George F. Will - The Unforgotten Man - washingtonpost.com

George F. Will - The Unforgotten Man - washingtonpost.com: "John Edwards, too, has puzzling ideas. For the entertainment of Iowans, he has reinvented himself as a 19th-century Kansan -- Mary Elizabeth Lease, the prairie populist who urged farmers to 'raise less corn and more hell.' In August, Edwards urged an Iowa audience to throw off Washington's yoke: 'We need to take the power out of the hands of these insiders that are rigging the system against you.' To measure how much Iowans are suffering from the rigging, Stephen Slivinski of the libertarian Cato Institute was asked to mine the most recent Census Bureau data. He concluded that Iowans paid $15.6 billion in revenue to the federal government and got $19.4 billion back, a gain of $1,286.53 per Iowan."