Author: A.T.

My ophthalmologist’s optician’s grandfather came to this country from Greece. To New York. This is a great country, and he got a job digging. They were building the New York City subway. Before World War I.

He was young. He spoke no English. He didn’t know what the hell they were doing, he was just digging in the street.

He thought they were digging for gold.

Every day he’d scoop up a little dirt and stick it in a handkerchief to take home. At home, he would sift through the dirt looking for specks of precious metal. He had been told the streets were paved with gold.

I don’t know if this is a true story. It seems to me I’ve heard it before, so maybe it’s just one of those that goes round and round. But my ophthalmologist’s optician heard it from his father and believes it to be true. That’s good enough for me.

This is a great country, full of hopes and dreams and stories. I tell you this to provide a heartwarming break in my relentless assault on Bob Dole’s curious 15% tax-cut proposal.

Tomorrow: 15% of What?

The last couple of days I’ve been trying to figure out how Bob Dole would balance the budget by slashing government revenues and spending more on the military.

This certainly is not the platform on which he was running in the primaries.

But let’s take him at his word — that he really plans to slash taxes, beef up military spending, and yet balance the budget by 2002.

Yesterday I suggested that cutting tax rates wouldn’t increase tax revenues, but rather, as you might expect, lower them. Also, that ending all foreign aid and funding to the arts wouldn’t make a dent.

So where is all the money going to come from to pay for the tax cuts, the increased defense spending, and balance the budget?

You can do away with government meat inspectors or ask airlines to inspect their own planes for safety . . . you could abolish the S.E.C. or cut back the I.R.S. (but those two actually generate money for the Treasury). You could end farm subsidies (but they’re already being phased out — Congress already did that) and sell the national parks to the highest bidder. But all this stuff if penny ante.

The real dollars have to come from the poor, the ill, the elderly — all the people who are getting the money now. This is where the real money is, other than defense, which Dole would increase, not cut.

And that’s fine, you may say. Let efficient, volunteer-based private charity take the place of wastrel government largesse. If children wind up begging in the street, as they do in so many countries, the good people of America will take them in. Or their churches will. Or their church-run orphanages will. Not for nothing have Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole and Ralph Reed all adopted children. They believe in forcing women to bring unwanted fatherless children into the world, because abortion is murder; but, to their credit, they are among the first to step up to plate and take those kids into their hearts and their homes. (At least I assume they are.)

Or, well, if you don’t adopt the kids yourself, you can contribute money to the orphanages, or pay taxes for the prisons (but local taxes, so it’s OK) they’ll eventually be housed in. Either way, the problem is solved.

But here’s where I get confused. According to the IRS, the average itemized charitable deduction in 1994 was between $1200 and $1800 for itemizers who reported adjusted gross income between $15,000 and $75,000. That’s pretty good, considering how tough it is to take care of your own family’s needs these days on an AGI of $15,000 to $75,000.

Now go up to the $100,000-$200,000 adjusted gross income range. Yuppies, lawyers, doctors. Their average charitable deduction in 1994 was $3,420 — less than 3% on average.

Now go up to the $200,000-$500,000 range. Surgeons, law partners, big-time corporate VPs. They averaged $8,372 — still barely 3%.

Now go up to $500,000-$1,000,000. Republicans. Now you’re talking about enough money to pay almost any basic costs of living, so there’s really a choice in how you allocate your funds between luxuries for your family and the needs of your community. Plus, you are very likely to be able to do your giving with appreciated securities, which makes it a lot cheaper than for the guy paying cash. They averaged $21,582. Still about 3%.

Built into that average you do have a few wealthy bleeding-heart liberal Democrats, who tend to give a lot more than average. (That’s one of the signs of a bleeding heart.) Net them out, and you’ve got rich Republicans giving maybe 2% of their adjusted gross income on average.

The IRS numbers I saw didn’t go beyond $1,000,000, but the trend — a more or less flat 3% — hinted at no change as you continued up the scale.

So here’s my confusion. If Bob Dole proposes to pay for his tax cuts and defense buildup and balanced budget by cutting aid to the poor, ill, and elderly, with private charity taking up the slack — what assurance does he have that this will finally serve to melt the hearts of rich Republicans to start giving more money?

