The trail head is a short walk from my house, and it goes straight up the side of the mountain. It gets pretty steep and there are railroad ties for steps all they way up. It’s a close to 3000 ft climb and, let me tell you, it’s much harder than it looks from the bottom. I’ll post pictures later.
I think he’s gone!! Or eaten … 
Did my Neo rid me of this pest? I’ll never know. There have been some days Neo hasn’t eaten as much, I wonder of he’s supplementing his appetite with fresh meat.
That’s not a year, that’s how many minutes I will have on my next phone bill. WOW!!! Nearly all of that is peak usage. In order to avoid the $500 bill, I bumped up to the 1350 minute plan. I’m now solidly into the 1000 minute club! This should make my monthly cell phone bill close to 150 a month. That would mean I pay about 250 a month on communications related bills. That’s more than I spend in food or dining out!
I find humor in the irony that I’m one of the most reclusive people you will meet.
As humans, we are known for fighting yesterdays battle. In war, armies tactics were learned from the last war that was fought, not always the next war they fight. Knowing in advance the tactics and equiment for the next war is an advantage in battle, but I don’t know if this has ever happened.
Today, the issues being discussed in the presidential primaries are also yesterdays issues. The issues of globalization and its effects towards a declining middle class, immigration policies and demographic things in general, and how to adjust the social contract that is social security and medicare to reflect the reality of future tax revenues, alternative energy policies, and economic issues in general, are the issues of today and tomorrow. Some of these are being discussed, but the biggest in my mind is the problem with the federal budget and future funding for social programs and any/all other financial issues. The financial issues coming down the pipe dwarfs the others and has not been seeing the amount of discussion it deserves. As a result, I think we are doomed to elect leaders unprepared and unsuited to address this issue. I wonder if any of the candidates know that the so called ‘trust fund’ for social security and medicare exists only in the form of IOUs that future tax payers will be repaying. How many people are aware that a substantial raise in income and/or payroll taxes is the only way to keep the government solvent?
The story of the foreclosure crisis we have today was a future written years ago. The next crisis is in the process of being written now and if we don’t change the story, eventually it will be too late.
Interestingly, it seems neither of the major paries are suited to dealing with financial issues. The Republicans can’t seem to get over their ‘let’s cut taxes’ mantra and the Democrats won’t be able to make the tough cuts needed to entitlement programs. I can only hope that whoever wins the next elections will get over their misguided campaign promises. In this case it is better to break promises made without regard to sound policy.
I make too much money to qualify for the so called ‘tax rebate’ coming from the government. It’s not really a tax rebate because people who don’t pay taxes will get money back. It’s nothing more than a handout. Interestingly, my parents will qualify even though they are far better off than I. That’s the nature of handouts that have exceptions. Teenagers who are still claimed by their parents will also get stiffed. And the real kicker is that the money used to send out the checks is borrowed. In other words, they robbed Peter to pay Paul. Another kicker is that since the rich pay most of the taxes, this was a de-facto redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. I’m not really opposed to this in principal, I just think it’s funny that some conservatives and libertarians, who would oppose re-distribution of wealth seem to have shut up about this particular re-distribution because it’s called a tax rebate. The more I think about it the funnier it is. This is a classic scheme of take from the rich and give to the poor in the vein of Robin Hood.
I like to claim that we are run by monkeys, but the truth is that we are the monkeys and the people in Washington are the zoo keepers. I don’t consider myself a monkey, so I just call them monkeys. From my perspective, politicians act like monkeys because they do stupid things all the time without forward thinking or learning from past errors. The truth is that they are just mirrors reflecting the greater population. In ancient Rome, the government kept the people preoccupied with bread and games so that they would not pay attention to the greater problems of society. It is not so dissimilar from today.
I really don’t want the government to give me money back, I want them to take care of their financial house however they need to do that. The sad truth is that nobody is minding the store. There are hard choices that need to be made, and nobody is talking about them. In order to secure the financial solvency of the government going foward, one or both of the following will need to be done:
If something is not done, projects state that taxes would need to be doubled to fund the promised benefits. This is untenable as you would tax to death the producers in society while paying to keep the dead weight around longer. Sounds harsh, but such is the truth and the truth won’t get you elected. The candidates know that lies are required for success in politics. This is a sad reflection on the state of awareness of the common voter.
