It's just my opinion, I could be wrong

Reason #n why I'm not going to be in California forever: this ruling . The most recent in a long line of idiotic rulings from California's idiot brigade (aka our "Supreme" Court) has found again that you can indeed be sued for trying to save someone's life in an emergency. This after the last time they found the same thing, and the Legislature passed a law giving people immunity (a "Good Samaritan" law). Apparently, the idiots decided that the law doesn't apply to people who are not being good enough helpers, decided after the fact by the idiots, thus circumventing the entire purpose of the law. California: nice place, except for the people.

So I had an idea this morning for how California could pass a balanced budget in about one day of work. Now, I'm sure this is not a new idea, or restricted to just California, but I think it could work pretty well. Of course, like all other good ideas for helping a government function effectively, it's doomed to be ignored... but I'll post it anyway. See, the problem in California is that the current process never works. You need a 2/3 majority to raise taxes/fees here (which is great), which means it's near-impossible to draft a partisan budget and ram it though the other party. Since politicians rarely negotiate with the other party, this means we have no budget for a long time, until enough time passes that enough people can get on-board with the "work around the law" plan. At no point does the system really produce a viable budget, or produce the desirable negotiation or compromise; moreover, it typically results in shortfalls, delays, and months of wasted...

I expect that in light of the recent Fed rate changes, the implicit effects those will have on inflation, and the [obvious] statement that the Fed will have to very carefully contain inflation expectation, this page will be very important PR for the government in the next few years. On it, the BLS quotes a couple of BLS economists spewing utter BS about how the CPI is not bogus, and all the complete lies and statistic manipulation introduced over the year to keep the CPI artificially and incorrectly low is actually not utter BS. Really, though... they might want to consider hiring a marketing team to advise them on how to appear credible. I'd guess if you're going to try lying to normal people, use pretty graphs and stay away from directly lying about simple, easy-to-understand facts. For example, when you say that hedonic regression is totally valid and not a blatant manipulation of the data, it just destroys your credibility with anyone who can understand the obvious lies yo...

By now, pretty much everyone with an internet connection and a passing interest in the economy has heard about the Madoff hedge fund Ponzi scheme, and it's global fallout . Rather than dwell on this as an unmitigated disaster in financial oversight on the part of the SEC (it certainly is), or as a referendum on the utter failure of governmental oversight in preventing fraud (yep, that too), or even as a parallel to the pitfalls of non-transparent investment of enormous amounts of money in extremely questionable vehicles for ulterior motives (see: the Fed), I thought I'd instead hypothesize about how we could productively learn from this meltdown, and try to prevent future disasters when there inevitably is fraud. Rather than get into the obvious (eg: effective oversight, which may be near impossible), or abolishing hedge funds in general (which does nothing, since the problem is fraud not hedge funds), I figure the best way to prevent fallout in the future is to take this oppor...

Ever question if increased government spending might actually help the economy, rather than hurt it like every other time it has happened? Well, then this video is for you. You can learn many valuable things, like how wealth redistribution is not actual economic stimulus, and how big government causes the economy to grind to a virtual halt. Of course, none of this is new, or particularly rocket science. What's amazing is that there are still people, in this country, today, who believe that big government will help them be more prosperous, and wonder why the government fabricating trillions of dollars to hand out to people could possibly be bad. I mean, it's like finding people who really do still believe the earth is flat: yeah, I'd guess they exist, but in America? Now? Roughly 50% of the voters? Boggles the mind. Stay in school, kiddies; learn the basics of how the world works so you don't grow up dumb. When the nice man on TV talks about enormous "stimulus pack...

Feel free to gloss over this post if the reasoning is also blatantly obvious to you, but it seems some [dense] people in the world are baffled that although banks have received upwards of $500 billion in direct cash injections from the government, as well as more than $2 trillion in US currency "loans" for their secret (and presumably worthless) collateral, yet private credit is still very tight, and most of the bank money is either in deposit at the Fed, or invested in Treasuries paying 0%. Well, let me explain why this is expected and easily predictable. See, the country has been running on borrowed time/money for a while. We have destroyed our industrial base while simultaneously running up huge consumer debt. This combination has allowed people to continue living "the good life", despite the fact that our country runs a huge trade deficit, and policies which actively discourage industrial production, development, and wealth creation (eg: environmental restrictio...

