The headline on Huffington Post sounded promising: Bloomberg Rips Government Over Failing Economy. It started out well enough:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has unleashed another flurry of jabs on Washington, ridiculing the federal government's rebate checks as being "like giving a drink to an alcoholic" on Thursday, and said the presidential candidates are looking for easy solutions to complex economic problems.

Makes sense, right? The article goes on to say:

This is the name of a low-budget movie which is billed as a romantic comedy. I did not find it either romantic or funny.

The "romance" occurs between Naveen who comes to the NY-NJ area on an H-1B visa and an Indian-American woman who is the friend of Bobby, the guy who owns the body shop that is his "employer". The drama, romance and comedy - such as they are - result from the cultural divide between the FOB (fresh of the boat) and ABCD (American-Born Confused/Compassionate Desi).

I urge everyone to watch it (it is available on Netflix), if only to see the business practices of body shops that bring hordes of H-1B visa holders to these shores. On the very first day, Bobby tells Naveen the rules:

Two news stories caught my eye.

1. An op-ed by Robert Reich in today's NYT titled "Totally Spent". He writes:

The only lasting remedy, other than for Americans to accept a lower standard of living and for businesses to adjust to a smaller economy, is to give middle- and lower-income Americans more buying power — and not just temporarily.

The only way to keep the economy going over the long run is to increase the wages of the bottom two-thirds of Americans. The answer is not to protect jobs through trade protection. That would only drive up the prices of everything purchased from abroad. Most routine jobs are being automated anyway.