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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Saturday, May 03, 2003
More Signs That California Government Needs To Grow Up Go ahead--read the whole account here. I'm excerpting just enough to give a feel for it, but even if you aren't concerned about guns--even if you think guns are icky-poo and naughty--ask yourself if your legislature is fiddling while Rome burns: Stereotypes are a common part of American culture. Often as not they are based on a grain of truth wrapped in a mile of exaggeration. While most of us enjoy a good laugh at the wacky world of California politics, a rational man might think that accounts of strange thinking on the Left Coast, like any good bass fishing story, were a little larger than life. After spending two days in the halls of California state government in Sacramento, it is apparent that the inmates are running the asylum.So while in the deepest budget crisis that California has experienced in my lifetime (and remember, I lived there from 1958 to 2001), what are these idiots doing? Pushing for a ban on a type of gun where there has been no reported criminal misuse--ever: The catastrophic failure in judgment is California bill AB50, authored by Paul Koretz of the Hollywood area. In his bill, Mr. Koretz expressed a sky-is-falling need to ban .50 caliber target rifles by including them in the ever-changing definition of "assault weapon". The strident urgency driving this bill was Mr. Koretz’ claims that these bolt-action rifles are a terrorist superweapon which have the ability to shoot planes out of the sky, punch holes through tanks, and kill people in armored limousines from four miles away.Very depressing. California is on the edge of becoming something like a libertarian utopia--no prosecution of misdemeanors in some counties, while other counties close most of their psychiatric facilities. But with one difference: in a libertarian utopia, the people wouldn't be paying taxes; they would have that money in their own pockets to spend on these services. They also wouldn't have the government running around trying to disarm the victims. Friday, May 02, 2003
The Decision About the Campaign Finance Reform Act Thanks to Orin Kerr for the pointer. Lawyers Relief Act should have been the formal title of the bill. The high level pointer is here. It is almost funny reading the description of how complex this case is, because of the number of provisions of the law, and the number of plaintiffs and defendants (who take up the first four pages of the decision). The guts that I quote here are the per curiam opinion: Because of the complexity of our positions, this per curiamI haven't had enough time to read this carefully yet (and perhaps I won't have enough time--I'm 46 years old), but it appears that many of the provisions that us knuckle-dragging right-wingers and our allied forces of evil (like the NRA) said were unconstitutional--by golly, the three judges on this special panel agreed that they are unconstitutional! I understand the concern about political corruption that motivates well-intentioned sorts to ask for laws like this. But the core problem here isn't addressed by complex and unconstitutional campaign finance reform laws. The fundamental problem was well stated by P.J. O'Rourke some years ago. (I'm operating from memory on this, so I may have a few words screwed up here and there.) "When buying and selling are controlled by the legislature, the first thing to be bought and sold will be legislators." Mike Royko's Boss, a political biography of Mayor Richard Daley the Elder mentions that when Daley was an Illinois legislator, back in the late 1940s, it was common to introduce what were known as "getter" bills. These were regulatory measures that would injure a particular industry. After the industry had ponied up money to the legislator's campaign committee, the legislator would quietly pull the bill. This is, I think, not unique to Illinois. Robert Sherrill wrote a very entertaining book in 1973 book about gun control politics--and Sherrill was definitely a supporter of gun control. That book, The Saturday Night Special , makes a similar claim about Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, a perennial introducer of gun control laws in Congress that generated much heat and light but until 1968, did not result in any enacted statutes. Sherrill's claim, after talking to Dodd's former staff, was that these bills were also intended as "getter" bills--strictly ways to get the gun industry to give Dodd campaign funding, at which point he would see that the bills died. The more control that the government can take over the economy, the more interest that various special interests will have in buying influence. Perhaps what we need is fewer opportunities to introduce "getter" bills? It Takes a Village to Watch Your Husband, Hillary A reader sent in this little song that came to her this morning while she was at the car wash. For those of you who weren't present at the time--a few years back, Hillary Clinton wrote a book titled It Takes a Village, and Other Lessons Children Teach Us. The title comes from an African saying that, "It takes a village to raise a child." There is some truth to the idea that the community as a whole plays some part in inculcating values--which is why you want to be careful what sort of community you try to raise children in. Hillary Clinton had more powermad ambitions that she was trying to justify, of course. (To the tune of, "It Takes a Woman" -- I keep wishing they'd remake Hello, Dolly with somebody other than Barbra Streisand, but now that Walter Mathau is dead, I guess it doesn't matter.) How to Become Wealthy (Part 7) Bonds, stocks, mutual funds, money market accounts--what are all those things? Today we will start to cover bonds. Until you have $20K-$40K sitting around with nothing to do, I would not encourage you to buy bonds of any sort. But: you need to understand bonds in order to understand bond mutual funds. We'll get to mutual funds in a later segment; you need to understand bonds and stocks first, because most mutual funds are built on top of bonds and stocks. Bonds are enough of a struggle to get through that I'll take two segments to get through them, followed by stocks, then by mutual funds. A bond is a loan to a government or corporation for a certain period of time at a certain interest rate. As an example, I have some 30 year Treasury bonds that are due November 15, 2016. When the U.S. government first sold these bonds in 1986, they sold for $1000 each. (That's also known as the par value or face value.) The U.S. government promises (cross their heart and hope to die) to pay 7.5% (or the coupon rate) of the par value as a dividend every year. This dividend is actually paid in two halves--one half on the anniversary date, November 15, and the other half on May 15 (six months later). When the bonds are due, on November 15, 2016, they will make the final dividend payment, and the par value of the bond. Now, this isn't like a marriage; you can sell a bond before maturity. (Okay, maybe it is like a marriage.) At any given time, there are people trying to sell bonds, because they want the capital out of them; there are other people who are buying bonds. As it happens, I was one of those people that was looking to buy bonds back about ten years ago. My first, very nervous foray into long-term investing, was to buy those Treasury bonds from someone who had bought them when they were first issued. If bonds were a straightforward loan, this would be simple to understand. But there's a little complexity here. It turns out that interest rates rise and fall--but the dividend that the government promised when they issued that bond doesn't change. If you think about this for a minute or two, you'll realize that a bond that pays 7.5% interest--and has the full faith and credit of the United States government behind it--is really, really good today. If you tried to buy new government bonds today, you would be lucky to get 4.5% interest. So, these older bonds, that pay