Photo illustration: Ed Johnson

“One day, whole tribe falls off cliff.”

—Chief Wild Eagle, Hekawi Indians

Wow, that was a close one, wasn’t it?  We just missed going over that fiscal cliff!

Or did we? Technically, we walked right off it, with no compromise on the budget officially voted on and signed into law before the end of 2012.

But then, that was an intrinsic part of this whole tortured endgame. By letting the old George W. Bush income tax rates expire with the old year—and replacing them with new rates—both parties have now magically changed what is really a $620 billion tax hike over the next ten years into a mind-boggling $3.9 trillion tax cut.  Hurrah!  The magic of politics.

Barring some mad tea party revolt in the Republican-controlled House, the great budget compromise will be completed shortly and signed by President Obama. (The Constitution, a document Republicans claim to consider sacred and insist must be followed literally, specifies that the budget is supposed to originate in the House. But apparently such principles didn’t hold up to the greater need for John Boehner to hang on to his speakership.)

The deal reached in Washington has its flaws and its bright spots—such as the fact that unemployment benefits will be extended for another year, thereby aiding those Americans in most desperate need of help. In any case, it will no doubt be hailed as a sign that we can all get along, and calm the markets until the next manufactured crisis—the need to extend the debt limit—which won’t occur until ... next month.

Lost in all this maneuvering is any rigorous analysis of why it’s so imperative that we conclude a long-term agreement to reduce the deficit right now, while we’re still crawling out of a devastating recession.

Thomas Friedman at The New York Times has been insisting forever that any budget deal should be a “grand bargain,” in which we cut Social Security and Medicare benefits, then use the money both to pay down the deficit and to invest heavily in infrastructure and technological research. He likes to call this “eating our vegetables,” or “taking our medicine,” and insists it will lay the foundation for a new era of American prosperity. The trouble is that it’s hard to see exactly how even roads and a new tech boom will help impoverished seniors desperate for health care. And, oh yeah, there’s the little problem that Republicans are insisting that any new revenue go toward reducing the deficit, period.

N. Gregory Mankiw, senior economic advisor to both W. and Mitt, warned us in the Times this weekend that “At some point, investors at home and abroad will start questioning our ability to service our debts without creating steep inflation.”

My goodness! When will this happen?

Well, Mr. Mankiw admits, “It’s hard to say precisely when ... and even whether it will strike in this president’s term or the next.” But don’t worry: “when it does [happen], it won’t be pretty. The United States will find itself at the brink of an unprecedented fiscal crisis.”

Deficit pimps Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, skipping between comic YouTube videos and $40,000-a-pop speeches, titled their risibly portentous report on the subject “The Moment of Truth,” and insist in its preamble that “Deep down, every American knows we face a moment of truth once again.”

See that? Who needs reason or logic? If you’re a true American, you’ll know it in your heart. And have no doubt: “The problem is real. The solution will be painful. There is no easy way out. Everything must be on the table. Washingtonmust lead.”

What Messrs. Bowles and Simpson want is actually another cliché, the full “burn this village to save it” solution: $2.9 trillion in spending cuts and $2.6 trillion in tax increases of one sort or another over the next 10 years.

The alternative? You heard it all through the presidential campaign: “The contagion of debt that began in Greece and continues to sweep through Europe shows us clearly that no country is immune. If the U.S. does not put its house in order, the reckoning will be sure and the devastation severe.”

Right—because the United States is just like Greece, a poor nation of 10 million people that doesn’t control its own currency.

A better model might be another debt-swept European nation. That’s doughty old England, still clinging to the pound and coming off more than 30 years of just the sort of Thatcherite and New Labour economics so widely admired in the American media.

The U.K. plunged into an even steeper recession than we had, at almost the same moment and for much the same reasons: a burst housing bubble leading to a major financial crisis. By 2010, it had also pretty much matched our own sluggish recovery, the U.K.’s economy growing slowly but surely.

But about the same time “The Moment of Truth” came out, the U.K.’s Conservative-led government actually imposed the ruthless austerity program that Messrs. Simpson and Bowles advocated. This included massive social welfare cuts, the slashing of nearly all government departments by at least 25 percent, wage freezes for the remaining public employees and a wide array of tax increases.

