August 9 2008

I have read that Presidential Candidate Obama has proposed a "windfall profits tax" on oil companies as part of his energy plan. Two things strike me about this proposal: (1) it was tried in the 1970s by Jimmy Carter and the then democrats in Congress and it did nothing to alleviate the energy crisis of that time; and (2) if we tax excess profits of corporations, should we not provide some form of relief to corporations when they have excess losses, I am thinking here of the American automobile companies. It occurs to me that the best thing the Federal government can do for the American economy is to stay as far away from it as possible. The price of oil has begun to come down, and thanks to our Washington gridlock (and I am not talking about the traffic), the Federal government has had absolutely nothing to do with the decline.

June 8, 2008

I went to see Sex in the City (the movie) last night with my wife and 19 year old daughter. I commented that it was the quintessential chick flick, however, upon reflection I must also admit that the movie’s message was one that needed to be stated for the sake of all women. I was never a fan of the TV series. I thought the four main characters were vacuous and totally lacking in any redeeming qualities. Their main purpose in life, it seemed to me, was the pursuit of males and the sexual conquest of same. Then they would get together, sip cosmopolitans, and talk about their conquests or failures and commiserate with one another on the inequities of life in general.

Sex in the City (the move) had a more positive message for women. While it is true that each of the gals suffered misfortune in their amorous affairs, in the end they all came to the realization that one size does not fit all, weather it be in shoes or the male anatomy. The main character, Carrie Bradshaw, had a 10 year relationship with a man, Big (aka John Preston), who she came to realize was the love of her life. They were together and happy until she fell into the common pitfall of a large number of upper middle class to wealthy couples. It is what I call the status trap or what used to be known as “Keeping up with the Joneses”. The wedding became the center piece of her life rather than her relationship with Big. He, being a man, felt he was playing second fiddle, and this caused him ask himself, “What am I getting myself into”. Everything collapsed sending him into exile and her into depression. It took a year, and a few clever plot twists, for her to come to the realization that Big was in fact the love of her life and being his wife was far more important that being in Vogue magazine. So they did what they should have done in the first place. They got married at city hall with no one in attendance and then they went out and celebrated with friends and whoever.

The other three women making up the ensemble also came to life altering realizations. Samantha, the nymphomaniac, realized that that indeed was her lot in life, so she left a handsome man who loved her and a dream house in Malibu for her old life in NYC. Miranda, the lawyer/mother/wife came to the realization that her number one priority in her life should have been her husband and her son. Instead of them taking a back seat to her legal career, it should have been the other way around. She finally got it right. Charlotte, pretty much had it right from the beginning of the movie, so she simply got rewarded with the baby girl she had always wanted.

The positive message of the movie, that everybody is different and no one answer is right for everybody, was for me, a refreshing change from the negative vibes of the TV series. I also liked the fact that Carrie waited until she and Big were in their forties to get married. Personally, as the father of two daughters this appealed to me, as did the idea of getting married at City Hall, a small church would have done, and then celebrating. All in all things turned out well for the girls, but I don’t know if sitting through almost three hours, of chick flickery was worth the effort for me.

There is an interesting article in the Washington Post this morning by Walter Williams, an economics professor at George Mason University. Williams cites The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 as the, or one of the causes of the current "Sub-Prime Crisis". The Act encouraged banks and savings institutions to make the so called "no doc" and "Liar" loans that are now so frequently in default. His point being that most problems in America are caused by Government actions, which are often well intentioned. The Government adopted, in the 70s, a policy that every American should own his or her own home. In theory this is a wonderful idea, but in actuality it can't happen without Government subsidizing home purchases. Instead of providing the subsidy the Government simply mandated the dream and hoped that it would become a reality. It worked for a while, but markets and economies do not exist in a vacuum. Things change! And so it was with the housing market. The moral of the story, the Government should stay as far away as possible from mandating things it can't deliver on, like lowering gasoline prices.