much higher interest rates, are in high demand. What happens to the price of a bond that everyone would like to buy? The price of the bond goes up. You must pay above par in order to buy that bond. The dividend each year will still be 7.5% of the par value of the bond--but you now have to pay $1300 to buy that $1000 bond. You'll get $75 a year in interest for the next 13 years, but in 2016, when that bond is redeemed, you will have lost $300. This goes the other way, too. If interest rates rise, a bond issued today that pays 4.5% dividend is going to be unattractive to bond buyers. Its price will fall. This leads us to the concept of "yield to maturity" (YTM). If you buy that $1000 par value bond for $1300, but it pays 7.5% of the par value each year, how much will you make on this bond, including both dividend payments, and the change in value of the bond from now to when it is redeemed? This is the annualized YTM--the yield divided by the numbers of years left. (Watch carefully--you will sometimes see YTM listed for a bond that has less than a year left. This may not be the annualized yield to maturity.) So, if you want to make money on bonds, you buy when interest rates are high, and sell when interest rates are low, right? Well, you can do that. If you hold a bond for more than one year, the difference between the purchase and sale price is taxed as a long-term capital gain. Long-term capital gains are subject to a maximum 20% federal income tax rate--for most well-paid people (the only sort who are going to be buying and selling bonds), this is a big improvement over the 28% or 31% federal income tax rate. (The states, however, don't necessarily follow the federal rules on this. Idaho, for example, taxes capital gains as ordinary income.) If you have a really good crystal ball, the strategy could be: buy bonds when interest rates are high, and earn high dividends; sell the bonds when the economy is in recession and interest rates are low; put that money into savings; wait for interest rates to go up again, and take the money you earned from the dividends and the capital gain on the bonds, and buy more bonds. The problem, of course, is that good crystal balls are in short supply. Had I realized that interest rates were going to be this low, instead of buying 50 of those Treasury bonds, I would have bought 200 of them. I had the cash available at the time, but I didn't have the guts to do it. Right now, I am looking at those 50 Treasury bonds, and it is tempting to sell them while interest rates remain low. I paid about $47K for them; I could sell them today for about $65K. Of course, that would mean paying about $4900 in capital gains taxes to the federal and Idaho governments, and giving up that lovely $3750 a year in dividend income.... When I run the spreadsheet, it tells me that I would have to reinvest the money in a 6.6% YTM bond next year to break even with this strategy--and I do not expect to see Treasury bonds with yields that good over the next few years. Generally, the reason to buy bonds is for the dividends. There are people that make a living buying and selling bonds. My own calculations suggest that unless you are doing this on a pretty large scale (millions of dollars in bonds), and have somewhere interesting to park the cash when interest rates are low, you are better off buying bonds and holding them to maturity. There are a couple of interesting exceptions, however, which I will now discuss. Bond Maturity and Volatility Rising interesting rates make the prices of existing bonds fall. Dropping interest rates make the prices of existing bonds rise. What happens to the price of a bond that is just about to mature when interest rates change? You own a bond that matures three weeks from now. Its price is going to be very nearly identical to its par value. No surprise in that, is there? You expect the bond to be repaid, with the final interest payment. So what happens if interest rates suddenly doubled? There's only three weeks left to maturity! The difference between what your bond will pay you, and what you could get by selling that bond and buying another is almost insignificant. Here's an important rule: the less time there is to maturity, the less sensitive bond prices are to interest rates. A bond due in 30 years can gyrate pretty impressively as interest rates change; a bond due tomorrow is going to be effectively untouched; a bond due in two years will be only slightly affected by interest rate changes. Last year, having watched the stock market sit in the doldrums, I decided to sell off some of my worst performing mutual funds, and move some of my spare cash, into bonds. But interest rates were low. Buying bonds with long maturities would have meant low interest rates, and the danger of the prices falling when interest rates start to rise again (as I expect that they will in 2004 or 2005). On the other hand, letting this money sit in a money market fund at 1.1% interest just wasn't attractive. So I bought bonds with relatively short maturities; some AT&T bonds due in 2007; some Capital One Bank bonds due in 2005; some Ford Motor Company bonds due in 2007; some Verizon bonds due in 2005. These are all short enough maturities that if rising interest rates sneak up on me, I can sell them and buy long-term bonds without much danger that my short-term bonds will fall dramatically in price from what I paid for them last year. If worst comes to worst, I can just sit on these bonds until they come due. The Ford bonds and the AT&T bonds, for example, have an annualized yield to maturity exceeding 7%. I can live with that! Next segment: bond creditworthiness, risk, and volatility. Thursday, May 01, 2003
How to Become Wealthy (Part 6) I am reluctant to get too specific about the sequence to follow on this, because everyone has slightly different situations. If you are single, or you and your spouse aren't planning to have kids anytime soon, buying a house may not make sense immediately. If you have a low income--and are therefore in a low marginal tax bracket--it may not make sense to buy a house either. What I intend to do is show you the sequence that my wife and I followed, as modified by what I have since learned. 401(k) Plans Especially if you are in a high marginal tax rate bracket, and especially the younger that you are, you want to put as much money into your employer's 401(k) plan as you can, as early as you can. The money that goes into a 401(k) plan is not subject to income tax. If you contribute $100 from every paycheck into a 401(k) plan, and you are in a 40% marginal tax bracket, your paycheck only drops by $60. However, you have put $100 into your 401(k) plan--and all the interest it earns in that plan until you withdraw (sometime after 59 1/2), is untaxed. Through the miracles of compound interest, if your 401(k) plan averages an 8% return over the next 38 years, that $100 will be worth $1862. Of course, you don't just put in $100 once; you put $100 in every month. If you start early enough at this, it turns into a huge pile of money. Start at age 22. Put $100 a month into your 401(k). If your 401(k) averages 8% return (which is not a terribly high return, when you consider the last 60 years), it will have $299,470 and some change when you retire at age 60. I cannot emphasize too strongly how important it is to get started early. This is one of the few cases where time is on your side. Instead of starting at 22, what happens if you start contributing at age 32? When you retire at age 60, instead of $299,470, you have $126,621--or less than half the amount. But in what sort of mutual funds should you invest your 401(k) money? The traditional model says that a young person should invest in the most aggressive stock growth mutual funds (which exchange high risk for high yield). As you reach your 40s, you start to move the money into more conservative stock funds. As you approach retirement, say, in your 50s, you move most of the money into bond funds (which have disappointing returns, and lower risk), and then, when you are ready to retire, any additional money going into