Who Does the Economy Work For?
About this time every month, I sit down at my desk and start paying the bills that are due the first of the next month. And as I proceed, I watch what looked like a comfortable cushion in my checking account quickly disappear. Mortgage? Check. Utilities? Check. Credit card. Gulp. I’m not complaining – we …
Active Patience
When I was a child, I recall a lesson in Sunday school teaching about “active patience”. The concept, as best I can recall, is to view patience not as passive idleness, but as an engaged and active activity. I assume the point of the lesson was to teach our impulsive and hyperactive selves that instant …
Exaggerated
No, the martians aren’t coming. But by the way the Associated Press covered the latest congressional estimates, you may have thought is was an equally important problem. A story earlier this week described how the Social Security disability insurance program is projected to experience a funding shortfall as early as 2017, meaning that benefits could …
Friends in High Places
In yesterday’s New York Times, Warren Buffett, the billionaire chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway made a simple pitch: tax me, and my stupendously rich friends, more. Lots more. This should not have caught many people off guard. Buffett has said publicly in the past that they supports increased taxes for the super-rich, because …
Newtonian Budgets
Pop quiz: What is Newton’s First Law of motion? (Extra points for the actual equation.) I’ll give you a few seconds to remember. Ok, time’s up – it states that the velocity of a body remains constant unless the body is acted upon by an external force. Or, put another, way, an object in motion …
Misdirection
While Congress nearly failed to solve a crisis of their own design, and before we got the late news Friday on the debt downgrade, the vaudevillian skills of professional politicians succeeded admirably in diverting the attention of the American people from the real problem we have – unemployment. While we were all worried about a …
Opportunity Cost
It appears this morning that Congress finally found their collective sanity and averted the financial calamity they themselves created. Truly, this is democracy at its finest. While the political pundits analyze the political winners and losers to this debt-ceiling debacle, one thing is clear: they won, and we lost. This should not be surprising. But …