On the one hand, their 15% tax savings will provide them lots of new giveable cash. But on the other hand, the lower tax bite and halved capital gains rate will actually raise the cost of giving. (Today, it costs a rich guy just 60 cents to give a dollar because of the tax benefit. Tomorrow, it would cost 66 cents. Using appreciated securities, the price hike would be even wider.)

My conclusion: the people so anxious for this 15% tax cut are not likely to turn around and give much of it to charity.

How come we don’t hear more about Bob Dole’s adopted kids, anyway? Or Newt’s? Or Ralph Reed’s?

Tomorrow: Gold in the Streets

Correction: If you bet $20 on the “birthday trick” as I suggested last week, you’re likely to lose. Oops. You don’t need 20 people for a 99% likelihood of winning, as Mark told us; you need 59 or 60. For the odds to be 50/50, you need about 23. Thanks to Keith Burdick, Toby Gottfried and others for pointing this out.

And now on to some other numbers that don’t add up . . .

Yesterday I expressed skepticism that Bob Dole would be able to balance the budget while slashing taxes and spending more on the military.

Unless — wait! Maybe the idea is that we’ll use the military to loot and pillage. Replace lost domestic tax revenues with a modest levy abroad. As the Romans demonstrated, this is actually a pretty neat idea. We could call the tribute we collect “the price of peace,” and explain that, as the world’s ultimate peace-keeper, we will exact $50 per head per year — about $275 billion. A little stiff for a Biafran family of eight, but peace doesn’t come cheap. Protection money. Could put John Gotti in charge of the program.

But failing that? Can we really slash taxes, spend more on defense, and still balance the budget?

The main contention of those who believe this stuff (and I’d bet you anything Dole isn’t one of them) is that if your income taxes were 15% lower, you would work harder than you do now, earn more money — and wind up paying the same or more in taxes after all. Would you?

But even if you would — and c’mon, are you seriously telling me you would? — might there be other people who would work less hard to make ends meet . . . since ends would meet a little sooner?

And if you and I did work enough harder to get our taxes back to where they were, would that throw anyone else out of work? After all, unemployment is awfully low right now. If you’re such a good waiter that your boss happily accepts your request to work two more shifts a week, won’t he just be laying off whoever else now works those shifts?

I’m not saying tax cuts can’t stimulate (or overstimulate) an economy. But common sense tells you they’re not always appropriate, let alone increase tax receipts. Why does Bob Dole suddenly think they’re appropriate now?

Anyway, one potential source of funds to pay for the tax cuts and increased defense spending is the extra tax on our extra earnings from working harder. I don’t think it would amount to much.

Another source is the revenue boost that would come from halving the capital gains tax. In the short run, that would like raise a lot of revenue, as people took advantage of the chance to take huge profits on stocks and real estate they won’t sell now because of taxes. But that would also, it seems to me, create a tremendous amount of selling pressure and relatively little buying pressure.

Do you anyone who keeps his money in a savings account, or bonds, because the capital gains rate is too high? Who would suddenly want to buy stocks or real estate if it were halved? I don’t. But I do know a lot of people — including me — who’d love to dump some stocks and real estate they’ve owned for years if the tax were cut.

More sellers than buyers . . . falling prices . . . gloomy times. Not great for the economy or increased tax receipts.

Ah, you say. The sellers become buyers. And that’s largely true. You sell one stock and use the proceeds (minus the tax, if you’re prudent), to buy some other. But you have other options as well. You can (a) wait a while and/or (b) use the proceeds to pay down debt.

Anyway, it’s complex. I’m not saying the capital gains rate shouldn’t be gradually trimmed. I think it should be. But it’s not going to help much to balance the budget by 2002.

So how else is Bob Dole going to pay for his tax cuts and increased defense spending? Well, how about foreign aid? There’s a good old whipping boy. But what politicians rarely tell the people when they rag on “foreign aid” is that ours currently amounts to just $13 billion a year. Cutting it to zero, which would be morally unconscionable and geopolitically dumb, would barely make a dent in paying for Bob Dole’s tax cuts, let alone closing the existing deficit. (Actually, rather than increasing the defense budget, we should increase the foreign aid budget, in sensible ways, to countries that are moving toward capitalism. Next to the Louisiana Purchase, the Marshall Plan was probably the best investment this country ever made.)

