If you are in the market and worried sick, maybe it’s time to trade your sleepless nights for paying off a tax liability that you’re going to face one way or the others, but doesn’t require paying additional taxes based on unreal income.
Most people are really bad at personal, financial planning. The people who make these mistakes are not just ordinary folks. They include highly educated, sophisticated people – including virtually all economists and Wall Street analysts. They almost certainly include you, the reader. So why do so many people get so many things wrong?
It’s the one thing that both the left and the right agree on: Democracy is being threatened as never before. The problem: Each side thinks the threat is coming from the other side. Evidence suggests that it is the threat from the left that should be the most worrisome, however. From using the FBI to spy on their enemies to using the IRS to release individual individual tax returns to criminalizing political differences and trying to imprison their opponents – it’s the anti-Trump forces that threaten to turn us into a banana republic.
In a short period of time, we have had some remarkable accomplishments. Here is a brief summary.
The Build Back Better proposal is a 2,466-page bill with a realistic price tag of $4.7 trillion. Although it appears to be dead on arrival in the Senate, its backers hope to revive most of it. John Goodman says there are good reasons to hope they fail.
One reason is drug price controls. With lower returns to new drug development, there will be fewer lifesaving drugs. University of Chicago economist Tom Philipson estimates that the resulting loss of life would be 31 times as great as Covid-19 to date.
The agricultural and technical university, which often has “state” in its name, is typically a land-grant university formed under the auspices of the Morrill Act of 1862. It was meant to be a practical, down-to-earth “people’s university,” and even today it is less prestigious than the state’s traditional university, usually founded much earlier. But the emphasis on technology has made some of the land-grant universities research powerhouses and often bigger than their in-state rivals.
Imagine you’re a small business owner at the outset of Covid and learn that you can keep your workers employed and stay in business thanks to the Payroll Protection Plan enacted by Congress. Further imagine your bank is the Bank of America…. Some ten months later, when everyone else is receiving forgiveness on their PPP loans, you start contacting the Bank of America for confirmation that your loan has been forgiven. What you get is months of stonewalling ultimately followed by a declaration that your PPP loan never qualified for forgiveness.
In most places the state employee health plan is one of the largest, if not the largest, health plan in the state. So, state legislators who want to reform health care should start with the one plan over which they have a great deal of direct control.… Another reform that is long overdue is the elimination of certificate-of-need (CON) laws, which create huge regulatory obstacles to newcomers who want to open a hospital or a nursing home, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center or even an ambulance service. Studies show that CON laws raise costs and lower quality. For that reason, 15 states have repealed all, or almost all, of them.
Human beings are by nature tribal. We are tribal because our ancestors were tribal. Our ancestors were tribal because tribalism had evolutionary survival value. Fifty thousand years ago, our ancestors lived in small communities of about 150 people. These tribes competed with other tribes for resources, and the competition was often violent and brutal. Loyalty to one’s own group and hostility to members of other groups was a valuable characteristic in tribal combat.
A retirement home has some resemblance to a college dorm. But that’s a good thing. Unlike a typical apartment complex, where one rarely knows one’s neighbors, a retirement home allows meeting many people—at meals, exercise classes, lectures and clubs.