An interesting thing happened today: short-term Treasuries sold with negative returns ( link ). This means that you get less money back at maturity for them than you pay today; ie: worse than holding cash. "How can this happen?", you might be inclined to wonder. Therein lies a very interesting context and back-story... See, in my mind it starts with the fractional reserve banking system and the Fed. The banking system is what allows currency in circulation to multiply, as banks loan out money based on fractional deposits. This allows the amount of loans outstanding (and consequently the amount of money outstanding) to be significantly larger than the actual sum of deposited "hard" money held by the banks as reserves on the loans. The mathematical maximum in additional money is 9x the "real" deposited money; in practice it's typically closer to 2x. As an aside, derivatives also add "fake" money to the financial system. These are conditional de...

I'd like to point out that this article is pretty fricken funny: Spore was the top pirated game for 2008. If you're not laughing at the delicious poetic irony already, read on for the brief explanation... See, Draconic Restriction Malware (DRM, also called Digital Rights Management by some marketing departments trying to distort the name to hide what it does) is software or other restriction devices which prevent purchasers from fully and arbitrarily using something they have purchased. Usually DRM is found in software, but the music industry is also well-known for abusing their customers with DRM, as are other well-known anti-consumer organizations. Now, Spore was published by EA, and become fairly well-known not for the game itself, but for the particularly onerous DRM added by the publisher. In particular, one aspect of their Malware additions was the requirement that EA's servers be available online, your system communicate with them, and they allow you to play the gam...

Today's nomination for Idiot of the Day goes to Tom Daschle, for his self-serving pronoucement that reforming health care will spur the US economy. Now, I'm sure Tom is as self-serving as any other [ex-]politician, but seriously, you'd have to be a moron to take that statement at face value. Let's look at Obama's health-care reform plan, in a nutshell. He wants to make medical insurance mandatory for everyone, and he wants to make businesses pay for it (directly through penalties or indirectly through increased taxes). By socializing medial insurance, you'll get a standard baseline coverage plan for everyone, but at a higher overhead cost (because the government is horrible managing costs in enormous bureaucracies). So the change would increase health-care costs for businesses, while simultaneously increasing health-care taxation on businesses. Maybe the great and mighty chosen one would like to explain how doubly increasing health-care costs is going to "...

So today, Bernanke commented that lenders were not doing what was in their best interest by modifying mortgages they service to keep people in homes they cannot afford. Now, I'm not sure when Benny became a comedian, but let's examine that pronouncement: - By modifying the loans they don't own, banks would be violating the contracts with the owners of the securities, exposing themselves to lawsuit costs and judgments for the write-down value (normally the loss to the investor, which would become the bank's loss if they illegally modified the loans). - The amount of write-down required to keep people in the houses they bought would, in many cases, be much larger than the current loss in value of the home, even subtracting the cost of foreclosure. Since foreclosure is still possible in the country (at least for two more months), it's still the most cost-effective option in those cases, even with the barriers the government is scurrying to erect. Strike two, Benny. - ...

In a surprise to nobody, the explosion of cheap private credit has made college ridiculously expensive and unaffordable for many people. I'm sure we'll have lots of opinions from pundits and politicians on how we can help people mortgage their futures to send their kids to college, but I have a novel solution to the problem: How about we stop giving out cheap loans to everyone and subsidizing the risk with public debt? "How does that help" you ask? Well, I'll explain. See, lots of cheap money means everybody can borrow for things they consider important investments. Many people think college education fits in that category, so there has undoubtedly been lots of borrowing (mortgages, etc.) to finance college. That, in turn, drives up college prices, due to simple supply and demand. If we reduced the flow of cheap borrowing, there would be less money competing for college spots, so prices would go down. It would also have the added bonus of reducing prices for all...

Just wanted to point people at this post , cause the video is interesting. I'd also like to plug my response on the post, because I've been meaning to write my own blog entry on it, but for now the response will suffice. I'm not sure how important it is for the average person to understand how the money supply works, and coincidentally inflation/deflation, but I'm pretty sure it's vital that if we want to preserve our monetary system and likely our country as a whole, we get some people who do understand it and care about preserving it making decisions about it, instead of the hopelessly corrupt blithering idiots in Congress currently.