Debt ceiling hysteria

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Bill

I suppose I will come out of my long blogging hibernation to comment on the bill that was just passed to increase the debt ceiling. I’m having a hard time reconciling the media perception of the budget cuts with the bill that actually passed. Everyone is screaming about huge cuts, but here are the facts. [...]

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Delusions of capitalism

Posted on February 18, 2010 by Bill

Earlier today, a man named Joe Stack crashed his plane into an IRS building out of frustration with the federal government. In a long letter which he posted, full of misspellings and grammatical errors, he makes an interesting point: I remember reading about the stock market crash before the “great” depression and how there were [...]

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Money, weapons, and power

Posted on February 14, 2009 by Bill

A truly awful post over at Queercents a few weeks ago deserves a proper analysis, and tonight I find myself with the time to do so. Ashley writes about the challenges of being transgendered: It seems to me that we Transgendered, as a group, are not overly prosperous.  Oh, I know that some of us [...]

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Have 401(k) plans failed?

Posted on January 23, 2009 by Bill

The stock market’s dramatic dive over the past year has some people questioning the usefulness of 401(k) plans. A recent article on msn.com reports: “This is the biggest test that the 401(k) plan has seen to date, and it has failed,” says Robyn Credico, the head of defined-contribution consulting at Watson Wyatt Worldwide, noting that [...]

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Dealerships finally get what they deserve

Posted on January 13, 2009 by Bill

The news is full of stories about auto dealerships closing and filing for bankruptcy, such as this one on Bloomberg: General Motors Corp. said it may lose as many as 500 dealers in its home market this year, an increase from 350 last year, as the largest U.S. automaker works toward a goal of cutting [...]

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Yes, Obama is a socialist – and so is McCain

Posted on October 29, 2008 by Bill

Lately, the Republicans have been claiming that Obama’s policy proposals are socialist. CNN quotes from McCain’s speech on Saturday: “You see, [Obama] believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that help us all make more of it. Joe, in his plainspoken way, said this sounded a lot like socialism,” McCain said Saturday. McCain also said in [...]

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4th Grade Intro to Socialism

Posted on August 25, 2008 by Bill

Today was the first day of school for kids in Dallas. I only know this because I’ve become partially financially responsible for a 9-year-old and 13-year-old girl in the last few months… it’s a long story I won’t get into. In any case, we enrolled them in the public schools near our home, and today [...]

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Election year blues

Posted on June 23, 2008 by Bill

It has been harder than usual for me to blog this year. Election years are hard to stomach. It’s easier to be optimistic earlier in the process, when one can imagine that we’ll actually get a new kind of president. Maybe an economist or a political scientist with a Ph.D. – someone with an extensive [...]

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Supporting our troops in Iraq

Posted on February 6, 2008 by Bill

Supporters of the war in Iraq have repeatedly argued that in order to “support our troops” we must send more of them to Iraq and keep them there indefinitely. This idea is reflected in articles like this one from Senator Joseph Lieberman, but there is certainly no shortage of such articles. Take your pick. However, [...]

Filed under: Politics | 1 Comment »

Why I hate federal taxes

Posted on February 5, 2008 by Bill

Today on Queercents, I describe my rather cynical view of Washington, D.C.: “The other day on Sirius satellite radio, Howard Stern was complaining about the fact that the merger between XM and Sirius has not yet been approved by US government regulators. The National Association of Broadcasters, which is made up of companies such as [...]

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