The same goes for things like funding for the arts. You could cut it to zero and not make the tiniest dent whatsoever.

Indeed, the last time the Republicans were asked how they’d pay for a tax cut — the 4.3-cent gas tax they wanted to roll back — Dick Armey said we could just take the money from “education.”

Smart — no?

And then we could also save some money by denying school lunches to the children of legal immigrants — listen, it may not be much, but I figure that if you deny just 100 kids school lunches, that alone would be enough to pay for the tax-savings I personally would reap from the 15% income tax cut. Not that I’m the richest guy around — to pay for some of my wealthier friends’ tax cut you might need to knock 10,000 kids out of the lunch line — but my point is that this is doable. Why divert resources to feed and educate children that could, instead, be used to lower my taxes and increase the military budget?

Tomorrow: Private Charity: Bob Dole’s Solution

Did you hear Bob Dole’s acceptance speech Thursday night?

Under Clinton, close to 10 million new jobs have been added to the economy (versus essentially none during the Bush years) even as the federal payroll has been cut to levels not seen since the Kennedy years and the deficit — enormous during Reagan/Bush — has dropped by nearly two thirds. Inflation is low, interests rates fairly low, and we have steady economic growth, free trade, sharply falling crime rates, 33,000 more cops on the streets (headed for 100,000), and peace around the world.

Bob Dole looks at that sorry state of affairs and says: no more!

He would increase defense spending (guns) and slash taxes (so we can buy more butter) — the very things Ronald Reagan did. But note that when Reagan did them:

A: The top federal income tax bracket was 70%, not 39.6%, and unemployment was high, not low. Slashing taxes may not be as appropriate now. (When Kennedy cut rates, the top bracket was 90%.)

B: The Soviet Union was a powerful and arguably aggressive military threat that he hoped to outspend into collapse. A strong military is of course important. But ours is already unrivaled. We have some enemies — Iraq, North Korea — but how would a military build-up cause them to collapse? Aren’t we strong enough to defend ourselves from them even now?

C: The deficit exploded. Why explode it again?

Bob Dole wants to balance the budget by drastically reducing government revenues, while increasing defense spending and appropriating money to build new prisons. He of all people surely knows this is a fantasy. In your own financial affairs, it would be like saying you’ll get out of debt by taking a pay cut and hiring a security guard.

Tomorrow: Where Bob Dole Would Find the Money to Pay for His Tax Cut

The first (and only) time I was ever subpoenaed by the S.E.C. was 25 years ago, in connection with a high-flying company I had worked for whose stock had crashed and whose president subsequently went to jail.

I just remember their being a little surprised I didn’t come with a lawyer — well, all I was going to do was answer their questions, why did I need a lawyer for that? — and that everything went fine.

I suppose the faces at the S.E.C. have changed somewhat since then, but I’ve always felt that, by and large, the S.E.C. are the good guys. That in a world of too many government regulations — a world where an entire agency, like the I.C.C. (Interstate Commerce Commission) could simply be eliminated — the S.E.C. is, by and large, a corps of overworked, underpaid protectors of one of America’s (and thus the world’s) very most precious assets: our free, efficient, and relatively honest capital markets.

This isn’t to say there may not be horror stories out there, cases of excessive zeal, botched opportunities and the like. But in thinking of the literally hundreds of millions of dollars private lawyers have made from the “strike suit” game described a few days ago, I couldn’t help wondering whether we shouldn’t, at the same time as we try to rein in the extortionate strike suits, find an extra $10 million or $20 million for the S.E.C. each year — enough to hire and support another 100 or 200 lawyers. (They have 1,070 now.)

You may say, how can you find a competent, motivated attorney to go after market abuses for just $70,000 or $100,000 a year? Unless lawyers have the prospect of earning millions from this job (as the ones specializing in “strike suits” do), they won’t do it well. But that’s not necessarily true. For example, would we really want to turn the job of issuing speeding tickets over to private cops paid on the basis of how many they can give? With no sanctions on the cops if they give you a ticket when you weren’t speeding?

