In 1726 Daniel Defoe wrote in The Political History of the Devil, "Things as certain as death and taxes, can be more firmly believed." The more familiar phrase was used by Benjamin Franklin writing in a 1789 letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, "In this world nothing can be certain, except death and taxes." In 2010 Apollo [...]
President Obama's debt-reduction panel is looking at curbing the more than $1 trillion in tax breaks the Internal Revenue Code provides as a way to raise money without raising income taxes. This sounds fair. Why should special interests get tax breaks while the average American foots the bill? Here's a sampling of some of the [...]
The Fed's policy of Quantitative Easing ("QE") in the wake of Lehman's bankruptcy and the subsequent financial crisis was aimed at providing a substantial pool of liquidity to restore confidence in the financial system. The latest round of QE (dubbed "QE2") is aimed at spurring economic growth. Whether QE2 is necessary or will work has [...]
Unless you've been living on the moon for the past 2 years you've heard Obama, Pelosi and team blame the housing crisis (and just about everything else from the Kennedy assassination to the extinction of the dinosaurs) on Wall Street. Indeed the financial engine that drives our economy is complicit. There's no debating this point. [...]
Your child comes home from school with report card full of lousy grades. What do you do? You coddle him. "Everything's OK. It's not your fault." He doesn't see a problem so he doesn't take the necessary actions and his grades don't improve. On the other hand you yell at him. "You don't try hard [...]
The eight investment funds created under "PPIP" (Treasury Secretary Geithner's Public-Private Investment Program) have proven a smashing success. Through September 30th the average net internal rate of return ("ROR") is 36%. The program aimed to help ailing U.S. banks by purchasing so-called toxic mortgage-backed securities ("MBS") weighing down their balance sheets. Treasury partnered with private [...]
What's more American than baseball, July 4th or apple pie? . . . . . it's the prenuptial agreement! You know what we're talking about. The "prenup" as it's come to be affectionately known is that device used by many a terrible movie, TV show and book to manufacture conflict. Well, maybe. More accurately the [...]
Proposed legislation from our friends in the House and Senate: HR 5318 (The Small Business Investment Penalty Relief Act of 2010) would waive the 10% penalty on early distributions from retirement plans if the funds were used for small-business investments. The bill is similar to HR 3612 and HR 3390. S 3720 and HR 6099 [...]
Poking fun at politicians is, well, fun. And why shouldn't it be? Many elected officials cling to their ideological biases - shamefully blinding themselves to the real-world and anything that may disprove their theories or derail their agendas. It seems it's been a long time - far too long - since we've heard "I'm wrong" [...]
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office ("CBO") now estimates our Nation's fiscal 2010 deficit at over $1.3 trillion. A whopping sum to be sure. As President Obama takes to the airwaves tonight to mark the end of combat operations in Iraq it's an interesting time to look at the cost of military action. The CBO estimates [...]