Since I pay for free shipping - an economic oxymoron - Road cost me less than the turnpike toll from Willow Grove to Bensalem.
A former three-term congressman from the Lehigh Valley, Toomey was most recently the president of the Club for Growth, earning $680,094 in compensation in 2008, when he was also, presumably, writing Road.
The Club for Growth sounds like a school investing group but is actually a national outfit advocating limited government and negligible taxes.
"Income taxes and capital gains taxes discourage work and investment, respectively," Toomey writes in Road. "The higher the tax one has to pay on the last dollar earned, the less it pays to work - literally."
That's screwy. By this argument, Bill Gates is disinclined to work, when there's no evidence of the sort, and Toomey as U.S. senator would be, too. Gee, Lindsay Lohan could use this thinking to justify her lack of employment.
Every story, even an economic treatise, requires a villain. For Toomey, that's Franklin Roosevelt and his "role in prolonging the Depression." Toomey believes Roosevelt hated the rich. He was rich!
"While people saw the new jobs created by the government," he writes of FDR's efforts to end the Depression, "they did not see the corresponding jobs whose creation was prevented by the allocation of funds away from the private sector."
Right, because companies had so much excess capital for employment when everyone was on a buying spree.
I don't know about your family, but mine believed FDR helped save America, making it a better and more compassionate nation for all. Much of what Roosevelt and his administration launched still helps people daily, while every week I pass some handsome building or bridge erected by the Works Progress Administration, which warms my heart.
