Credit Card Reflux; Reagonomics Redux April 16, 2001February 19, 2017 Dan Flikkema: Re: its taking an hour to eat a meal and 39 years to pay it off, if your credit card charges 19.8% interest and you pay just the minimum each month . . . ‘Actually I come up with 501 months to pay off the $3,000 credit balance — 41.75 years. If you were ever late or missed a payment, it would quickly increase to 45 years. But hey, 39 or 41 or 45 years, I suppose your point would really be the same wouldn’t it? My no-annual-fee Visa card works the opposite way (Wells Fargo 1-800-642-4720). Instead of paying interest (I pay the balance in full each month), I get 1% cash back. This month, I will get roughly $300. Wow, that means I spent over 30,000 on my credit card last year! What did I buy? Now I’m depressed again. I need to cut back.’ Bob Eatho: Re: our racking up $4 trillion in debt during the Reagan/Bush years, the last time we tried a massive tax cut for the rich . . . ‘Yeah . . . Darn that Reagan/Bush era. Let’s return to the Carter era where the economy was a mess, and inflation was a whopping 17%. Give me a break!!!!!!!!!!’ ☞ Why go back to the Carter era? What’s wrong with sticking with the Clinton era? We had the best economy in history. We found a balance that seemed to work just great. Under this balance, the top 1% – despite their hiked tax bracket – found their after-tax income increasing way faster than everyone else’s . . . which is fine with me, being in that top 1%. But need we tilt the balance further in the favor of the top 1%? Under Carter, the top federal tax bracket was 70%. Likewise, under Ford, Nixon, LBJ, and Kennedy. Way too high! Crazy! (Not to mention poor old Ike, who gave us a 90% bracket.) But the current 39.6%? I’m not saying it’s fun to pay taxes, or that it’s easy to rack up after-tax wealth with a tax burden like that. (Once you do rack up some wealth, you can put it to work at a substantially lower capital gains rate, or at a zero municipal bond rate.) But I am saying that the top 1%, and most of the rest of America, have done great with the current balance. Why mess with it? We seem now all but certainly headed toward a huge shift of wealth in favor of the top 1%. The Republicans are geniuses at getting the rest of America to go along with that at the expense of things like a prescription drug benefit for seniors, money to renovate dilapidated old schools, incentives to develop and deploy sources of alternative energy, or, simply, a faster pay down of the national debt. (I know some of you are worried we’ll pay it down too fast. Fat chance. But if that problem ever did present itself, that might be the time to enact a massive tax cut for the top 1%.) How do they do it? Tomorrow: A House of Cards – and a Plain Old House
Malcolm in the Middle, Florida in a Muddle April 13, 2001February 19, 2017 How is a great TV show like a great stock? Well, with a stock that’s done really well, you worry that by the time you recommend it to a friend it may be too late. So it goes with ‘Malcolm in the Middle,’ Sundays on Fox. Yes, ‘The West Wing’ is still the best thing on television, both for its entertainment value and because it – astonishingly – teaches so much and makes us better citizens. But ‘Malcolm’ is a close second. It, too, is brilliantly written – the last two episodes especially. (Did you see the one where they take two of the kids bowling? Genius!) I’m just terrified that the first time YOU decide to watch it, you’ll get an episode that somehow fails to engage your interest . . . you’ll not make the small investment required to get to know and like the characters. But I’ve got to chance it, because ‘Malcolm’ deserves all the praise it can get. This Sunday, Fox is showing two episodes, one at 8:30, one at 9:30. And this summer you can maybe catch up with reruns. If you ever get to see the bowling one – or last week’s episode where Dewey becomes germ-phobic – well, I just think you will be grinning from ear to ear. (Same with the Simpsons. First time I watched, 100 years ago, I couldn’t imagine what everyone saw in it. Indeed, I could barely make out what the characters were saying. Ah, but once I caught on!) And now on to the X-rated portion of our entertainment, starting with this, from Wednesday’s Miami Herald. A group that wants to overturn Broward County’s [ordinance that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation] has raised $14,299, while a group that supports the ordinance has collected $485, according to reports filed this week with the supervisor of elections. . . Among the donors: Janet Folger of the Center for Reclaiming America, a national political organization based at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church; Jean Hansen, former chairwoman of the Broward Republican Party; and Ken Jennings, Republican candidate