The President Takes It TO ‘Em! March 1, 2014 You can read his speech to Friday’s winter meeting of the Democratic National Committee, of course, but then you miss the half the humor and most of the warmth. Far better, if you can, to just settle back in a comfortable chair and watch. I’m posting it early — this is Monday’s column — so you have something to do today. It’s WAY too cold to go out. (And, yes, the first couple of minute of pleasantries will not rivet you . . . but by the time he’s heckled for his plans for nuclear war with Russia you should be pretty well engaged. And by the time he’s finished . . . well, I hope you might be fired up. Let me know your thoughts.) # Corrections from yesterday: VHS VS BETA Daniel: “You write, ‘Then again, to the average consumer, VHS and SONY’s Betamax did roughly the same thing.’ Not even remotely true! At intro in 1975 through the early 1980’s, Betamax only permitted a single hour of recording. VHS debuted in 1976 allowing two hours of recording. True enough that video quality was nominally better with Betamax which had 250 scan lines vs 240 for VHS, but customers were also swayed by the fact that a Betamax deck started at $1000 vs hundreds less for a VHS deck.” ☞ I’d forgotten that. So the better deal for the customer did prevail. Good! Based on what we know, WheelTug will be the better deal for the customer: dramatically lighter and simpler to install (or remove) than its competition; zero cost up front. Which may be why WheelTug has 14 signed customers and the competition, so far, none. HENRY FORD Sid and Diane: “I hate reading anything good about this guy. Click here.” ☞ The link is to a story in Forbes explaining why Ford really paid his workers so well. Even so (as the President noted Friday), rising wages are good for business. They strengthen the purchasing power of the middle class and are part of the virtuous cycle — more purchasing equals more demand equals the need to hire more people who then are themselves able to purchase more . . . all leading to more profits available to reinvest in R&D and new plant and to more tax revenue available to fund the things we need to do collectively (education / infrastructure / police-fire-sanitation / safety net) . . . and, if it doesn’t get out of balance — as it did as Reagan/Bush/Bush skewed things so dramatically in favor of the very rich — up and up it grows. I give you, yet again, the Nick Hanauer clip. And that quote from 1896: There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them. — William Jennings Bryan, 1896 Watch the President!