March 23, 2008

West Virginia University finally made the front page of the Washington Post Sports section. The WVU basketball team beat Duke 73-67 in the NCAA tournament to make it to the "Sweet 16" for the second time in three years. During that time Duke only made it to the "Sweet 16" once, yet Post columnist Mike Wise devoted almost his entire column to the loosing squad. WVU was mentioned, but the article was about the losers. This is typical of Post coverage, or I should say, non-coverage of Mountaineer athletics. The Post treats Virgina Tech like a local team, but seldom mentions WVU even though Morgantown is closer to DC than Blacksberg (161 miles to 215 miles). Virtually every VT basketball and football game is covered but WVU has to do something out of the ordinary to even get a mention.

March 18, 2008

I filed our Federal Income Tax return today, electronically! It cost us $46, I used Turbo Tax, what the hell we can deduct it all on next year's return. What really amazed me was that when I printed it out the return was 62 pages. Unreal! We are not rich, we don't have complicated finances, so why does the Federal government need 62 pages of information about our income? How many pages does Bill Gates need? Or, Warren Buffet? We really need tax reform in this country, but, I don't hear any of the candidates for president talking about it, so I don't suppose it will happen.

March 16, 2008

I read a brilliant article in the Village Voice, dated March 11, 2008 (http://www.villagevoice.com/generic/show_print.php?id=374064&p...), by the Pulitzer Prize winning play write David Mamet. He summed up pretty much what I have gone through in my political thinking. Like him, I am a child of the 60s, meaning that I grew up with negative feelings about government, business and positive feelings about human beings. I have learned that while the usual human vices hold sway throughout the world, in my life things are not always wrong, neither are they wrong in the community in which I live or in my country. Mamet's comparison of George W. Bush and JFK is pretty much right-on, except that JFK had charisma and Bush doesn’t. For me, the person occupying the White House, or the party controlling the Congress, makes little difference in the long run. What makes our country so great is the U.S. Constitution, which created a form of government so brilliant that no single person or party can fuck it up for very long. Sure, we have ups and downs (like right now is a down), but I am sure this will not last. I really don’t think the next presidential election is going fundamentally change anything in America. I like Obama because he is charismatic, like JFK, in form if not in substance.

I really liked the Mamet piece, especially, when he called Thomas Sowell “our greatest contemporary philosopher”. I have been reading Sowell’s columns for years and could not agree more. My only question is why he is never seen or heard of in the MSM? You want to know how smart Thomas Sowell is, just read this article. http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2008/03/12/non-judgmental_nonsense.

Sowell was born in North Carolina, where, he recounts, his encounters with white people were so limited that he didn't believe that "yellow" was a possible color for human hair (A Personal Odyssey). He later moved with his mother's sister (whom he thought to be his mother; his father died before he was born) and siblings to Harlem, New York City. He dropped out of high school when he moved out on his own at the age of 17 because of money problems and a deteriorating home environment.^[2] Soon after, he served in the US Marine Corps.

After his service, Sowell passed a GED and enrolled at Howard University. His top-notch grades enabled him to transfer and completed a B.A. in Economics from Harvard College, magna cum laude, an M.A. in Economics from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. He chose University of Chicago, he has said, because he wanted to study under George Stigler. Stigler's achievements were recognized when in 1982 he won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Sowell has taught at prominent American universities including Howard University, Cornell University, Brandeis University, and UCLA. Since 1980 he has been a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he holds the fellowship named after Rose and Milton Friedman.

February 29, 2008

Leap year! I was born in a leap year, 1944, but not on February 29. Am still in the process of preparing my 2007 income tax returns, a process stalled while I wait for more forms. I was distressed to discover that we will owe the state of Maryland $616, and that we were assessed a penalty of $11 for not having enough withheld. What kind of bullshit is this.

Yea, that’s right Maryland sucks! With all the taxes assessed on its citizens this putrid state still has a budget deficit. We paid the state and the county $5000 in income taxes in 2007, not to mention the nearly $6000 we paid in real estate taxes. What the hell do the idiots in Annapolis spend this money on? The Inter-County Connector? The Purple Line? New schools? The only thing they can agree on is that nobody should smoke cigarettes, which is really ironic since the state of Maryland’s main product for 150 years was tobacco.

While we are talking about taxes, has anybody seen the assessed value of their house go down? All you hear about in the media is how the housing market is depressed and people are loosing their shirts because the value of the family home is in the tank. But not one word about property taxes going down to reflect the depressed market. I propose a moratorium on the payment of salaries to all elected officials in the state and county until the budget deficit is eliminated.