That’s the strike suit game now. It leads to a lot of unjustified speeding tickets that are nonetheless too costly and time-consuming to fight. So they’re paid, the private cops make a fortune — but is the driving public really better off? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a few more $40,000-a-year highway patrolpersons armed with radar guns?

No outfit is perfect, but as government agencies go, the S.E.C. could be a lot worse. It costs a mere $300 million or so a year — less than a twelfth what Coke spends on advertising — and none of that comes from taxpayers (not to say that it’s free). It comes mostly from corporate filing fees, from a tiny SEC fee you pay when you make a sale on one of the exchanges (grabbing a confirm here I see that I paid 32 cents on a recent $9,450 sale), and from penalties the S.E.C. collects from companies and brokerage firms who (while almost always denying any wrongdoing) get their wrists slapped. All told in 1995, those revenues totaled about $600 million — twice what the S.E.C. cost., with the balance going to the U.S. Treasury.

On top of that, in 1995, the S.E.C. won orders requiring defendants to disgorge $994 million in illicit profits, most of which went back to investors. (When that would be impractical — $2 each, or something — the money goes to the Treasury instead.)

On top of which we get little bonuses, like Edgar, the free on-line access to tens of thousands of S.E.C. filings, and like the S.E.C.’s excellent recent effort to narrow the spreads on the stocks we buy and sell.

In short, while I trust you to write me with examples of awful things the S.E.C. has done, I would say this is a group of government employees who can, by and large, feel proud of their public service. Unlike the lawyers at the strike-suit firms.

No one’s talking about ending private lawsuits — least of all the S.E.C., which welcomes the additional policing the threat of private lawsuits provides. But in a field as complicated as this it’s a matter of balance, not absolutes. As Congress overwhelmingly agreed last year, the strike-suit racket had gone way out of balance. Too easy for the private cops to pull you over and shake you down.

A few days ago I shared my shaken faith in Robert Leroy Ripley, the New York City sports cartoonist who, in 1918, at the age of 25 found himself stuck for something to draw. According to the keepers of his legend, he “dug into his files where he kept notes on all sorts of unusual sports achievements” and did a little collection of oddities, including a Canadian who (believe it or not) ran the 100-yard dash in 14 seconds — backwards. One thing led to another, including the opening in Chicago in 1933 of his “Odditorium,” stocked with odd items he’d collected from around the world, which, believe it or not, 2.5 million visitors came within one year to see. (Times were simpler then — and no TV.)

Anyway, what shook me was this item: “Mrs. E.H. Bisch’s 3 children of Santa Rosa, Calif., all have the same birthday! The odds against three children in the same family being born on the same date are 28,000,000 to 1.”

As I pointed out a few days ago, the odds of this are in fact not at all 28,000,000 to 1. “The first kid could have been born any day [I wrote] — the odds of that are 100%. So what are the odds each of the next two would be born the same day, wherein lies the remarkable occurrence? The answer is 1 in 133,225 (365×365), if you don’t nag me about leap years. Not common, to be sure. Not likely. But not 1 in 28 million, either.”

Well, leave it to my wonderful readership to run with this and point a ton of things I missed.

In the first place, thanks to those of you, like Monty Goolsby, who pointed out that even with his faulty logic his math was wrong. Ripley was apparently multiplying 365x365x365 to get his number, but this was back in the days before pop-up calculators. Pressing Ctrl-N in my trusty old DOS version of Managing Your Money and raising 365-1/4 to the third power, I get 48,727,112. So he didn’t mean 28 million to 1, he meant 48 million.

But that’s just math. It’s the logical nuances you noticed that were more interesting.

Writes John: “Not to nag the point too much further, but the odds of the 3 children with the same birthday could be even less than 1:(365 x 365). If the parents are inclined to have such an occurrence, they could plan things out 9 months ahead and further increase the odds. From what I remember of my wife’s OB/GYN telling her, the normal gestation period for humans is 40 weeks +/- 2 weeks, so then the odds could really be as low as 1:(28 x 28) = 784 to 1. That’s even less than the Pick 4 lotteries!

From Glen: “I’m surprised that you didn’t point out that a child’s birthday is hardly a matter of random chance. I know a family with five children, all born within about two weeks of each other. The father’s birthday is about three months later — or nine months earlier, depending on how you count.” I.e., we know what HE gets for his birthday.

