i’m not holding my breath for tax refund checks.

Everyone’s beating up on the ZOMG EVUL CAPETALISTS for the credit and housing market bubble, and living for years off of inflated and largely imaginary gains.
How come nobody ever mentions the money raked in by the government in capital gains taxes, income taxes, and other assorted tax burdens attached to those inflated gains?  I mean, [...]

health care as a human right, part the 58th.

Picture a little town in Flyover Country, U.S.A—let’s call it Liberty Falls.  You know the kind: three stoplights, one gas station, a little corner grocery store, white picket fences, and a covered bridge.
Liberty Falls has 1,000 residents, and one doctor, a kindly old country doc who’s a few years shy of retirement.  Everyone who has [...]

spending what you don’t have.

So the budget deficit is going to hit 1.7 trillion dollars this year.  Mind you, that’s just the gap between government expenses and government revenue for the current tax year, not the national debt.
It’s kind of difficult for most people to envision just how much money we’re talking about here, so I’ve done a few [...]

a novel approach to embedded content.

News from the publishing front:  Entertainment Weekly to embed video-displaying LCDs in their September issue.
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THE SCENE: A horse buggy manufacturer’s office, circa 1909.
HORSE BUGGY EXEC #1:  Those new-fangled motor-cars are getting dreadfully popular these days.  Fewer and fewer people buy our solid and proven technology, and everyone is spending their money on those new contraptions [...]

the shape of things to come.

Now that Chrysler is worker-owned and government-run, we can look forward to curbing capitalist profiteering and consumerist excess by building the cars Americans need (whether they know it or not.)
Maybe after 40 years of central planning and public ownership, Chrysler will be able come up with something comparable to the crown jewel of socialist automotive [...]

reason #2836 why i love new hampshire.

So the government of Taxachusetts is miffed because the subjects of the Volksrepublik go shopping in our state, where there’s no sales tax.  One of their targets is a tire chain called Town Fair Tire, which has a few shops in southern NH, and a lot of shops in MA.  The state of MA ordered [...]

a purveyor of fine bull.

Bernie Madoff had much of his stuff seized by the Feds recently, including his 55-foot custom yacht “Bull”, a smaller 24-foot boat called “Little Bull”, and his multimillion-dollar Palm Beach property.
“There were bulls everywhere,” [a deputy U.S. Marshal] said. “Large statues of bulls, small statues of bulls, bull bookends.”

Kind of funny that the guy running [...]

hunting the fail whale.

Last night, I said on Twitter:
Good thing government bailed out the whaling industry in the late 19th century. Where would we get lamp oil now?
If government in the 1800s had handled the whaling industry like they’re now handling the car and financial industries, we’d have the tenth generation of whalers on Nantucket right now, collecting [...]

explaining financial terminology.

With all this talk of “Ponzi schemes” and confusing financial terms being thrown around in the news today, I thought it might be helpful to explain some of those terms to the interested layperson.
When a private citizen accepts investment money from people, and uses the cash from subsequent investors to pay out promised gains to [...]

porkosaurus rex has escaped the enclosure.

And with the stroke of a pen, the government injects a hundred-odd tractor trailer loads full of monopoly money into the economy–all of it borrowed, of course, since they don’t have an extra three quarter trillion bucks in the till over at the Treasury.
I don’t know how this is all going to pan out–I’m hoping [...]