for the Florida Senate last year. The group has spent $6,632 so far. Its largest expenses — two checks for $2,500 — went to Executive Director Joel Hawksley. He resigned Monday following disclosures in The Herald that he was charged in 1999 with sexually abusing a 15-year-old girl in Maryland. The case never went to trial. If you wonder why some people work so hard to deny gays and lesbians the same protections, real and symbolic, that other once-despised groups already enjoy – let alone tangible things like domestic-partner health care benefits or the right of a spouse to inherit tax-free – you could read this from the previous day’s Tampa Tribune: Gay students lobbying for discrimination protection in Florida schools got a jolting civics lesson Monday from a lawmaker who welcomed them into his office only to declare: “God … is going to destroy you.” . . . After listening patiently for 10 minutes as the students made their pitch, Trovillion, a conservative lawmaker representing the Orlando suburbs, told them flatly: “You’re throwing your life away.” . . . The meeting left 17-year-old Chris Vasquez in tears. Vasquez, an honors student and editor in chief of Edgewater High School’s campus newspaper, thanked Trovillion for his time but was stunned as he left the lawmaker’s office. “The Florida Legislature says we’re going to hell,” he said.
Dinner Out: An Hour to Eat It, 39 Years to Pay It Off April 12, 2001February 19, 2017 ‘If you have a $3,000 credit card balance at 19.8% interest . . . and you pay the required minimum balance of 2% of the balance or $15, whichever is greater . . . it will take 39 years to pay off the loan. And you will pay more than $10,000 in interest charges.’ – ‘Cleveland Saves’ brochure ☞ C’mon people – if you’re among the 60% or so of credit card holders who pay interest, cut it out! How DARE they! WHAT SOME ARE SAYING ABOUT US ABROAD Click here.
A Good Year to Convert to a Roth IRA? April 11, 2001February 19, 2017 You want to know what I think of the budget and the tax cut? I think they are terrible. It’s just nuts to give a huge tax cut to the top 1% or 2% when, under the current structure, they were already dramatically outpacing everyone else after-tax. Let’s use most of that money to pay down the debt. Yes, the surplus is ‘our money!’ but so is the $5 trillion National Debt ‘our debt’ – about $4 trillion of it racked up under Reagan/Bush, the last time we tried a huge tax cut for the rich. Why don’t we take the prudent course and first do the stuff we know needs doing, like paying down the debt and keeping cops on the street and providing a prescription drug benefit, and then, if we’re still rolling in it, turn our attention to cutting taxes for those in the top 2%? For shame! Blood pressure falling . . . back . . . to normal. OK. Now: With a Roth IRA, you get no tax-deduction for the money you contribute . . . but neither do you pay any tax on the money you withdraw. (There’s also less paperwork and more flexibility.) As a result, many people have toyed with the notion of converting their traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs. It often makes sense. (The scenario in which it would not is if you are in a high tax bracket now, and expect to be in a very low one as you withdraw the money. I say: fat chance. But if you did expect to be in a very low tax bracket as you withdrew the money, the tax benefit of the Roth IRA would be correspondingly low, and would probably not justify giving up today’s tax deduction.) You don’t have to convert by any special deadline. But if you were thinking of converting, this could well be a better time to do it than, say, this time last year. For two reasons: First, your IRA may have shrunk in value with the stock market. If so, there will be less money to convert and, thus, less tax to pay on the conversion. Later, when it bounces back, all that bounce-back will be free of tax. Second, it looks as if tax brackets themselves are likely to come down this year – so the tax you’ll owe may be lower still. Of course, if the bear market has further to run, as it probably does, you might want to wait still longer to convert. And if some of the drop in tax brackets winds up being phased in over time, that, too, would be a reason to wait. But clearly, this year would be a better time for most to convert than last year – even if it proves not to be as good as, say, next year. (You could always waffle, converting some now and – if the value of your traditional IRA falls further – the rest later.) For Vanguard’s worksheet on Roth IRA eligibility and conversion, click here. And don’t forget that the deadline for contributing this year to either kind of IRA (as opposed to converting, for which there is no deadline) is Monday. (Monday – oy! — is also the deadline for filing YOUR TAXES! Or at least your Form 4868.)