Eric Pollack says he “would be shocked to learn that they didn’t actually TRY for the same birthday with the third” child, which makes a lot of sense, too. And, he adds, “the same assumptions of randomness corrupt market evaluations. Look for reasons behind and beyond the numbers, and you’ll have a better shot at making predictions.”

Finally, there’s this from Mark Brady, which can make you twenty bucks: “I enjoyed the Ripley’s story because in our family we had three pairs of birthdays, three days apart. My fiance and myself, my mother and her mother, and my sister and her husband. Of course we had a lot of family members to choose from, as well as the range of days apart. Which leads me to ask: In a room of 20 people, how often will two people have the same birthday? Most people guess 20/365 or about 5% of the time. In reality, the probability is above 99% because you are comparing each person with every other person in the room.”

I was aware of that one, as you may have been, too. But most people find it astounding. So it’s not a bad way to win $20 in a bet.

Tomorrow: Back to the S.E.C.

Bill Lerach is king of the “strike suits.” These are class-action lawsuits brought on your behalf (like it or not) against companies you may own shares in (which drives down the value of your shares if you still own them) but makes the lawyers a pile of money. Lerach’s San Diego firm takes in tens and tens of millions of dollars a year from these suits. He contributed almost $400,000 to the Democratic party last year, according to Common Cause, to gain a little White House “access.” His firm contributed $1.9 million to fight a California ballot initiative I was helping to push that would have curbed such suits at the local level.

Some of the suits are doubtless justified. Lord knows there’s a lot of foul play out there. And whether justified or not, the threat of lawsuits probably keeps some CEO’s a little more honest than they might otherwise be. So Lerach is right that the suits his firm and the handful of others around the country specializing in this field bring serve a valuable purpose.

But in a world of trade-offs, they also do a lot of harm, too — more harm than good. The game has gotten out of balance.

According to one study, all ten of the top ten public companies in Silicon Valley have been hit with one of these so-called “strike suits.” Is our whole high-tech industry run by crooks?

The way it works now, many of the suits are brought with little or no foundation. A stock drops on bad news; the word processors are fired up and a suit is filed alleging that the bad news should have been disclosed earlier or was purposely hidden from shareholders so insiders could sell their stock first. And sometimes that’s doubtless true. But often it’s not.

Yet the targets have to settle for a few million dollars anyway, because fighting the suits takes a tremendous amount of management time and effort, costs millions even if you win — and you can never know for sure what a jury will do. Even if you’re certain you’re innocent, is it really prudent to bet $100 million a jury will agree — or smarter to pay $10 million (some of which you would have had to pay in legal fees anyway, and some of which is covered by insurance) and just make it go away?

Most pay the toll, which results in $2 million or $3 million for Lerach’s firm or one of the others, and ridiculous little checks like $37.92 or $5.61 or $87.13 for the thousands of guys who own (or owned) 200 shares and went through the paperwork required to collect.

(I’ve done this myself once or twice. By the time you make sense of the legal papers and find and photocopy and mail in the brokerage statements from years ago proving you are a “member of the class,” and so forth, it can be easily an hour’s work. In my case, because I’m lucky enough to buy more than 100 or 200 shares at a time, the check I eventually got came to something like $335, if I remember right — not bad pay for an hour’s work, I guess, but really trivial in context of my overall investment.)

In most cases, T. Rowe Price vice president Liz Buyer told The San Jose Mercury News in the midst of our California ballot fight, suits of the type Lerach specializes in “not only aren’t helping the small investor, they’re causing significant harm. The one who gets hurt is the small shareholder. The one who gets helped is the lawyer.”

So Congress passed a bill to make these suits harder — but by no means impossible — to bring. The President came close to signing it, but on the advice of a couple of law professors, decided it tipped the balance just a little too far in the other direction. He vetoed it, but, one might say, half-heartedly. It was the only time in his presidency he’s been over-ridden. Joining in the override, lest you think this is all the evil Al D’Amato’s doing, or whatever, were Ted Kennedy, Barbara Mikulski and Dianne Feinstein. So it’s not just a Republican issue.

