Here's a little something for those of you that are like me...and can't take another second of listening to every single news outlet blithering endlessly on about Michael Jackson, his crazy dad, his kids, his "mystery love child", his doctor, his missing nose(s)....etc. etc. ad nauseam.
Maybe it makes me a callous, heartless fiend...but I just don't care about postmortem, inter family, conspiracy theorist dead celebrity drama.
It would be a refreshing change to come home from a hard days work, pour a drink, turn on the news and see something that might actually affect something other than the Michael Jackson estate.
Perhaps as mental self defense against this assault on my intelligence I've been reading a lot more lately. In particular I've been reading epic poems.
Most recently I read (and then listed to a podcast of) "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. There are too many brilliant passages in this poem to share them all in this post (so you should go read the poem); but here are a few of my favorites:
IV.
He holds him with his glittering eye - The wedding-guest stood still, And listens like a three years' child: The Mariner hath his will.
XXVIII.
Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.
CXLII.
He went like one that hath been stunned, And is of sense forlorn: A sadder and a wiser man, He rose the morrow morn.
For those of you who are interested and don't mind reading directly from your computer, you will find most of the classics free at google books.
Now go! Save yourselves from the mind numbing hours that pass as "news" lately and get some culture.
That's right. You can deposit money in this life...and when you are reincarnated you can stop by and pick up your deposit...with interest.
And here I was worrying about the shrinking value of my retirement account. How could I have been so short sighted?
Do you think I could come back as a Nigerian prince and offer to give away the fortune I earned in compounded annual interest to anybody willing to email me their bank account information in response to my mass email spamming?
P.T. Barnum said that there is a sucker born every minute...he would be so proud.
You’ve heard the phrase about getting a taste of your own medicine? Well the medicine we’re talking about is the health care plan the government wants you to have…but doesn’t want to take themselves.
Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that the Senate Health Committee voted (barely) in favor of an amendment that would require all members and their staffs to enroll in any new government run health plan.
Only three Democrats voted in favor of the amendment.
So the party that wants to shove a “public option” down our throats before anybody has a chance to think twice about it has already thought enough about it to know they don’t want it.
Kind of reminds me of a certain stimulus spending package that had to get approved over a weekend or the world would come to an end…even though many months later we’ve only spent about 11% of the funds. And most of the funds that have been spent aren’t on anything stimulating…but I digress.
I’m not saying that the existing state of health insurance coverage isn’t in need of overhaul because I think it is. But I am saying that I don’t need to hear any additional details about the plan currently being proposed beyond the fact that those who would impose it would also avoid it.
How about this for a first step: absolutely no plan whatsoever is put into motion for “the people” unless every single federal and state employee relinquish their existing health benefits and replace them with the “public option”…including Congress, Senate and the Executive Branch.
Certainly if tax dollars are going to pay for a health insurance option, those whose living is funded on the backs of taxpayers should be required to consume it; particularly when those same people are bent on requiring you to consume it.
When you consider that our tax dollars are already paying for the health benefits of the aforementioned group and that we’re being told that this new “public option” will bring down the costs of health care; how can there even be any discussion about whether publicly funded employees (including Congress & Senate) will adopt it?
It would be nice if politicians had to eat their own dog food for a change.
Their failure to very willingly and very publicly adopt whatever public option comes to pass is all I need to hear to know that I don’t want it.
This is a quote from Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in response to criticism over the City of Los Angeles footing the bill for the $1.4million in police and other services necessary to host the Michael Jackson memorial last Tuesday (7/7/09).
Noble Mayor Villaraigosa…noble indeed.Oh wait…that’s not your money you’re spending?It’s ours?Taxpayer money?
That certainly explains your generosity.
Mr. Mayor, if it’s so “nonsensical” to charge the family for a funeral, is it safe to assume that effective July 7, 2009 you have declared that funerals in the City of Los Angeles are free for everyone?You might want to let Forrest Lawn in on that plan…or are you are offering up the Staples Center as the universal funeral site for all of Los Angeles?
A nice gesture mind you, but given there are more than 4 million people living in Los Angeles you might need to let the Lakers know that they will need to defend their NBA title in another venue, because the Staples Center will be booked all year, every year, with free funerals.
Do I even need to point out that Michael Jackson paid nearly fifteen times this amount to “bury” certain other events in his past?Is it really too much to expect that his estate cover the cost of his own funeral?I mean, did somebody put a gun to someone’s head to force this public spectacle?Why not a private family memorial that wouldn’t have cost the City one red cent?
By the way, has it slipped your mind that the City of Los Angeles has a $530 million estimated budget shortfall?(A highly optimistic estimate given that the City is doing the estimating).That usually means dropping $1.4 million in completely wasted spending isn’t a good idea.And yes, from a taxpayer perspective, Michael Jackson’s memorial was a complete waste of money.
And now that we are on the topic I might also point out that most (arguably all) of the $178,789 salary paid to each of the 15 LA City Council members, is also a complete waste of spending….as is a very large chunk of your $232,426 salary.
