Quote of the day

...there is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.

--Oscar Wilde

Channeling the inner Hank Moody

So… the list of people who I know personally and have published books is short but distinguished. It now also includes Greg Gammer, who now has his novel The American Nightmare out in the world. Congratulations to Greg!

The book itself looks interesting, so this is not one of those half-hearted congrats posts – though (full disclosure) I haven’t read any of it while writing this post…. But I will as soon as he releases the Kindle version.

ObamaCare - the prequel

You can go to the doctor and get medicine for a plethora of ailments. You can get everything from anti-fungal cream to steroids to Viagra to cancer drugs to knee replacements to lobotomies to radiation treatment to allergy shots to a baboon liver installed instead of your real one. All from doctors and free-market pharmaceutical companies that develop this stuff.

But the one thing right now controlled by the government, H1N1 Piggy Flu vaccine - just try getting that. Nope. Some of you (read:me) don't qualify. Those that do (read:wife and kid) had to wait almost three hours in line - OUTSIDE. In the COLD. Where they could GET SICK. But government-run healthcare is BETTER, you see. It's better because EVERYONE was waiting in the cold. It's unfair if only some people are stuck outside.

Oh, and they may run out of vaccine. Again.

Is it something in the water?

I wonder, what happens when someone signs on to write a column for the NYT? Does the paper filter the list of candidates to make sure no one with any reasonable cognitive ability is dismissed? Do they only accept columnists from an approved Party list, in effect serving as the propaganda arm of the [use your imagination] Party, without having to consider the commercial, logical, ethical, or journalistic impact of their content? Or maybe they hire normal people, and through a hazing period of tiger cages, Clockwork Orange-style indoctrination, and massive doses of LSD turn them into barking lunatics?

For example, reading anything written by Paul Krugman SHOULD result in a reaction of "Paul, what the fuck is wrong with you?" But yet, he gets to keep devaluing the NYT, journalism, and the Nobel Prize with crap like this piece pining for Richard Nixon's economic policies. Nick Gillespie at Reason wrote a critique of Krug-nonsense here, but frankly a critique could be written weekly about Krugman's inane rambling. But he writes on.

Or this week, when "The World Is Flat" author Thomas L. Friedman, who also writes a column for the NYT, conjured up a screed about how China is better governed than America. Allow me to quote Matt Welch's piece from Reason's Hit & Run column:

The next time anyone tries to tell you that Thomas L. Friedman is a serious
thinker, or a tribune for global democracy, or even a good columnist, or
basically someone who isn't worth sending on the next slow boat to Shanghai,
please refer him to this despicable column from today, then ask: Do you, too, prefer Chinese governance to American democracy? No really, Friedman says that:

There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

Then there's the recurring fun and games of Maureen Dowd's convulsing gibberish, and Roger Cohen's "reporting" of how happy the Jews of Iran are.

I don't understand - who pays for all this nonsense?

Like herpes, Spitzer just won't go away

Whenever you feel like things are settling down, that life is starting to make sense again, and that some balance has been restored to the natural order of things, some kind of stupid bullshit will throw it off again. For me, today, just as I was feeling there was a bit of justice and normalcy creeping back into our collective lives (no real reason btw that I felt that, maybe it was just gas) I see this headline in Slate (pic above).

Shouldn’t this guy be in prison for corruption and whore-banging? And didn’t he, in very large part, help cause the AIG debacle? Does anyone have any memory at all left, or are we al living in Memento world?

House Democrats contemplate abolishing 401(k) tax breaks

Here we goooooooooooooo! Down the drain that is. The socialisation of America has begun, and Obama's not even in office yet! This October 12th article in Investment News highlight a brilliant plan to replace your 401(k) tax deduction with... SURPRISE! A GOVERNMENT PROGRAM!!


House Democrats contemplate abolishing 401(k) tax breaks

Mandatory contributions from workers considered
By Sara Hansard October 12, 2008, 6:01 AM EST

Powerful House Democrats are eyeing proposals to overhaul the nation's $3 trillion 401(k) system, including the elimination of most of the $80 billion in annual tax breaks that 401(k) investors receive.

House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., and Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee's Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, are looking at redirecting those tax breaks to a new system of guaranteed retirement accounts to which all workers would be obliged to contribute.
A plan by Teresa Ghilarducci, professor of economic-policy analysis at The New School for Social Research in New York, contains elements that are being considered. She testified last week before Mr. Miller's Education and Labor Committee on her proposal.

