High finance, low results? Tell about it in a haiku
Judging from some of the news coming out of Washington, civil discourse seems to be in extremely short supply. Perhaps Americans would be more civil if they used an ancient Japanese poetry form to discuss the major issues of the day.
As it happens, the Fiscal Haiku site from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation encourages people to do just that. It’s got categories for “bailout haiku,” “credit card haiku,” “government haiku” and more. It has inspired poets of left and right alike, and someone even slipped in an anti-Monsanto haiku.
My favorites are this concise gem:
Had an IRA
Then the money went away
No retirement
and this one:
Loan is called, bubble burst
Must work for dinner now, we
Ate our dessert first.
How about it, readers: Can you create some fiscal haikus of your own and post them in the comment section? To inspire you, I’ve made a couple of attempts of my own. The first relates to Wall Street pay, a subject I wrote about in a recent column:
Bonus, guaranteed
The way of life on Wall Street
Pay czar now says no.
And here’s one inspired by my recent interview with Vikram Pandit:
Bailed out Citigroup
shrinks to just a bank again
We still bear the risk
Please, readers, show me you can do better. Especially welcome would be some haikus with a St. Louis theme. Before I take off for a few days of vacation, I promise to compose one more and post it on Twitter.
(3 votes, average: 1.67 out of 5)
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David Nicklaus has covered St. Louis business for more than 25 years. His column appears three days a week on the Post-Dispatch business page. 
Pay your balance off?
It makes no matter at all
Fees will still apply
Rack up lots of debt
Blame bankers for recession
hand out for bailout
High unemployment
A rise in uncertainty
We all feel the pain
Pensions were the way
Before the 401K
Feel the shift of risk
Nationalizing the health care system is not the real answer because the bigger problem what can we afford ?
We need more wealth to fund a bigger, better system. Yes, there are savings involved and I particularly like the German system, which costs the Germans about half as much Gross Domestic Product as ours (6 to 8% vs our 12 to 15%).
To pay for the health care system, we need to produce enough wealth, and whether we pay the bill for the program through our taxes or through our salaries is actually a problem of the second order.
Right now, we live in the aftermath of the exportation of our wealth producing factories to China, Korea, and elsewhere.
Not having the high-value added products made here reduces their costs, but the social costs have been completely overlooked.
We need to get all that stuff back.
Then we need to get the 50 million uninsured, the working poor, insured. The rest, the poor, the wealthier, have insurance, either from the government or from their own pockets.
Yes, we can make cuts in the military budget and all that, but the enormous black hole of debt that our Medicare program faces cannot be solved by nationalizing the program.
Fifteen second sound bite
Nothing new
In old Japan was called haiku
Healthcare,stimulus
Cap and Trade all urgent now
Country broke real soon