Traditional Deficit Republicanism August 28, 2002February 21, 2017 Harry Mark: ‘In a follow-up to what you wrote about Republican deficits recently I ask: Isn’t it time to begin calling it Traditional Deficit Republicanism? A generation has grown up under GOP borrow-and-spend. Time to re-frame the debate, eh?’ ☞ You know, if we were borrowing to ‘wire the last mile’ with fiber optic cable, a program whose implications could conceivably rival those of the Interstate Highway System decades ago . . . or if we were borrowing to rebuild our schools and invest in our children through smaller class sizes and richer programs . . . or if we were borrowing in a grand international Manhattan Project / Marshall Plan to find effective ways to move large chunks of the Third World into the modern economy over the next couple of decades . . . then it wouldn’t bother me, because this is borrowing with a potentially huge pay-off. Instead, our friends in the Republican Party borrow to lower taxes on the best off. They did it from 1980 to 1992 and added $3 trillion to our national debt; they’re doing it again now. What kind of vision is this? So Harry may be on to something: Traditional Deficit Republicanism. Tomorrow: Beware Sucky Section 529 Tuition Plans!
More Real Estate August 27, 2002January 24, 2017 DON’T PAY POINTS Pete Kirby: ‘My work as a loan agent has taught me one thing very clearly: people should very rarely pay points to obtain a mortgage. The reason is that ANY refinance ends the first mortgage and the points paid are then not doing their job anymore. I have clients that have refinanced five times in two years. They never knew ahead of time when refinancing would be feasible. Each refinance was done with no points and they ratcheted their interest rate down each time. By now, interest rates may not fall much further; but then again, who really knows?’ ☞ Not I. But as we enter a new era of (Republican) borrow-and-spend deficits, it’s quite likely that the long slide in long-term interest rates is more or less over. So I’d be surprised if you have many clients refinancing five times in the next few years. Though, as you say, you never know. DON’T WORRY – PRICES WILL JUST KEEP RISING Rob Zelms: ‘You wrote that you should rent if you plan on owning a house for 2 years or less. This is somewhat confusing considering most people in today’s real estate market are able to make a significant tax-free profit when they sell a property after only 2 years. I’m on the verge of selling my second home in two and a half years and I can assure you it has been the best financial decision I’ve ever made. Not to boast, but I cleared 50k on my first home and will clear in excess of 100k on my next. All things being equal, you should always own if you’re going to live there for at least a year. That way, your only tax is the 20% capital gain.’ ☞ Hey, so long as home prices jump $50,000 and $100,000 a year, you are absolutely right. But what about going forward? Can homes appreciate at, say, 10% a year forever? I think not, unless incomes are growing at 10% a year also, which they tend not to do. Might home prices even fall back a little if long-term interest rates should rise and mortgages become harder to carry? ONLY YOUR EIGHTH ANNIVERSARY? Earlier this month I mentioned that Charles had put up with me for eight years now. Several of you sent kind words – thanks – including Paul Ward, who went on to write: ‘My partner David and I have been together now for 28 years as of last February and are proud to have contributed to the ideals of love, family, nurturing and Christ’s admonition to ‘love one another.’ We live quiet, productive lives, pay our taxes and expect only to be allowed to live our lives without interference.’ ☞ Equal economic benefits might be something to expect, too. If one of you goes before the other, why shouldn’t the survivor inherit tax-free, just as with any other committed couple? And why shouldn’t he be eligible for Social Security survivor benefits? But 28 years – hats off to you both, and here’s to 28 more.