your 401(k) should be in money market funds (almost no return, but no real risk). There's a lot to be said for this model--and I kick myself that when I first start contributing to a 401(k) in the mid-1980s, I put everything into bond funds. I was so scared that the money might evaporate away. Even into the early 1990s, I was still far too heavily weighted towards bond funds and conservative stock funds. If I had followed the traditional advice on this, I would have benefited from the most amazing stock market boom in history--the 1990s bubble--and I would probably have another $40K-$80K in my 401(k) account than I have now. However: there is something to be said for being cautious, especially when you are living in "interesting times." (There is supposedly an old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times.") A lot of people saw their 401(k) funds drop quite impressively in value since May of 2000, as the stock market bubble deflated with all the charm and grace of a tire running over a nailstrip. I think it is likely that over the next two to three years, all of this will be a painful memory (for most Americans). Those who cashed out their 401(k), or who had to retire, or moved 401(k) money from stock funds to bond funds--they are never going to forget this experience--and not in a positive way. DO NOT PANIC IN A BEAR MARKET! This not only wipes out the advantages of the bull market that you just enjoyed, but you, along with millions of other nervous nellies, cause the market to sink even faster, because you are trying to sell when others are doing likewise. The time to buy is when others are losing their heads in panic; the time to sell is when others insist that the market can only go up. (Thanks, Abby Cohen, the stock analyst who was talking about Dow 20,000 a couple of years ago, and persuaded me to stay in the stock market. Yes, that "thanks" is sarcasm.) I am about 15 years away from the magic age where I expect to start using some of that 401(k) money, so I have been allocating my new contributions to medium-term bond funds--funds that invest in corporate and governmental bonds that will come due roughly when I will start to draw down on that money--and very conservative stock growth funds (the kind that emphasize stocks that pay a regular dividend). I generally leave money that is already in existing funds in place, hoping that the managers of those funds are smart enough to make sensible decisions with the money. I still think that people in their 20s should be investing primarily in stock growth funds--but I would emphasize growth funds that buy stocks in blue chip companies--the kind that pay dividends; not the funds that invest in companies that have never made any money, but that everyone knows are going to be worth a lot one of these days. Yeah, those days of high tech companies losing piles of money while their stock rises 800% a year will come again--but it seems like a pretty risky thing to put much money into. This isn't play money; you are going to need this to pay for your health insurance in 30 years. I emphasized "hoping that the managers of those funds" know what they are doing a couple of paragraphs ago. This is one of the reasons why I think it is best to have the money in your 401(k) plan distributed among several different plans. I don't think it is likely that any of these mutual funds is going to make the headlines when the fund manager cashes out everyone's money and moves to Brazil. Mutual funds tend to have lots of checks and balances to prevent that sort of thing. But it is not unknown for mutual fund managers to make very, very poor decisions--and it would be nice if only 10% of your 401(k) money ended up disappointing you, instead of 100% of it. You may not have access to a 401(k) fund at your employer. There are Individual Retirement Accounts available to you. I don't know enough about them to tell you much, however. (Well I could, but I might well mislead you, and I would rather not do that.) Indecent Behavior With Your 401(k) Vitally important: way too many people put piles of money into a 401(k) fund, then, when they leave their current employer, instead of leaving the money there, or rolling it over into their next employer's 401(k) fund--they take a distribution of the money. They thus get taxed on all that money as taxable income, plus pay a 10% penalty for doing so. Remember: high marginal tax bracket means that if you pull $30,000 out of a 401(k) fund, that will be added to your income for the year, and suddenly, you may find yourself being taxed at a 45% marginal tax rate, plus the 10% penalty. Your $30,000 windfall, after the IRS gets done with you, is now about $14,000. Hmmm. Maybe it would have been best to leave it there. Some people get especially screwed on this because they take the money out when their job evaporates, live on it for a few months, and forget about the tax problem. Come the following April, they are scurrying around looking for $10,000 to pay to IRS and their state income tax agency. Another really amazing behavior that I will mention, because I've heard of people doing this: a guy leaves a job he has held for 15 years to go to work for a startup. He takes a huge wad of money out of his 401(k) plan because he is convinced the startup is going to make him rich. He buys himself a very fancy car (so he doesn't have to wait for the startup to be successful). The startup makes him a very disappointing amount of money (if it doesn't just go down the tubes, like my last startup did). Whoops! There went $65,000 on a fancy car--and it's not going to be available for his retirement in another 20 years. Dumb, dumb, dumb. If you don't understand bonds, stocks, etc.--not to worry. We'll get to that soon. The McVeigh Trial From an AP news story that I read in the local paper today: WASHINGTON (AP) - Less than two weeks before Timothy McVeigh was executed, the Justice Department received a letter suggesting a key prosecution witness had given false testimony. Prosecutors didn't disclose the allegations to McVeigh's lawyers and later sought to recover all copies of the letter in exchange for a lawsuit settlement.If you read the McVeigh trial transcripts--as I did, while the trial was taking place--this is no surprise. It was obvious that the FBI's much respected crime lab was run by the Keystone Cops. Agents walked directly from the bomb range (where they were handling and setting off explosives) into the lab where technicians were running gas chromatography tests. Testimony from the director of Britain's equivalent was devastating--evidence coming from the FBI's lab had enormous problems from an evidentiary standpoint--and that was assuming just honest errors, not intentional shading of the truth. As an example, evidence from the Oklahoma City bombing site and evidence from McVeigh's car were thrown in the same paper bag to be transported to Washington DC. When you are measuring the presence of explosives in microgram quantities, it takes very, very little contamination to make your evidence untrustworthy. To put it bluntly, it's a good thing that McVeigh finally confessed before he was executed--the FBI's case against McVeigh was utterly destroyed by McVeigh's highly competent attorney, Stephen Jones. This is, by the way, one of the reasons that I am a weak opponent of the death penalty. There is way too much dishonesty and carelessness to have 100% certainty about guilt in a many capital cases. How to Become Wealthy (Part 5) When I first started mulling this series over, I didn't even think about this topic: financial struggles with your spouse. I received enough emails suggesting that I deal with it--because they were dealing with it. I'm going to keep this short and simple, because this is only partly a financial planning problem; it is mostly a problem of your relationship with your spouse. Almost any advice I can give about how to handle financial disputes with your spouse is going to be wrong for some of you. The Spendthrift Spouse I can tell you that I have seen a lot of serious financial insanity that results from one person