All of this succeeded—in immediately plunging the nation into a double-dip recession. As the Boston Globe reported Sunday, Britain’s unemployment rate surpassed our own last October; it is now 60 percent above what it was at the start of the first “dip” back in 2008, and shows no signs of slowing. The country is devastated, with families mobbing its food banks.

“It’s a hard road, but we are getting there,” insisted George Osborne, the hard-right British chancellor of the exchequer. “Britain is on the right track—and turning back now would be a disaster.”

But this statement is as bizarre as Mr. Mankiw’s contention that we must inflict more human suffering now, out of fear that it might occur sometime before 2017—or maybe after. Economics is a function of time as well as money, not some theoretical quest. Years of mass unemployment and neglected public investment can never truly be recovered, either in shattered personal lives or the life of a nation. They mean emptied bank accounts, foreclosed houses, foregone opportunities, rusting job skills, despair and rage.

“Austerity” only makes it more difficult—if not impossible—to climb out of a recession. In the end, it’s difficult not to see all this rhetoric of pain and hard roads and vegetable-eating and heartfelt truths as anything but what Dick Cheney once trashed conservation as: “a sign of personal virtue, but not a sufficient basis for sound ... policy.”

None of these commentators or economists or public officials will experience any actual pain from anything they’re proposing, nor will anyone they know. In the meantime, neither they, nor President Obama, nor the Republicans offer us even an acknowledgement of the central matter at hand throughout the Western world: how do you keep enormous, mass-consumer economies afloat while simultaneously eradicating their industrial bases, shrinking their public sectors, depressing wages and subsidizing the most irresponsible financial institutions in modern history?

Photo Illustration Ed Johnson

So now that the election is done at last, we can get down to the hard work of striking a “grand bargain” on the budget by cutting spending and raising taxes, and thus avoid the looming “fiscal cliff.”

Any bargain will be a bad bargain, of course. Not so long ago, any moderately bright schoolchild could have told you that you never slash spending or raise taxes when the economy is still slowly emerging from a steep recession. As if the object lesson of the 1930s isn’t enough, we have the ongoing suicide of the European Union to confirm that “austerity” is just one more misguided attempt to apply the same rules that might work for a middle-class household to the course of nations.

It’s not working there, and it won’t work here.

But until Europe collapses completely, China’s slowing economy grinds to a complete halt, and all the “fiscal cliff” metaphors are inevitably replaced by unremitting references to “a perfect economic storm,” our nation’s leaders are bound and determined to continue with this madness. Since the campaign is finally over and our leaders are now reverting to habit—completely ignoring what the rest of us want—all we can offer is this feeble challenge:

The next media pundit who calls for shared sacrifice must describe in detail just what he or she is prepared to give up.

And it has to be a real sacrifice.

The idea that Thomas Friedman might see his federal tax rate go up a few percentage points does not equate with a sanitation worker or Walmart clerk having to clock in for another four years before they can claim Social Security. David Brooks, say, losing a favorite deduction isn’t the same as a retired waitress in her 80s seeing her Medicare slashed.

Right now, “shared sacrifice” means that many wealthy, powerful people share the opinion that the rest of us should sacrifice.

Mr. Friedman, for instance, calls every few minutes or so for President Obama to “endorse the Bowles-Simpson plan” for closing the budget gap. In fact, it’s a stretch to say that any such “plan” even exists. The Bowles-Simpson committee that Mr. Obama set up never actually managed to reach an agreement. Instead, the two committee chairmen, former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles, a North Carolina Democrat, and former Republican senator and professional loose-cannon Alan Simpson of Wyoming came up with a plan between them that they trumpeted—with the help of a fawning media—as a great, bipartisan accomplishment.

It is, instead, a prescription for hunting down every last remaining vestige of the middle class in this country and beating it to death with a stick.

Under the Bowles-Simpson plan to reduce the deficit, the top federal income tax rate would be dropped to 24 percent, the top corporate rate would be cut from 35 percent to 26 percent, and almost all deductions would be eliminated, including those for home mortgage interest, and employer health-care plans. Meanwhile, military pensions, student loan subsidies, Medicare and Social Security would be slashed, while other revenue would come from new, regressive levies such as a 15 percent increase on gas taxes. By the way, if the notion of putting a crazy old, obnoxious right-wing coot and Bill Clinton’s chief fund-raiser at Morgan Stanley in charge of a committee to make the very richest people in America still infinitely richer while at the same time ripping open the underbellies of working people in this country from stem to stern seems like a puzzling idea coming from the great avatar of hope and change, you’re onto something.

