Why is David Brooks Such a Fraidy Cat?

Check out David Brooks' latest Op Ed, The Big Test.

How many times did he say he was scared or worried? How did he go from being a self-confessed young liberal college student to such a pasty wuss? What happened? Did he fall in love with some like-minded hottie way back in the day? Did she dump him hard and break his heart? That might explain his, "I'll never get hurt again" approach to life.

Fear.

Worry.

Mr. Brooks should check out Michelle Obama's speech back in the summer of '07 in which she said, "I am tired of being afraid" and questioned the place of fear in making decisions.

A mother, a wife, an Obama about to watch her husband run for the highest office in the land, with all the things she had to fear, she refused to let her worries get the best of her.

Mr. Brooks can have his fear and allow his moldering worry to danken his days. But it is courage that clears that allows us to go out and try.

According to Mr. Brooks, there were too many initiatives at once. Too many tasks for the administration to have any hope of accomplishing any one thing. I think this is not a choice that Mr. Obama has made. As he said in his speech, "Difficult decisions were put off for some other time."

That was inaction in action. Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush again. It's not like any of them had the courage to do anything about oil dependence, for instance.

The time is now because nobody did anything for so long.

Mr. Brooks stated that history is littered with the charred remains of government initiatives that have crashed and burned but he fails to notice the triumphs of desegregation, the New Deal and public education.

No, they aren't perfect but we shouldn't call them failures.

Go slow?

Dr. King wrote a letter while locked in a Birmingham jail in which he called out those who urged caution when it came to integration. He wrote that time itself does not make change, people, he wrote, make change. People who wait, don't make anything.

Do I need to mention that there is nothing to fear but...

The time is now.

Speculation, Investment and Capital Gains

I just fired off an email to Rakesh Khurana! Oh, you did, too? I guess we were both struck by the clarity and insight he gave to the issue of corporate compensation during his interview with Scott Simon on Weekend Edition.

If you missed it, Scott Simon led off the piece with the revelation that over 700 Merrill Lynch suits stuffed over a million bucks into their Prada wallets last year while their company's red ink was running like bull's blood in the gutters of Wall Street.

OK, even if they had taken a pass on the payout, their beloved Bull would have ended the year as a patty on a bun. But sometimes you have to do something just to say you did something and taking a check with all those zeroes just stinks like a honeywagon.

Anyway, Professor (Harvard B-school) Khurana accused Wall Street firms of being a kind of ATM for executives and proposed a shift from the Wall Street "I'm a financial A-rod and I should get paid like him" mentality to one in which the Bergdorf Goodman crowd are willing to forgo quarterly profits and huge rewards in favor of the long-term health of the company. To continue the baseball analogy, an exec. should be willing to take an out if it advances the runner.

But there's no reward in that. In the same way that baseball Knights of the Realm James and Beane re-examned the conventional wisdom of player values, the same analysis needs to take place on The Street.

I have a modest proposal. Call me crazy (I have heard a lot worse) but I will bet you a cold one that this might work.

Take the capital gains tax (yes, the one that inexplicably 20% lower than the income tax rate) and put it on a sliding scale to reward longer holding period. Keep a stock for five years and the IRS leaves a mint on your pillow in April. Hold onto it for ten years and Uncle Sam gives you a big, sloppy one. But flip that stock after a quick gain and the he wears a leather suit and goes medieval on your ass.

In an era when the average stock is owned for less than ten months, a change in the tax code could encourage long term investment and discourage speculation. This, in turn, should encourage the CEOs of publicly traded firms to take the long view rather than panic when quarterly profits are down. Maybe then we will have a corporate pay profile that resembles Honda and Toyota where the top executive still have yet to crack a million dollars. Compare to this side of the Pacific where Home Depot's Bob Nardelli forgot to measure twice and cut once and the board still said, "Nice job! Here's $210...and don't let the door hit you in the ass!"

Why are we still listening to them?

And conservative lawmakers are grumbling about being "shut out" of the shaping of the stimulus package when overnight money set aside to fix crumbling schools and designed to give middle-class Americans a fighting chance against stagnant earnings for the last decade disappeared overnight.

I don't call that being shut out at all.

I call that wielding extraordinary power.

There is no debate to be had. It's over. The post-mortem has been performed and as the toxicology reports dribble to reveal that our economy has been sick for a long, long time. It was just a matter of time. Just a small matter of time before the drumbeat of tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts, tax cuts would pount this economy into into recession.

And the stimulus package comes out and they complain. Those who earmarked their way to secure seats in our Nation's heartland throwing chump change to their constituents while doling out the real money to agri-business, big oil, pharmaceuticals, and wall street.

So why do we still listen to them? They got us into this mess. True believers in their version of the free market, they still believe in their version of truth. They still believe that the economy will turn around on its own. They still believe that it was all a bad dream and things will pick up again if we just do nothing.

Well, they were wrong about that trickle-down economics thing. Dead wrong. Give tax breaks to the wealthiest five percent and they become wealthier while the middle class uses credit to fill the void where reasonable income growth should have been.

Don't do it. Don't listen to the supply-siders. They are wrong.

Spend, Baby, Spend!