Is It Worth Paying Points? August 26, 2002February 21, 2017 William M: ‘I’m pretty ignorant about mortgages. I know that a point equals one percent, so that on a $300,000 mortgage, one point equals a $3,000 up-front payment. But I’m not sure if I want to pay points to get a lower rate. Which of these six mortgage options I’ve been offered for a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage on a new house makes the most sense?’ $300,000 30-year Fixed Mortgage Interest Rate Points in % Points in $ 6.000% 2.625 $7,875 6.125% 2.000 $6,000 6.250% 1.250 $3,750 6.375% 0.750 $2,250 6.500% 0.250 $750 6.625% 0.000 $0 ☞ It comes down to a judgment call: how long will you keep this loan in force before you either sell the home or refinance the loan? The longer you think you’ll keep this mortgage, the more reason you have to pay up-front points to get a lower interest rate. But this is an odd progression they’re offering you, isn’t it? For each extra eighth of a percent in annual interest you are willing to pay, you’d expect to save roughly the same amount in points. Yet at the first break you save 5 eighths of a point, then 6 eighths, then 4 then 4 then 2. Not sure why they do that. Right? I’ve added the column in red to show the difference in dollars. If you were willing to pay 6.125% interest instead of 6% – an eighth of a percent more – you’d pay just $6,000 in points versus $7,875, saving $1,875. Whereas (at the other end of the progression), if you agreed to pay 6.625% instead of 6.5%, you would save just $750. Why would you agree to 6.625% rather than 6.5% – when doing so saves you only 2 eighths of a point? That would only make sense if you planned to keep the loan for less than two years. And if you think you will only be in this house for two years, don’t buy it – rent something. If you plan to keep this mortgage in force for a long time, then you want to pay the points in order to get the lower rate . . . even when you have to pay 6 eighths of a point up front in order to save just 1 eighth of a point a year for 30 years. You ‘break even’ in this situation after 6 years, and then enjoy 24 years of additional savings, assuming you hang on to the loan until it is fully paid off. Admittedly, there are a few wrinkles to consider. Wrinkles are orange. Feel free to meet me a few paragraphs down, when we’re back in the black. One wrinkle is the tax-deductibility of the points. This is a new mortgage, so the points are deductible up-front and you’re comparing apples and apples – both the points and the mortgage interest are deductible. But if it were a refinance, the points would only be deductible over the life of the mortgage (with any remaining undeducted points deductible all at once if you sell or pay off the mortgage early). And that would make the points more expensive, giving you more reason not to want to pay them. A second wrinkle is the time value of money. Clearly, paying 6 eighths of a point now to save 1 eighth of a point a year for 6 years isn’t really a break-even situation, as I described it above. Who in his right mind, given the choice between $6 now and a $1 a year for 6 years would choose the latter? Money now is more valuable than money in the future. (A bird in the hand, and all that.) Depending on where you set your “discount rate” – which is a measure of the importance you place on having money now versus waiting for it – you could come up with a very specific breakeven point. “So long as I hold the mortgage at least 7.4 years,” you might calculate, “it makes sense to pay 6 eighths of a point now to save 7.4 eighths over 7.4 years. Anything beyond that will be gravy.” Let’s leave your discount rate for another column. But the sense of it is this: If you are desperate for money, or have fantastically profitable things you can do with it (like pay off an 18% credit card), you will have a high discount rate, and place a great premium on saving money up front, even if it means higher payments for many years to come. If, on the other hand, you really don’t have that much you need the money for – you figure it would just sit in Treasuries earning 4% – then your personal “discount rate” would be low, and you’d be more inclined to pay the points in order to enjoy a lower interest rate going forward. The final wrinkle (or at least the final one that occurs to me) is that you are not really borrowing $300,000 for 30 years, so figuring the precise breakeven point is even more complicated. You are borrowing $300,000 to begin with, but each month you are paying down the principal – imperceptibly at first, but then a little more each year. So those last 10 years of a 30-year mortgage are really pretty insignificant when it comes to this decision, for two reasons, First, as I say, the time value of money – $1 saved 25 years from now sure ain’t worth paying $1 for now. (More like 12 cents, if you use a 9% discount rate.) Second, after 25 years on a conventional 30-year 6.5% $300,000 mortgage you are not borrowing $300,000; your outstanding principal is down to under $90,000. So the eighth of a point you’re saving in year 25 doesn’t save you $375, as it did the first year, but just $112.50. These wrinkles can be of an interest to a math major. But since you don’t know how long you’ll hold your mortgage, it’s a level of complexity you can comfortably ignore. As a practical matter, William, faced with this grid of options, you should probably take the 6.25% choice, which is the low-hanging fruit – it costs you very little up front to lower your rate by 3 eighths of a point. If you keep the loan even just 4 years, let alone 30, you will come out ahead.