Free Stuff April 10, 2001February 19, 2017 John Dicks: ‘Regarding the recent comment on the Handspring Visor through CSFB Direct (then DLJ Direct) — I, too, opened the account and got the Visor (and never used it and subsequently got rid of — it makes a good gift). Anyway, I noticed that the rate paid on the money market account averaged about 2.75%. I’ve closed the account, but certainly see how they could afford to give away the Visor!’ ☞ That 2.75% put you about 30% ahead of most folks in the same time period – coulda been worse! (And seriously, by giving up 2% for 6 months versus something safe-but-higher-yielding, you gave up about $50 on $5,000. Not too bad for a Handspring Visor.) Michael Young: ‘Based on their handling of my ‘free Handspring Visor’ account last year, I would never do business with DLJ Direct again. After opening my account, I expected to receive instructions on how to fund my account, but I never did, so I had to call to find out. {Of all the things associated with opening an account, you’d think this is the one they’d make an effort to get right!) While I was on the phone, I asked whether I’d still be eligible for the free Visor. There was no indication I’d signed up through a promotion – their web page was having troubles, they said – but they promised that they’d put in the promotion code. Several weeks passed, so I called to make sure the promotion code got entered after all. Of course, it had not. More promises. It took three more calls before it actually shipped (and then two more to FedEx, who found a wonderfully creative place to hide the box). Nice gadget, though. I might even buy some add-ons.’ Gary Krager points us to a free Palm m100 when you open a Citibank checking account with $2,500 or more. And how about a little free cash? Allan Tanner, from Wichita, directs us to an online offer from TD Waterhouse. ‘If one opens a brokerage account or even a bank account (they have a bank, too) with at least $1,000, they will add $100 to it. Sounds like a good deal to me. Even if you earned nothing else on the $1,000, as I figure it, you’d be getting a 20% return for those six months.’ ☞ In percentage terms, the return on investment is indeed awesome. If only they’d let you do it with bigger money – say a $2,500 gift for keeping $25,000 on deposit for six months. Ah, well.
Analyze THIS April 9, 2001February 19, 2017 *IRA Reminder: You have until next Monday to set up and contribute to an IRA (preferably, in my view, if you qualify with an income below $95,000 single or $150,000 joint, a Roth IRA). The younger you are and more inconvenient this is, the happier you’ll be 30 years from now that you made the sacrifice and got into the habit. Not sure where to start? The nearest bank will do just fine. Do it this afternoon!* Spencer Martin: ‘Re ‘analysts‘ Friday . . . you’ll get a kick out of this graph.’ Toby Gottfried: ‘Rather than, company earnings fall below analyst expectations, stock drops, shouldn’t those headlines read, analyst estimates exceed company earnings, analysts fired? Ivy Guy: ‘I’m in New York for the first Ivy League Investment Club Conference, sponsored by Goldman Sachs. The conference began today with the delegates (students from each school) hearing the Goldman Morning Call at 7:15am, the summary of all the GS analysts’ calls for the day. One major point of the conference call was California’s electric utilities. There had been very positive developments on Thursday evening, and so the analysts said that the stocks (PCG and EIX) had nearly 100% upside; they were priced like they were going bankrupt, but this was a ‘near impossibility.’ To reiterate, this is at 7:15am yesterday, Friday. ‘The rest is history. At about 2:30, one of the scheduled speakers begins his talk by saying, ‘If any of you own PG&E, call your brokers–it just filed for bankruptcy.’ There was a palpable silence in the room. We didn’t know if this was some kind of joke. We’d just heard the analysts of Goldman Sachs – GOLDMAN SACHS – talking for several minutes (a good chunk of the morning call) about how this was a near impossibility. In a word, everyone was dumbfounded. ‘In my opinion, this was the best lesson Goldman gave us during the day, inadvertent though it was. If you print this, please don’t use my name or school.’ Emily Rizzo: ‘Re 400 MBA Candidates last week . . . Whatever happened to the clickle? I would love to pay you to write more of these columns.’ ☞ Well, if you insist.
