Tag: Rorschach Test

Defined Benefit vs. Defined Contribution Retirement Plans: Why 401k Plans are Not Your Father’s Oldmobile

Making the rounds the past 24 hours is a piece by Atrios in USA Today called “401Ks are a Disaster.” Here are the first two paragraphs: We need an across the board increase in Social Security retirement benefits of 20% or more. We need it to happen right now, even […]

The Tax Sunsets (Mostly) Sunset

We can, I suspect, all agree that taxes impact behavior. To see that this is so, one need only look to Vancouver, Washington, a Portland suburb adjacent to the Oregon/Washington border, where many Vancouverites go out of their way to do most of their shopping across the river in Portland, Oregon, where there is […]

Today’s Rorschach Test: The Federal Government’s Money-In and Money-Out Numbs

And here’s to you, you billions and trillions of dollars that is the federal government’s Money-In and Money-Out. A nation turns its lonely eyes to you. Do you know what those numbers look like? Most people do not. *  *  * One of the most long-lived financial sites aimed at […]

The Golden Gate and the Gun: Two Equally-Easily-Deadlies?

The Twitterverse is abuzz today with talk of Bob Costas’s Sunday Night football comments about guns. The context for those comments, briefly, is that a day or so earlier a professional football player in Kansas City named Jovan Belcher had allegedly shot and killed his girlfriend, with whom he had […]

What Does It Mean When Big Negative Numbers Get Smaller?

So, say you have a big negative number, such as, oh, I dunno, a negative 1 trillion, and say that that number measures something. And say that you measure that thing a year later and it now measures out at a negative 900 billion. Is that second number smaller or […]

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