Foreigners Hate Bush

I was noticing after Hussein Obama was elected that they had a fair amount of coverage about how happy people in other countries were that Hussein Obama was replacing President Bush. So I did a little digging to see how people were voting with their feet. This chart is the number of petitions for citizenship filed from DHS. Apparently even Bush's America is better than where they are from.

Senators Post Higher Returns

This story makes me want to invest in companies that sell rope and street light poles. They sick the SEC on Martha Stewart when they are doing the exact same thing. (Martha was convicted of lying). Perhaps government officials and employees should be scrutinized for their investments even more so than CEO's and CFO's. At least management can only inside trade on their own company. Government regulators can inside trade on every company they regulate.

Healthcare Costs

Coyote has a good chart today for those who want to blame healthcare costs on insurance companies.

Because everyone knows that most of the costs of healthcare reform can be paid for by ripping the excess profits out of the health insurance business like a liver from a fish. Just to remind everyone, these are net profit margins reported by Google Finance for 3Q2008 of the largest health care providers and insurers:

Cigna: 3.50%
United Health Group: 4.56%
Aetna: 3.64%
WellCare: 4.08%
Amerigroup: 3.51%
Humana 2.56%
WellPoint: 5.49%

Those margins are seriously pitiful. In my opinion if we have the best healthcare in the world then we should expect it to cost a lot. Its not convenient for most of us and I am not saying that their isn't waste in the system. However, the costs of letting the government run the program are worse than I want to think about and it would come with crappy service.
If you really want cheaper medical care we should outlaw all very high deductible health insurance. Because after all when was the last time you called around for quotes on a doctor visit.

Watch Your Kids

Don't you hate when people just let their kids wander all over.

You Know You Want to Try This

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYhDu1UzLSs

Another Way to Save

I've talked before about how allowing more immigration could help save social security. The basic premise being that there are not enough payers projected to be in the system. I would think that the same type of argument could be made against gay marriage. One day these people will begin receiving payments from Social Security without any children paying in. Or in other words my children will have to pay for both my and their social security.

Financial Help

Having trouble paying your bills. You could try this.

Social Security

One of the key reasons for the projected shortfall in Social Security is that as a large portion of the population retire there will not be enough payers paying into the system. Here is my solution. Instead of basing social security benefits on your earnings over your life it should be based on the number of children you have had. This would create an incentive for people to have more kids i.e. create more payers into the system. It would also give some economic benefit to the stay at home moms with a pack of kids that I talked about in my last post.

CNBC #2

The second article on CNBC I read this morning is also horrible. Of course I should have known that when I saw the title "Obama's Tax Hike For Wealthy—Why Young Should Embrace It". First off when is a tax hike good. Pretty much never. The idea of the article is that rich people are generally older and if we tax them they will get out of the workforce giving opportunities to the young. Ya thats probably true but is this one benefit worth losing their experience. What some people don't understand is that you are generally paid equal to whatever value you create. This is the benefit of capitalism. So if an older person creates $500,000 in value each year and a younger person creates $50,000 wouldn't take 10 young people to equal one old. If that old person stayed working wouldn't it free up ten young to get further education or come up with some crazy idea like oh I don't know a search engine called google.

And before you comment I say people are generally paid equal to the value they create. There are some glaring exceptions to this. The biggest in my mind is being a stay at home mom. They invest HUGE amounts of time and money into the future labor force and future stay at home moms for no immediate economic gain.

CNBC

Reading CNBC this morning is depressing. First you have Cramer, who I always thought was at least kind of a capitalist. If you don't want to read the article hear are the cliff notes. The article is his plan for Obama.
1. Make Cramer the head of the SEC, Fed, and Treasury Secretary. Ummm...OK why?
2. Fix the auto industry AIG style, by buying large stakes in the company. I thought we already found out that communism was a bad idea.
3. Force oil companies to sell natural gas at their filling stations. Great another regulation because government is so much smarter than we are. Seriously, if natural gas vehicles are so much better and cheaper wouldn't we all have them converted already.
4. Stop deporting illegals. This one I agree with but not for the same reasons he cites. I see immigrants legal or not as another set of hands and another set of brains. He sees them as home buyers.

Seriously when has increased regulation ever benefited the market. The most depressing thing is that Cramer should know better.
And actual government ownership of large companies, they already have a 35% interest in profits errr get 35% in taxes. Why give them a stake in the equity. Well once again more than their 15% share of capital gains.

A Democrats Version of Voluntary

What a buffoon.