It’s another of the truly idiotic notions President Obama misguidedly backed on the advice of all those old Clinton economic advisers he ran against in 2008—and promptly hired back in 2009. It’s likely to work out as well as their other determinations, such as the prediction that unemployment would drop so fast we didn’t need to go any bigger on the stimulus, and that the housing market would turn around in no time.

The idea that we must “reform” entitlements derives partlyfrom the observation that many people are living longer nowadays. That’s true enough overall, but not for most men and women toiling in blue-collar professions, who will be forced to work even longer at jobs that exact a terrible physical toll. For that matter, the extra time for all of us comes at the end of life, which we’re more and more likely to spend in an oxygen tent or a state of dementia.

What’s more, forcing people to work more years, especially amid a dismal labor market, is like squeezing a tube of toothpaste in the middle, and squeezing it hard. It means either that many more people just out of college won’t be able to get jobs right away, or—even worse—that many more people will be laid off in their mid-60s, and forced to somehow scramble to keep hearth and home together until they can qualify for their (much-reduced) Social Security and Medicare.

Besides being appallingly cruel to working people, and destructive to the general economy, what’s wrong with this scenario? Oh, yeah: it will endanger everyone. You really want that fireman with the double knee replacement coming to save you from the flames? How ’bout hitching a ride with that bus driver with the cataracts and the heart condition?

The grand bargain is in fact a grand and arbitrary cancellation of the social covenant that’s brought this country unprecedented prosperity and social justice over the last 80 years, and it’s being pressed by a small coterie of wealthy, overwhelmingly white men who will themselves contribute about the equivalent of a working person’s laundry money for the week.

No one voted for it, and not even most political activists understand fully what it means or how likely it is to pass. An informal survey I took of a dozen, random delegates at the Democratic convention found that not a one of them thought this was or should be a priority for a second Obama term—it’s just not on their radar. (As for Republican die-hards, they didn’t plan on this either—instead, it’s safe to say, most heard whatever Mitt Romney was espousing at any given time as simply, “I will take away stuff welfare mothers in New York are getting and don’t deserve.”)

Are there better ways—once the recession is fully in the rearview mirror—to eventually balance the budget? Sure, and I’ll get to some of them in the weeks ahead.

But first, I’d love to hear the specifics from all the Grand Bargainers: just what do you intend to sacrifice?

Mr. Friedman's daughter and new son-in-law. (Photo credit: The New York Times).

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman spent the weekend celebrating his daughter's wedding.

"Natalie Harold Friedman, a daughter of Ann B. Friedman and Thomas L. Friedman of Bethesda, Md., is to be married Sunday to Daniel Abraham Winston, the son of Denise S. Winston and Theodore M. Winston of Wakefield, R.I.," read the wedding announcement in, naturally, The New York Times.

The bride, 24, and groom, 25, met at Williams College. The new Mrs. Winston is an editorial assistant in the elections unit of National Public Radio in Washington. Mr. Winston works for a French public-transportation services company in Silver Spring. We really hope that somebody managed to include a " the world is flat" joke in a drunken toast.

But the Friedmans weren't the only family with a New York newspaper connection in the "Weddings and Celebrations" section this weekend.

Hannah Elka Meyers, the daughter of a Wall Street Journal photo critic, married Joseph Abrams, an associate editorial page editor of The New York Post, reported the Times.  Mr. Abrams's mother has written blog posts for The Weekly Standard and his step-grandfather is "Norman Podhoretz, the author and former editor of Commentary." Step-grandparents seem like a stretch to us, but we guess it depends who one's grandmother remarried.

Needless to say, mazel tovs all around.

(Scott Dvorin)

"I think in the last year I've done, I want to say--it's tough--a few dozen? Thirty to forty would be my guess?"

Jonah Lehrer, a contributing editor at Wired, was on the phone from Los Angeles Monday evening, trying to recall how many paid speeches he had delivered in 2010. Mr. Lehrer, 29, is the author of two books on the brain, is writing a third about creativity and is in high demand on the lecture circuit. Thousand-person convention halls, intimate corporate gatherings--he's done them all. "I remember being at a podiatry conference in Denver for my first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist," he told The Observer.