being a spendthrift. One marriage that I watched break up (and being from California, I have seen a lot of that) involved a spendthrift husband. He operated on the theory that if there was any money, he was going to go and spend it, on what he wanted to spend it on. It also meant that they were in continual financial difficulties, and so the little luxuries of life (like regular dental checkups for the kids, and health insurance) were beyond them. The wife worked very, very hard to try and correct for this. This wasn't the fundamental cause of the divorce, but it certainly contributed to it. There are a lot of causes of this tendency. In the case of this particular guy, the problem was probably two factors combined: he came out of a physically abusive home with an alcoholic father; he had been sexually abused by a Scoutmaster as a child. Children growing up in alcoholic homes often have trouble with the notion of causality--that action A results in result B--and that this is likely to be a repeatable phenomenon. Why? Because in homes where alcohol is a major influence on people's behavior, there is no causality. The mother or father who is sweet and concerned one evening may be a violent, raging monster the next. You can't predict the future because the past makes no sense. You've got an extra $200 this month? Quick, spend it! It may disappear over night! The sexual abuse had also left some very serious scars on this guy. In some respects, he had never grown up. Again, this is no surprise. I know several dozen child sexual abuse survivors (remember, I'm from California), and all of them, to one degree or another, are still exhibiting signs of that damage. Difficulties with emotional maturity seem to be common. Of course, not every spendthrift has deep and dark secrets driving them. Some people just don't like to exercise the self-discipline that says, "I don't really need this." Others become convinced that they are never going to have anything anyway, so why bother to save? (I speak from experience on both counts.) Persuading a spendthrift spouse to rein in their unnecessary spending is a very, very hard thing to do. If there are some deep dark secrets driving this behavior, professional counselling may be in order--but I wouldn't make that assumption, especially in a society that encourages spending and materialism as a way to achieve happiness. It almost never does provide happiness; at most, your latest purchase is a short-term distraction--and then you feel the need to spend again. A friend of mine calls it "retail therapy." Retaliatory Purchasing More common than the spendthrift spouse, especially where we lived in California, is retaliatory purchasing. In my experience, this is more common in homes where both partners bring in adequate paychecks. The husband decides to take flying lessons; the wife retaliates with a new car. "If he's going to spend money on something stupid for him, I can buy something that I want!" In the especially brutal form, this is done surreptiously. If you have good credit, this can escalate to a point where a financial crisis makes bankruptcy look like a good idea. Most of the time, it's a bit more restrained than that, and just leads to increasing resentment. Sometimes, neither party sees their complicity in this. "Everything I buy is reasonable and necessary; she's the spendthrift!" Sometimes, this spending frenzy is the result of an agreement: "I want new furniture for the living room; you can go buy that milling machine you want." This is an improvement over the retaliatory purchasing approach, but something you need to think about when you get to a point of negotiating extravagant purchases with your spouse: would I rather have new living room furniture this year, or would I rather be wealthy in five or ten years? The choice is yours. Divorce: A Really Effective Way to Prevent Wealth If you think a spendthrift spouse is a financial problem, wait until you get yourself involved in a divorce! My wife and I have been married for 23 years ("The last trees in a forest full of stumps"), and this is at least part of our healthy finances. A divorce means that the two of you are now paying for two separate residences. You are probably eating out more (especially the non-custodial parent). If the divorce turns messy, or custody issues turn messy, both of you will probably end up paying lawyers to represent your side. The only longitudinal studies that I have seen about the effects of divorce on the kids suggest that you are going to be putting out money to help them through their feeling of abandonment and responsibility for the divorce. I've also personally seen a lot of these damaged kids. Divorce: it's a luxury that you can really only afford when you get really, really rich. I've watched (from a painfully close distance) dozens of marriages break up. I've only seen a couple where the divorce was really necessary (spousal or child abuse; repeated infidelity). Quite a number of these divorces can be laid at the feet of a materialism that says, "We gotta have all those toys that everyone else has!" The result: husband and wife both working their tails off, coming home exhausted, then Mom cooks dinner, helps the kids with their homework, and does the laundry. By the time Dad and Mom crawl into bed, he's ready; she's just ready to go to sleep. Eventually, Dad meets a woman who isn't too tired for sex, or Mom meets some guy who listens to her complaints sympathetically. Shortly thereafter, Mom tells Dad to move out. Here's the hardest question I am going to ask in this entire series: how important are those toys you want to buy? Is it worth you and your spouse being so exhausted that you have to make a weekend getaway to make love? You are both working too hard. As our kids were growing up, my wife stayed home and raised our kids. She was there doing the housework, dealing with plumbers, taking the kids to doctors and dentists, sitting on hold with insurance companies. I was able to devote my full energies to my job. Are you surprised that our marriage held together, and most others did not? A lot of people misunderstand how much extra they are gaining from having both parents working full-time. Remember the marginal tax rate issue we discussed earlier in the series? If Mom is working full-time, grossing $3,000 extra per month, on top of Dad's $3,500 a month, how much extra do they actually get to keep? Perhaps $2,000 extra a month, assuming that you have a house mortgage. Out of this, you have the commuting costs, day care costs (if the kids are still small), extra money on clothes (if Mom has to get dressed up for her work), the cost of lunches out--and then, because both of you are exhausted at the end of the day, a lot more dinners out, or pizzas delivered. Yes, there is actually a net gain from Mom working--but once you figure in those other costs, you may be astonished at how little it turns out to be. Your personal equation is going to be dependent on what you do for a living. If your paycheck is $5,000 per month, even after paying those bills, the job will contribute significantly to your wealth--but there are a lot of Moms out there whose gross income is more like $1,500 a month, probably netting, after taxes, commuting, and day care expenses, closer to $600 a month. You should consider whether you can cut expenses instead. Can you operate with one car instead of two, if one of you isn't working? For a number of years, my wife and I had one car. I walked or took the bus to work most days; sometimes she would drop me at work and pick me up. (Obviously, this only works if your job is close to home.) Now, it's true that a stay-at-home Mom (or Dad--your choice) isn't a guarantee of a successful marriage, and there is certainly a price to pay in reduced income. But from what I have seen, the model of two full-time working parents while the kids are small leads to divorce far more often. The next segment will deal with retirement plans. Wednesday, April 30, 2003
