Change that America Needs

Happy President's Day everyone! While many of you are enjoying this day off, I am at work literally dripping with sweat. Since my client has the day off today, the AC is off in their office. However, my firm does not have off today which means that we are in fact at the client, working, and sweating. When we called the Buildings people to ask them to turn on the AC, we were told that they needed a cost center to allocate the air conditioning to. Well given that we are in a recession, and every penny counts, my team decided it would make more sense to just deal with it. (Obviously this would not have been my decision). Who said that corporate America isn't making sacrifices? While for you President's day might mean 3 day weekend, for me, it means wearing a light colored shirt to work so that I don't sweat through my clothes. Good times.

I'm not really sure why anyone should have President's Day off to begin with. I just don't see what it is about this day that would require us to have off from school and work. Are we supposed to be reflecting on past presidents? Does thinking about Washington and Lincoln really qualify as such heavy lifting that we need off in order to properly execute this duty?

I think it would be much more appropriate to have off for the current president's birthday, which in this case would be August 4th for Obama. I just think it makes more sense to give the day off to the guy who would appreciate our efforts the most. This would add a great element to elections, because people would compare the nominee's birthdays and vote based on when they could use another day off. You know, that stretch between President's Day and Memorial Day is pretty long...maybe I should think about running for office on the platform of breaking things up in early April...change that America needs.

A Bunch of Idiots

I think it's funny that over the past week Wall Street has been called shameful, greedy, and selfish by numerous politicians. While I partially agree to a degree, these statements are primarily being made in reaction to the size of bonuses being received at the end of 2008. These people work 70 hour weeks at minimum, through one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history. Oftentimes, these bonuses represent the bulk of one's pay for the year. Meanwhile, for the third time in the past few weeks, it has been made public that a prospective member of Obama's cabinet has failed to properly pay their taxes (Geithner, Daschle, Killefer). By the way, not paying taxes is illegal- receiving bonuses for working hard, no matter how excessive or stupid, is perfectly legal at this time.

These are not low level staffers that have not paid their taxes- these are individuals that Obama has selected as being the most capable people in the entire country to serve the nation in a given expertise. This has now happened three times. That is a small sample size with a pretty high number of occurrences if you ask me. How about you pay your taxes before you start calling others greedy and selfish? I doubt that these taxes were avoided maliciously, and in most instances I'm sure these politicians are good public servants, but how stupid do you have to be to have back taxes when you know you can possibly be nominated for the cabinet?

In the words of Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, "We have a bunch of idiots on Wall Street that are kicking sand in the face of the American taxpayer." Hey Claire, I think we found more idiots kicking sand in the face of the American taxpayer, and they are in Washington. I think the moral of this whole recession is that we are all idiots. Let's stop pointing fingers and actually do something about it.