Today Has Been Canceled February 6, 2003March 25, 2012 Do not be alarmed. It is the way we make February a shorter month.
Slamming Spam in Knockemstiff, Ohio February 5, 2003February 22, 2017 From the estimable Less Antman: ‘Having to be available to clients and students has forced me to adopt a high profile with my e-mail address and subjected me to 300 spam messages per day. I couldn’t risk using a traditional spam program, which often throws away legitimate messages. But I no longer get any spam messages. ‘I use a program called ChoiceMail that intercepts my mail, checks it against an approved sender list, and asks others to fill out a simple registration form listing their name and reason for e-mailing me (which I then approve 99% of the time). Spammers, of course, never fill it out, so I never receive their messages, but unlike other spam programs, it doesn’t discard messages that might be legitimate. You can preview the messages in ChoiceMail that have been stopped and approve them yourself without waiting for the person to fill out the registration . . . or simply assume that anyone who had a legitimate purpose for contacting you wouldn’t have a problem filling in the simple form one time. You can also have the program scan your address book and develop a good guy list to begin, or add other senders automatically. One option adds to your good guy list anyone that you e-mail. ‘I went from 300 spams per day to none, and haven’t had any problems with legitimate correspondence. The program is cheap ($40) and, like all e-mail programs of quality, doesn’t work with AOL’s proprietary e-mail program (sorry, Andy). But I know AOL users who use it successfully, because they use Outlook Express to read their mail instead of AOL’s reader.’ YOU’VE BEEN TO PARIS – BUT PARIS, MAINE? These are real places: 1) Toad Suck, AR 2) Hot Coffee, MS 39428 3) Spread Eagle, WI 4) Frankenstein, MO 65016 5) Chicken, AK 99732 6) Fifty-Six, AZ 7) Knockemstiff, OH 8) Rabbit Hash, KY 41005 9) Happy Jack, AZ 86024 10) Truth or Consequences, NM 87901 You may have seen this list going round the Internet. But only here will you find the zip codes. (Well, for those that have zip codes.) Ours is not only a family web site, it is a value-added web site.
Conglomeration February 4, 2003February 22, 2017 RUEFUL . . . AND EVEN A BIT TRUEFUL This Saturday Night Live skit takes a long time to load if you’re on a dial-up modem, but on my machine eventually did load and began playing. MEDIA CONCENTRATION Can we rely on the media conglomerates to make media conglomeration the important topic of discussion it should be? Click here. TAX-FREE DIVIDENDS Dave Neal: ‘Do you know how the current bush plan to eliminate tax on dividends would affect CIRA/401k accounts? It would seem that ‘tax-free’ dividends would still be be taxed when withdrawn. This would actually penalize retirement accounts!’ ☞ True. But Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill would save $6 million a year (to take just one example), so it all evens out.
Cell Hotels.com, Buy Jet Blue And Maybe a Little PCG? February 3, 2003February 22, 2017 CELL PHONES FOR THE STONE AGE Imagine cell phones in the days before electricity. They must have worked with a hand crank. And now they do again! Click here for a $26 pocket-sized hand-crank cell phone recharger. (I haven’t tried it myself, but will.) HOTELS.COM I’ve written several times about how great Priceline.com is for getting cheap 4-star hotel rooms. Well, for a variety of reasons I decided to try Hotel.com for a recent three-day visit to Los Angeles (mainly: a friend is involved with Hotels.com). It suggested the Elan Hotel, a relatively new 50-room boutique hotel. It had only three stars, but was featured as a special, value. I clicked through to the hotel’s web site, and it looked fine. I decided it had been awarded just three stars because, as a ’boutique,’ it lacked restaurants and room service and all that – which was fine. (Do you know what hotels charge? Brunch for three at the Beverly Hills Hotel this morning on my way to Jet Blue was elegant and delicious and cost more than the flight from LA to New York. Literally.) Hotels.com offered three nights at the Elan for $456, total, and I was all set to click when I realized that Elan itself was offering the same thing for $477. Hotels.com was not exactly saving me a fortune. I decided to book direct with the Elan. It just looked so nice, I figured I’d go all out. And it is nice, in its cozy, thin-walled, motel-ish funky way. Certainly the staff works hard to do a great job. But upon checking in, I logged on to Priceline and, for about $50 a night less – $86 a night – moved to the Bel Age a few blocks away, at Sunset and San Vicente, which is 20 times nicer. For hotel rooms, Priceline.com rules. (As I’ve suggested before, the only two times not to use them are if you need to be in the same hotel as the rest of your conventioneers, say; or if you think you might have to change or cancel the trip. Once purchased, the rooms are not refundable.) JET BLUE Long Beach airport is so easy! You just keep going south on the 405 past crowded, scary LAX and, maybe 20 miles later, get off at Long Beach Airport . . . drop off your rent-a-car across the street from the terminal . . . and hop on Jet Blue to New York for less than the cost of brunch. For travel to or from the New York area, at low cost and with minimum restrictions and penalties for changing your plans, check out Jet Blue. PCG A value investor I know, who really does his homework, thinks that PG&E (symbol: PCG), now $13.80, could be $22 in a couple of years. Not without risk! But if he turns out to be right, as he often does, it wouldn’t be half bad. I bought some.