Flag Burning Amendment--Again! Eugene Volokh has something to say about this perennial error. My view is that the notion that flag burning is a form of protected speech is a bit bizarre (along with smearing your naked body with chocolate sauce on stage), but you know what? I want left-wing crazies to burn the American flag. It's just one more way for them to marginalize their ideology with the vast majority of Americans. The map is not the object. An American flag is a symbol of our nation. Burning the symbol does not burn the nation. Does anyone besides me find it interesting that many of our traditions about proper American flag etiquette (it should never be allowed to touch the ground, when too worn to be used, it should be buried, not burned) are also traditions about Torah? Oops! I see that while it was the case when I was young that American flags should always be buried, this is no longer considered required. Burning is now preferred. South Carolina Democratic Party Activists Want Lyndon LaRouche In Democratic Party Debate This is absolutely wonderful. South Carolina media reported today that the state's Democratic Party chairman had received a letter from nearly 40 current and former Democratic elected officials asking that Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche be invited to the May 3 Presidential debate to be broadcast nationally by ABC-TV. At a press conference held by the representatives on April 28, Florence, S.C. City Councilman Edward Robinson released the letter, which had been sent to state chairman Richard Harpootlian on April 12. In it, the Democratic leaders—roughly half from South Carolina and the other half from other states, joined by former Surgeon-General Joycelyn Elders—pointed out that LaRouche now has more contributors to his Presidential campaign than any of the nine Democratic candidates invited to the debate, from which the Party is seeking to exclude him.For those of you to young to remember--LaRouche's "Anglo-Venetian Dope Inc." conspiracy theories make Rev. Al Sharpton look like a serious statesman. LaRouche used to head the U.S. Labor Party, a Communist group that was big (for a Communist party) in the 1970s. There was some unfortunate incident in which LaRouche's first wife ran off with a British member of the party. When LaRouche returned from a long absence, he went from a fairly unsurprising communist to a bizarre conspiracy theorist in which traditional "international Jewish bankers" are replaced with "British royal family," and the theory works about as well with either substitution. I am pleased to see Jocelyn Elders--an example of the insanity of the left end of the Democratic Party--allied with LaRouche. Oh yes, LaRouche is a big advocate of nuclear power--this should make the green factions of the Democratic Party so happy! Make sure that you read this. At first, I thought it was a parody of LaRouche's disconnected, irrational writing. But it appears to be legitimate. UCLA's New Sexual Harrassment Policy I am both disturbed and amused by UCLA's new sexual harrassment policy, as described by Eugene Volokh (who teaches there). Among other things, Eugene says that, "it risks punishing a wide range of speech -- allegedly sexist political statements, sexually themed jokes, sexually themed art, and other speech. And it would potentially do this in student newspapers, in public places, in Internet discussions, and in a variety of other places." Now, I find this very disturbing, because "sexist political statements" would seem a rather arbitrary defintion. A conservative who supports traditional families would almost certainly not be allowed to ask some questions in a classroom there. But I also find this somewhat amusing because I think the first time that I ever saw a photograph of naked female breasts was when I was very, very young--in an artsy black & white photograph at a UCLA art gallery, around 1964. Wouldn't this be amusing--if UCLA became more restrictive now that the left runs it, than it was in the bad old ideas of crew cuts and co-eds going to UCLA to get their Mrs. degree. Virginia Makes Spamming a Felony Virginia has made spamming a felony. My careful, rational, analytic approach says, "This is wrong. Felony should be reserved for the most serious and egregious of crimes--not wasteful nuisances." The part of me that has to wade through and add filters for hundreds of spams a day offering me pornography (including stuff too sick to discuss on my blog), penis enlargement, Homer Simpson beer mugs, mailing lists that let me spam others, and--best of all--spam offering to sell me spam blocking software--thinks felony is letting these greedy, stupid, usually incompetent morons on the hook way too easy! Drawing and quartering! When the Framers wrote our "cruel and unusual punishment" protection, they didn't have to do deal with spammers!!! There, I feel much better now. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program. Punitive Damages Sasha Volokh discusses the question of punitive damages vs. compensatory damages. I think I disagree with him, but I also think he raises an important question. For those of you who aren't quite sure what the difference is--or what the dispute is about--compensatory damages are those awarded in a civil suit to compensate you for an injury or loss that you have experienced. Punitive damages are those awarded in a civil suit to punish (hence, punitive) wrongdoing. In principle, a civil suit might involve a few hundred dollars of actual damages that you suffered, but because the actions that caused your loss were so outrageous and so obviously wrong, the person that caused you the loss gets hit for $100,000 in punitive damages. (I believe that the judgment against BMW in Alabama a few years in which they had repainted a car damaged in shipping, but didn't disclose this to the purchaser--and in which several million dollars in damages were awarded--was such an example.) Sasha's argument--and it's not a silly argument--is that punishment is properly a matter for the criminal justice system, where there are procedural safeguards to make sure that the evidence is very clear-cut. In the civil lawsuits realm, all you need is a preponderance of evidence. Why does anyone care about this matter? At least partly because some of the punitive awards are huge. The BMW lawsuit, I think, is such an example. The actual loss of value of the car was negligible, and it seems hard to justify that repainting a car represents some dramatic injury to the purchaser. How is it so different from the original paint job? The award of millions of dollars in damages smacks of "I've won the lottery"--a recurring problem, I understand, with Alabama juries. However: one of the reasons why I am not quite as negative as Sasha about punitive damages is that there are times when an individual, or a corporation, does something that is clearly and obviously wrong, and they need their nose whacked good to get the message across that this is not just a matter of paying for the damage that you have done. Up in the north end of Idaho there is a place where silver and lead mining went on for a long, long time. From the accounts that I have read, the poisoning of the environment with lead meant that large numbers of kids were being born with severe birth defects--and the company involved in the smelting operation paid the families off, encouraged them to move elsewhere--and keep their mouths shut. There are some evils that should simply not be done--and sometimes the only way to get the attention of a corporation's board to the inappropriate actions of their lower level managers is a big, fat award. Swat 'em on the nose! The McDonald's hot coffee suit is another example of something that, by itself, was pretty trivial. The Wall Street Journal account of what happened that I read some years ago indicated that McDonald's could have made the suit go away at the earliest stages for less than $1000--the amount of actual medical expenses that the old woman was burned asked them to pay. The arrogance of McDonald's counsel prevented them from seeing that whether they were, in any sense, liable or not, it was good customer relations to pay actual medical