August Is Happiness Happens Month August 3, 2010March 18, 2017 Artichokes are badly misunderstood. And apricots! They are in season and just 17 calories each. The trick to not spurting juice onto your clothes or close associates as you bite into them is to put the whole little thing in your mouth and eat it, shunting the pit off to the side with your tongue. I may have more to say about this at a later date. CHEESE DOODLES Joel Grow: “A moment of silence to honor the passing of a true Great One.” ☞ Morrie Yohai, inventor of the cheese doodle. Gone. Dead at 90. It was a good life. Gone too: NATIONAL THRIFT WEEK It died in 1966, after a half-century run. (“In 1916, with the First World War looming imminently on the horizon, the leaders of America’s major civic organizations launched an ambitious education campaign designed to ready the American public for a wartime economy. Dubbed ‘National Thrift Week’ and sponsored primarily by the Young Men’s Christian Association (Y.M.C.A.), the campaign became a recurring celebration, beginning each year on January 17, in honor of the birthday of Benjamin Franklin, the ‘American apostle of thrift.’ . . .”) It sounds silly – there’s a “week,” or more commonly a “month” for everything, and few pay attention. (August is, among much else, National Cataracts Month, National Beach Month, National Investors Month, Happiness Happens Month and Psoriasis Awareness Month – the perfect month for happy investors with psoriasis and cataracts to go to the beach.) And yet think what’s happened to America since discontinuation of National Thrift Week. It’s time to bring it back. COLLEGE LOOMING? Zac Bissonnette writes on the Huffington Post that the default train wreck on student loans is just beginning. Out at the end of this month, available now for pre-order: Debt-Free U: How I Paid For an Outstanding College Education Without Loans, Scholarships, or Mooching Off My Parents.
Your 2011 Tax Bill August 2, 2010March 18, 2017 APPLE (OR SOMEONE) RESPONDS Friday I warned you about the sharply off-color language in this cartoon mocking the iPhone. Here now the even more sharply off-color – and equally funny – response. (Thanks, Dan.) The broader context, of course, is that both phones are breathtakingly good. When my stepfather was born (hey, Lew!) no one had radios. When my brother was born (hey, Steve!), no one had televisions. When I was in college, I remember visiting my college roommate in Cincinnati (hey, Arn!) and seeing my first ‘touch-tone’ phone. Cincinnati was a test market. And until about five minutes ago, no one had personal computers or iPhone or iPads or GPS or a free way to make cartoon characters talk trash. TAX COMPARISONS Want to see how you’ll do if the President’s tax plan is enacted? John Seiffer: ‘I don’t know who this organization is or if it’s accurate – but this calculator is pretty easy to use.’ ☞ The basic notion is that for taxpayers with income under $200,000 (single) or $250,000 (joint), taxes won’t go up. But check out your own situation.* Be sure, however, to note the biased way the results are summarized. ‘If Congress fails to act to extend the Bush tax cuts,’ it reads, ‘ your income tax burden will be [$2,500] higher in 2011.’ The exact same data could just as easily have been summarized, ‘As you can see by comparing the second and third columns, if Congress ratifies Obama’s plan to keep the Obama tax cuts for 95% of working families (but to let the Bush tax cuts for the most affluent expire), your taxes will not go up a dime.’ *In response to a bug I reported, since fixed, the developer, writes me: ‘We’re very confident in the regular tax calculations for all scenarios. Alternative Minimum Tax calculations might be slightly more shaky because we don’t ask about many things that could affect it, and because of a handful of complicated proposals described on pages 123-130 of this JCT report. Another element that is perhaps slightly more ambiguous than the rest of the calculator are the various education credits, again, because we make a lot of assumptions and don’t ask important questions in an effort to keep the calculator simple. After all, we’re not TurboTax – we’re just trying to give people a reasonable estimate.’ BRCI Doug Gary: ‘I’m curious if you might offer readers an update on BRCI. Your last update, I think was in March.’ ☞ I’ve been disappointed that their very good efforts have thus far not taken off. I think one just holds it expecting the worst, but with a small it might yet work.