Why Does Anyone Listen to Analysts? April 6, 2001February 19, 2017 Carl: ‘This set of comments comes from April 17th and 18th, 2000. The NASDAQ was coming off of a month of very heavy selling and the index went from 5,000 all the way down towards 3,000. On April 17th and 18th the index shot up 472 points or 14% leading many to believe that it had bottomed. The NASDAQ closed at 3,793 on April 18th and has been chopped in half since that time . . . “We’re telling people to buy tech stocks. I do think the bottom is over. Typically, with this kind of increase in volatility, the near-term returns tend to be sloppy. But in 12 months, it should be just fine.” — Jeffrey Applegate, chief investment strategist for Lehman Brothers. “The Ciscos, the Microsofts, the Oracles . . . those companies will weather these kinds of storms.” — Richard A. “Rocky” Mills, branch manager at Sutro & Co. “We continue to view most stocks (excluding dot-coms) as cheap, with an S&P 500 median (price-to-earnings ratio) of roughly 15 times 2000 estimates. Over the next 12 months, we believe the Nasdaq has 200 points of downside risk and 2000 points of upside potential, creating a ten-to one-ratio of reward to risk which makes this an opportune time to be aggressively buying stocks.” — Thomas Galvin, chief equity analyst at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. “We do feel, however, most of the damage in the technology sector has been done. We think that we will see a turn. We’re very close to the bottom on this.” — Steve Wing of American Frontier Financial in Denver. “It certainly reaffirmed that the notion of buying the dip — and that was some dip — still has some validity.” — Jim Waggoner, market and tech strategist for Sands Brothers and Co. ‘ . . . My favorite out of this group goes to Thomas Galvin’s comments. He actually estimated a 10 to 1 reward ratio for the NASDAQ but had it almost completely backwards as the NASDAQ ended up dropping about 2,000 points over the next year. This has to be one of the worst predictions that I have ever seen from a well-known Wall Street analyst. I swear that I must be the only one looking at this stuff. How these guys maintain credibility and continue to appear in the media is beyond me.’ ☞ Thanks, Carl. This is a point I’ve been trying to make ever since The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need was first published in 1978. Not that I could do any better than these folks. Well . . . maybe a little better than these folks. But in general, I sure don’t know how a company will perform in the future relative to Wall Street’s expectations for it. And if you don’t know that, you don’t know whether it’s stock is likely to rise or fall. It’s a tough game (another point I’ve been trying to make for 20-odd years). Which is why incurring expenses to play it generally makes less sense than keeping expenses to a minimum and investing most of your stock-market money through index funds.
