{"id":13270,"date":"2026-05-13T05:18:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T05:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=13270"},"modified":"2026-05-13T05:18:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T05:18:00","slug":"officers-eat-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=13270","title":{"rendered":"Officers Eat Last"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n<\/div>\n

By KIM BELLARD<\/p>\n

A New York Times<\/em> interview<\/a> with Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D \u2013 Mass) by Bret Stephens caught my attention. I am somewhat familiar with Mr. Stephens from his various pieces in NYT; he is definitely a conservative, but in the old, pre-MAGA sense where it meant you worried about spending but you didn\u2019t hate people who weren\u2019t like you. Rep. Auchincloss, on the other hand, was unfamiliar to me, but the headline of the interview \u2013 The Democrat Who Makes Me Listen<\/em> \u2013 proved apt.<\/p>\n

For me, the final line the interview summed everything up. Rep. Auchincloss is a Marine veteran, having served in Afghanistan. Mr. Stephens asked: \u201cFinal question. If there is one thing you learned in the Marine Corps which every American should know, what is it?\u201d Rep. Auchincloss\u2019s reply was succinct, to the point, and highly instructive: \u201cOfficers eat last.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOfficers eat last\u201d \u2013 wow. That\u2019s a philosophy I can buy into. That\u2019s a credo I hope I can live up to. That\u2019s a slogan for a political movement I could get behind.<\/p>\n

Of course, I\u2019m not just talking about literally only Marine officers, and I\u2019m not just talking about eating. I\u2019m sure Rep. Auchincloss intended that it was a life lesson that should be applied broadly. I.e., people in authority should make sure the people they are responsible for get taken care of before they take care of themselves. I don\u2019t think that attitude is solely responsible for the esteemed Marine esprit de corps, but it\u2019s got to be part of it.<\/p>\n

The trouble is, we don\u2019t see much of that attitude in the rest of America. When Congress failed to pass a budget and millions of federal workers went without paychecks, they (and their staffs) kept getting paid. When the White House went slashing various budgets, it didn\u2019t eliminate White House jobs.<\/p>\n

If you want to keep your blood pressure under control, don\u2019t even ask how generous the Congressional retirement package is<\/a>. Suffice it to say that, if you are one of the few workers<\/a> who still qualify for a defined benefit pension, it is almost certainly less than theirs. Don\u2019t get me started on how members of Congress seem to get richer \u2013 a lot richer<\/a> \u2013 while in office, possibly due to insider trading loopholes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

According to Gallup<\/a>, only 10% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, with 86% disapproving, but they don\u2019t care. They get paid anyway, and most House seats aren\u2019t competitive<\/a>, so most incumbents are in little danger of getting voted out.<\/p>\n

This is no \u201cofficers eat last.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just politicians. <\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

All those billionaires \u2013 over 1,000 of them in the U.S. alone! \u2013 didn\u2019t get (or keep) all that money by putting anyone else first. CEOs used to<\/a> \u201conly\u201d make 15x the average worker, but now make closer to 300x, with their pay going up 20x<\/a> the average worker\u2019s pay increase in 2025 alone. If there was ever an era of benevolent CEOs looking out for their workers, that era has long gone. If CEOs can underpay or, better yet, layoff their workers, the better for their compensation. The rich guys eat first, with the finest dining their employees\u2019 labor can finance.<\/p>\n

Or private equity investors. They\u2019ve wrecked their havoc on manufacturing and other industries, and more recently have turned to areas like housing<\/a> and health care<\/a>. They\u2019re not just coming for your job, they\u2019re coming for where you live and where\/how you get care. They don\u2019t make any pretense that what they\u2019re doing is for your good; they are openly in it for the R.O.I. They\u2019re face first in the dinner trough and don\u2019t really care if you even get any of the scraps.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s obscene. It\u2019s the opposite of officers eating last.<\/p>\n

Rep. Auchincloss calls for \u201ceconomic patriotism,\u201d saying:<\/p>\n

If the core idea of America is that the circumstances of your birth shouldn\u2019t determine the condition of your life, you cannot have a durable \u201cdemos,\u201d a durable sense of a shared American future, if you have an ossified American aristocracy. And that is what has happened. The top 10 percent of the American economy are people just increasingly divorcing themselves from the rest.<\/p>\n

He wants, in particular, for more wealth to be taxed at death, so the richest Americans can\u2019t keep passing along their wealth without ever paying taxes on the gains. He recognizes that government overregulation can be an issue, but correctly points out that the unbridled corporate monopolization we\u2019ve seen in recent years is also harmful. Gordon Gecko famously said \u201cGreed is good, \u201c but Rep. Auchincloss counters with \u201cOfficers eat last.\u201d<\/p>\n

I know which side I\u2019m on.<\/p>\n

If the Democrats had any sense, which they don\u2019t, they\u2019d seize upon this slogan and help define how it applies to our everyday lives. They\u2019d build out what \u201ceconomic patriotism\u201d means. Dems are still getting blamed for NAFTA and letting China join the World Trade Organization, with the subsequent loss of many U.S. jobs, but those jobs didn\u2019t just magically disappear. Rich people decided they could get richer by offshoring them, and if that meant losses of lots of jobs and devastation of many communities, so be it. The Dems should never have taken the blame, and, instead, should have aggressively pointed the finger at the true culprits.<\/p>\n

To be honest, I don\u2019t think the Democrats are the right party to advocate this idea. They have their own cadres of rich people, both in office and among their donors, and it shows in their policies. The Democratic brand is so toxic that they may be beyond reinvention. That\u2019s why, say, Rob Sand<\/a> in Iowa\u2019s Governor\u2019s race or Graham Platner<\/a> in Maine\u2019s U.S. Senate race are carefully trying to not talk about their ties to the party, and Dan Osborn<\/a> in the Nebraska U.S. Senate race is running as an independent (with the tacit support of the state\u2019s Democratic Party).<\/p>\n

Those are the kinds of politicians who could make the \u201cofficers eat last\u201d pitch and make it work.\u00a0 Chuck Schumer? Kamala Harris? Gavin Newsom?\u00a0 I don\u2019t think so.<\/p>\n

Neither party has a real vision for how \u2013 or agreement on even whether \u2013 to address the growing inequality in America, much less a vision for how to address AI and other revolutionary technological changes that are upon us. We should have long ago grappled with climate change and microplastics, but there was too much money in the status quo.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the<\/em> answer, but \u201cofficers eat last\u201d could be part of an<\/em> answer. Show me the candidates who believe in, live by, and will fight for it, and they\u2019d have my vote.<\/p>\n

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented\u00a0<\/em>Tincture.io<\/em><\/a>, and now regular THCB contributor<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By KIM BELLARD A New York Times interview with Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D \u2013 Mass) by Bret Stephens caught my attention. I am somewhat familiar with Mr. Stephens from his various pieces in NYT; he is definitely a conservative, but in the old, pre-MAGA sense where it meant you worried about spending but you didn\u2019t…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":13269,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13270"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}