Category: mafia

Short term loan at 0%, and how you can get one

Not from the Federal Reserve; surely none of my readers are “too big to succeed” and therefore qualified for direct quantitative easing. But an arm of the U S Government actually will sell you cash, in $250 increments, accepting credit cards without surcharge (you get any usual rebates or bonuses that your card provides) and with free shipping. The only catch: Your cash is in the form of dollar coins.

Stated purpose of the program is “to make $1 coins readily available to the public, at no additional cost, so they can be easily introduced into circulation—particularly by using them for retail transactions, vending, and mass transit.”  (Your government does not want you to just deposit them in the bank, but CTA farecard machines accept them.)  Altho coins cost more to produce than dollar bills, they save your government money because they last a lot longer.

For those of us who do not love the Federal Reserve, there is also the consideration that the coins are issued directly by your government, the closest thing we have to greenbacks (more about the advantages of greenbacks).

This program apparently has been going on for a couple of years; I learned about it recently from this old post.  It really works; I placed an order January 17, it arrived (by ordinary U S mail!) about a week later, and I will pay for it next week.  Presumably you could roll it over by placing another order.

Of course, what with credit cards, checks, direct bank transfers, etc., I don’t spend $250 cash in any month.  But maybe we’d all be better off if there was more use of the anonymous cash economy, which this seems to encourage.

Just because they’re “Nobel” prize winners doesn’t mean they’re wrong

Washington’s blog says:

Virtually all independent financial experts say the size of the big banks is hurting the economy

and fortunately George Washington been keeping (documented) count.  It’s a total of 30 (mostly individuals but including a few coherent small groups), of which at least three have received the “Nobel” prize.

So why does “the market” cause such large banks to exist? Perhaps because correlates of bank size include political influence and chief executive salary.

Land prices, not house prices, have dropped

in the past few years, as well illustrated by this article from MSNBC.  Homeowner insurance costs generally haven’t declined, because construction costs haven’t declined. (Homeowner insurance covers the cost of repairing or replacing the structure.) If it’s not construction cost, what went down? Must be the land. (ht Rob’t Blau)

I’m struck that an article about homeowner’s insurance doesn’t touch on title insurance, which is having difficulties of its own.

Missing from Chicago’s Transportation Platform

Eight area advocacy organizations have issued “Chicago’s Sustainable Transportation Platform,”  recommending public policies for a better transportation system. Since I’m a paying member of at least two of the eight, and on the mailing list of a well-funded third, I had hoped that maybe a few sensible things would be included.  You can decide for yourself which of the ideas are sensible (“Design streets that are safe and convenient for all users.”).  Pretty much all of them could be construed as “Create additional jobs and funding opportunities for us and our friends,” but that’s true of most public policy discussions.

I’m mainly concerned about what’s missing, for instance:

  • Obtain transit funding from those who benefit from transit service– the owners of land and other privileges in areas served by transit.
  • Reduce the number of free and subsidized parking spaces provided at public and nonprofit facilities, including libraries, police stations, educational and medical institutions.  Use the resulting revenue to reduce taxes on productive activity.
  • Improve transit governance by requiring the majority of governing boards of CTA, Pace, Metra, and RTA to be regular transit users, and no board member who takes fewer than five transit trips in a month can receive pay for that month.

Other ideas?

Income tax rates don’t matter

Lots of discussion lately about income tax rates, pointing out that individuals reporting high incomes once were subject to marginal federal rates in excess of 90%, whereas today that rate never exceeds 35%.  And corporate incomes face federal tax rates of 39.3%, higher than most other countries. Various ignorant or deceptive interests use these figures to make all kinds of arguments, such as that America’s rich are undertaxed, or American corporations are overtaxed.

But the secret, that all lobbyists know, is that income tax rates don’t much matter.  When wealthy Americans were subject to 90% taxes, they didn’t really have to pay them.  Instead, accountants and lawyers and various other shysters put together all kinds of partnerships, trusts, and other mostly imaginary constructs, which were used to legally hide or redefine income into something else.  It was a bother and an expense, but way cheaper than paying taxes.

As for corporations, they have all kinds of manipulations available to reduce their taxes, as I discussed two months ago.  (If individuals figured their taxable income the way that corporations do, we could deduct all our expenses for food, clothing, medical treatment, and practically everything else).  If a few corporations appear to pay taxes in excess of the federal rate, it is due to state income taxes, local real estate taxes, other nonincome taxes, or special circumstances.

What brings all this to mind is this post, which provides two nice examples to illustrate my point.  Read them if you have the patience, but the basic point is that corporations are able to entice many very intelligent, experienced people to devise ways to avoid taxes that legislators intend (or at least pretend to intend) to impose.  They are opposed by many very intelligent, somewhat less experienced (and less well-compensated) people employed by IRS and other agencies, many of whom hope in the future to be employed by the corporations.  The net result of taxing incomes, especially corporate incomes, is that many of the most intelligent and creative people, who might be providing goods or services that people need or want, are instead playing word-games with each other.

I would appreciate if someone would explain to me how a land value tax could possibly waste 1/10th of the brainpower absorbed by this useless, destructive system.

Why Why the German Republic Fell is Hard to Find

Bruno Heilig’s 1938 essay Why the German Republic Fell is posted and freely available on the Internet. Unfortunately, the Scholars at the School of Cooperative Individualism are not the world’s greatest proofreaders, so google has some trouble finding it, but it is here.  There is also a nice abridgement here.  Hardcopy, of course, is for sale cheap at Schalkenbach.

