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Michael M. Thomas
[address and phone redacted]
midasw@gmail.com

April 17, 2006

Mr. Roger C. Altman

Evercore Partners
55 East 52 St.
New York, NY 10055

Dear Roger:

You may recall that I wrote you a couple of years ago in connection
with some ideas for the Kerry campaign. I didn't hear back, which I suppose
didn't surprise me, although now that I think about it, the fact that I gave you
your first job in investment banking, from which you have springboarded to
ever greater visibility and prominence, might have entitled me to at least the
minor courtesy of a rubber-stamp acknowledgement.

You may also recall that I sent along a copy of an unpublished book I
wrote back in 1992 about where I thought this country was headed wrong
and what to do about it. That the book never saw publication looks in
retrospect to have been a pity, since all of the more dire prognostications I
laid out have come true. To make these required no genius on my part,
although it did take a form of thinking conspicuously absent in what I then
described as the American "overclass": intellectual honesty – not to mention
a touch of moral imagination.

In the book I also put forward a number of prescriptive notions, some

radical in fact, others only so in perception, that basically involved the
application of common sense both to the way we live now and to the way we
seem quite happy to see others live. Among these were suggestions
regarding Congressional pay and staffing, a sensible tax structure, market-
based incentives for individual educational accomplishment and so on.
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My purpose in writing that book was to suggest, by example if you

will, that it is no longer practical, even if eminently feasible, to attack the ills
that beset this great Republic with further dosages of bullshit, although I
recognize that in some circles this substance, of which Prof. Frankfurt has
written with uncommon eloquence, is thought to have the same therapeutic
effect on overclass social guilt that Zoloft does on clinical depression.

And that brings me to the Hamilton Project, the Wall Street Journal
report on which prompted me to look up your website and download the
mission statement. This I read with great interest, several times, and what I
read prompts me now to write to urge that you and your colleagues in this
amazingly self-congratulatory undertaking cease and desist.

I say this in a kindly, even condolatory way. The "Project" has

absolutely no chance of success – unless, of course, you equate (and it
occurs to me that by now you may) a certain measure of PR exposure with
achievement. For one thing, there are no new ideas in the statement.
"Economic security and economic growth can be mutually reinforcing" is
not a new idea, nor is any to be found in the page-long gloss that follows the
enunciation of this bold new "principle." If I may paraphrase Churchill's
well-known apothegm on the late Soviet Union, what we have here is
platitude wrapped in cliché inside bromide – over and over and over. And
this begs the question, for this nation at least, of a nation-fixing mission
statement that nowhere (unless I am blind) includes the word "immigration."

Another reason that the Project has absolutely no chance of success is

- how am I going to put this gently? – the people behind it. Your Advisory
Council consists of 25 individuals. Of these, twelve come from Wall Street,
broadly considered. I cannot say for sure whether experience in grossly-
overpaid lines of work such as hedge funds and derivatives trading and
private equity and giving merger advice, which do not in the ordinary course
of their business concern themselves with such matters as how to get a job,
pay the doctor, put food on the table, equips one to understand, let alone deal
with the vexations faced by the people in this country we need to worry
about, but it seems conjectural at best.

Another ten members of your Advisory Council come from Academe,

which requires no further comment, a consideration that also applies to the
member who comes from the Never-Neverland of management consulting.
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Two others make their home in think tanks, and the last is in publishing. At
a time when enterprises like General Motors and Ford are back to wall, one
might have thought some representation from the "make and do and hire and
fire" sectors of American commerce would have proved helpful, even
insightful. Perhaps even someone from Wal-Mart.

That said, I have no doubt that the Project will achieve its real goals.
It will commission studies, enable consultants, stage conferences and
symposia and panels, publish full-page newspaper ads, generate press
coverage and the like, in the same inspiring manner as its ancestor in blather,
the Concord Coalition of blessed memory.

But is this really the point? If there were some way to monetize self-
congratulation, or to convert into BTUs the energy released by stroking the
chin while gravely pursing the lips, I would argue otherwise. But the
chances seem twofold: slim and none. The sad truth seems to be, at least in
the eyes of one who has spent enough time at the Four Seasons to have a
sense of how this stuff works, that this really isn't a program about helping
the less-advantaged or getting the country straightened out in a fiscal and
intellectual sense, this is an advertisement for a government-in-waiting.

In conclusion, let me say that this letter is written in darkest self-

interest. The day you receive this letter I shall turn 70. Years ago, I took my
design for living from a famous New Yorker cartoon, in which a very fancy
mother says to her son, "Eat your broccoli, dear," and the lad, after
inspecting his plate dubiously, replies, "I say it's spinach and I say the hell
with it!" The sun will soon enough go down for the last time for me, and
already the chances are that its final twinkling rays will be blotted out by the
giant mounds of spinach with which the American landscape has been
heaped by self-aggrandizing Panglosses in pinstripes. I beg you not to add to
the pile.

As always,