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Category Archive for 'Personal Finance'

Reader warning – this is not well thought out, and I am narrating it to my phone via voice as I am driving to work this morning. It occurs to me that either retail financial institutions are intensely sclerotic, old-school, dinosaurs, or that regulation is strangling what they are able to offer retail customers, or […]

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Just how badly are public pensions underfunded? Here’s a great way to extract an answer: A good response occurred to me, to those cited by Josh who want to argue that underfunding is a mere $1 trillion. OK, let’s issue the extra $1 trillion of Federal debt. Put it in with the pension assets. Now, […]

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Lost in the stupid, yes stupid, handwringing about the sequester is a simple bit of personal perspective. No, this is not an analytic point, but it should nonetheless appeal to the folks who are fueled by narrative and emotion. Think of the following. Can you even tell me how much you spent, yourself or your […]

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Once graduation hits and the students go home, I rarely head into my office. Many of my class-notes and books are there, and that is a true cost of not heading in, but I generally really dislike my commute for a whole host of reasons. “Pick up and move!” you might say to me. I’d […]

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Regular readers probably are aware that I view public education as the single most appalling institution in America. As a result, we send our children to Catholic schools. While I do have some fondness for the type of education the Catholic schools supply, I probably hold the human embodiment of the Catholic church to be […]

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Per capita GDP in the United States is roughly $47,000. Per capita personal income is about $39,880. Let’s think about the kind of tax system we have in the U.S. What kind of effective marginal tax rates do you think a family faces that has per capita income below half of per capita GDP in […]

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Do NOT take financial advice from Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine. Are there economics editors over there? The brief article is talking about how zero inflation is “bad for you.” Ignore the larger economic question about how inflation is bad for you, this article is arguing that from a pure dollars and sense perspective, inflation makes […]

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The startling revelation in the recent Congressional hearings on the Bear Stearns situation was not simply that the SEC and its Chairman Christopher Cox failed to foresee the impending failure of Bear Stearns. Rather, the remarkable news was that at all times leading up to its failure, Bear Stearns was in compliance with each of […]

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