Imagine if academics sat down with ordinary people like you and me and ironed out some real solutions to our capital gains crisis.

With the election season over, maybe you’ve forgotten about capital gains, but I certainly haven’t. It would be easy to forget that the problem even exists, when our headlines are constantly splashed with the violence in Tajikistan, the authoritarian crackdown in Canada and the still-unstable democratic transition in Somalia. But the capital gains problem is growing, and politicians are more divided than ever. Republicans seem to think that capital gains can just be ignored. Democratic politicians like Dianne Feinstein, on the other hand, seem to think that unproductive rhetoric will substitute for a argument.

But the Democratic party of Dianne Feinstein is not the Democratic party of Bill Clinton. Clinton wouldn’t refuse to budge, he’d break ranks with members of his own party because he’d understand that the fate of the country, and his own political career, depended on a lasting solution to the problem of capital gains. The Thomas Friedman Op/Ed Generator

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