Obama's gotten to the point of not even trying to thinly veil his pandering.  If you're older than 65 and you make less than $50,000, Senator Obama promises a life free of federal income taxes.  Hooray!

But not really.

First of all, presidents don't make laws, whether they be good ones or stupid ones like the senator is proposing.  That's why I hate all the promises that presidential candidates, like Obama, make.  It's like me making promises that I won't scream or cry when I go into labor.

Secondly, it's poor policy.  Aside from medical expenses, doing a comparison of 30-40 year olds and 65-75 year olds would almost always give the edge to the younger group in terms of who needs a lower tax burden.  Although bringing this up may bother 65-75 year olds, it's hard to escape from the facts.  Older citizens, as a rule, aren't supporting children, unless by choice.  The vast majority have paid off mortgages.  They've done a majority of their financial saving.  Almost all 65-75 year olds have incomes boosted by Social Security.  Again, the only major expense in this category where the 65-75 category leads is medical expenses.  You can disagree and send me all the anecdotal or one-off evidence you'd like, but don't get too worked up: I'm not saying the 65-75 category should pay more taxes; just that it's fiscally silly to provide them an exemption. 

But before anyone gets too riled up and starts lobbing in "agism" grenades at me, the primary difference between the 30-40 year old bracket and the 65-75 year old bracket isn't that one group should have to pay more taxes than the other. No - the primary difference is that one group votes.

Once in awhile I do a search for information about my hometown.  Sometimes I find some stuff on Google or YouTube or Flickr or sites like that.  It's interesting to get perspectives on the place I grew up, as strange or as mundane as those perspectives may be.

As I'm searching, I almost inevitably find references to my high school alma mater, and from these comments I've come to find it very interesting how few people, retrospectively, seem to have truly enjoyed their high school experiences, OR, perhaps, just maybe, how vocal those remain that did not enjoy their high school experiences.  I think it's because of the formative, emotional petri dish that is high school and the physiological difficulty for people currently swimming in that dish to maintain clarity and perspective.  Ultimately, as the years pass, I think the happiest people are those who are able to look back and realize they were most probably an idiot in high school, at least for many practical purposes, and can be ok with that.  The unhappy people are those who still cling to the concept that somehow or someway they've always been special and immune to the foolishness that acommpanies immaturity.  Life's hard when everyone's out to get you.  Even if they really aren't.  Or weren't.

What a joke. Congress has approved some sort of "mortgage relief" bill that will supposedly help 400,000 people that are underwater with their mortgages.  72-13 was the vote in the unusual Saturday Senate session.  13 noes?  I would expect better than that from the Republican party.  And I can't believe the President is going to sign it.  What in the name of anything that makes any financial sense is he thinking?

Here's an idea, Congress: stop punishing people that have made, in general, wise choices with their home financing.  "Punishing?", you say?  Yes, punishing.  Those billions of dollars going to bail out homeowners and lenders doesn't grow on trees.  It grows on the backs, in the investments and in the bank accounts of hardworking Americans that weren't fleeced by lenders or didn't buy homes that far exceeded any modicum of sensibility.  It grows on the backs of entrepreneurs and small businesses and corporations that pay taxes.  Entrepreneurs and small businesses and corporations that hire people based on need and on financial feasibility, which decreases drastically as you tax the snot out of them.  If you want people to have money, stop taking it away, for goodness' sake.

As a country, let's just rip off the band-aid and stop using the government to bail out poor decision makers.  Things will suck royally for about 18-24 months, and then we'll begin another recovery that should take 2-3 years, after which things will stabilize...until the next foolish mania comes along.  (And it will come.)  If a few banks go under and some people have to move into apartments, then that's part of the pain of making poor choices.  We cannnot eliminate consequence from our financial markets or economy.  Risk is a powerful stabilizing force and should be neither meddled with nor ignored. Furthermore, we should return to viewing homes as places to live rather than predictable sources of income growth.

The July 14th Newseek features a writeup "True or False: Having Kids Makes You Happy".  The author determines that, in the end, having kids does not make you happy.

Now, the initial response of people that support the family and having children is probably to explain why the article is a load of crap and they love having kids, etc., but I think this is the wrong approach.  From a polemical perspective, this is because while having kids may make YOU happy or Dave and Joy down the street happy, there are no guarantees that having kids will make all or most people happy.  So I think the right approach is to first look at the concept of happiness and how it betrays the title -- and then address the idea of the family and children.