The President took a lot of heat for vetoing the bill. Many believe he did it as a favor to the trial lawyers and Lerach who’ve been such strong supporters of the Democratic Party. But you know what? Since it was pretty clear the veto wouldn’t stand — even Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, chairman of the Democratic Party was working to override it, and the President made no real effort to avoid the override — why not?

I don’t mean to be cynical here, but if someone gave MY party millions of dollars and I could do something nice in return that wouldn’t hurt (i.e., be overridden), maybe in the real world that’s a good solution. Certainly better, in my view, than taking tobacco-industry money and doing REAL favors for the tobacco industry that are NOT overridden.

In any event, what’s put all this back in the news is Lerach’s latest move, putting his own initiative on the November ballot — Proposition 211 — that would essentially roll back the federal law for suits brought in California. Indeed, it would void the new law for the whole country, really, because it would allow suits to be brought if the public company in question had even just one California shareholder.

Last week, the President, to his credit, came out against Prop 211. It was clearly the right thing to do, because on balance Prop 211 would have been bad for both investors (who don’t want to see their companies mired in these suits) and bad for the economy (the way to compete with Toshiba and NEC and Sony is not by diverting management time from innovations to depositions).

Now the President is taking heat for having flip-flopped. But c’mon. In the first place, the main thing is he’s on the correct side of the issue, helping to defeat Prop 211. Flip-flopping should be encouraged when one is flopping in the right direction — or would we prefer a President who is steadfastly wrong?

In the second place, in vetoing the federal law, he never used his position to fight against the concept of the legislation — he acknowledged the reasons it was needed — he just said he thought it was flawed. If a politician sometimes does favors for his or her largest contributors, better that they be favors that, like the veto-he-knew-would-be-overridden, are of no practical consequence.

The bottom line, from my point of view: if you’re from California, vote NO on Proposition 211 in November.

We must always allow securities-fraud lawsuits — this is a balancing game, not a prohibition. But the way to police the securities markets isn’t to funnel hundreds of millions more into the pockets of Lerach and his small group of colleagues in this game. Better to appropriate one-tenth as much in additional funding for the S.E.C.

Dissenting views welcome.

Tomorrow: More on Ripley, Believe It or Not

Yesterday I suggested that only Jack Kemp, of the Dole/Kemp ticket, actually believes in a 15% income tax cut right now. Tax-cut talk is a good way to buy votes, but not appropriate fiscal policy when the economy is expanding. Save it for when, say, you are trying to climb out of a recession or, when, say, you’re projecting a budget surplus.

But just as Dole’s marketing guys have analyzed the polls and focus groups and forced him to swallow the 15% tax cut line . . . and a running mate he’s never much cared for who actually believes in the tax cut and will sell it well . . . so have they also slipped him a good “surrogate” tax cut that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Even the Washington Post editorial page — never staunchly Republican — likes it.

It’s the Moynihan/Lieberman/Dole/McConnell bipartisan “choice no-fault” auto insurance bill introduced in the Senate June 11 that would basically let vehicle owners around the country decide whether they like their auto insurance the way it is, as some do, or would prefer to opt out of the lawsuit-lottery in return for sharply lower premiums and limited but guaranteed benefits if they’re hurt — even if they can’t prove the other guy was at fault.

Roughly the same thing was handed Bush in the last weeks of his faltering campaign, and he was actually set to deliver a speech about it in New Jersey the day — my memory is hazy on this, but was it the day the guy in the chicken suit showed up taunting him to debate? Or the day the guy in the chicken suit showed up one time too many and Bush finally lost his cool? I just remember that it was the day Bush actually quit in the middle of his speech, or no one heard him because of all the paCAW, paCAWing, and this last-minute proposal sank before it had even really surfaced.

If it grabs anyone’s attention this time around, I’ll go into more detail, because it’s a plan that could basically put $200 or $300 into the average family’s pocket — not with a tax cut that just winds up lifting interest rates (and thus taking away that same $200 or $300 because of higher variable-rate mortgage payments, etc.) but in +real savings on the legal expenses and fraud built into today’s auto insurance in almost every state but Michigan.

