Normally, this is the time of year that money advisors and gurus trot out the old canned advice on end-of-year tax planning. Not this year. This year we are all just too confused.
Generally, we can do little things in November and December to slightly lower our tax bill because, generally, we can predict what the tax rates will be in January. Not this time. Congress managed to adjourn for the elections without doing anything at all about the expiring Bush tax cuts, and when they 
reconvene for the lamest of lame duck sessions today I do not foresee a sudden clarity of purpose.
Could there have been any larger indication that the Democrats were in very serious trouble than that they passed up an opportunity to enact tax cuts a few weeks before an election? Yes, there were (and are) differences of opinion on what bits of the Bush cuts should be extended, but those differences ought to have been bridgeable. Instead, the Democrats became frozen in fear and indecision, petrified (and not entirely without reason) that any legislation they passed, whatever the particulars, would cost votes.
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As election day approaches, I thought this would a good time to discuss a bloated federal program that wastes taxpayer dollars, annoys the citizenry, and uses up our precious natural resources. I am talking about the minting of coins.
I was reminded of this continuing national tragedy by a post at The Consumerist about a brave grass-roots effort to address this issue. Apparently, there is Dunkin Donuts shop somewhere (for obvious reasons of safety its location was not disclosed) that now rounds all purchases to the nearest nickel. If a customer for some reason actually wants the pennies (the mind boggles) the shop will provide them.
I think this is an excellent first step and one that I hope more courageous shop managers will employ. I am sure this must be a violation of federal law (why else has it taken so long?) but if all stores do it the feds will be overwhelmed. I think the Secret Service must be in charge of enforcing the penny laws.
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Am I in danger of becoming obsessed with plastic cards? It’s possible. But there is one type of card I have somehow managed to avoid discussing in 21 months of blogging.
That type is gift cards, the anonymous chits that are as good as money in one particular store. In their current form they are a relatively recent innovation. When I was your age (20+ years ago) stores sometimes sold paper gift certificates for specified amounts, but they were a one-use item. If you bought a $50 sweater with a $100 gift certificate you generally got $50 in actual cash as change.
It wasn’t until we entered the digital age that modern gift cards, each a miniature debit account, were born. Spend $50 with a $100 gift card and your “change” is the same old card, only now it is worth just $50.
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What is the total cost of airline delays in the US? Funny you should ask. A recent 82 page paper from The National Center of Excellence for Aviation Operations Research (miraculously acronymed as NEXTOR) estimated a total cost of $32.9B for 2007.
It is a wonderful paper. That it uses 2007 data tells you that it was a multi-year effort. It has ten primary authors and employed the “assistance” of six others mentioned on the title page. And they included in their calculation everything from the cost to the airlines of paying flight crew to wait around to the added cost to passengers who take earlier flights than they really need to account for the possibility of delays. I look forward to reading it through someday.
The $32.9B NEXTOR laboriously comes up with sounds pretty big, but in context it’s not quite as alarming as I think they mean it to be. It is about $109 per American per year, or about $39.40 per air passenger-flight. Now, of course, that’s not zero. If there was something easy we could do to eliminate that “waste” we would be better off.
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The latest manufactured outrage to fill the media and blogosphere is that Social Security will not have a cost of living adjustment in 2011. This is only the second time this has happened in the 35 years that cost of living adjustments (COLAs) have been in place. The other time was in 2010.
The AP led off its reporting on this tragedy with:
More than 58 million retirees and disabled Americans will have to go another year without an increase in their Social Security benefits, the government is expected to announce this week.
The blog WalletPop, always a little more colorful, started its post thusly:
The prediction from scholars that the Social Security Administration will announce zero cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, to Social Security recipients in 2011 is a blow that many older and disabled Americans can ill-afford.
I think that they meant that the lack of a COLA, not the prediction of one, is an ill-affordable blow. But apparently, it is an even wider problem.
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reconvene for the lamest of lame duck sessions today I do not foresee a sudden clarity of purpose.
Government, Investing, Taxes | Frank Curmudgeon | 
November 15, 2010 12:59 pm | 
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