Salty Weekend Reading August 23, 2002February 21, 2017 SALTED GRAPEFRUIT Mark Kennet: ‘You might also try salt plus chili powder on slightly under-ripe mangos. That’s how they eat them in Thailand, and it’s really surprisingly good! Here in Peru, I’m so happy to have a zillion different types of fresh fruit every day that I don’t bother to put anything on it – I can’t imagine anything improving a cherimoya.’ John Calkins: ‘Your “Grapefruit” column described exorbitant room service charges at a four-star Beverly Hills hotel, while “Pressing Matters” states that the grapefruit in question was delivered to your hotel room in San Francisco. Jet lag, perhaps, or did you inhale too much steam in Des Moines?’ ☞ Oops. EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION Tim Bonham: ‘Have you seen ecomponline.com? It uses SEC reports to give you the compensation of the top executives of companies. Very interesting. Looking up ones like Enron, etc. can be infuriating! I just wish they had included a line at the bottom giving the total reported profit (or loss) for the company for that year.’ ☞ Neat. YOU CAN CUT/PASTE FROM MYM12 IN WIN ’98 OR XP! Michael Rutkaus: ‘For XP Home: Click over little icon at upper left of MYM12 Screen in XP. Select Edit. Now you can mark (you do this to select what to copy) cut, paste almost like in Windows. You also have a better Find than in MYM12. Also if you don’t have the nice MYM12 Icon on your Windows XP desktop, but have a DOS looking icon, you can right click on that, select Program, then select change icon and then Browse in the MYM12 folder to find the icon. For Win98/Me and even Win95, the key, running it inside a window, not ‘full screen.’ (Right-click on the MYM icon on your desktop and select Properties and then Screen. Then tell Windows you want to run MYM in a window, and that you want to Display Toolbar. Next time you start MYM12 it will have a modicum of a toolbar at the top.’ ☞ Now they tell me. VARIABLE UNIVERSAL LIFE INSURANCE Steven: ‘An advisor wants me to buy a low load, commission-free VUL. What do you think of this product?’ ☞ If there’s a load, low as it may be, how can there be no commission? If you mean he/she gets absolutely no commission for recommending this product, that would be a reason at least to listen. But do you need life insurance? (From Steven’s e-mail address, I’m guessing he may not.) If not, don’t buy. And even if you do, why not buy inexpensive term life insurance, that’s easy to shop for, and do your stock market investing separately (and/or use the money to fund a Roth IRA)? WEEKEND READING FROM GEORGE SOROS Click here.
Are We the Next Japan? August 22, 2002January 24, 2017 THE WACO ECONOMIC SUMMIT John R: ‘On PBS a few minutes ago, Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill tried to play down criticism that the forum’s attendees aren’t representative of everyday people. He cited attendee Marilyn Carlson, ‘who owns a travel business. She should be able to give us perspective about what it means to be on the front lines.’ Well, Marilyn Carlson’s ‘travel business’ is the Carlson Companies, the privately-held conglomerate that owns the Radisson hotel chain, TGI Friday’s, and a dozen other entities. (See carlson.com.) She’s the daughter of the late Curt Carlson, the wealthiest person in Minnesota. That’s the Bush administration view of what it must be like to be on the front lines?’ ONE DOWN, 50 MILLION TO GO Bill: ‘Your rants are finally getting to me. I voted for W. because I liked his public political agenda. And I still do. But this Florida thing got to me, finally. You just may get me to register as something other than Republican.’ ARE WE THE NEXT JAPAN? Click here. The author’s conclusion, thankfully, is no, probably not – our system is more flexible and resilient than Japan’s. But the analysis is interesting. One thing it reminds us of is how hard it is – for us, certainly, but even for the Fed – to know what’s really going on with the money supply. The obvious measure: how fast the Fed is letting it grow. But is rapid growth in the money supply inflationary? Or even an effective boost to our economy? Not if most or all of those newly printed dollars are merely being used as currency in other countries, where greenbacks are the unofficial currency. And not if the velocity of money is slowing. When that happens, yes, there are more dollars, but each one of them, by moving around less quickly, does less work. Back when interest rates were sky high, people would race to the bank not to lose a weekend’s interest. Now, with interest rates on short-term money all but zero, who cares if a check takes an extra day to get deposited? Or if it’s not just pennies, but dimes and quarters, that sit, unused, in a jar? Is the Fed pushing on a string? Does deflation loom? No, probably not that, either, says the author; at least not in a major way. But the discussion, if you have time, is informative.