In a city with over 10% sales tax rates, grossly overpaid City officials, a half Billion dollar budget shortfall, over 11% unemployment and one of the worst school districts in the entire Country (LAUSD)…you, ever the politician, decide that it is the taxpayer’s responsibility to take this $1.4 million in the shorts.
You think it’s a good idea to stick the taxpayer with this expense.I, the taxpayer, disagree.I think it a much better idea that you and the entire city council go without pay until the $1.4 million boondoggle you are so proud of has been offset via your salaries.
I only wish I had written THIS...I'd say it sums things up beautifully. Think GM bailout, Nancy Pelosi and negotiating the purchase of a car...trust me, you want to read THIS.
Courtesy of Cafe Hayek (one of my personal favorite blogs).
I just logged on to CNN.com and found a Breaking News headline that read: “Regulators shut six more banks; closures for 2009 reach 51, more than twice as many as all of last year.”
And for good measure this headline was in a big bright red box at the top of the page to make sure I noticed it…and noticed that it was probably bad news.
It certainly isn’t good news. So I guess that makes it bad news. Of course that begs the question of just exactly how bad this news really is. The way this headline reads one would assume it is catastrophically bad news.
If I was a lawyer and this information was introduced by opposing council I would object to it on the grounds that it is “leading the witness”. (For the record, I’m not a lawyer; but I’ve watched so many episodes of Boston Legal that I think I could be.)
All of this got me to wondering how many people read that headline, swallowed it whole and are now sitting depressed in their homes awaiting some impending doom. And further, how many of us actually stop to think deeply and critically about the information that is fed to us in today's 24/7 non-stop news cycle?
So in the interest of trying to preserve everyone’s sanity…what do you say we actually put this headline into broader perspective and see what happens?
By the way…since I first saw this “Breaking News” announcement, the number was corrected upwards to a total of 52 failed banks in what is essentially the first half of 2009 vs. a total of 25 bank failures in all of 2008.
That’s not good.
How “not good” is it? To have any understanding of that we need to ask a few questions…
Question one: what does the number 52 represent relative to all banks? Is that a big number? Is that a small number? Is it half? With no perspective it doesn’t really mean anything.
So let’s get some perspective.
There are approximately 8,300 FDIC insured banks today. Thus, 52 banks represent a failure rate of 0.0063%.
That doesn’t sound so scary.
But the media is fond of ensuring that nobody forgets that we are in the worst economic crisis since the great depression and absolutely the worst recession in the past 25 years.
That sounds scary; and it leads us to our next question…
Question 2: how does today’s number of bank failures compare to bank failures during the great depression? And how does it compare to bank failures during the recession that started in the 1980’s?
Have a look at these two charts both of which are from a site called Calculated Risk (a very worthwhile site to visit I might add):
This one shows the number of bank and thrift failures dating back to 1921. This data includes banking failures from 1921 to 1933 which was prior to the formation of the FDIC. The FDIC was formed Jan 1, 1934 specifically to insure bank deposits and to bolster confidence in the US Financial System in response to the thousands (yes, thousands) of bank failures during the 1920’s and early 30’s.
52 bank failures is barely a blip on the radar compared to depression era bank failures; which were literally thousands per year. The same is true relative to bank failures from the recession that started in the 1980’s which included more than 500 bank failures in 1989 alone.
Even if we continue at the same pace (or an accelerated pace) we aren’t going to come close to the number of bank failures that took place back in the 80’s and 90’s.
Maybe it’s not so scary after all; and that leads us to our third question…
Question 3: if it isn’t scary then what is it? Besides providing confirmation of a recession we already know we are in, what does any of this tell us?
Good question.
The best answer that I could find is that it doesn’t really tell us much of anything. If you take a look at this chart you’ll see that there is no systematic relationship between FDIC interventions and annual US stock returns. (You can even check out the pretty scatter diagram complete with the Pearson correlation and the R2 statistic if you are totally into overly complex statistical modeling)
In fact, the FDIC bank intervention rate can only explain about 1% of the variation in stock returns, even when you include the extreme intervention cases during the great depression and the recession during the 80’s.
In other words…this news, while being newsworthy, is not a predictor of anything. In this case, it’s just news. Like the score of a baseball game; it has no bearing on what the score will be tomorrow.
So what should we do with all this new found perspective?
First…can we please stop beating this dead horse? We’re in a recession. We know already. You don’t have to tell me all day, every day
Second…did you notice we got out of that last recession without nationalizing everything under the sun? Can we stop with all the auto bailouts, the farming subsidies, the idiotic stimulus spending projects (like under highway turtle crossings…not joking) for a while and see if this patient (the economy) really needs more of that medicine? You do realize there is such a thing as over-medicating don’t you?
And finally…relax. We say the economy is cyclical for a reason; that being that when the economy needs to correct it will swing down, the market corrects, and then it goes up again. Always has...and if we let it...always will.
So why don’t we let the mechanism that has worked for the past 200 years - a free(ish) market – get us the rest of the way back.
Otherwise I’m afraid the number 52 is going to become awfully scary; because it will no longer be a 0.0063% failure rate…it will be our tax rate.
