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POPSThe Health Care Issue So what would happen? The good news, such as it is, is that more people would buy individual insurance. Indeed, the total number of uninsured Americans might decline marginally under the McCain plan — although many more Americans would be without insurance than under the Obama plan. But the people gaining insurance would be those who need it least: relatively healthy Americans with high incomes. Why? Because insurance companies want to cover only healthy people, and even among the healthy only those able to pay a lot in addition to their tax credit would be able to afford coverage (remember, it’s a $5,000 credit, but the average family policy actually costs more than $12,000). Meanwhile, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most: lower-income workers who wouldn’t be able to afford individual insurance even with the tax credit, and Americans with health problems whom insurance companies won’t cover.
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POPSInnocent Govt Bailing out Evil Industry=NOT ! Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002, placing some very stringent, inappropriate, and inflexible reporting rules on financial institutions. Under this law, financial assets must be valued at fair market value--- even if they are not for sale! The Working Capital Model eliminates this problem entirely, but it is difficult to apply when the individual securities are not identifiable. More than 95% of Americans are making their mortgage payments right on schedule, yet there is no market for the financial products that contain these mortgages. Consequently, balance sheets reflect trillions of dollars less than the maturity value of the securities held by the financial institutions.
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POPSPiece on Fisher Investments Fisher Investments is headquartered in Woodside, California, and maintains additional operations at its office locations in San Mateo, California and Vancouver, Washington. Fisher Wealth Management is a wholly-owned subsidiary based in London, England, offering Fisher Investments’ services to clients in the United Kingdom. Fisher Investments’ joint venture affiliate, Gruener Fisher Investments, serves investors in Germany.
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POPSDeath Row Realism "Why should we pay to keep him locked up for life? I hear that question constantly. Few people know the answer: It's cheaper -- much, much cheaper than execution. If we condemn the worst offenders, like Massie, to permanent imprisonment, resources now spent on the death penalty could be used to investigate unsolved homicides, modernize crime labs and expand effective violence prevention programs, especially in at-risk communities. The money also could be used to intervene in the lives of children at risk and to invest in their education -- to stop future victimization. To take a life in order to prove how much we value another life does not strengthen our society. It is a public policy that devalues our very being and detracts crucial resources from programs that could truly make our communities safe."
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POPSAAE Declares Victory over 'Eco-Terrorists' Typical 'us vs them' rhetoric but this group takes it too far. I am all for breaking our dependence on foreign oil, but current oil shale extraction technology is too water intensive, environmentally destructive, and too expensive to be considered a viable alternative to foreign oil. Any oil that is extracted will be sold to the higher profit markets overseas and we Americans will still be faced with high pump prices in addition to ruined landscape. Oil shale production requires lots of fresh water that is currently being used to irrigate food crops and ranch land which means producing oil will come at the cost of food production.
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POPSWhy Would Warren Buffett Stoop So Low?
The market still works! With all due respect to Buffett, nobody has yet made a compelling case to me that there is, in fact, a crisis that extends much beyond overleveraged banks with bad business practices. There's a simple fact lost among all of this fearmongering and jawboning about how bad things could get if the government doesn't throw $700 billion (or more) at failing financial institutions. The stock and vulture-capital markets are still generally working, in spite of the cries from politicians and failing speculators to the contrary. The market also has a really good mechanism to help struggling financial companies get money. It's called "price," and it's still functioning. You can see it in action by looking at the one-year CD rates that various banks are offering to entice people to deposit money with them. When the people lobbying the hardest for a bailout are those who stand to benefit from it, you have to ask whether their motives are altruistic or self-serving.
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POPSSocial welfare programs do not keep a country from prosperity
The Nordic states have also worked to keep social expenditures compatible with an open, competitive, market-based economic system. Tax rates on capital are relatively low. Labor market policies pay low-skilled and otherwise difficult-to-employ individuals to work in the service sector, in key quality-of-life areas such as child care, health, and support for the elderly and disabled. The results for the households at the bottom of the income distribution are astoundingly good, especially in contrast to...American social policy. The U.S. spends less than almost all rich countries on social services for the poor and disabled, and it gets what it pays for: the highest poverty rate among the rich countries and an exploding prison population. Actually, by shunning public spending on health, the U.S. gets much less than it pays for, because its dependence on private health care has led to a ramshackle system that yields mediocre results at very high costs.
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POPSObama Takes Careful Aim at Contractors Government Executive story covers a recent Obama speech on his approach to government contracting. Further down in the story, there's cautious approval from trade groups representing government contractors. "It's certainly not a harsh assault on the public-private relationship," said one. Welcome words, no doubt, to many companies on our Forbes Beltway Index http://www.forbes.com/fdc/beltway/fbi.html.
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