Jeb – Part 2 August 21, 2002February 21, 2017 FULL DISCLOSURE Sold the Citigroup written up at 25.90 last month for 35.77 yesterday. Nothing against Citigroup, but any time I can make 38% on a blue chip in less than a month – i.e., never – I’ll grab it. And I do worry there could be a chance to buy it cheaper again. Yes, selling flies in the face of the buy-and-hold strategy that generally works best (although it was in a retirement account, so there was no tax hit). And yes, if it were a speculative stock bought for a home run, it could also be a mistake to sell. (If one always sold with a 38% gain, the risk versus reward of taking big risks would change dramatically: from, say, ‘heads, I make 1,000%, tails I lose 100% to ‘heads I make 38%; tails I lose 100%.’) But Citigroup is no nutty little biotech. The other stocks we bought that lucky day were: EPN (up 43% from $24.75 to $35.52, and still sporting a good yield); MRK (up 29% from $39.10 to $50.64), JNJ (up 24% from $44.16 to $54.90), CSPLF (up slightly from $2.60 to $2.80) and the long-suffering ‘stock that will surely be zero,’ oft chronicled here, BOREF (more or less unchanged at around $3). PRESS, BATHE, FLUSH Alan: ‘Forty-nine states have some degree of drought (severe in my state of NC). Do not use a half hour of water to unwrinkle a suit.’ ☞ I kept the stopper in, so that the light steamy spray would collect. Later, with a tub half full of water, I took a bath. Then I shut off the water to the toilet temporarily, refilling the tank with cupfuls of water from the tub.* *Or will, thanks to your admonishment, next time. JEB’S FURTHER APPOINTMENTS Following up on yesterday‘s disclosures, here’s a column from the Miami Herald. If you’re a separation-of-church-and-state kind of gal or guy, you might fund it vaguely troubling. As you might, also, Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s 1985 dissenting opinion in Wallace v. Jaffree, where he wrote: ‘The ‘wall of separation between church and State’ is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.’