bills in such a case, and perhaps improve warnings about hot coffee. I can see if the original request was for huge amounts of money for pain and suffering why being hardnosed might have made sense--but that wasn't the case in that suit. McDonald's arrogance made it into that sort of suit. Swat 'em on the nose! Sasha suggests that these suits tie up resources of the civil justice system. Very true. You won't find me defending the greedy ambulance chasers. Except: there are times (a lot of times, actually) when the government isn't terribly interested in chasing these sort of evils--especially when the bad guys have sufficient political influence. I'm not keen on limits on pain and suffering damages, at least as such limits are usually written, because they are flat amounts: usually $250,000. Monetary punishments of any sort (civil or criminal) should be in some way tied to the net worth of the person who has done something wrong. I received a speeding ticket last year for about $70. Yeah, I wasn't thrilled about it, but relative to my net worth, that's a minor nuisance. Relative to the average resident of Idaho, that $70 fine would be the equivalent of $700 to me: $70 must really, really hurt. The same is true up the line. I have friends for whom, if the goal of a fine is to swat 'em on the nose, their traffic tickets would be in the tens of thousands of dollars. For some corporations, the fine for wrongdoing would be measured in the millions. The large punitive damage awards may seem absurdly large. There is, I think, an argument for making sure that punitive damages have a higher standard of proof than compensatory damages--just to avoid the "I've won the lottery" approach. There is clearly a strong argument that a lawyer shouldn't become multimillionaire for spending 100 hours pursuing a lawsuit. (You may recall that Republicans tried to limit the amount lawyers could earn on the tobacco settlements to something like $1500 per billed hour, and the Democrats simply wouldn't hear of it.) I am reluctant to go quite as far as Sasha suggests. UPDATE: Sasha says, and I agree, that he wasn't talking about resources being used up in the literal sense, but the social resource of blame. Let me be clear on this: product liability suits are legitimate. What I call "ambulance chasers" are those attorneys whose pursuit of profit causes them to pursue lawsuits against not the responsible party, but the one with the deepest pockets--or where the case is clearly absurd (such as those complaining that gun makers are failing to do the government's job). My objection to lawyers making vast quantities of money on these suits is that it creates an unhealthy interest in pursuing a suit--even if there is no merit to it. "Let's see, the evidence that has popped up in discovery shows that the defendant really didn't do anything wrong. But if I can persuade a jury--I'll make $10 million for my efforts! Should I do the right thing, or continue the suit?" Lotteries: if you are genuinely an injured party, you deserve the money. If your belief is that a suit might be your chance to retire, regardless of its merits, that's a greed problem. Sasha also says, "the McDonald's suit is an awful example of why punitive damages might have been necessary: given that you believe you're not liable, it's never reprehensible to refuse to pay unless you lose the lawsuit." It isn't reprehensible to settle out of court for actual medical expenses; it may, however, be good business, both from the standpoint of being sued for a lot more money later, and because it shows concern for an injured customer. Did McDonald's get negative press from being hardnosed about paying for her injuries? Yes--and doubtless far more than the several hundred dollars in medical bills. Arrogance Is Dangerous Instapundit and Virginia Postrel are both apparently irritated by the positive press that Bill McKibben's book, Enough, receiving. I haven't read McKibben's book, but to judge from the David Gelernter review of it, it is a passionate warning against genetic engineering of people. Now, remember, Gelernter isn't exactly a technophobe. He is missing bits and pieces of his body because the Unabomber decided Gelernter was part of the evil conspiracy to remove us from the state of simple farmers who sacrifice chickens to agricultural deities. I'm not technophobe, either. But I fear that Instapundit and Postrel have spent too much time reading science fiction that presents future technologies as unalloyed good (say, almost everything by Larry Niven), and not enough reading the dystopian visions. Let me recommend Lawrence Saunders's The Tomorrow File. Published in 1975, in the aftermath of Watergate, it was a cautionary tale about arrogance, power, and a society that values results over morals. The Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (predecessor to Health & Human Services, for you young'uns that don't remember) is de facto the controller of the executive branch; post-Watergate, the President's powers have been constitutionally limited. A race of superbabies have been created by increasing oxygen in utero. These superbabies are brilliant--completing their doctorates typically by 18, and then go on to government service, remaking the technologies under which we live. There's only one thing that they lack--a conscience. Having been raised in a post-Watergate world, if someone gets in the way of their vision of what should be, they kill them. But of course, they don't call it that. They "stop" them. People don't die; they "stop." Nothing is true or false; statements are "operative" or "inoperative." Dishonesty, deception, cheating--all are considered completely acceptable if used in pursuit of what you think is a laudable goal. There is no sexual morality in this future, of course. Sex is something that use for pleasure, for manipulation, for control. Promiscuity is widespread, especially among the younger generation. Nearly all of the protagonists are bisexual--it serves their purposes, and if there is no right or wrong, why be limited in any way? When I first read it, I saw it as a worrisome, though unlikely future. In some respects, it has come true. Had it not been for the outbreak of AIDS, much of the sexual subplot of The Tomorrow File would be true today. The acceptability of cheating, deception, dishonesty? That subplot is fully realized. I shudder when I see intelligent people so enthusiastic about genetic engineering of people. These are powerful technologies, and arrogance is especially dangerous the more technology that you combine with it. Shelley's Frankenstein was a cautionary tale about scientists meddling with life, playing God, as was Huxley's secular Brave New World. Today, the popular conception of Shelley's work is colored by the horror aspects of the monster--but the real horror of the novel is Dr. Frankenstein's willingness to create life, without understanding the suffering it causes. Tuesday, April 29, 2003