Awaiting the Fat Lady April 5, 2001February 19, 2017 John Seiffer: ‘Thanks to a mention on your site, I got a Handspring Visor last year for opening an account with what was then called DLJ direct. I waited the requisite time period and closed my account. Then they sent me a note saying if I funded my (now closed) account with $5k I could get another Handspring (which I’m in the process of doing) and now I find the offer’s available to all. There is no requirement to trade, you can keep the money in a money market. I’ll soon have enough handsprings to use as coasters.’ Before you all start writing to tell me, ‘See? Bush won Florida after all!’ please note that he almost certainly did not. I expect – but don’t know for sure – that the Wall Street Journal-New York Times consortium will report this a few weeks from now, when they are through counting not just the ‘undercount’ but also the ‘overcount.’ (The overcount is where, for example, someone circled Gore on the optical ballot, but then also wrote in, ‘Lieberman!’ or some such down below, rendering ‘the intent of the voter’ undiscernable to the machine – but clearly discernable to a human.) For a bit more on the voting scandal – widely reported in Britain but oddly undiscussed on this side of the Atlantic – click here. It is a remarkable story. And for Molly Ivins’ latest, click here. Molly pokes fun at the notion of a Bush mandate. And, really, about the only thing everyone agrees Geo W. and Congress have a mandate to do is to fix the election system so that every vote counts. After all, this is a big deal! A huge deal! The integrity of our democracy is at stake! So . . . where are the Congressional hearings on this? Why is no one in Congress getting to the bottom of this? Why are George and Jeb not making this a priority? Are the Republicans really concerned with what happened? (‘And shucks,’ Strom may be thinking, ‘was the old notion of white guys with property being the only ones who could vote really so bad?’ After all, all throughout his formative years, women didn’t have the vote. And until he was 62, many African-Americans were denied access to the polls – a situation a lot worse than, but not completely unlike, what they endured in Florida in 2000.) Tomorrow: Why Does Anyone Listen to Analysts?
Are You Getting 100% or 3%? April 4, 2001February 19, 2017 I learned the other day that the vaunted filibuster – that can derail just about anything in the Senate – can’t derail the budget, which includes Bush’s proposed tax cut. It’s scary, because I had always assumed that if all else failed, there was always the filibuster. The $1.6 trillion Bush plan, which is closer to $2.6 trillion if you look at it realistically, is, I have argued here several times before, dangerously large and, to my mind, blatantly unfair. Well, check this out. It is excerpted liberally from Matthew Miller’s March 12 column (no one ever accused me of being ahead of the curve): For weeks [Treasury Secretary Paul] O’Neill has been bellyaching about what he claimed were bogus analyses that showed how dramatically the Bush plan favors upper-income Americans – to which the fair reply of critics has been, ‘then issue your own ‘distribution tables.” Indeed, the respected career civil servants at Treasury have routinely issued such reports, comparing the impact of proposed tax changes on people in different income groups. The only mystery this year was why that hadn’t yet happened. Well, the other day O’Neill put out Treasury’s assessment, and now we know why it took so long. There must have been one helluva internal fight to get career officials to scrap their normal rules for doing such analyses in favor of a rigged methodology cooked up to make Bush’s plan look fairer. For starters, unlike Treasury’s previous standard practice, O’Neill’s analysis deals with only part of Bush’s plan: the income tax cut. It ignores entirely the proposed estate tax repeal and corporate tax changes that amount to hundreds of billions of dollars – and which disproportionately benefit top earners. Next, the new Treasury report compares the size of the income tax cut people will get only to the amount of income taxes they currently pay; the old standard method showed how an income tax change affected a person’s overall federal tax burden. Take a modest-earning family that pays only $100 in income tax but $3,000 in payroll taxes. When this family is taken off the income tax rolls by the Bush plan, O’Neill scores it as a ‘100-percent tax cut.’ Previous Treasury reports would have rightly scored it as a 3-percent cut in the family’s overall federal tax burden. Trust me, there’s more of this flimflam – the worst of which may be O’Neill’s refusal to show the actual number of dollars in tax relief people at each income level stand to receive (which gives rise to accurate claims that Bush is offering the rich a Lexus and poor workers a muffler). While such duplicity is as normal in politics as in real estate, there are moral distinctions to be made even among frauds. When Democrats lie about Medicare, they rationalize it by telling themselves they’re doing it to win the power to make sure that Medicare is reformed on terms more favorable to the sickest, frailest seniors. When Bush and O’Neill lie about their tax plan, they’re doing it purely to convince the nation they’re New Age antipoverty warriors when their plan mostly makes America’s top-earners better off. I don’t know about you, but to me the Bush charade has the edge when it comes to cynicism and immorality. The GOP plainly believes that if Americans know the full truth about who benefits from Bush’s tax plan, they’ll reject it. Granted, Matt’s $100 / $3,000 example is extreme, to make the case. But the case is clear nonetheless. It’s hard to get average folks to favor a plan so heavily skewed to the top 1%. You can see why rich oil company executives would favor it. But why would the rest of the country be keen to risk a massive tax cut for the rich? The Republican challenge, in effect, is to have the American people take this survey . . . Please rank this list of alternatives in terms of priority: 1. Spend money to strengthen our national defense. 2. Provide cash assistance to help build new schools, renovate dilapidated ones, and hire more teachers to shrink class sizes. 3. Pay down the national debt, to keep interest rates low, the dollar strong, and prices low. 4. Provide meaningful tax relief for typical American households. 5. Beef up basic scientific research. 6. Provide incentives to encourage the development of environmentally friendly alternative energy that cuts our dependence on foreign oil. 7. Add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare for America’s seniors. 8. Provide massive tax relief to the 1% or 2% wealthiest households in America. 9. Continue funding for the 100,000 community police Uncle Sam has been subsidizing. 10. Continue and expand programs like Americorps, the national service program that has brought more than 200,000 young Americans of diverse backgrounds together to work in local community service projects. . . . and get them to pick #8 as their first priority, largely crowding out all the rest. How do you get the American people to do that? Well, Matt Miller’s column gives at least some of the answer. PS to yesterday’s column . . . According to the April issue of Genre, 23 nations now allow gays to serve openly in their armed forces. ‘The United States and Turkey are the only original members of NATO that continue to ban service by known homosexuals.’
What Advice Would YOU Give These 400 MBA Candidates? April 3, 2001February 19, 2017 Hey – that ‘A&P preferred J’ that I suggested here on January 3 at 12 hit 21 the other day. That’s a 75% gain in what were otherwise a pretty rough three months. Like you, I only wish had bought more. (And like you, I’m not certain whether to hold on.) I mention this because some of you really hate it when I stray from personal finance. For you, I guess, I am offering an annoying bargain. I will do my best to give you something occasionally useful – not that I’m likely ever to get remotely this lucky again. In return, you do something hard but admirable – and important to a strong social fabric. Namely, you take the time to consider views with which you do not agree. (I appreciate your feedback and try to read it in an equally constructive way.) # And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. I got to address a spectacular group of 400 bright young MBA students at ‘Reaching Out,’ the third annual gay and lesbian MBA conference. This year’s was sponsored by Stanford Business School, UCLA, and Thunderbird – with lavish spreads hosted by Booz-Allen Hamilton, McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Price Waterhouse Coopers, each eager to attract its share of hires from this exceptional talent pool. The morning break-out session I sat in on was a panel of senior folks from JP Morgan, BCG, AOL/Time Warner, Capitol One, Deloitte Consulting and Bain. A lot of stories were told (Well, how DO you answer the interviewer when he asks you about your wife or your girl friend, if you’re a gay guy? How DO you answer the client when he asks you – a top-notch consultant who happens to be lesbian – what your husband does?), but my favorite was by the panelist who was being asked to move to Switzerland for a year or two to head up a multi-million dollar consulting project for one of his firm’s clients. ‘I was a little nervous about this,’ he told us (or words to this effect), ‘because the client was a conservative Swiss Bank, and their guy who had hired us, one of their American executives living in Switzerland, was an ex-marine. I didn’t want to uproot everything and move over there, begin to head up this 120-man project, and then, after a few weeks, find out it wasn’t going to work. So at the end of my sort of ‘trial week’ over there, where we were planning out the project, I took the client to dinner. I told him that I would have to fly back to New York for four days every second week. I knew that while in Switzerland it would be a non-stop all-out effort, and I was eager for that; but that I’d need these four days every two weeks because of my boyfriend, and wanted to be sure he was OK with that kind of schedule. He said he was, and later I learned he told his board more or less the following: ‘Tom is gay. I view this as a good thing. In my experience, gay people tend to work very hard.’ And that was that. The project was a success.’ Ah, how the world has changed . . . in significant measure thanks to the incredible leadership of the Clinton/Gore administration, as well as to far-sighted Republicans like former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, Senator Jim Jeffords, and conservatives like the late Barry Goldwater (who said of the gays-in-the-military flap that all that mattered, as far as he could see, was whether soldiers could shoot straight) . . . and thanks, of course, especially, to tens of millions of Americans who, given a little time to consider a once-taboo topic, and get to know some of us for who we are (oh is that why Uncle Charlie never got married!), have shown, yet again, what a fair-minded and terrific country this is. Even China, as you may have seen, has recently told its 1.26 billion people that being gay is not some kind of mental illness that needs to be ‘fixed.’ (The American Psychiatric Association came to more or less the same conclusion circa 1974, concluding, ‘ . . . therefore, be it resolved that the American Psychiatric Association deplores all public and private discrimination against homosexuals.’) Oh, sure, there are still some folks who think it’s an illness, but no one really of any note. Well, except maybe the Senate Majority Leader, Republican Trent Lott. (It was he who told the press he felt homosexuality was a compulsion for which we should feel some compassion, but strive to combat, like ‘kleptomania or alcoholism.’) And, yes, there are still quite a few folks who still call us fags and dykes, as some still use ‘the N word.’ But no one really of any note. Well, the House Majority Leader, Republican Dick Armey (famous for calling his colleague Barney Frank, ‘Barney Fag’). And, I guess, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (who called then San Francisco city councilwoman Roberta Achtenberg a ‘damn dyke’). And, sure, there are still those who would support the few remaining archaic state sodomy laws. But no one really of any note. Well, George W. Bush. He supported the Texas statute under which two Houston men were arrested in 1998 for having sex at home in the privacy of their bedroom. (Texas has had a sodomy law since 1860, but decriminalized such activities by different-sex partners in 1974. Texas now is one of only four states that singles out gays and lesbians as criminals. Bush opposed its repeal, and last month, the Texas Court of Appeals came down on the same side. It upheld the conviction.) But the world is changing, and I actually expect even the Republican Party, if only out of political exigency, to move from the 1950’s to, say, 1975 – which would be progress, and I would quite genuinely welcome it. People have to go at their own pace. (It goes without saying – but given the Republican rhetoric, I guess I’ll say it anyway – anyone who abuses children, regardless of his sexual orientation, should be dealt with severely . . . anyone who leads a promiscuous life, be he Don Juan or the characters on ‘Friends,’ is making a choice that has its downsides. Republicans are right, in my view, to celebrate stable, long-term relationships and accord them special economic benefits. It’s just that in the Republican view, these celebrations and benefits should be available only to couples of the same race. Oh, wait – that legal taboo was finally extinguished in 1967. Now it’s only same-sex couples whom the Republicans would deny these benefits.) At least a couple of the young MBA candidates in my audience had worked in the White House. I explained to them that, although I am treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, I try to be bi-partisan. (Karl Rove was on the my flight from DC – does that count?) I eagerly accept contributions from Republicans as well as Democrats. And I make a point of bringing with me, to every speaking engagement, the entire contingent of openly gay and lesbian appointees to the first Bush administration (zero), along with the entire contingent of openly gay and lesbian appointees to the George W. Bush Texas administration (zero), and, for good measure, all the openly gay officers and staffers of the Republican National Committee and the current Bush administration (zero, and zero). If I’ve missed anyone, by all means let me know, and I’ll stand corrected. So J.P. Morgan and the country’s top consulting firms may all want to draw on the talent of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, sons and daughters . . . the Big Three auto companies in Detroit may all now offer domestic partnership health benefits to their same-sex coupled employees . . . but for now, I advised my 400 young MBAs-in-the-making, don’t look to work for your country when you graduate. Not, that is, unless you are willing to go back in to the closet and live a lie. No one should have to do that – least of all in America (something about ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’) – and the great news, as evidenced by this conference along with so much else the last few years, is that no one, or surely no MBA, has to. In the words of Joe Lieberman, is this a great country or what? Tomorrow: Are You Getting 100% or 3%?