One thing about Colorado is that we like beer. We like beer so much that we prefer to brew our own. The last issue of Time magazine agrees. There are 74 breweries within 100 miles of Denver, and Denver is the host of the Great American Beer Festival. I recently picked up two different stouts which came from Front Range breweries. The one I liked the most was the Milk Stout from the Left Hand Brewing Company out of Longmont. I went to their website and it turns out that it won some Gold award. And I thought I liked just because I was left handed It’s a very smooth and easy to drink stout and the alcohol content is manageable. Not as good as that oatmeal stout I had once at the Rock Bottom Brewery in La Jolla, but still very good.
Inflation is back in the news as the price of food and energy go up … a lot. There seems to be some talk about the difference between ‘core’ inflation and headline inflation. Core inflation excludes the effect of food and energy, which is the same thing that is going up and up. Core inflation is what the Federal Reserve looks at as a guide to raise and lower interest rates.
I want to talk about the inflation statistics for a moment. Inflation is calculated by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. You can go to their website a www.bea.gov for more info, but the basic idea is that there is a weighted bucket of products that they use to attempt to measure prices.
People spend a lot of money on housing, right? Most of us pay rent or or mortgage, so that’s a big part of the CPI statisics for inflation, about 30 percent or so? I’m too lazy to look up the exact weight. How does one compute housing? The BEA uses something called ‘Owners Equivalent Rent’ where they ask homeowners what they would get if they rented out their house. There is a big problem with this and it does not directly track either ACTUAL rents or ACTUAL home prices.
What happens when real estate prices go up sharply with respect to rents and income? This was the case in pretty much every major city over the last 10 years. The CPI component for housing didn’t budge. This means that inflation was UNDER reported for that time period in which the Federal Reserve kept interest rates low to spur the economy onward. This was the same period that people were getting those low interest rate adjustable rate mortgates. The Federal Reserve thought that inflation was under control when it wasn’t. Today, we know that home prices are falling through the floor. The Federal Reserve knows this because they are bailling out failing banks. The person who needs to buy or sell knows this as well. And, of course the statistics are showing this as well. The CPI component for housing hasn’t budged. This means that inflation is OVER stated.
One of the important uses for the CPI is to adjust Social Security payments. In todays world where housing is dropping, and food and energy are rising, an accurate CPI would really hurt people on Social Security. I’m going to generalize, but I think that in retirement, your food and energy are a higher percentage of your bills. It would not be good to see your outlays for food, heat, and transportation go up while your check fails to keep track. I think it would be better to have Social Security checks tied against a modified version of the CPI bucket to better correlate with what retireees pay.
Another issue with the concept of the CPI is the fact that for most people, the housing component doesn’t matter at all. This would be everyone who does not rent. When housing prices were skyrocketing most people weren’t complaining about about inflation or their 3 percent raise, while I was fuming at my boss and quitting all over the place just to get a decent salary increase. Now, people are complaining about inflation only because food and energy are going up, when an accurate CPI would show near 0 or even NEGATIVE total inflation.
The funny part is that while we do have a somewhat free market, we still have central planning. The failure of central planning is part of the reason why socialism doesn’t work in reality. And, here we are with the government trying to centrally manage prices and interest rates. The fact is that when you attempt to manipulate things, you get blamed for it when things go wrong. There is also good evidence that says central manipulation of the economy is impossible to do properly. Ron Paul gets this when he says he wants to abolish the Federal Reserve. John McCain, Hillary, and Obama are all clueless monkeys.
“One of the reasons that millions of families face foreclosure and/or the loss of their life savings is that the ideologues of homeownership continued to promote homeownership even when it was clear that buying a home would be financially detrimental.”
Hat tip to Housing Panic.
I keep hearing reports of people taking out 401k loans or even caching them out all together in order to help pay everyday expenses. That is really a DUMB thing to do because money parked in IRA’s or 401ks are safe from foreclosure and even divorce! And, they are tax advantaged. It’s like being able to park your money in an alternate universe for a while. If you can’t pay your daily expenses, trade down in life or declare bankruptcy.
Guy Serving Tea: What do you do?
Guy In Suit: Oh, I test out new consumer electronics. What do you do? … Serve Tea?
Serving Tea: This is one of the hats I wear. I also drive trucks …. and hand out subversive literature.
Powered by WordPress