I read this booklet about 25 years ago, didn’t remember a thing about it, but hoped it would give me some insight into how the Weimar inflation was dealt with. No such luck, it really begins after inflation had been tamed and prosperity commenced, but it’s all the more worthwhile for that.   Heilig asserts that the rise of Hitler was caused by land speculation. I am no expert in German history, but he does seem to make a good case.

Not by land speculation exclusively, of course, but land speculation as an ingredient along with:

  • public aid to large landlords, encouraging them to withhold land from use
  • privatization, on especially favorable terms to connected individuals and groups
  • failure to fully utilize farmland, resulting in unemployment as well as high food prices
  • tariffs, raising prices of consumer and industrial goods
  • public subsidies to favored enterprises
  • control of the major news media by the landed class

Land prices soared, wages fell, eventually the economy slowed, and:

Although it was obvious that the, “invariable costs” — i.e. the tribute land monopoly exacts from the working people — were eating into all production, the responsible men and the leading exponents of what was taught as economics kept their eyes, as if under some hypnotic influence, fixed upon the worker’s pay-packet.

Reformers advocated unworkable or ineffective solutions: If progress brings poverty, they urged that we retard progress.

The newspapers, of course, served the interests of their owners:

I need not explain what that propaganda organization meant in operation. Its effect was to sway public opinion into believing that the interests of the landowners were the interests of the nation. Subsidizing the landlords was the accepted policy for preserving and even saving the sources of subsistence of the people: the higher tariff walls were for the benefit of the wage-earning population: increase in land values meant increase in the national wealth: and so on…

[A]s unemployment grew, and with it poverty and the fear of poverty, so grew the influence of the Nazi Party, which was making its lavish promises to the frustrated and its violent appeal to the revenges of a populace aware of its wrongs but condemned to hear only a malignant and distorted explanation of them.

Much in this essay is similar to today, tho Heilig never uses words like “TIF” or “terrorism.”  Some things are decidely different, for example I don’t think Germany at the time had anything like a well-paid public employee class, nor a large class of small-scale investors, such as workers with 401k’s.  But it’s easy to see how today’s conditions could lead to similar results.

Fiscal responsibility and reform

The “President’s National Committee on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform” has issued its “draft report,” actually just a series of powerpoint-like slides in pdf format, with a few complete sentences here and there.   Yves Smith [correction: These comments were guest-posted on Naked Capitalism but originate at The Daily Bail] has already posted comments, of which I fully endorse the last sentence, but I would like to expand a bit here on my own site.

Now, it would be too much to expect the President’s Commission to suggest anything that would seriously change the way the powers-that-be conduct their business.  Continue reading Fiscal responsibility and reform

Car plague and bankster plague intersect

I have long tried to avoid any dealings with the various tentacles of Chase Morgan Stanley, figuring somehow or other I would be injured by them.  Apparently, at least in Colorado, some (or all?) of their staff are exempt from prosecution for assault.  Google finds only two reports, one from the UK Daily Mail , one from the Vail Daily, local to the event.

In case these links disappear, the first three sentences from the Daily Mail story give a pretty good summary.

A financial manager for wealthy clients will not face charges for a hit-and-run because it could jeopardise his job, it has been revealed. Martin Joel Erzinger, 52, was set to face felony charges for running over a doctor who he hit from behind in his 2010 Mercedes Benz, and then speeding off. But now he will simply face two misdemeanour traffic charges from the July 3 incident in Eagle, Colorado.

And from the Daily Vail:

Erzinger, an Arrowhead homeowner, is a director in private wealth management at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney in Denver. His biography on Worth.com states that Erzinger is “dedicated to ultra high net worth individuals, their families and foundations.”

Erzinger manages more than $1 billion in assets. He would have to publicly disclose any felony charge within 30 days, according to North American Securities Dealers regulations.

The decision to drop felony charges was made by the local prosecutor, over the victim’s objections.  One infers from the articles that the Erzinger will pay some monetary restitution.

More details from the Daily Vail:

Erzinger drove all the way through Avon, the town’s roundabouts, under I-70 and stopped in the Pizza Hut parking lot where he called the Mercedes auto assistance service to report damage to his vehicle, and asked that his car be towed, records show. He did not ask for law enforcement assistance, according to court records.

Erzinger told police he was unaware he had hit Milo, court documents say….

Meanwhile another motorist, Steven Lay of Eagle, stopped to help Milo and called 911.

It appears that neither the perpetrator nor the victim is British, so it’s kind of curious why the Daily Mail covered this.  Or maybe more curious why only one paper in North America did.

ht Naked Capitalism

You could invest in privilege…

…thru the Rent Seeking ETF proposed by blogger Cassandra Does Tokyo.

Companies that purchase influence, contracts, and favorable legislation/regulation are worthy of investor attention (not because they are more dynamic, which they aren’t) but because they have a definable edge – something many others cannot boast about. Of course, ETF marketers would need to sanitize the pursuit into something like “Government Partnership Focused ETF”…

Somehow she omitted land from this fund; I guess there are already ETF’s for real estate.

Dangerous checks, no balances

I always knew that those checks sent by the credit card companies were dangerous.  You pay a cash advance fee, and interest; it’s extremely unlikely that you couldn’t get better rates elsewhere if you urgently need cash.  Now I have received from Discover Card some unilateral revisions to the Cardmember “Agreement:”

We will charge you a Returned Discover Card Check Fee each time we decline to honor a Discover Card cash advance check, balance transfer check, promotional purchase check, or other promotional check.  The amount of this fee is $25, except [if we have already done this to you within the past six months] it will be $35.

So, any time they want, if I try to use one of those checks, they can pick up an easy $25 or more.  Probably put something nasty on my credit report, too.