Foot doctors in the Rockies are paying to hear about a madeleine, and they are paying well. For decades, media critics have scolded journalists who give speeches for outsize sums, deeming it unseemly at best and a conflict of interest at worst. But in an era with fewer watchdogs--and a profession that has had a measure of its righteousness sapped by pay freezes, furloughs, layoffs and bankruptcies--the practice is thriving once again. Scan the rosters of the various speakers' bureaus, and you'll find no shortage of names from The Times, TV news and the monthlies, all eager to hit the Hyatt ballroom and fling spittle over a sea of warmed-over salmon.

Not everyone pockets the money. Some speak gratis or donate their fees to charity, and straight newspaper reporters know better--or should--than to take cash from groups that they cover. But opinion journalists and ideas-y magazine writers are largely free to collect five- and even six-figure checks for a single afternoon's work.

"There are journalists at every price point within the lecture field. You can say anything between $5,000 and $100,000 and up," Bill Leigh, whose Leigh Bureau represents Malcolm Gladwell, Chris Anderson, Atul Gawande and others, told The Observer last week. "I can assure you that journalists are well represented--and that that is new. That much I can tell you emphatically."

Mr. Leigh recalled, years ago, being unable to even gauge Walter Cronkite's interest in a speaking tour: The CBS anchor's reps assured him that the field's maximum pay did not meet the minimum for the man's time. Today, pretty much everyone has a price; the Washington Speakers Bureau discreetly lists a fee range next to each of its clients, from Luke Russert ($7,501 to $10,000) to John Heilemann ($10,001 to $15,000) to Christiane Amanpour ($40,001 and up).

It's the multiplication factor that really pays. For most writers, an idea is only good for a single article, or a single book--and a single paycheck. But that same idea rendered in speech form can be delivered many, many times. "You can assume that speakers as a rule end up doing between 15 and 50 dates a year," Mr. Leigh said.

Is this a ray of hope for the wily journalist, The Observer asked David Lavin, of Toronto's Lavin Agency? A new way to actually make a career at reporting and writing?

"Viable? It's the world's best-paying part-time job," Mr. Lavin said. He added: "Some people write books just to get on the speaker circuit."

Old model: tour the country to promote your book. New model: write a book to tour the country.

"It's interactive. They both support each other," Mr. Leigh said. "Initially, the speaking promotes the book, and afterwards the book promotes the talks, and then the talks go on keeping the book alive."

"The book doesn't even need to be good. You just need to have written one good book, to get known," said a longtime magazine editor who has worked at several large media companies. "The book is just the loss leader for the speech."

Wired editor Chris Anderson cemented his speaker-circuit bona fides with a 2006 book, The Long Tail, that was hailed as cogent and disruptive. His last effort, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, met with considerably worse reviews, and its premise was derided on many blogs. Worse, chunks of it turned out to have been copied and pasted without attribution from Wikipedia. None of that matters on the speaking circuit, where Mr. Anderson's agency says he is in more demand than almost any other client worldwide.

A PERUSAL THROUGH the media criticism archives indicates that the practice of writers speaking for money was probably invented shortly after writing itself. "The phenomenon of journalists giving speeches for staggering sums of money continues to dog the profession," Alicia Shepard, now NPR's ombudsman, wrote in the American Journalism Review in 1995, when the top fees were around $35,000. "Welcome to the era of the buckraker," Jacob Weisberg wrote in The New Republic in 1986, coining the term; fees at the time could hit $25,000. Just 21 then, Mr. Weisberg knew a devilish way to tweak power when he saw one, and according to TNR legend, he installed a bell at his cubicle, taped to a photo of notorious yakker Robert Novak, that he would ring whenever a senior staffer snuck out to the podium.

These days, event organizers know to clam up when media reporters come calling about honoraria, as The Observer did this week. But numbers inevitably leak out. New York found Malcolm Gladwell netting $80,000 from a dental suppliers group in 2008, and the next year, Thomas Friedman was busted by the San Francisco Chronicle for taking $75,000 from a government agency, in violation of Times rules. "We have all become lax in complying with the parts of the ethics guidelines that require annual accounting of income from speaking engagements," executive editor Bill Keller wrote the staff in a May 2009 memo that Gawker published. "The rules are vague and need a fresh look," ombudsman Clark Hoyt frowned in the paper that month. (The policies have not been updated since, a Times spokesperson said.)