Jeb Bush Stands By His Man August 20, 2002December 29, 2016 Two things going on in Florida, both speaking to the vision of our governor, Jeb Bush. This is not about the Florida state troopers posted menacingly in black precincts on election day a couple of years ago, or Jeb’s assuring his brother that he would not lose Florida. This is not about Jeb’s cutting Florida’s intangible property tax – which only the wealthiest Floridians pay – in half, while leaving taxes on everyone else unchanged . . . and then slashing drug treatment programs . . . of which I have written before. This is about two other things going on in Florida, with breaking news in just the last couple of days. The first is a rerun of Anita Bryant’s 1977 campaign to overturn an ordinance that protected gays and lesbians from discrimination. She was successful, and it was not until December 1, 1998, that the Miami-Dade County Commission passed a new ordinance making it illegal to discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation – just as it is illegal to discriminate based on race, sex, national origin, age, religion, or disability. Now, the Religious Right is out to see that repealed, to assure that gays and lesbians can be discriminated against. It would be bad for tourism, to be sure, and hurt the county’s economy. But it’s just like cheating or stealing or marrying a non-virgin bride – the Bible proscribes it and no more need be said. (Hold that cheating/stealing thought for a minute though, won’t you?) They are determined to see the human rights ordinance repealed on September 10, and have gathered tens of thousands of signatures to put their repeal initiative on the ballot. It’s actually open to some debate whether the Bible, least of all the New Testament, proscribes love between two people of the same sex. Clearly, love is OK – love in fact is encouraged on virtually every page – but same-sex physical relations are proscribed in the Old Testament. I would argue that it is same-sex relations between God’s heterosexual children that were intended to be proscribed. But that’s a different column. The point is, these people feel deeply that it is their calling to get the voters of Miami-Dade to the polls September 10 to proclaim gays and lesbians unworthy of equal protection under the law. You gotta respect someone who feels that strongly about living a highly moral life, even if you don’t necessarily see it the same way. So isn’t it interesting (here comes the cheating/stealing part) that one of the leaders of Take Back Miami and two of his followers were arrested for fraud Friday? August 17, 2002 Christian coalition chief accused of falsifying gay rights petition By David Cázares Florida Sun-Sentinel Miami Bureau MIAMI — The head of the Miami-Dade County Christian Coalition, a key figure in a battle to repeal anti-discrimination protections for gay men and lesbians, was arrested on Friday for allegedly lying on the petitions that propelled a referendum on whether voters should repeal the measure onto the Sept. 10 ballot. And therein lies a tale. The short form is that the alleged petition fraud was completely evident – pages and pages of signatures in exactly the same handwriting, for example – more than a year ago. But this is Jeb Bush’s Florida. When the Miami-Dade state’s attorney finally got close to filing charges, Governor Bush moved the case to tiny Polk County, near Orlando, which lacked the resources easily to pursue it. But pursued it ultimately was, which is a heartening thing (and too long a story for this column), and the result was the arrests of the deeply moral leader of the Miami-Dade County Christian Coalition. I know it’s Florida, but you’re really not supposed to forge pages and pages of signatures. Even in Florida, election fraud is a crime. It looks as if the initiative will remain on the September 10 ballot. But perhaps this latest event will discourage some of the big money from flowing in to support it. Or, well, maybe not. The Take-Back Miami take on this is a press release headlined, “Homosexualist Extremists Hide Behind Arrests of Pro-Family Citizens.” A homosexualist extremist, I guess, is essentially anyone who supports the Miami-Dade human rights ordinance, including, I guess, the county commissioners who enacted it. “Desperately seeking to undermine the much-needed repeal of Miami-Dade County Florida’s highly unpopular ‘sexual orientation’ amendment,” the press release explains, “politically well-connected homosexualist extremists have instigated the baseless and unwarranted arrests of pro-repeal citizens.” Yep – we got Bush in our pocket. Does basically anything we want. (The opposition to Take-Back Miami is led by a group called Save Dade, which has secured the endorsement of almost everyone who is anyone in South Florida, including the AFL-CIO, the Beacon Council (a business group) and the Miami Chamber of Commerce – extremists all, I guess – though not, of course, the endorsement of Governor Jeb Bush.) With luck, the outcome September 10, 2002, will be quite different from the outcome June 7, 1977, with Anita Bryant and her group, “Save Our Children.” The world has come a long way since then. (The mayors of Paris and Berlin are both openly gay; one of the two American political parties openly embraces the equal rights of its gay and lesbian citizens; and so on.) But isn’t the name of Anita Bryant’s 1977 group – Save Our Children – an interesting segue? Because if there’s one thing we virtually all quite genuinely care about, it’s children. And that’s one of the reasons it’s been so awful to see Jeb Bush’s Department of Children and Families in Florida losing them. You remember the national attention focused on that little girl whom the department simply lost? She is still not found. And did you see where one of the Department’s workers was found slumped over the wheel of her car, drunk, with a 7-month old foster child in the back? The Department failed to do a background check on the woman. And did you see where the Department put out a list of “lost children” and the Sun-Sentinel immediately published the whereabouts of 9 of them? So a few days ago, Governor Bush tossed out the Department chief he had been defending for months and put in, as head of Florida’s Department of Children and Families, a fellow named Jerry Regier from Oklahoma, a good fundamentalist Christian who it turns out had his name attached to a 1989 paper saying that women should be subservient to men, that they should stay at home if they have children, and that it was okay to inflict corporal punishment on children that produced welts and bruises, so long as the welts and bruises were not permanent. The Miami Herald discovered all this with a simple Google search. (I did a Google search of my own – on nothing more than “Regier bruises” – and got this when I clicked the I’m Feeling Lucky button. And a friend sent this amusing column from the Herald.) Regier has apparently disavowed that paper, and Jeb has accepted that disavowal and stands by his choice. So there may not be money in Florida to decrease overcrowding in elementary schools – that money went to cut the intangible property tax on the wealthy in half – but at least we can rest easy that every compassionate effort, short of spending money, is being made to promote the welfare of Florida’s children. It is a grand time to be rich and powerful in America.
