Just heard that 2007 Healthcare costs were 2.2 Trillion $. Let’s see. 300 Million People. That’s $2200000/300 = $22000/3 = $7,333.33 per person.
You know, I think this is a manageable amount to provide a national HMO-type health plan.
Tag Archives: Economics
Who Knew?
I found this link at Boing-Boing and it is impressive to see how accurately Peter Schiff, Euro Pacific Capital president, was explaining – two years ago – the underlying financial problems we face today. And it is being polite to say the fellow economic pundits to whom he was trying to explain things only went as far as ridicule.
Being Lazy
I just came across this site that gives some guidelines on developing worry-free investment portfolios. They make sense to me and I think I am following them with my own retirement planning. I do like #5 – If you’re not saving 10%, you’re spending too much.
I wonder about this quote:
Albert Einstein put it very simple: “There is no greater power known to man than compounding interest.”
I checked on Snopes and it is undetermined that Einstein really said anything like that. So he probably didn’t. Even though the sentiment is right on.
I don’t worry about what my portfolio is doing these days and I keep telling Elaine not to worry. We have set up a portfolio as best we could and we will see what it looks like in a few years.
My concern about the current state of the market is for the overall state of the US and Global economy. We have to live with the macroeconomic fallout of this meltdown and I don’t see any reliable hands the helm at present. But what do I know? Maybe paying dividends to shareholders of failing financial institutions is the best way to go. Not.
The end is just the again beginning
I found this interesting article by Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, discussing a bit of what’s been happening on Wall Street in the twenty years since he left. I liked Liar’s Poker when it came out and find it disturbing that the next generation of Wall Streeters found it to be a useful how-to manual.
There is an object lesson somewhere in all this involving doom-sayers, pessimists, and people trying to see the dreams all the while ignoring the nightmares. How to make reality the nightmare? Ignore it for a while. Wall Street seems very good at ignorance.
Eisman was appalled. “Look,” he said. “I’m short. I don’t want the country to go into a
depression. I just want it to fucking deleverage.” He had tried a
thousand times in a thousand ways to explain how screwed up the
business was, and no one wanted to hear it. “That Wall Street has gone
down because of this is justice,” he says. “They fucked people. They
built a castle to rip people off. Not once in all these years have I
come across a person inside a big Wall Street firm who was having a
crisis of conscience.”
Even I, an uneducated fiscal novice, could see that a house of cards was being built with my, and everyone’s, money for the past decade. And it was being built in an earthquake zone. And I was asking at every chance “how can I protect my investments?” And knowledgeable folks couldn’t help me. Even those that agreed that an earthquake was coming didn’t have any viable alternatives. Now I see, I should have shorted the mortgage/CDO/CDS market.
AAAAAAAIIIIIIIGGGGGGG
I have a very bad feeling about this…
I pity the poor sucker that has to clean up this mess.
Let me see if I have this straight
Let us say I am making $200,000 a year and paying 10% tax on that. My take home would be about $180,000. So I wouldn’t want to exert myself a little harder to make, say, $300,000 because I would be in a higher tax bracket. For $300,000 I would pay the same 10% on the first $200,000 (Take home $180,000) and, say, 20% on the next $100,000 (Take home $80,000). Because then I would be taking home only $260,000 instead of $180,000 and there isn’t any incentive in the world that would make me exert that extra effort.
I wouldn’t want to move into the top 2% of earners in the US because I would have to pay more taxes for making more money. Nevermind that I am earning such a comfortable income because I am using the social infrastructure this country has developed with tax dollars. No, I have gotten to this level on my own and nobody gave me anything along the way and they shouldn’t expect me to give back to some imaginary community that makes it all possible.
Yeah, that sounds straight enough.
This is not looking any better
The Nation is tracking how the bailout is proceeding. It continues to ring so wrong.
This bit
But, if you look more closely at Paulson’s transaction, the
taxpayers were taken for a ride–a very expensive ride. They paid $125
billion for bank stock that a private investor could purchase for $62.5
billion. That means half of the public’s money was a straight-out gift
to Wall Street, for which taxpayers got nothing in return.
is very irksome, but the private investor they are invoking is Warren Buffett, who was only putting up a few billion into Goldman-Sachs. And then they extend the analogy of the deal Buffett made with GS to cover all nine institutions, something I don’t think is quite fair.
But the upshot is that we appear to have the wolves in charge of the foxes in charge of the chicken coop. And the wolves are preparing for one last plunder before they retire. I don’t trust the administration to monitor and manage the bailout, I don’t trust the Congress to provide oversight on the wolves. I don’t expect the Justice Department to initiate criminal prosecutions in a timely fashion. I don’t trust the Republicans to do anything other than plunder the US treasury as best they can. And I don’t trust the Democrats to provide any ‘check and balance’ to stop the Republicans. (Hell, they may even join the bandwagon.) It would be nice to be pleasantly surprised.
How do you prevent someone from sharing what you want to sell to others
I don’t know if this would work, but what if you sold something digital to someone and hashed it with their credit card information such that it would be perfectly usable on any system? Anyone could use it anywhere at anytime. They could pass it around and share it with everyone in the world. But, if they shared it with others, they would be passing along their credit card information at the same time. So maybe they wouldn’t want to share with others so readily.
A Privatized Social Security
Recently, I have been seeing or hearing a few references about privatizing Social Security, and how it doesn’t seem to be an issue this election. I wonder why?
If people really wanted to go about privatizing Social Security, I would suggest that we build on the existing scheme. Leave the current SSA accounts in place and then allow the individual to set aside some completely voluntary amount into an account that they, personally, can manage. They can select the funds to be invested in, or the stocks or bonds to be purchased. I imagine a lot of brokerage firms like Fidelity and T Rowe Price and Merrill Lynch and Charles Schwabb and others will be glad to set up structured plans to aid the novice investor in directing the growth of these future retirement accounts (all in exchange for a very small percentage, annually, of the account’s net worth).
We can call them Individual Retirement Accounts, since they are for an individual to build up a retirement nest egg. And we can motivate the reluctant citizen to invest in their future with all sorts of tax reliefs and incentives. It’s hard to see any down-side to this plan. If everyone invested 10% of their income every year, in not too long a time everyone would be millionaires. Just think of it, a nation with 300-Million+ millionaires. And they would still be getting Social Security checks! This is such a no-brainer, I’m surprised no one has thought of it before.
WTF!
Banks to Continue Paying Dividends
Here we are, bailing out all these banks who are so badly in need of capital in order to operate and do their banking thing, and they want to pay out over half of the money we are rescuing them with to the investors who goaded them into their malfeasant ways in the first place.
And then there’s this:
Ed Yingling, chief executive of the American Bankers Association, said he was increasingly hearing from banking executives who feel they should not be forced to accept money with so many strings attached. He said these banks don’t need the money, but they are willing to use it to increase lending, so long as they are not punished for doing so.
Are we forcing banks to accept federal money?
The more I hear about this entire venture, the more it stinks. I think the best idea is to take the $700 Billion and create a separate banking system. Let the new banks put liquidity into the system and let the old banks die. (I heard this proposed earlier this month (Oct 10?) on CNN or MSNBC but my google-fu is not not working and I can’t find a link to it. It sounded like a very workable idea. There was even a way for the government to gracefully bow out of the banking business once the foundation was set.)