There are two types of people who like discussing the habits and characteristics of “the rich.” Those that want to point out how evil these oppressors of the masses are, and those that want to learn how to be rich themselves.
I do not have much patience with the oppressors shtick. Thankfully, the great majority of Americans agree with me. Outraged complaints about how the rich 
are not paying their fair share of taxes is something leaders of the Blue Team voice to raise money from their navy blue supporters early in an election cycle, only to be conveniently forgotten as the day of actually voting approaches.
Support for raising taxes on high income households dissipates quickly once how much they are already paying is understood. An easy majority of Americans will say yes when asked if those making more than $250K should pay more taxes to reduce the deficit. But if the pollster gets specific and asks just how much those lucky few should cough up, a big majority choose rates lower than the current ones. Raising the marginal rate on households with incomes over $250K to 40%, which the administration claims to want, was found by a February poll to be supported by all of 4% of voters.
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Imagine a business losing $1B a month. Its brand name is well known by consumers, but associated with bureaucratic inertia and occasional acts of workplace homicide. Management has a scheme to massively cut costs and
modestly raise prices that, with luck, may return the company to break even five years from now.
Would you like to own a share of this outfit? Too late. You already do.
The inevitable, if not imminent, demise of the US Postal Service is one of the recurring themes here at BMA. Aside from affording me the opportunity to poke fun at Washington, and make predictions that are safely in far off in the future, I keep returning to the topic because it is an example of one of the core ideas of this blog, that vague and wishful thinking is no match for the reality of dollars and cents.
The Post Office is in serious trouble. If it were a normal corporation with private creditors it would almost certainly be in Chapter 11 by now. Deficits are large and getting larger. The top line is shrinking quickly.
Mail volumes are down 23% since 2007. And that decline is part of a long term trend, not some short-term effect of the Great Recession. Overall volumes peaked in 2006, but first class mail, which is is the real money maker for the USPS, peaked in 1999.
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Imagine that you did not know all you should about the ins and outs of mortgages. It is not that hard to do. Try. Now suppose you searched the web for a good place to learn about mortgages. A place where you could trust the 
source. Not some dumb blog. Someplace prestigious and maybe even a specialist on the topic.
How about the New York Times’ weekly Mortgages column? The Times is as august and authoritative as you can get in the old media world. And real estate has been an obsession for New Yorkers for as long as anybody can remember. (Rome has a foundation myth involving twin orphans and a wolf. New York’s centers on buying Manhattan really cheap. Tells you something.)
Vickie Elmer writes the column for the Times on mortgages every Sunday. It appears to be all she does there, and it is reasonable to suppose that it is her full time job. So she must be an expert. This must be the place for the confused to learn about mortgages.
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As I have written several times in the past (e.g. here and here) there seems to be no subject on which I am more out of step with normal folks than those plastic cards, credit and debit, that we all use to buy stuff.
In the past I have politely implied that this is a failing of mine, that I am just too old or too dense to understand what everybody else does. I hope nobody was fooled by that. I really think I may be the last person in America who can think clearly about plastic.
A few weeks ago, SmartMoney ran a round-up of the best credit card deals. The listing of best offers for the various categories of credit cards was fine, but the introductory gloss managed to encapsulate just about all the craziness (and I do mean craziness) that clouds thinking about cards in America.
… credit cards have lately emerged as the surprise champs, offering fewer fees and better rewards than the typical debit card.
Surprise to who? As far as I know, credit cards, in general, have always had lower fees and better rewards than debit.
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I should probably come clean right at the start of this and admit that I have a thing about energy saving light bulbs. You might call it a pet peeve. What
bothers me about them is not that they give off light of a slightly different hue than I am used to. Nor do I have any reason to believe that they do not use less energy, as advertized.
What drives me up the wall is the pious focus on them as a great green savings of energy and/or money. A focus which some years ago resulted in the federal government actually banning the old-fashioned Edison bulb.
Do not get me wrong. I agree that switching to energy saving bulbs will save energy. My point is that it will save only a tiny amount of energy. An amount that really only works as a symbolic act, and symbolism is in the eye of the beholder. What some may see as a visible sign that we love the planet is for me a sign we are governed by innumerate twits. I am here referring to both our politicians and the citizens who elect them.
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are not paying their fair share of taxes is something leaders of the Blue Team voice to raise money from their navy blue supporters early in an election cycle, only to be conveniently forgotten as the day of actually voting approaches. 
Media | Frank Curmudgeon | 
May 16, 2012 11:59 am | 
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