2.9 Cents a Minute? April 2, 2002February 21, 2017 MINT YOUR OWN Took two friends to dinner tonight and suggested the mint-in-the-Coke deal. They humored me (amazingly, the restaurant had fresh mint) – and . . . loved it! So, sure, Coke is about to come out with Vanilla Coke, and that will be good. But ten years from now, just watch: Mint Coke. (You are wondering how I discovered this. Answer: I had come to the bottom of a mojito, which is basically sugar water, rum and mint leaves. Having thus reached the extreme limit of my alcoholic capacity, I ordered a Diet Coke. When it came, I dumped the remaining sugary ice and mint from Glass A into Glass B – I like a lot of ice – and behold! Or, well, betaste! The rest, I feel sure, will soon become Beverage World history.) Not that any of this can compare with a good iced cold glass of Moroccan Mint Honest Tea. Available at Barnes & Noble Cafes everywhere. X-RAYS Michael Axelrod: ‘Madame Curie did not discover x-rays. That honor belongs to Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen who accidentally discovered x-rays in 1895.” ☞ Yeah – and with my luck, Suze Orman will get credit for discovering Mint Coke. LOWER YOUR BILLS EVEN FURTHER? Chris Petersen: “Lowermybills.com listed several long distance plans for 4.9 cents per minute, but you can have an even better rate! Go to Sam’s Club and pick up an AT&T long distance card. They currently cost 3.4 cents/min and can be renewed with a credit card. (Costco has the MCI card at the same price.) Not only do you save on the basic rate, you also save on taxes. It is only necessary to pay sales tax and not the various other taxes and fees that are included with regular long distance service. (I noticed that my 5 cents/min AT&T plan quickly became 7 cents/min after all the taxes and fees were applied.)” Gary Thompson: “The best rates I’ve found are at Bigzoo.com at 2.9 cents per minute. I’ve been using this for six months and have saved a bundle of money. To make it easier to use, input their access codes on the speed dial of your telephone. AND, there are NO fees or taxes added!” GREAT NEW IDEA I’m not sure every one of the ideas tossed out in Forbes’s inaugural “Why Not” column, co-written by Honest Tea co-founder Barry Nalebuff, is a winner, but this one surely is: Why not require HMOs to bundle term life insurance in with their health insurance? That way, the HMO would have a million-dollar incentive to keep you alive and well. (Right now, if you’re sick enough, your expiration would not – financially speaking – be bad news.) ANOTHER IDEA A reader named Don likes the Russian 13% flat-tax idea, but thinks replacing the income altogether, with a national sales tax, would be even better. “Under my plan,” he writes, “your supermarket bill comes out 15% higher. That’s offset by the fact that your income is at least 15% higher than it used to be. Whenever you wanted to do something with your life, you would just do it. There would be no “tax planning”. If you wanted to buy/sell an investment, you would buy/sell it. The only consideration would be “is it a good/bad investment”. This is revolutionary. (It used to be common sense.) Progressivity: you could still have it! People who want progressivity could file with the IRS and claim a rebate. If you didn’t want your rebate or you were in an income category where you were precluded from receiving one, you wouldn’t file. Therefore, the amount of tax work would be much less. Progressivity would be viewed as a kind of welfare, decoupled from the tax system. ‘IRS’ would stand for ‘Internal Rebate Service.’” ☞ Well, it’s an interesting twist, anyway.
Cheap Phone, Flat Tax, Mint Coke April 1, 2002February 21, 2017 Breaking News from the Borowitz Report: March 29, 2002 LAUGHTER NO LONGER THE BEST MEDICINE Bumped From Top Spot By Red-Hot Antidepressants Laughter, long thought to be the best medicine, has been surpassed in popularity by two widely used antidepressants, Prozac and Zoloft, according to a just-released market study paid for by the pharmaceuticals industry . . . * Last week we spent an inordinate amount of time calculating the annualized rate of return one might ‘earn’ by changing his or her habits to buy by the case. The answer came to precisely 177.46%. Or precisely 176.7%. The estimable Less Antman explains: ‘Those who got 176.7% are only compounding for 52 weeks (364 days). Using 365 days, you get 177.46%.’ And, yes, using 365.25 days you get even a smidgeon more. I promise never, ever to raise this again. * Did you know that some people – not you, of course, but perhaps an elderly relative, a frugally challenged son-in-law – actually pay the ‘Basic Rate Plan’ for long-distance telephone service? Last month, AT&T, MCI and Sprint all quietly raised these rates, from an astonishing 30 cents a minute, in some cases, to an even more astonishing 35 cents. This is about 7 times what you should be paying. Click here to find a better rate. And don’t tell me about dialing ‘ten-ten-two-twenty,’ whose celebrity pitchmen get all excited about paying only 99 cents for 20 minutes. That works out to a nickel a minute if you talk for exactly 20 minutes. If you get an answering machine, it works out to 99 cents a minute. If you really had only 12 minutes of stuff to say but – not being one to waste money – you found a way to stay on the line an extra 8 minutes, then you in effect paid 8.25 cents a minute (for the time you actually wanted to talk) and wasted 8 minutes of your life and 8 minutes of your conversant’s life gabbing pointlessly. * Sandy sent me this good article praising Russia’s 13% flat tax and lambasting Democrats for standing in the way of a flat tax here. Thanks, Sandy. Someday, we may enjoy an economy like Russia’s. Seriously: I’m all for tax simplification. But of the 45 billion pages in the tax code, it would take less than a single page to say (for example): the tax up to $20,000 is zero, from $20,000 to $50,000 it’s 13%, from $50,000 to $250,000 it’s 25%, from $250,000 to $2 million it’s 35%, and above that is 40%. Or whatever. The complexity is not in the progressivity. It’s in the other 45 billion pages. Yes, I understand some people don’t buy the notion of a progressive income tax, where the tax rate is higher for those who make the most money. That’s an honest philosophical difference of opinion. But we’ve had progressive taxation for nearly a century, and it hasn’t rendered our economy, or our society, totally unsuccessful. * I discovered something important at dinner last night purely by accident, the way Madame Curie (?) accidentally discovered the X-ray: Mint in your diet Coke. This is not exactly Cooking Like a Guy™, but try it.