Jack Kemp: A Remembrance
I remember so clearly sitting in Jack Kemp’s congressional office in Washington with Howard Jarvis in the early 1980s, Kemp making a fist, and considering earnestly in his raspy voice, how to “get hold of the (Republican) Convention in ’88.” He was already thinking ahead to a run for the presidency, anticipating a second term by President Ronald Reagan, then a continuation of the Reagan Revolution under Jack Kemp.
And why not? The Reagan Revolution built its foundation in part on the work Kemp did in promoting economic growth through tax cuts and supply-side economics. Author of the Kemp-Roth tax cut bill in Congress with Delaware Senator William Roth; the bill was a forerunner to the Reagan tax cuts in the president’s first term. Kemp was a believer in supply-side economics, tax cuts and enterprise zones advocating economic growth as a way to raise up the poor.
College is for California
If you harbor any doubts that California must urgently prepare all students for college – and ensure they then graduate with a four-year degree – please spend a minute with this important recent study from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC).
Hans Johnson and Ria Sengupta, extending earlier work by PPIC, found that California’s economy will inexorably increase its demand for a highly educated workforce, but “the state is unlikely to meet this demand unless decisionmakers implement policies that effect substantial changes in college attendance and college graduation among the state’s young adults.”
Chrysler’s Bankruptcy: A Template for GM?
After months of talk, last week America’s weakest of the Big 3 Automakers, Chrysler, finally bit the bullet and filed its Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Petition. The case (luckily for Chrysler) drew an outstanding Bankruptcy Judge, Arthur Gonzalez, a veteran of the Enron (filed Dec. 2001; Reorganization Plan approved: July 2004 – lightning fast for these monster cases!) and other massive bankruptcy cases, and was a ‘pre-packaged’ one, in the sense that as much as possible has been planned ahead to streamline the proceedings.
The media has reported what sound like overly-optimistic time estimates that would have Chrysler emerging by mid-Summer, after its shotgun marriage with Fiat, who has hungered for decades to have an American dealer network and to re-make its old 60’s and 70’s image for building cars that break and are hard to fix.