragging hundreds of thousands of American consumers into profligacy and over-indebtedness. America now has a two-tier financial institutional system—one catering to the “investor class”, the other to the “lottery class.”
Our Brandl group urges all citizens of good will, policy enthusiasts, bloggers and media, to hear Ms. Whitehead elaborate further at 4 p.m. next Thursday at . Please RSVP to the Whitehead speech if you can.
Dane Smith
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