Clarifying About Public Nudity and Gay Pride Parades See here. My remarks were snippy and not terribly clear. This Tax Cut Question I think rather highly of our current president (as I am sure most of you know)--but I was a bit disappointed with his radio address this last Saturday. He portrayed those Congressmen who support a smaller tax cut than the one he wants as not making any sense, because, Bush claims, they agree that a tax cut would create jobs. Therefore, opposing a large tax cut means that they oppose a large number of jobs being created. Now, if this were a remark make off the top of his head, I might be inclined to call this thoughtless or ignorant. If Bush wrote his own speeches (which no president, to my knowledge, has done since Wilson), I would wonder if he was as stupid as the Democrats claim. But Bush's speech would have been carefully crafted and discussed before he gave it. Whoever wrote this speech--and I presume Bush as well, because he's not stupid--must know that this is misleading. Yes, there is some level of tax cut, depending on which taxes are cut, and who ends up with the extra money, that will create jobs. If the tax cut increases money available for middle income families to buy cars, houses, and other big ticket items, it will certainly create a lot of jobs. If the tax cut puts money into wealthy families (as a neutral tax cut inevitably will--the rich pay most of the income taxes), it will probably increase savings and investment, which is more indirect and less certain way of creating jobs. But it is also true that a dramatic tax cut can increase deficits enough to drive up long-term interest rates. This might help sales of items that are financed on 2-5 year loans, like cars and appliances, but it will not help house sales--quite the opposite. Driving up long-term interest rates will impair house sales. I, personally, would benefit from an increase in long-term interest rates--at least if the increase only lasted for a few months--because I could take some of my short-term corporate bonds and reinvest the capital in long-term A-rated corporate and government bonds, and increase my income significantly. Of course, as nice as it would be if President Bush structured our budget to suit my interests, they probably aren't your interests, and they certainly aren't in the best interests of the nation as a whole. I don't know if the size of the tax cut that Bush is asking for is good or bad. There might well be an economic model in which a very sizeable tax cut more than compensates for the increase in deficits. Imagine, for example, such a dramatic expansion of the economy spurred by lower tax rates that total revenues increased fast enough to wipe out that deficit. But this is where we get into the voodoo aspects of economics--predicting what an n% change in this tax rate does six months, one year, and two years from now to total government revenues. The Laffer Curve suggests that a 100% income tax rate is bad for the economy and the government (everyone goes on the dole, and tax revenues drop effectively to zero) and a 0% tax rate is good for the economy but bad for the deficit (everyone works hard, but the government doesn't get any revenue). Somewhere between those extremes will be an optimum rate--one that gets maximum tax revenue with minimum impact on the economy. No one knows what that rate is, however, and it varies from year to year (and probably from second to second) based on the aggregate set of decisions of a free eonomy. No one really knows for sure what the optimum size of tax cut would be right now. I just would prefer Bush to have admitted that there is some legitimate uncertainty about the effects of a large tax cut. Of course, that's because I want intelligent people to rationally debate this matter, and politics and swaying the masses (not partial to either intelligence or rationality) is what this is really all about. How to Become Wealthy (Part 4) Okay, you have cleaned up your finances enough that all you have is your rent and car payments. What now? Should you cut your credit cards up? No. You just need to be careful what you pay for with your credit cards. I am at a point now where almost everything that I purchase, other than groceries, I put on my Discover Card. It's convenient (much quicker than writing a check), and I get 1% of my total purchases back from Discover. Should you do this? Hmmm. Maybe not--at least until you are sure that you aren't going to return to the bad practices of the past. What Credit Cards Are Good For They are a convenient way to not carry a lot of cash and to avoid writing checks. Especially if you live in a place where carrying cash is risky (as Los Angeles was, when I grew up there 1975-1985). They are a relatively low cost way to amortize larger purchases over a 1-3 month period, especially if writing a check would deplete your savings account. These should be purchases that are necessary, unusual, and that you don't expect to repeat during the time that you are paying for that purchase. Good examples: tires; brake job. Bad examples: groceries; meals out; books. Yes, the interest rate is high, but if you have something that you truly need, use the credit card to finance it over a short period of time. Yes, 18% APR over three months will be about 4.5% that you are paying for that purchase. If you can pay cash or check, all the better. But if paying by cash or check means that you have $28 left in savings, it might be better to pay the interest, and keep your savings account a little healthier to cushion any surprises that come along. Some people, unfortunately, can't handle a credit card. If you find yourself (or worse, your spouse) charging stuff like groceries, or confusing "want" with "need," it might be best for the credit cards to go into a drawer, and stay there until a legitimate need for them arises. If you really have no self-control, give up the card--but remember that if you have screwed up badly in the past, getting a new credit card might be a lot harder now than it was before. Building Up A Savings Account Savings accounts perform three useful functions: 1. They provide a cushion against unexpected financial disasters. 2. They gather interest (pitiful as interest rates are right now, it's better than 0%). 3. They are a staging area to bigger forms of wealth--like houses. It used to be a widely spouted rule that you should have six months living expenses in savings. There's certainly some merit to this idea, but this rule seems like it was designed for the era before unemployment insurance, and there was only one person in a family bringing home a paycheck. Today, if you get laid off, unemployment insurance will help a bit. If you are a two paycheck family (as is, unfortunately, now the norm), if one of you loses his or her job, the disaster won't be quite as sudden as it traditionally was for the one paycheck family. I would encourage, however, the idea that you should strive for having at least a couple of months expenses saved up before you start looking at the next step: buying a home. Buying a Home Not everyone should buy a home. If you think it likely that your job is going to evaporate, and you might need to move, buying a home may not be the best maneuver. At times, homes, especially condos and townhomes, can be highly illiquid. There are also situations where the housing market simply doesn't justify buying, because there is such a huge oversupply of rentals that you will be paying a lot more to buy than to rent. If you have a very low income, and therefore you are in a very low income tax bracket, and you have the good fortune to live somewhere where houses are so cheap that you can afford to buy a house in spite of your low income, it may still not make sense to buy a home, for reasons that we are about to explore. But if you are likely to live in the same area for the next several years, and especially if your household income exceeds $60,000 a year, it almost certainly does make sense to buy a house. The reasons are: 1. Equity. 2. Appreciation. 