The Face of Retirement: Meet the Future You

Can a brokerage firm scare you into saving for retirement by adding years to your picture? Try it at http://faceretirement.merrilledge.com/

What Makes Guinness Guinness

A pint of Guinness examined from a physicist's point of view. The science of Guinness doesn't interest me as much as owning Diageo stock and tilting back a pint very now and then as I help the company grow its profits.

A Year of Linux

Grouch: I'm a big Linux fan, even though I recently gave Windows 8 a try. You name it, I can figure out how to do it for free. My only limit is my imagination.

Here's a picture of my desktop-- two 23 inch monitors.

Quote of the Day: George Will

It is enough to make you want to hop in your Fisker and drive off a fiscal cliff.

You should know Fisker because you have helped to finance the Anaheim, Calif., company that makes — well, has made a few — electric cars. Its only model, the Karma — really; Obama administration green investments are beyond satire — costs $110,000. Your subsidy helped Justin Bieber, the fabulously rich Canadian teenager (he sings), buy one. No one ever said saving the planet one electric car at a time would be easy.

The Wall Street Journal reports that despite Fisker’s $192 million in Energy Department loans, the Karma “has been hobbled by recalls and quality problems” and the company has sacked half its employees. But perhaps Fisker’s biggest problem is that its source of batteries, A123 Systems, has gone bankrupt in spite of its $249 million Energy Department grant. The administration that in the fiscal cliff drama is demanding control of much more of the nation’s wealth is the author of many Solyndra-style debacles.

~ George Will

Grouch: Comrades, this cannot be true. Mr. Will surely knows our central planners have great and glorious visions of the future that will lead us to economic nirvana if we only give them a greater percentage of our money. His kind of wit is not appreciated at the highest levels of the politburo. We just may have to gift him a Fisker and let him suffer the consequences.

Quote of the Day: Adam Carolla

Well, first off, we should stop saying, "tax the rich," and say, "tax the successful." Because I'm not rich, I'm successful. And rich is easy to tax because that's just the guy who inherited daddy's money, whose dad was the Monopoly man and he lives up on the hill.

I'm successful, you're successful because we worked our tails off. And it's harder to take money away from people that work very hard for it.

And it's very easy to say, "Tax the rich." But, really, it should be "Tax the successful."

~ Adam Carolla

Grouch: Couldn't have said it better myself.

A Very Crony Christmas

Cartoon of the Day: Big Labor

Quote of the Day: Nicholas Kristof

This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.

Some young people here don’t join the military (a traditional escape route for poor, rural Americans) because it’s easier to rely on food stamps and disability payments.

Antipoverty programs also discourage marriage: In a means-tested program like S.S.I., a woman raising a child may receive a bigger check if she refrains from marrying that hard-working guy she likes. Yet marriage is one of the best forces to blunt poverty. In married couple households only one child in 10 grows up in poverty, while almost half do in single-mother households.

Most wrenching of all are the parents who think it’s best if a child stays illiterate, because then the family may be able to claim a disability check each month.

~ Nicholas Kristof, from Profiting From a Child’s Illiteracy

Grouch: The three laws of social programs all too often apply to those receiving Government benefits under the best of intentions:

1. The Law of Imperfect Selection. Any objective rule that defines eligibility for a social transfer program will irrationally exclude some persons and all efforts to correct that exclusion will expand that program well beyond the original problem area.
2. The Law of Unintended Rewards. Any social transfer increases the net value of being in the condition that prompted the transfer (i.e., what you subsidize you get more of).
3. The Law of Net Harm. The less likely it is that the unwanted behavior will change voluntarily, the more likely it is that a program to induce change will cause net harm.