Mr. Sterling – Tonight on NBC at 8 January 31, 2003March 25, 2012 My only regret is that I didn’t know to suggest this in time for you to see the first three episodes. But you’ll quickly catch on. It is to the Legislative Branch what the West Wing is to the Executive. Tonight on NBC at 8pm. Donald Millinger: ‘While you may be heartened by Bush’s commitment to increase spending by $2 billion a year to combat AIDS in Africa (let’s wait and see if that’s fully funded), and it is indeed a great promise, it only makes me angrier about his domestic behavior on the issue. By forcing his ‘abstinence only’ policies, opposing needle exchanges, failing to encourage schools to provide accurate and complete prevention education and eliminating effective information on government websites, he is reducing prevention efforts here at home and increasing the likelihood of more infections. As evidenced by Jesse Helms as he was leaving the Senate, it is easier for Bush to ‘sell’ AIDS in Africa to his party than confront it as a domestic issue, since it is still perceived by many conservatives as a gay disease in the United States.’
Where Would We Be Without Molly? January 30, 2003February 22, 2017 THE PITTS Click here. Enjoy. (Where would we be without great Texas women like Ann Richards, Liz Smith, Marie Brenner, and – as per this latest column – Molly Ivins?) AH, THE BIBLE CLUB And here. This one’s not about your money, as Molly’s is. It’s about teaching kids in Kentucky to hate. (Where would we be without the New York Times?)
The State of the Chicken January 29, 2003February 22, 2017 Jim: ‘I say my tax-deferred interest income is not like money coming into my budget; my wife says it is part of my income. We don’t receive it as cash; it compounds. Should this be included as part of my income to budget with?’ ☞ I prefer your approach because it’s more conservative. Ideally, your investments would occupy a separate place in your brain for growing, not spending – augmented each year by the surplus from your budget – until the time come to buy a house or pay for college or, eventually, supplement Social Security during your retirement. I goofed with the link to Gary Halbert’s letter yesterday. It’s fixed. My wide-eyed optimism was obviously misplaced a couple of weeks ago when I hazarded that Amram Mitzna would replace Ariel Sharon in yesterday’s election. It was presented more as a wishful hunch than a prediction (what do I know from Israeli politics?), but either way, I was not even close. I have so many thoughts on the State of the Union (the least of them being that it’s pronounced NOO-klee-er) that I’m not even going to try. Suffice it to say that on the Iraq part – especially if Russia comes around, as seems to be happening – I think the administration may have it about right, awful as the situation is. (Well, about right other than that the timing of the war debate was incredibly cynical, and the approach should have been multilateral from the start.) I don’t think we should proceed unless we can persuade a lot of our friends that it is the right thing to do. But I think we will persuade them. And who knows – maybe Russia will be able to persuade Saddam that the jig is up. I was heartened by the additional $2 billion a year to combat AIDS in Africa and by the boost for hydrogen-powered cars. I don’t know enough about the latter to know how real it is, but it does at least seem more hopeful than the original Bush push to cut the budget for alternative energy research in half. The colossally misguided tax proposals? The Social Security proposal? The prescription drug plan? Well, it’s a great time to be rich and powerful in America. But I don’t think that going into debt in order to lop $327,000 off Dick Cheney’s tax bill is going to produce jobs. Finally, you may recall my November 14 column about cruelty to animals (I was for it!), titled, I Don’t Want to See the Factory – Please Pass the Salt. Now from my friend Dan Mathews at PETA, who once dressed up as a carrot to protest something – it wasn’t cruelty to carrots, I remember that much – was it cruelty to rabbits? I think that may have been it – now comes this e-mail. I was contrasting various compensation levels (you knit, you play tennis, I contrast compensation levels), and I thought to compare the pay of Tyson chicken chief John Tyson, who made $7.3 million plus options and