3. Lowered income taxes. Equity is obvious. If you pay $900 a month in rent, that's all money that is down the tubes. If you pay $1100 a month for a mortgage, most of that is interest, but some of it is payment on the loan principal. You will, after a few years, own some equity in your home. More importantly than the equity you gain from paying down the loan, however, is that real estate usually appreciates. It doesn't always appreciate--a friend of mine likes to tell of how his family managed to lose money because they bought a house in Malibu, California, and sold it a few years later. People who buy houses during California's periodic panic buying frenzies can find themselves regretting it two or three years later. In some areas of the country, appreciation is quite slow--or even negative. A figure that is often quoted for the Boise, Idaho area where I live is 1%-3% a year. Where I lived in California, however, it was often a bit higher than that. We bought a house in San Jose in 1985 for $115,950, and sold it in 1987 for $125,000 (3.9% per year). We bought a house in Rohnert Park for $116,000 in 1987, and sold it for $160,000 in 1995 (4.7% per year). We bought a house for $244,000 in 1995, and sold it for $429,000 in 2002 (10.8% per year). None of these are spectacular results for California real estate, but they are all a giant improvement over renting. The biggest reason for buying a house, however, and why it may not make a lot of sense for those in low tax brackets, is the tax advantage. The government, paying careful attention to the lobbying efforts of the National Association of Realtors, and various homebuilding groups (both corporate and labor), has structured our tax code to encourage you to buy a house. All the interest that you pay on the mortgage (which is typically 95% or more of the monthly payment in the first several years) is tax-deductible. So is the entire property tax bill. The "points" (prepaid mortgage interest) you pay on the mortgage when you purchase (not refinance) a house are deductible. What does "deductible" mean? It means that if you make $75,000 a year, you get to reduce your income by the amount of mortgage interest and property taxes before you compute the federal and state income tax that you owe. For most renters, that kind of household income will mean that they pay a marginal federal income tax rate of about 21%. (What does marginal mean? It means that for every additional $1 you make, the federal government will demand $0.21 in federal income tax.) Marginal state income tax rates vary wildly, from 0% (for those states with no state income tax) to 9.3% for California. (I think it may even be higher in other states.) Let's assume that you are in a pretty typical state; your combined federal and state marginal income tax rate will be about 25% to 28%. For every $1 in mortgage interest and property taxes that you get to deduct from your income, you reduce your federal and state income taxes by $0.25 to $0.28. This means that even though your mortgage payment might be 10% higher than rent--you still come out ahead--because your income tax drops when you start making house payments. (But be careful--if you get enough of a reduction in your taxable income, your marginal tax rate will drop--and the reduction in your income taxes drops accordingly.) One other advantage of buying over renting--you have a pretty good idea what the mortgage is going to be. If you get a fixed mortgage, you know exactly what your payment will be for the next 30 years. Even with most adjustable mortgages, you know the maximum payment for the next several years. This cannot always be said for rent! I'm not going to try and go into all the nuances of buying houses--there's far more than I can ever tell you, and I won't claim to any great expertise in this area--but I will tell you these items that I have learned over the years: 1. Adjustable mortgages are really, really scary. Why, if interest rates went up 5 points, your house payment could be $1400 a month! However--if interest rates went up that high--and stayed up that high for very long--the whole economy would collapse. Lunatics sometimes get in charge of the asylum in Washington, but they don't hold it indefinitely. In addition, most people refinance their house, or sell, within five years. Calculate what a fixed mortgage will cost you over the next five years--and then what an adjustable will cost your over the next five years, even if interest rates went up so fast that you were paying the maximum possible payment. You'll often find that the fixed mortgage isn't going to be dramatically cheaper. The more realistic scenario--interest rates go up, but not radically--and the adjustable will usually be a bit cheaper. (Be careful, however, about the difference between the "teaser" rate that is in effect for the first six months, and the actual rate you will pay for the following year, three years, or five years.) 2. Don't buy a house primarily for the appreciation. There are too many people who spent too much time watching programs about how to become rich in real estate who ended up in bankruptcy. Buy a house because you need a place to live, and you want to pay yourself part of that monthly payment, not a landlord, and reduce your income taxes. 3. Don't buy the biggest house you can afford. At best, you may find yourself living on beans and peanut butter for the next several years. At worst, you may find yourself out of the house, with a foreclosure black mark on your credit history. You will discover unexpected surprises when you move in. Remember: you are responsible for the repairs--there's no landlord to call up and have fix the clogged toilet, or the leaky faucet. Buy the smallest house that you can afford that meets your needs--even if it is only for a few years. Our first house was 887 square feet, 3 bedroom, 1 bath. It was cramped, but it was brand new, and it was adequate for my wife and our rambunctious toddler. 4. Condos and townhouses may be an adequate substitute for a real house in crowded big cities. They are generally harder to sell than real houses. With condos and townhouses, there are usually homeowners association fees that you have to pay as well--and these can be surprisingly steep. Generally, they are not deductible on your taxes. That's just money down the drain. 5. In spite of the hype from people selling timeshare condos, this is not a substitute for a house. Buy the house first. If you want a timeshare condo on the Kona coast (I visited a nice one there when we were vacationing there last year--but we didn't buy), wait until you have bought the house first. 6. If you want a snazzy car--buy the house first. Four or five years after you buy your house, your income will have risen so much faster than your house payment that you will be able to buy the snazzy car without pain. Trust me on this. I spent too much money on new cars when I started working at 18, and not enough saving for the house. Next segment (whenever I get to it): dealing with conflict in your marriage about money. Monday, April 28, 2003
Minnesota Goes Non-Discretionary? I have received a short email telling me that Minnesota's governor has just signed, or is just about to sign, a non-discretionary concealed weapon permit issuance law. Yahoo! UPDATE: Here's the news story about it: The bill's Republican sponsors, led by Sen. Pat Pariseau of Farmington, dismissed the protests as fear-mongering and doomsday predictions, maintaining that 34 other states have adopted similar measures without catastrophic consequences.And here's the highly rational response of opponents: Sen. Jane Ranum, DFL-Minneapolis, said the bill's lack of a Minnesota residency requirement will make the state a magnet for gun-lovers from the handgun-restrictive neighboring states of Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois.Except, of course, if you aren't a resident of Minnesota, federal law prohibits you from buying a handgun there. Here is the end of the article, and it really captures the issue well: Ranum also criticized the bill's limits on evidence of applicants' dangerousness that sheriffs may consider in deciding whether to issue permits. For example, alleged crimes that a person has been acquitted of cannot be factored in.And from KSTP-TV in Minnesota, this article has a nice quote from Hamline University Law Professor Joe Olson (who, of course, they don't identify as such): "Today is a wonderful day in that honest, law-abiding citizens will be able to protect themselves starting next month," said Joe Olson, president of Concealed Carry Reform Now, an organization formed in 1996 to push for such legislation. "Good people are going to be safer."The article mentions that several legislators were wearing bullet-proof vests on the floor while the debate went on. I hope that this is just for dramatic effect--otherwise, I wonder about their sanity. Interesting Email Conversations That I Am Having About Male Homosexual Promiscuity I've received several interesting and somewhat contradictory types of email (some from self-identified homosexuals) about my recent postings. I am pleased to report that none of them have been abusive or threatening. Some have told me that they don't know any homosexual men that are promiscuous, and certa |
