Follow Fareed Zakaria & Rana Faroohar in Time Magazine. Time has finally discovered that it’s the maldistribution of wealth (taking payroll taxes only off the bottom ensures that all wealth flows toward the top–the trickle up practice) that is causing our jobless recovery. We need a confiscatory estate tax (life is a game, money is how we keep score, and when the game is over, the money goes back to the government, who printed it so that you could gather it, and NOT to your offspring, who are ungrateful, unworthy or both, and if you don’t think so, you need to get an unbiased appraisal, as you would with any other investment). We need to encourage redistribution by restricting all government contracts to companies whos officers make no more than 20 times the salary of the least paid workers with the same seniority, and by breaking up any company that’s too big to fail, and by disallowing mergers such as those that have created Verizon and the Murdoch news empire. This is not class warfare–it’s warfare against establishment of an American class system. It’s bad enough that you can get your kids and grandkids into Harvard by endowing a chair or constructing a building–when you die, your great-grandkids should have to get in on their own merit and their own money.

Meanwhile, don’t head for the hills–we have met the enemy and it is us. About 75% of us (see John Sununu’s article in the August 8 Time) are getting benefits from Uncle Sam, whether it’s food stamps that don’t help us eat better, to mortgage deductions that help us buy big homes in the suburbs that make “urban planning” an oxymoron, to tax breaks that make General Electric get money back from taxes they didn’t pay.

Credit unions are a great response to B of A,, but there are more problems. Do you send your printer back to Hewlett Packard when you find out that your convenient customer service rep is in Pakistan? Do you throw away anything not made in America? Do you write your Congressmen every time you find out that a law is not working (e.g., all software patents)? If you love your country, you shouldn’t hate your government if you haven’t tried to get it to represent you. For instance, the Tea Party “landslide” was elected by about 16% of all citizens elegible to vote, and that number doesn’t include anyone who’s lost his right to vote by committing a felony, or immigrants who have to abide by legislation without representation. So get out on the hustings or kwitcherbitchin.