The lucrative lecture circuit may be the one thing that Mr. Friedman and his longtime antagonist Matt Taibbi have in common. In many thousands of bilious words over the years, Mr. Taibbi has savaged the Times columnist's metaphors, ridiculed his worldview, insulted his mustache and worse. But when the $75,000 mistake happened, and readers inundated Mr. Taibbi with links to the news, eager for a fresh beat-down, he gave his favorite punching bag a pass. He didn't say why.

But the clearest sign of just how unobjectionable the new speaking-fee era is may be this: Last week, the Lavin Agency says, it signed Mr. Taibbi as a client.

THE MONEY IS good. But the speaking circuit is not a glamorous world. "You end up getting existentially sad, where you look through your wallet and you realize you've got like seven hotel keys," Mr. Lehrer said. "It happened last week in San Francisco, where I was convinced this key wasn't working. I went down to the front desk, and they pointed out that I was using the wrong key. It was from a month ago."

The way Mr. Lehrer tells it, joining the circuit just ... happened. When his first book came out, in 2007, he didn't even have representation; corporations simply sought him out themselves. Subsequent books and regular contributions to Wired, The New Yorker and other publications have kept his bio fresh.

"To be totally crass about it, I think I got into this for the revenue side, but I've been surprised in the last year by the other perks," he told The Observer. He can see clear improvement in his writing as he tests out loud what elements of a given story work and learns how to build tension, withhold key information, deliver a punch line. His latest book is stuffed with characters he never would have met if not for his travels. The act of taking gobs of money, though, still feels strange.

"The stage fright, that's something I've acclimated to," Mr. Lehrer said. "But I've never really gotten over the sense of fraudulence that comes with being onstage and, you know, dispensing knowledge and wisdom. That's where I think the feelings of insecurity and self-loathing come in." He corrected himself. "'Self-loathing' is too strong a word. But certainly, it's a strange business. And the enjoyment that comes from all the perks of it--the getting better at storytelling, the revenue, the meeting new people--that's on the ledger against the fact that ..." He made a digression about airport logistics and eating too many Egg McMuffins, and apologized.

"For me," Mr. Lehrer continued, "the toughest part of public speaking is kind of psyching myself up onstage beforehand, to be like, 'Who am I to do this? What could I possibly offer you that will make it worth the price you're paying me to go up here?'"

nsummers@observer.com | @nicksumm

In a moment of Carl Paladino, Mel Gibson and Tea Party madness, we are living in angry times. A patron outside a Brooklyn bar last week kills a man whose little dog is tied too close to his little dog. An 82-year-old theater producer on the Queen Mary 2 doesn't like being told by a man at her dinner table to shut up or to hear him say there are too many Jews onboard, so she tells him to fuck himself and ends up locked in her cabin. "She tends to get belligerent," a passenger told the Post.

Last week, demonstrators angry about a gay student's suicide at Rutgers (where, ironically, a Civility Project for teaching courtesy and respect was in progress) had to be physically separated from other students. This week, anti-gay attacks were reported in Chelsea and the West Village. Congress is a war zone. Anti-Muslim militias are on the rise around the country. Sarah Palin is, too, of course, and likens herself and her fans to fiercely protective "mama grizzlies."

Never mind that she doesn't say what's actually threatening her children. The anger gives everyone a reason to get worked up and bare some teeth. YouTube is a national archive of celebrity tantrums and meltdown, from Bill O'Reilly to Christian Bale and Michael Cera.

You'd think that in an age when everything can go viral, the famous would practice some self-control. Yet rage seems to work for all the cable pundits these days. The angrier you are on a reality show, the higher your ratings, even if you're Gordon Ramsay and your vitriol has been linked to two suicides.

So where is all this anger coming from? It could be the economy, or perhaps it's the tinderbox of the world right now. Yelling gives people a voice and a sense of control, even when they have none. Thomas Friedman of The Times suggests the Tea Party is more a tea kettle because it's about spouting off steam more than anything else. If not blood, people want revenge. Perhaps that's why Angry Birds, which gives power to the injured and wingless, has become such a popular video game right now. It recently inspired a Times Magazine columnist to gleefully declare, "I hate everything!"

