The other evening, after reading that Atlantic Blue Fin Tuna have way too much mercury in them and you shouldn’t eat a lot of tuna sandwiches in Boston, I got out a can of my tuna. With a sigh of relief, I noted it was white albacore, probably from the left ocean. Of note was the small phrase “Dolphin-friendly”.  Well, that’s good, right? For all you old Flipper fans maybe, but who speaks for Charlie Tuna and his friends?

This would actually end up being another humorous article except for one thing. This is what the President did today when he signed the bill giving a tax credit to employers for hiring Vets. He did a wonderful thing-no doubt about it- but his efforts didn’t float all boats. Who speaks for all the other unemployed non-Veteran souls out there? Where is their jobs preference bill?

America is a resilient Country with a capital C. If we leave it alone, the economy will right itself like a kayak. If Congress and the Man keep trying to artificially alter it, we will suffer far longer. Regardless of who’s fault it is, the jobs have to come back. That can only happen when demand ratchets up the need for production. Giving a tax credit to employers who have no market to sell to is like handing out life preservers on the Mojave desert. Worse, they’re only handing them to people who might employ Vets if they could hire them.

I’ve gone through this feast or famine routine twice. This is the third one in my adult memory. Jobs become scarce and things get tough. You fix it with time. You enact laws that will prevent it from happening again. They never work because the government intervenes with crazy rules. People adapt to them and a new way to fleece us is born a decade later.

I had a construction co. building spec. housing for decades. I can no longer work and, to be fair, I no longer run my company because I collect SSD. Even if I was still in charge, I couldn’t take advantage of this offer. Nobody will buy a new house for X dollars if they can buy a repo for 40¢ of the X dollars. Until that flood of underpriced homes is absorbed and people have jobs again, unemployment will remain flat. Economists say that even after, there will be fewer workers. Geez. That sucks.

Let’s look ahead to the new year as a time for finding new recipes for success. The boys in D.C., be they donkeys or elephants, don’t know what to do other than to spend our money. It’s an incurable disease. We can take the pressure off them by putting them out to pasture and buying a new herd of milk cows that produce without an excessive amount of flatulence and caterwauling. Who, indeed, speaks for the Tuna? We do-all of us- America and her Vets. Let’s not lose sight of the objective by falling for the class warfare argument. Vets are really neat people and statistics tell us that 30% are unemployed currently.

I propose firing a bunch of people in a far away country and start building those products here again with Vets-and Americans. We used to do that, you know. It may come to pass that America can become self-sufficient once more. I represent the Dolphins but also speak for the Tuna.