The Fourth of July

I am grateful to live in a nice part of an independent free country that has relatively low crime-rates with a low level of corruption. It is good to be able to drive most places I want to go when I want with nothing more than my car, a drivers license and gas money.

I have been reading the book Learned Optimism. The point is to develop positive thinking skills to the level of being somewhat of a Pollyanna. That is a lot healthier than being a pessimistic Cassandra. While trying to write about the best of our country, I am almost unable to overcome the compulsion to write about corruption or other negative aspects of our great nation. In writing that last sentence, I realized I can write about how minor our corruption is!

The largest developer in Bellevue is against light rail. His balking and legal shenanigans have delayed the process of building light rail for years leaving us with some of the worst freeway traffic in the country. Fortunately for the developer, Kemper Freeman, he had the money to spend on lawyers to be the only guy to be able to fly his helicopter to downtown Bellevue thus avoiding the traffic mess that he helped created and blocks the rest of us from improving by using the world-wide standard for moving lots of people between communities—trains. This is a lot better than the corruption faced in many African countries from Libya to Zanzibar.

The income gap between the rich and poor in the US has been rising steadily in my adulthood from 1981 till now. It's generally understood that we live in a time of growing income inequality, but "the ordinary person is not really aware of how big it is," Krugman told me. During the late 1980s and the late 1990s, the United States experienced two unprecedentedly long periods of sustained economic growth—the "seven fat years" and the " long boom." Yet from 1980 to 2005, more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans' income went to the top 1 percent. Economic growth was more sluggish in the aughts, but the decade saw productivity increase by about 20 percent. Yet virtually none of the increase translated into wage growth at middle and lower incomes, an outcome that left many economists scratching their heads. The good news is that our economy is growing.

I am grateful that the biggest problems with corruption in America are mostly economic. That is a lot better than crimes of violence and murder, although wealth is transferred at a much greater rate by Goldman-Sachs than all the armed bank robbers in the country. At least I am unlikely to get shot while going to my new bank (Chase) that took over my old bank (Washington Mutual) after controversial forced takeover imposed by the FDIC.