A Penny Saved . . .
Norman Podhoretz, one of the original neoconservatives, just wrote a 352-page book asking Why Are Jews Liberals? To Podhoretz, and to many others, it's a mystery why Jews remain loyal to the Democratic Party and continue to avoid aligning with today's Southern-based GOP. After all, many Jews fall into a demographic—higher income, suburban, professional—that has tended to align with the GOP. And recent Republican administrations have been aggressively pro-Israel (at least when Israel happens to be governed by a right-of-center coalition). Plus, Republicans have pretty much purged the folks who make unfortunate stereotypical comments about Christians' elder brothers in faith. Well, pretty much.
In a letter to The Times and Democrat (Orangeburg) on Sunday, two South Carolina Republican officials defended Sen. Jim DeMint from charges that he had opposed earmarks that would have benefited the Palmetto state.
"There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves," wrote Edwin O. Merwin Jr. and James S. Ulmer Jr., chairman of the Bamberg County and Orangeburg County Republican Parties, respectively. "By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation's pennies and trying to preserve our country's wealth and our economy's viability to give all an opportunity to succeed."
Oy vey!
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Daniel Gross is one of the most widely read financial and economic writers working today. He is a senior editor at Newsweek, where he writes the "Contrary Indicator" column. He writes the twice-weekly "Moneybox" column for Slate, which also appears on Newsweek.com.
Before joining Newsweek in the spring of 2007, Mr. Gross wrote the "Economic View" column in the New York Times, was a contributing writer to New York, and contributed regularly to magazines such as Fortune and Wired. From 1998-2007, Gross served as the editor of STERNBusiness, a semi-annual academic magazine on economics and management published by the New York University Stern School of Business.
A native of East Lansing, Michigan, Mr. Gross graduated from Cornell University in 1989, with degrees in government and history, and holds an A.M. in American history from Harvard University (1991). He worked as a reporter at The New Republic and Bloomberg News, and has contributed hundreds of features, news articles, book reviews and opinion pieces to over 60 magazines and newspapers. Areas of expertise include: economic and tax policy, the links between business and politics, the rise of the investor class, the culture of Wall Street, and business history.
He is the author of four books: "Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time" (Wiley, 1996), which was a New York Times Business bestseller and a finalist for the Financial Times "Lex" award, given to the best business history book of 1996. Translations have been published in Spanish, German, Czech, Polish, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Chinese, Turkish, and Japanese; "Bull Run: Wall Street, the Democrats, and the New Politics of Personal Finance" (PublicAffairs, 2000); "The Generations of Corning: The Life and Times of an American Company," co-authored with Davis Dyer, (Oxford University Press, 20010; and "Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy," (HarperCollins, May 2007).
Mr. Gross appears frequently in the media. A regular guest on CNBC, MSNBC, and National Public Radio, he has also appeared on CNN, Fox News Channel, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Bloomberg Television, C-SPAN, BBC, and Reuters TV, and on more than 50 radio programs and talk shows.
Mr. Gross lives in Westport, Conn., with his wife and two children.
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