perks last year, with the pay of PETA President Ingrid Newkirk, who made $26,000. I e-mailed Dan just to make sure I remembered correctly that PETA was down on Tyson. This is not to say Tyson is wrong and PETA is right – the more efficiently Tyson can produce chicken, the less it costs consumers – but read Dan’s response and you decide. Do Not Read This Before Lunch: Tyson is among the key culprits in making sure birds are exempt from the Humane Slaughter Act. As one of the world’s largest poultry producers, Tyson confines billions of chickens to filthy, poorly ventilated sheds where they spend their entire lives living in their own waste. To increase profits, they genetically manipulate birds to grow so large, so fast that their legs cannot withstand their own weight, leading to deformities, chronic leg pain, crippling arthritis and an inability to get to food and water. Overcrowding is so severe that suffocation, heart attacks from stress, and disease transmittal are all too common while it is often impossible for the birds to make even the most basic movements, such as spreading their wings. During transport, birds are crammed into cages on trucks for hours without food or water and many are trampled to death by their frightened cage-mates. At the slaughterhouse, they are dropped fully conscious into boiling water to defeather them. Hungry yet? Coming: I Still Owe You Dissenting Views on the Copyright Issue
Nineteen Percent of Us Are in the Top One Percent January 28, 2003February 22, 2017 [Sorry if you had trouble reaching yesterday’s column – and for its length, if you did reach it. It was the Internet worm.] MOVE OVER, LAKE WOBEGON! Paul Lerman: ‘In regard to your wonderment at . . . ‘the Republicans’ skill at persuading so many folks, who don’t earn $300,000 or $3 million, that huge tax cuts for the best off are something we should go deeply into debt to provide’ . . . a Time Magazine survey referenced by David Brooks in the New York Times (‘The Triumph of Hope Over Self-Interest’ – January 12) may help to explain it. The survey asked people if they are in the top 1 percent of earners. Nineteen percent said they were. A further 20 percent said they expected to be someday. ‘So right away,’ notes Brooks, ‘you have 39 percent of Americans who thought that when Mr. Gore savaged a plan that favored the top 1 percent, he was taking a direct shot at them.” [Not only are all the inhabitants of Lake Wobegon above average – they are way, way above average.] BORROW-AND-SPEND REPUBLICANS James: ‘You ask . . . ‘How much deeper into debt do the borrow-and-spend Republicans have to bury us before that moniker – ‘borrow-and-spend Republicans’ – finally catches on? Another $3 trillion? Another $6 trillion?’ . . . Your partisanship is showing. You know it is a fact that we have not had a year-over-year reduction of national debt since the 1950’s. Both parties have been on a spending binge for the last 50 years.’ ☞ The national debt went up far more as a percentage of GDP under Reagan/Bush and will now again under this Bush than it did under Carter or Clinton. Yet all we ever hear is ‘tax-and-spend’ liberals. The Republicans seem to spend as much as the Democrats; they just don’t want to pay for it. They push it off onto our kids to pay instead. My point is simply: the term ‘borrow-and-spend Republicans’ is probably just as valid as ‘tax-and-spend liberals.’ But we don’t have a Rush Limbaugh brainwashing 17 million cheerful ‘ditto-heads’ a day, so you have to spread the word. GARY HALBERT NEVER MET A MAN WHO MADE MORE THAN $200,000 Walt Klypchak: ‘The attached letter seems to be an objective, fact-based review. Is it?’ ☞ Well, it’s interesting, the more so because the author, Gary Halbert, says it reaches to 1.6 million people. The part I find most worth reading describes how the dividend-tax-cut proposal, if it ever passed, would lower the capital gains tax as well. (And complicate taxes even more.) So that part is worth reading. But then, at great length, Halbert sneers at those of us who fault the Republicans for favoring the rich. Take this one little snippet near the end. He writes: And Finally, Who Are ‘The Rich’ Anyway? If you make $28,000 a year, you are in the top 50% of taxpayers; $55,000 puts you in the top 25%; and $92,000 puts you in the top 10%, the so-called “super-rich.” The liberals NEVER quote these figures either. They know that most people making $28,000-$55,000 do NOT consider themselves remotely to be rich, nor do many who make $92,000. These folks would be appalled if the liberals were to call them rich people, so they don’t. And why would we? Who ever said that someone in the top 10% was ‘super-rich?’ I have never heard anyone say that. Have you? No place in Halbert’s letter does he ever mention anyone earning more than $200,000. He admits those folks would save $3,000 compared to what would be saved by people earning less, but, heck, they paid so much more to begin with – all of which I don’t much dispute. But that’s not what most people are objecting to! That’s not the famous ‘top 1%.’ No place does Halbert mention what someone in the top 1% would save. Not President Bush, who it’s been estimated would save $44,000 a year from his tax cut. Not the VP, who it’s been estimated would save $327,000. And even they are not ‘super-rich,’ by the way, if you ask me. They are three hundred million miles from the Forbes 400. If Halbert is trying to be objective – and not just trying to seem objective – why is he casting this as a dispute between average folks and those who make $200,000 a year? The top federal income tax bracket doesn’t even kick in until you get to $307,000 in taxable income (which can mean a lot more than $307,000 in total income) – so why was $200,000 the highest income he could imagine mentioning in his discussion? Halbert is obviously a bright man. My guess is that he earns far more than $200,000 a year himself. It strikes me that sending his message out to 1.6 million readers, most of whom probably earn less, is purposely deceptive. I wonder how much the tax cuts would save him? I wonder, for that matter, how much the tax cuts will save Rush, and whether he’s told all his ditto heads – 19% of whom are in the top 1% and 20% more (God bless ’em!) expect to be.
More Thoughts About the 10 Men and the $100 Dinner January 27, 2003February 22, 2017 Dan Marcucci: ‘Thanks for that idiotic thing about ten men going to dinner. It is truly idiotic. The part of the story that really grates is the premise that all ten men are eating the same dinner. In reality, the first four men receive a crust; the last man, a feast.’ ☞ Also grating: the premise that four of the ten pay nothing for their meal. In reality, they pay sales tax, payroll tax and property tax (either directly or through their rent), gas tax, alcohol tax, phone tax and what is in effect the ‘lottery-ticket tax’ – a tax on hope. Michael Axelrod: ‘The thing missing when analyzing the story and the tax system is the concept of ‘utility.’ There is general agreement that the marginal utility of income decreases the more you earn. [To a starving man, $4 for a sandwich has enormous utility; to a rich man, virtually none.] This is the justification for a graduated income system. The idea is to have every taxpayer give up at least approximately the same amount of total utility in taxes. But there is no general agreement on what utility function to use. So politics determines the tax system.’ And speaking of politics . . . Kevin Rasmussen: ‘The story should include the rich guy’s making a contribution to the owner’s re-election fund, giving him far more clout in determining the distribution of the $20.’ Jonathan Levy: ‘Point #1: We are hardly in a situation where our $100 dinner now costs $80. It is more like the restaurant was firebombed a couple of years ago and now has to charge $120 for dinner in order to pay for the extra security. If we ever find ourselves in a situation where the government needs 20% less money to do the same job (maybe the day we are free from interest payments on the extra $3 trillion in debt run up under Reagan/Bush?), sure, let’s look at cutting taxes on everyone. Point #100 (since there must be 98 in-between): The stated threat is that if the rich feel too abused they are going to pack up and leave. Fair enough. This country was built by people who got fed up and quit other countries over economic conditions or oppression. Anyone who feels it is unbearable to be wealthy in the U.S. has a complete right to quit this country and become a citizen of another (assuming it is for real and not just a paperwork trick to get out of taxes). That is a basic human right but one that, so far, few wealthy Americans seem to have felt a need to exercise.’ Randy Woolf: ‘The ‘dinner analogy’ is hopelessly flawed. The main problem for me is: in the story, the diners are presented with a special $20 bonus, or ‘surplus,’ i.e. cheaper food. But the U.S has a deficit now, not a surplus. Also, in a real society, our fates are all bound together, and the well-off suffer when the poor become ‘too poor.’ A better analogy would be more along these lines: the 10 people are employees in a restaurant. A new restaurant [China] has opened with much lower prices. The 10 employees at our restaurant agree to take a pay cut so the restaurant can compete. The highest paid employees say everyone should share the pain, not just them, so everyone’s pay is cut 20%. This results in the subsistence workers’ being paid below subsistence. So the lowest paid employees are now too addle-brained from lack of food to do their jobs well. Some of them have caught infectious diseases, but cannot afford to go to the doctor, and are spreading these diseases to the customers. All the educated employees who could do so went elsewhere, so the remaining ones are too illiterate to read the health department sanitation signs. A few of the customers get sick and die from e. coli. When the place gets robbed, the security guard decides this pay is not worth risking his life for, and runs away. Business gets worse, and the highest paid decide they must lower prices – and pay checks – a further 20% to attract customers!’ ☞ And soon the entire world collapses. But if you think Randy may have gone a little over the top to make his point, how about this. How about imagining that we’re all part of an enterprise called America, Inc., and that business these days is not so hot. It isn’t terrible, by any means, but we’re dipping into the red. And we have some capital equipment – like our schools – in pretty sore need of investment. So, sporting a high credit rating, we determine to borrow $2 trillion over the next few years (by running deficits) to get us over this rough patch. Interestingly, we decide not to invest in the schools. And we decide not to help bail out our 50 subsidiaries, most of which are having severe financial difficulty. Instead, in our wisdom, we decide to use the borrowed money to give our employees pay hikes (for isn’t that what an income-tax cut effectively is? a hike in take-home pay?), but only to our higher-paid employees. Those at the bottom will get no raise. The preponderance of the trillions we borrow will go to the 5% who are already earning the most – with a very special emphasis on the top 1%. The trick is to get people to think this is (a) fair and (b) a good deal for them personally (so they will circulate stuff like that idiotic thing about the 10 men and the $100 dinner). So we tell them: ‘These tax reductions will bring real and immediate benefits to middle-income Americans. Ninety-two million Americans will keep an average of $1,083 more of their own money.’ (I bold this statement because it is an actual quote from our commander-in-chief.) We do not tell them that the $1,083 is an average, and that because the top 5% get most of the benefit (Bush: an estimated $44,000 a year; Cheney: an estimated $327,000 a year; Gates, an estimated $40 million a year), most Americans will get much less – yet all will be saddled with their share of the extra trillions we’ll be borrowing to do this. When I added that comment last week, Kevin Clark felt I had gone too far. He wrote: That ‘average savings of $1,083’ has been bothering me too. I chalked it up to the usual political hyperbole, but it is misleading. Good for you (and others) for pointing it out. But it was a little disappointing to see you then turn around and do the same thing in the opposite direction. I refer to your saying ‘most of those 92 million families would . . . be saddled with their share of the trillions in new national debt all this is leading to.’ I’m sure you know that half of all taxpayers pay virtually nothing in taxes. So it seems to me that most taxpayers aren’t being saddled with anything, much less their share. If the debt ever gets paid back it’ll be from taxes on the ‘rich,’ so it seems more accurate to say that current rich people are saddling future rich people with debt. I don’t know that that’s smart or necessary, but that’s a separate question. Well said, but I believe lower- and middle-income families do bear much of the burden when we add trillions to the national debt: Big deficits make a country’s currency weaker than it would otherwise be. That makes prices higher than they otherwise would be. It costs more to buy clothes from China or TVs from Korea or fruit from Mexico if the dollar is weak than if it is strong. Higher prices don’t much hurt the family that just got a $40,000 tax break, but they do hurt the family that is just scraping by. Big deficits likely lead, sooner or later, to higher inflation and interest rates. That’s bad news for those who owe and borrow, not such bad news for those who own and lend. Those getting the bulk of today’s tax cuts will be unaffected by higher auto loan rates. We buy our cars for cash. Those of us who already own nice homes won’t mind terribly if inflation drives their prices higher. Those less fortunate will only see their rents rise. Big deficits crowd out the possibility for other things, like smaller classroom sizes and a prescription drug benefit for seniors. Not an issue if you can afford to send your kids to private school and are covered by a top-notch health insurance plan, but a very big issue for those “fortunate” four out of ten who “pay nothing” for their dinner in that idiotic story about the 10 men who go out for the $100 dinner. So I disagree with those who believe that we need to tilt the balance further toward those already best off. And I am in awe of the Republicans’ skill at persuading so many folks who don’t earn $300,000 or $3 million that huge tax cuts for the best off are something we should go deeply into debt to provide. How much deeper into debt do the borrow-and-spend Republicans have to bury us before that moniker – “borrow-and-spend Republicans” – finally catches on? Another $3 trillion? Another $6 trillion?
Your Thoughts on the Idiotic Thing About the 10 Men and the $100 Dinner January 24, 2003February 22, 2017 But first: Going out on a date this weekend? Need a little confidence builder? You will surely want to click here. And second: Ever wonder how fast you are cruising the internet? Click here and you’ll see. (Thanks to Alan Light for this link.) I have two laptops running simultaneously from the same cable modem. The one that is directly wired to the modem clocked about 550Kbps (kilobits per second) connecting through AOL 5.0. (I can’t upgrade to a higher version because my address file is too large and AOL can’t handle it in its higher versions.) The one that connects to the modem wirelessly and by-passes AOL was twice as fast – 1100Kbps. Connecting over a plain old phone line and my computer’s built-in modem, the connection logged at 43Kbps. And third: I am indebted to Paul Lerman for this link to Jeff Brown’s Philadelphia Inquirer column on index funds. Brown points out that one should only be in the stock market for the long haul . . . and that over the long haul – according to data that Morningstar supplied him comparing the Vanguard 500 index fund with the most recent 10-year performance of actively-managed large-cap mutual funds – just 22.72% of the actively managed funds beat the index fund on a pre-tax basis. For funds held in taxable accounts, just 7.1% did. We have discussed the reasons for this many times in this space, and in my investment guide; but it’s always nice to see common sense confirmed. And fourth: Bob Daniels: ‘The repeated talk of ‘average’ tax cuts in the propaganda campaign for the Bush plan* reminds me of the line from Darryl Huff’s 1954 classic How to Lie with Statistics: The roadside merchant was asked how he could sell rabbit sandwiches so cheap. ‘Well,’ he explained, ‘I have to put some horse-meat in too. But I mix them 50:50. One horse, one rabbit.” ___________________ *Wherein, as described Tuesday, our commander-in-chief promises 92 million families ‘an average $1,083 a year’ from the latest proposed cuts, never mentioning that Bill Gates would get $40 million or so, Dick Cheney $327,000 or so, and George W. himself $44,000 or so . . . while most of those 92 million families would get much less than $1,083, yet be saddled with their share of the trillions in new national debt all this is leading to. And now, finally! Oh, my – will you look at that? We’re out of time. Please come back Monday for your very good thoughts on the 10 men and their idiotic dinner (and Tuesday for your thoughts on copyright extension).