Good advice from the grave

Tax reduction thus sets off a process that can bring gains for everyone, gains won by marshalling resources that would otherwise stand idle—workers without jobs and farm and factory capacity without markets. Yet many taxpayers seemed prepared to deny the nation the fruits of tax reduction because they question the financial soundness of reducing taxes when the federal budget is already in deficit. Let me make clear why, in today's economy, fiscal prudence and responsibility call for tax reduction even if it temporarily enlarged the federal deficit—why reducing taxes is the best way open to us to increase revenues.
—President John F. Kennedy,
Economic Report of the President,
January 1963

The politicians of yore sure were different animals.

Geithner: unemployment could rise

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the U.S. unemployment rate could rise for two months before it drops, potentially deepening Democrats' problems in the November congressional elections.
"It's possible you're going to have a couple of months where it goes up," Geithner said on ABC's "Good Morning America" interview broadcast on Tuesday and taped a day earlier.
"But what we expect to see ... is an economy that's gradually healing. Of course we want to do what we can to reinforce that process because it's not growing back as quickly as we'd like."

I wish it would rise by one person, Turbo-Tax Timmy to be exact. Everything he says is preempted in my mind by the words "tax cheat." It has the effect of discounting everything else he has to say, even if he has a point. That's not an admirable trait in a Treasury Secretary of the United States.