(Michigan has pretty close to real no-fault auto insurance. If you’re hurt — even if it was a hit-and-run or a one-car crash, or not the other driver’s fault — you get unlimited medical care and rehabilitation, plus generous wage loss coverage. Yet, because suits for pain and suffering are sharply limited, auto insurance in Michigan costs less than in, say, California, where if you’re hurt you often get nothing despite the high premiums.)

It’s a long story, so for now consider this nothing more than a “heads up.” If you hear Dole/Kemp talking about it (and if you own a car) — listen. You should vote for Clinton/Gore, in my view; but this $300-per-family saving would be like a tax cut that did make economic sense.

Poor Bob Dole. He’s not a bad guy, has been a fine American and a good Senate Majority Leader. But unlike Bill Clinton, who deeply wanted to be President not just because it’s the top prize, but because he so strongly believed in the importance of education and universal health insurance and reinventing government and fixing welfare and equal rights and on and on . . . Clinton is the ultimate, passionate public policy wonk . . . Bob Dole is, by contrast, just sort of going through the motions.

It’s Jack Kemp (don’t any of these guys have a second syllable? what ever happened to Ei-sen-how-er? since Bush, the Republicans all seem to come pre-”Ike”d) who really wants to be President for a reason. And Kemp is a very good guy. But (a) he’s not running for president; (b) we already have a dynamite one-syllable vice president; (c) though irresistibly likable and thoroughly decent, Kemp can’t match Clinton/Gore on the economic, technical, social and foreign policy issues. Clinton/Gore have four valuable years’ experience running what we used to call “the free world.” Why change CEOs when things are going rather well?

But as I say, Jack Kemp isn’t running for President, Bob Dole is. Big problem. Clipped thoughts. Little embarrassed by it all.

I’m not one of those who talk, every time there’s an election for anything, of having to choose between “the lesser of two evils.” I think many of our elected representatives are really exceptional, dedicated people.

Not a wacko like Ross Perot or a personable lightweight like Dan Quayle. But Clinton, Dole, Gore, Kemp, Bush, Dukakis . . . while I clearly have my preferences, I could go on at some length as to why I think they are better, by and large, than they get credit for being. All anyone remembers about Dukakis is how silly he looked in the tank. But this was a very sharp, fine guy.

I guess it is part of our American birthright to consider all politicians crooks and morons — the criminal class, as Mark Twain long ago referred to Congress. But surely in our more private, sober moments, we realize we’re fortunate to have people of such caliber willing and eager to go through this for us. Would you? I wouldn’t.

Which brings me back to poor Bob Dole. You know he doesn’t believe in that 15% tax cut — it’s exactly the kind of thing he is prudent and responsible enough to know makes no sense right now, much as we’d all enjoy the break. You know it wasn’t his burning conviction that this would solve America’s problems (the good economy? the low unemployment? the modest inflation? the amazing stock market?). Or that it was the chance to realize this grand vision that motivated him to run for President.

Give Steve Forbes and Jack Kemp one thing — they really believe in tax cuts. Bob Dole is more of the school that looks at all the Forbes family built in the era of 70% marginal tax brackets and concludes: “The top bracket was 70%; busted their butts to build a great business anyway.”

A tax cut when the economy is strong, as now, could overheat it, leading to inflation that kills the nice long economic run we’ve been having. Or a tax cut could easily spook the bond market, leading to higher interest rates (a tax hike of a different sort), that could also kill our nice run.

And why do we have to call him Bob Dole, anyway? Why does HE have to call himself Bob Dole? Can’t we just call him Bob? Or Dole? And can’t he just call himself “I” or “me”?

Especially because his chances of winning seem modest, why doesn’t Bob Dole just shuck his handlers and use the amazing three-month megaphone he’s won — his real prize for so many years of public service — to say what he really feels and lead the country back a little from cynicism, negative campaigning, and partisan rancor toward the civility, decency and common sense you know are, for the most part, in his heart?

(And why doesn’t he finally denounce the tobacco interests that he and his wife have been beholden to for so long? Not cool.)

He’d still lose — Clinton/Gore are the better team to lead us into the next century. But he’d have made a real contribution in this, his final major act of public service.

Tomorrow: The Good “Surrogate Tax Cut” Dole’s Handlers Have Given Him

Oh, sure. This could be one of those daily comments that tells you why the stock market went up or down yesterday or, better still, what it will do tomorrow.