Pressing Matters August 19, 2002February 21, 2017 I was on the road, including a mid-afternoon, mid-August drive through the Mojave desert, a red-eye from San Francisco to Des Moines, and then, finally, Saturday morning, a small run-in with security at the Des Moines Airport on the way back home. (‘But they’re just magazines and newspapers!’ ‘It doesn’t matter, you can have only two carry-ons.’ ‘But I got upgraded to first and the plane’s empty and there’s no one here – it’s 7:30 Saturday morning – it’s just you 17 security guards and me and my roll-on bag, my computer bag, and this bag of newspapers.’ ‘You can only have two carry-ons.’ ‘You want me to check the newspapers?’ ‘You could do that.’ ‘Go all the way back to the counter and check this little bag of newspapers?’ ‘Or just stuff them in your suitcase.’ ‘You mean just smash ’em in and scrunch everything together even worse for three minutes while I go through security and then take them back out? That will make America safer?’ ‘That would be fine. It’s the government. Only two carry-ons allowed.’) My bag was already stuffed – 10 days on the road in a single roll-on – but I got them in somehow, all the while thinking of Philip K. Howard’s book, The Death of Common Sense (and its sequel, The Collapse of the Common Good). I had managed fine with my little bag of newspapers at LaGuardia and at LAX and at SFO. But here in Des Moines, the jig was up. And my suit got even more grotesquely crinkled than before. Yes, Charles has tried to show me how to do this stuff. You turn the jacket inside out, smooth some things, fold just so, lay in on top of all the other neatly folded things – voila! I got to Des Moines, unpacked the suit, and it looked like origami. (This was on the way in from San Francisco, where I had just had it pressed in the same hotel that charged $17.54 for a grapefruit.) There was some thought of sending it out to be pressed yet again, but I was afraid it would not come back in time. I pulled out the ironing board, plugged in the iron – I have seen this done before – and tried to imagine how to spread the jacket out in a way that would allow ironing it. Should there not be some sort of ironing mannequin? My suit is not shaped like a board. After a little on-the-job training (oh! I guess I should take my glasses and stuff out of the breast pocket!), a light bulb went on. Two, in fact. The first bulb was the bright realization that I cold never, possibly, under any imaginable circumstances, succeed at this. The second, retrieved from the dim recesses of my memory, was that there was another way. I hung the jacket in the John, turned on a light spray of scalding hot water, closed the door, and left. Half an hour later, miracle of miracles, the wall paper was still on the bathroom walls, steam was everywhere, the jacket, though dank, was perfectly smooth, and I think I saw two guys sitting with towels talking about the baseball strike, but it was so steamy I couldn’t be sure. (Later, when the steam cleared, they were gone.) I took the jacket out and hung it in front of the air conditioner for a couple of hours; put it on, and went to dinner. The other way to do this in August is simply to send your jacket to Florida. Speaking of which – come back tomorrow.