I'm only slightly more selective than that in my hatred.

Let's see. Street fairs that give nothing back to the city but traffic jams and fried dough. Idling Fresh Direct trucks blocking streets in Manhattan, where markets and gourmet shops are within walking distance. Texting pedestrians you have to step around on sidewalks. The ones coming at you with umbrellas. Loudmouth parties at expensive restaurants. Impossibly arrogant doormen like the ones at the Rose Bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Slow drivers in the left lane.

And, of course, the criminally inept. The other day, after my Long Island Railroad train was canceled, the next train to arrive an hour later was listed on the wrong track. I missed it and ended up delayed two hours.

I complained to a station employee. Instead of being defensive, she was apologetic and conciliatory. It didn't get me home on time, but it made me feel better.

It also made me think that there's hope, even in these mad-as-hell times.

Look at Pete Rouse, Rahm Emanuel's successor. He's known for his gentle cool, not his bluster. "He puts out fires," Tom Daschle told The Times. "He reduces friction."

But does he hold doors open for people without expecting a thank-you?

1. Rich is king this Sunday and is the only top 10 writer to directly
address Obama
2. Health Care editorial! It's a crisis where "all Americans are
affected"! The conclusion, if not exactly provocative, is a guaranteed
winner to the email-sending set: "Doctors have been complicit in
driving up health care costs. They need to become part of the
solution."
3. Barbara Ehrenreich debuts a new Op-Ed series on the poor! It's a famous person, on poor people! Aunt Mabel loves Ms. Eherenreich.
4. Friedman tackles the Mideast. Always a winner!
5. Gout affects the Middle Class! AND (!) it's about the
pharmaceutical industry! We're surprised, actually, this isn't higher
than Friedman.
6. Business writer Joe Nocera writes about a D.I.Y bike tour in
Provence for the Travel section that he took—happily, to the
budget-capped Times—last July.
7. If there's one thing we've learned so far it's that we're all poor!
So how about an affordable trip to the Research Triangle that combines
"slow-paced Southern charm and urban cool?" Slow-paced and cool?
Sounds like how Aunt Mabel sees herself!
8. Dowd on women and men. LOL! Not really.
9. Kristof and Drugs
10. Hey, it's a story that could have appeared in Portfolio!
Ex-Portfolio big shot Amy Wallace scores a big business investigative
piece on how Edra Denise Blixseth is getting battered by this
financial mess.

Final Tally:

Columnists: 4
Editorials: 1
Op-Ed Contibutors: 1
(6 for Op-Ed Pages)
Travel: 2
Health: 1
Investigative Journalism: 1

Here's Mr. Parker on Mr. Friedman's working method for both his column and his book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded:

Mr. Parker describes Mr. Friedman as sometimes taking "the role of a chipper uncle in line at a barbecue," as in this anecdote shared by Maureen Dowd, Mr. Friedman's "closest friend on the paper" (per Mr. Parker):

Except for those who were invited. A press release said that the building opened before a "glittering crowd" and here's who they consider glittering: Thomas Friedman was there, along with reporter Helene Cooper, Maureen Dowd, Baghdad bureau chief James Glanz, Beijing bureau chief Joseph Kahn and assistant business editor and columnist Gretchen Morgenson. They all spoke on a panel to a crowd that included Arthur Sulzberger, Bill Keller, Frank Rich, Ray Kelly and--if they made it, though the Media Mob never spotted them while peering through the glass of the lobby for about 45 minutes--Eliot Spitzer, Chuck Schumer and Michael Bloomberg.

After reading his speech, he told the audience that he didn’t think the 2008 election cycle was a big leap forward, technologically speaking.

“So far, I don’t see this election, so far, as a quantum leap forward on the last one," he said. "When we think of what Dean did in terms of fund-raising. I don’t see that disruptive move in this election yet; somebody taking the technology and making really a disruptive move and everybody saying ‘I gotta do that.’”

The bright spot, he said, was that there at least one candidate campaign on a promise to raise taxes on some fuels:

“Chris Dodd finally said the t-word. He came out in favor of a carbon tax. And, um, that’s the good news. The bad news is, he’s the only one. You’d think one person running for President would just take a flier and say, ‘What the hell. Let's tell the truth. Okay, if we don’t our prices right, we’re never going to get off oil.'”