“A crash is no more than weeks away,” famed market seer Granville told Barron’s last September. “Sometime over the next month and a half, we will witness a stock market crash comparable to the legendary disaster that shattered Wall Street 66 Octobers ago” in 1929. (I stopped following Granville’s pronouncements the day he reportedly dropped his trousers at one of his investment seminars, decades ago — seminars which had come to involve a piano, for reasons that have blurred in my memory with time.) But by his lights, “the signs [were] unmistakable.” “All that I have learned in analyzing the market over the past 40 years tells me: The end is near.”

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but looking back to last September — was there a gargantuan 1929-style crash in there someplace I just missed somehow? Maybe the day I was watching that Seinfeld marathon and forgot to check CNBC?

Or take this newsletter solicitation from someone named Nick Guarino who, according to the outer envelope, “predicted the 1987 stock market crash and turned $200,000 into $14 million for his associates in a day.” Postmarked September 2, 1995, from Minneapolis, it was an “URGENT WARNING. You have less than 100 days to the biggest stock market wipeout of our lifetime. The stock market is about to give back a year’s worth of gains in one day. . . . We are on the verge of the biggest bear market ever. Before it’s over, the stock market will be trading under 2000.”

Hmmm. Add 100 days to September 2 — his measure, not mine — and you get December 11 as the date by which the crash will occur. Here we are several days past that cut-off (well, 240 days, actually), and the wipe-out has not yet appeared.

Not to be smug. Mr. Market is at his best seeking out and demolishing smug. Show me a smug investor, and I’ll show you an investor about to get blind-sided somehow.

So I’m not trying to jinx things by making fun of these predictions. And I’m certainly not discounting the possibility of another major bear market someday. All I’m trying to discount is the value of daily market comments, where guys tell you buy! sell! whatever! based on their reading of the tea leaves or their need to sell newsletters.

Which is why I prefer to write my daily comments about things like Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.

Faithful visitors to this web page will remember that in a recent “comment” I provided the cure for the common cold. A little off subject, perhaps, but useful all the same. Missed it? Too bad! (Oh, OK: the secret is to swill just the tiniest sip or two of apple cider vinegar the minute you begin to feel that tingle where your sinuses meet your tonsils.)

In connection with that comment I referred to one of my favorite childhood books, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. So then, after signing off, I logged on to www.amazon.com, my new favorite neighborhood bookstore, and quickly located a whole bunch of Ripley’s paperbacks, several of which appeared at my door a few days later. Ah, brave new world.

And I have to tell you I was shaken. Not that Donald Case and his stepfather Glen McGraw were both stricken with appendicitis “on the same day”, relatively hard though I found that to believe. Nor that “the Peace Poplar planted in Jena, Germany, in 1815 to celebrate the end of the Napoleonic war with France toppled suddenly 99 years later on August 1, 1914 — the start of World War I.” (Believe it or not.)

No. I was shaken when I read that “Mrs. E.H. Bisch’s 3 children of Santa Rosa, Calif., all have the same birthday! The odds against three children in the same family being born on the same date are 28,000,000 to 1.”

What shocked me of course was not that they were all born May 28, but rather the fact that in 100% of the cases where I could actually check Ripley’s veracity — namely, this one — I found it sorely wanting. Yes, I know he says “believe it or not,” but isn’t the whole idea that these things are unbelievable, yet true? And I still like to think they’re mostly all true.

But my faith is shaken, because as many of you instantly grasped, Ripley’s math is just silly. The odds of three kids in a three-kid family all being born on May 28 are indeed about 1 in 28 million (365x365x365). But who said anything about May 28? The first kid could have been born any day — the odds of that are 100%. So what are the odds each of the next two would be born the same day, wherein lies the remarkable occurrence? The answer is 1 in 133,225 (365×365), if you don’t nag me about leap years. Not common, to be sure. Not likely. But not 1 in 28 million, either.

The point is: it makes me worry that maybe the well that supplied water for Christopher Columbus’s three ships didn’t “dry up suddenly on May 20, 1506, the die Columbus died.”

I’m not saying I don’t believe it. I’m just shaken. That’s all.