At that hearing, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Peter Orszag, testified that some $2 trillion in retirement savings has been lost over the past 15 months.
Under Ms. Ghilarducci's plan, all workers would receive a $600 annual inflation-adjusted subsidy from the U.S. government but would be required to invest 5% of their pay into a guaranteed retirement account administered by the Social Security Administration. The money in turn would be invested in special government bonds that would pay 3% a year, adjusted for inflation.
The current system of providing tax breaks on 401(k) contributions and earnings would be eliminated.
"I want to stop the federal subsidy of 401(k)s," Ms. Ghilarducci said in an interview. "401(k)s can continue to exist, but they won't have the benefit of the subsidy of the tax break."
Under the current 401(k) system, investors are charged relatively high retail fees, Ms. Ghilarducci said.
"I want to spend our nation's dollar for retirement security better. Everybody would now be covered" if the plan were adopted, Ms. Ghilarducci said.
She has been in contact with Mr. Miller and Mr. McDermott about her plan, and they are interested in pursuing it, she said.
"This [plan] certainly is intriguing," said Mike DeCesare, press secretary for Mr. McDermott.
"That is part of the discussion," he said.
While Mr. Miller stopped short of calling for Ms. Ghilarducci's plan at the hearing last week, he was clearly against continuing tax breaks as they currently exist.
SAVINGS RATE

"The savings rate isn't going up for the investment of $80 billion," he said. "We have to start to think about ... whether or not we want to continue to invest that $80 billion for a policy that's not generating what we now say it should."
"From where I sit that's just crazy," said John Belluardo, president of Stewardship Financial Services Inc. in Tarrytown, N.Y. "A lot of people contribute to their 401(k)s because of the match of the em-ployer," he said.Mr. Belluardo's firm does not manage assets directly.
Higher-income employers provide matching funds to employee plans so that they can qualify for tax benefits for their own defined contribution plans, he said.
"If the tax deferral goes away, the employers have no reason to do the matches, which primarily help people in the lower income brackets," Mr. Belluardo said.
"This is a battle between liberalism and conservatism," said Christopher Van Slyke, a partner in the La Jolla, Calif., advisory firm Trovena LLC, which manages $400 million. "People are afraid because their accounts are seeing some volatility, so Democrats will seize on the opportunity to attack a program where investors control their own destiny," he said.
The Profit Sharing/ 401(k) Council of America in Chicago, which represents employers that sponsor defined contribution plans, is "staunchly committed to keeping the employee benefit system in American voluntary," said Ed Ferrigno, vice president in the Washington office.
"Some of the tenor [of the hearing last week] that the entire system should be based on the activities of the markets in the last 90 days is not the way to judge the system," he said.
No legislative proposals have been introduced and Congress is out of session until next year.
However, most political observers believe that Democrats are poised to gain seats in both the House and the Senate, so comments made by the mostly Democratic members who attended the hearing could be a harbinger of things to come.

ADVICE AT ISSUE
In addition to tax breaks for 401(k)s, the issue of allowing investment advisers to provide advice for 401(k) plans was also addressed at the hearing.
Rep. Robert Andrews, D-N.J., was critical of Department of Labor proposals made in August that would allow advisers to give individual advice if the advice was generated using a computer model.
Mr. Andrews characterized the proposals as "loopholes" and said that investment advice should not be given by advisers who have a direct interest in the sale of financial products.
The Pension Protection Act of 2006 contains provisions making it easier for investment advisers to give individualized counseling to 401(k) holders.
"In retrospect that doesn't seem like such a good idea to me," Mr. Andrews said. "This is an issue I think we have to revisit. I frankly think that the compromise we struck in 2006 is not terribly workable or wise," he said.
Last Thursday, the Department of Labor hastily scheduled a public hearing on the issue in Washington for Oct. 21.
The agency does not frequently hold public hearings on its proposals.
E-mail Sara Hansard at shansard@investmentnews.com.

Foreclosure pets - F'ng sad

Times are getting rough when you have to ditch the family pet. CBS reports that pets are being given up to shelters (at best) when people can't afford them any more. I guess that was always the case, but they're positioning it as "Foreclosure Pets". When the phenomenon has a clever name on NY local news, that's when it's officially sad.

The Onion nails the Bear Stearns buy-out

The Onion nails it again.

JPMorgan Chase Acquires Bear Stearns In Tedious-To-Read News Article

NEW YORK—As a volatile market reacts to news of the Bear Stearns fire-sale deal with a surge in stock prices but reduced bond yield, officers...

Smurf your smurfing terrorism, here's the real news

Smurfs -- known in the original Belgian comic strip as Schtroumpfs -- may only be as tall as three apples ...

Again, I need to understand what strange algorithm (or stoned intern) at Reuters decides what stories warrant a "priority". It seems almost uncomfortable to read about the Smurfs in any context, but for fuck sake it's between a bomb in Karachi and a bomb in Kabul!

There's people dying across the globe but stop the presses! This time, there's a superfluity of smurf vaginas! C'mon Reuters; you're better than this. Also, why is this a Reuters World story to begin with? Do they know the Smurfs aren't really in our "world"? Who did the fact checking? I'm so tired...

"Top" Stories?

This is what I'm greeted with at the top of my newsfeed... Someone at Reuters should examine how they rank top stories. Isn't there a war or goat-rape or election generating news somewhere?