Amend the Constitution

Accountants, actuaries, economists, mathematicians, engineers, statisticians, physicists, finance specialists, budget examiners, cashiers, but especially MBAs should be disqualified from running for President of the United States. This blog posting is my opening salvo in calling for a Constitutional Amendment prohibiting anyone able to pass an eighth grade test on four function arithmetic from becoming our chief executive.

Let’s get right to it; Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover demonstrated beyond any doubt that they knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. They could add, subtract, multiply and divide better than any other incumbents of the Oval Office. But Hoover has yet to deliver that chicken for every pot, and poor Jimmy is still wondering why the American people are suffering from a malaise over the price gas when it went over a buck.

But George W. Bush takes the cake. His MBA from Harvard renders him able to see that the Iraq War will cost no more than $70 billion, that a defined contributions Social Security program will make all Americans rich, that Brownie’s doing a heck of a job, that tax reductions for the rich are the best thing that ever happened to the poor in New Orleans, that oil revenue will pay for the war and reconstruction in Iraq, that he is the best interpreter of the Constitution, that budget and trade deficits stretching from here to your great grandchildren are good for us, and he has a gazillion more answers to policy questions yet to be asked.

Much as we denigrate lawyers, actors and philosophers, at least we have to acknowledge they never try make things add up. George Washington kept his mouth shut by munching on wooden teeth. Thomas Jefferson concluded that it was unconstitutional to make the Louisiana Purchase until Napoleon was in need of a quick financial fix. Abe Lincoln went to about the fourth grade. FDR was labeled a second rate intellect, and Ronald Reagan – well you know that he couldn’t add up anything. But all these guys did great.

So it’s clear, if you can do anything higher than algebra I, you shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the nuclear button. Got it?

You heard it here first.

Blog on!

Wild Bill