The Intersection of Personal Finance, Economics, and Politics.
Ahh, another weekend in the Bay Area – this one with lots of open homes in my own neighborhood. Boring? I know – but, hey, spying on the improvements my neighbors make is fun. Speaking of spying, let’s talk informally for a bit about the NSA’s recently revealed spying programs… and of a compliant press [...]
It was less than a month ago when I weighed in on the need for privacy, in the wake of the IRS scandal. In light of the recent revelation of indiscriminate data collection by the NSA – on both foreigners and Americans – I’ll be visiting the topic again. However, for a change of pace, [...]
A few months back we wrote a post asking readers how much privacy they would sacrifice to save money, trying to get a feel for the value judgements of DQYDJ readers on the common tradeoff of privacy with security and convenience. To me, the number of people who weren’t very concerned with privacy was a [...]
“First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for me, [...]
A couple weeks back we put up a visualization of Federal Spending per State. It was good fun, but we did leave out one ‘little’ aspect of that whole spending thing – Defense Spending. Cameron sort of explained the rationale in the comments – Defense spending is a collective good that would tend to have [...]
Edit: Commenter Free By 50 has pointed out that guidance has been issued on employer paid contributions to an HSA or an HRA. You can find that calculator on the Center for Consumer Information & Insurance Oversight website. I was only able to open it in a recent version of Microsoft Office – YMMV. I [...]
I just wanted to share with you folks a quick hit from exiting Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, who was defeated in the Senate primary by Richard Mourdock. Mourdock lost in the general, after making controversial statements on rape. But he’s not the story here. Senator Lugar gave a speech at the moderate Ripon [...]
To all of the people complaining about mathematical forecasting in relation to the current election, I’m here to tell you something: don’t be so naive. I know, I get it – Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight is an adult. He can defend himself. He’s also a political writer – so before he started engaging in his [...]
You watched the Presidential Debate on Monday, I assume? Good – because we can discuss a very confusing yet important topic about debate strategy this year. Specifically, let’s discuss Mitt Romney’s strategy in the second and third debates, and Paul Ryan’s strategy in the VP debates. The Bully Pulpit The President doesn’t have as [...]