Under Six! August 16, 2002February 21, 2017 Fixed-rate 30-year mortgages have fallen a hair under 6% for the first time in something like 40 years. MSNBC reported a 5.95% average rate. Just by way of perspective: from 1880 to 1965 – 85 years – there was never such a thing in this country as a home mortgage at more than 6%. (And didn’t Hamurabi’s Code impose the death penalty for charging interest above 6%? My memory’s a little less clear on that one.) So, far from being all but impossible, sub-6% mortgages are actually just the way things ‘always’ were. Yet something tells me it won’t remain this way for 85 years this time. Not the worst opportunity to refinance – perhaps with a 15-year loan at a 5.7% rate. Later this weekend or Monday: Andy learns to press clothes. (If he had ever learned to pack properly, he wouldn’t have needed to learn to press clothes.)
Health Notes August 15, 2002February 21, 2017 EIGHT GREAT YEARS Today is our eighth anniversary. I’m stuck out West asking people for money for the upcoming election, but that’s OK, because it’s part of a process. At some point a majority of Americans, and their representatives in Congress, will decide that a gay couple that’s been together eight years is entitled to the same economic rights and benefits as a straight couple that’s been together eight years. (Indeed, the straight couple gets these benefits even if they met yesterday.) And that a society that wants to encourage stable, responsible, loving relationships should recognize them. BUT WILL GRAPEFRUIT KILL ME BEFORE OUR NINTH? Kerry Moskop: ‘If you’re still taking Lipitor … well, nibbling on them … grapefruit is a ‘no-no.’ My Lipitor prescription container has a big, red warning label: ‘Do not eat grapefruit or drink grapefruit juice at any time while taking this medication.’ I don’t know if it’s because grapefruit counteracts the beneficial action of Lipitor or the two, work together, do something dastardly to you.” Vince DeHart: “From MedicineNet.com: ‘Grapefruit juice inhibits a special enzyme in the intestines that is responsible for the natural breakdown and absorption of many medications. When the action of this enzyme is blocked, the blood levels of these medications increase, which can lead to toxic side effects from the medications.’” ☞ I quit taking Lipitor when I discovered this conflict. I decided grapefruit and exercise were better for me than Lipitor and its potential side-effects. I was also offended by a slick brochure the manufacturer sent out trying to help me with a friendly warning never to split the tablets. Ostensibly, this was for my benefit. In fact, I believe, it was for theirs. At Drugstore.com, a year’s supply would have cost $678 if I had bought the prescribed 10mg size, versus $269 if I bought the 40 mg tablets and cut them in quarters. I PAID THREE GRAPEFRUITS TOO MUCH John Seiffer: “I usually go lower than you on Priceline.com. In Dallas I get 3-star hotels for $30. One time I was at the DoubleTree and asked if I could extend the stay at the Priceline rate of $30, saving them some fee I imagine they must be paying Priceline. They said no, so I went back on Priceline to extend the stay and got the same hotel for $30. They did let me keep the same room.” PHILIP MORRIS: ALWAYS LOOKING OUT FOR YOUR HEALTH Speaking of companies that have only your best interests at heart, the New York Times reported yesterday that Philip Morris and others in the 1980’s and 1990’s successfully pressured drug companies to dial back their marketing of nicotine gum and skin patches that help people quit smoking. TAKING GRAPEFRUIT WITH A GRAIN OF SALT Mike Kozlowski: “You should have tried the salt on the grapefruit. Someone told me about this, and I was very very skeptical, but: It’s good! It doesn’t taste salty at all; it just brings out the grapefruit’s taste more. Delicious.” EAT WHAT YOU WANT I became famous in our family (with just one sibling, it was hard to be an unknown) for the simple observation to my indecisive cousin – age five at the time, like me, and unsure of a piece of Thanksgiving dinner – “Michael! If you want the ham, eat the ham. If you don’t want the ham, don’t eat the ham. But let’th not asCUTH it all the time!” It is vaguely in that vein that this bit of Internetiana could be read, forwarded by Eric Loeb. You may already have seen it: The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. CONCLUSION: Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is apparently what kills you.