patrick.net

No strawmen needed Just strawberries. Happy holidays!

Headset said: 'Wonder if we will see some sort of government bailout for Madoff “victims.” '

With that list of who's who victims - pretty much count on it. You and I (of the taxpayer/slave subculture) will foot the bill. I'm betting they'll get the meat hooks into bailout money using creatively structured brokerage coverage, nominally through the SIPC. The SIPC's empty Mr. Paulson, fill'er up! Another round on the house!

1 car family: Deflationary psychology

We have been a One car family of four adults for 2 months now. We had 2 cars with about 75,000 miles on them and I sold them both, then bought a subcompact brand new for cash at a deeply discounted price. Like many families, our income has not risen while major expenses like property taxes, insurance, etc have increased. Consolidating into one car has been less painful than I anticipated and we are managing well. I suspect more families are doing with less now as the fear of economic disaster looms. Certainly car sales indicate that more families are doing with keeping aging cars or perhaps some are reducing the number of cars they own, sometimes involuntarily.

We do not have to have only one car. I can easily buy another car for cash, but am waiting for a 'rip their lungs out' desperation sale price later in 2009. In the past I would not have considered this patient an approach and just hunted for a new car to buy immediately after selling my old car. Now, I smell blood in the water and fully expect the deflationary impact of this economy to result in capitulation car prices. Perhaps, I will have to wait 6 to 9 months until The Crisis in the Fall of 2009 for the Big 3 auto makers to miserably fail and then buy a car when they go bankrupt.

I am a good example of Deflationary psychology: putting off purchases in the expection of lower prices in the future.

I can easily buy another car for cash, but am waiting for a ‘rip their lungs out’ desperation sale price later in 2009.

Ain't it grand? About time cash was king.

Besides, a large part of this deflation is really a correction of prices that were inflated by easy credit. The current reduction of easy credit is allowing prices to settle to a more natural level.

I have given up the car also. Too expensive, with insurance and whatnot. I am aiming for the big items in my balance sheet. It sure feels good to save all of that money, since I thought I had cut as much as was possible. We still have two cars left. Cars are my biggest expense after housing. Getting rid of one car put money in the bank, and cut that expense by one third.

justme Says:
December 25th, 2008 at 7:17 am
Very amusing sarcasm on another blog:

1) Bill Clinton - attended Cambridge.
2) Jimmy Carter - spoke English.
3) Barney Frank. - lived.

True, and there have been booms in NZ, Oz, Netherlands, Eire, Spain, etc, all without FM-type institutions. The biggest conspiracy theory of all tho says that FM and FM and the Fed lowering interest rates effectively created tons of credit and liquidity out of thin air which went around the world, stimulating lending and liberalised credit in all these countries. Also, Wall St CDOs and MBSs etc were directly sold into a lot of countries as investment vehicles, but this would not influence national banks to lend too much to domestic home purchasers. What then of this theory that FM, FM, Wall St and the US Fed indirectly created the world-wide housing boom and bust?

Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year to all patrick.netters...

I understand SF Bay Area prices are down 45% this year????

4) LABOUR PARTY!!!

Very funny. The irony is that there were 12 years of conservative, laissez-faire 'Liberal Party' rule in Oz during the whole boom cycle, and Labour came in just as the bust commenced. They luckily have a $40 bn Federal surplus mainly from mining proceeds that they are desperately using to pump-prime the economy a la John Maynard Keynes' prescription, but the surplus will probably run out before the recession is over. It's currently being spent on writing Xmas cheques to pensioners and anyone with children ($1k per), pumping up house prices by offering $21K to all first home buyers, and providing 'liquidity' to banks. And supposedly a massive infrastructure-building, job-creating Keynesian-style nation-building exercise -- new roads, rail, fibre optic infrastructure, whatever. Anyway, they inherited a poisoned chalice from the previous 'business-oriented' govt (who sat on their hands and did nothing but slash services) but who at least scrimped and saved a reasonable surplus, mostly from the fluke of a mining boom...

FuzzyMath Says:
December 19th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
do you ever get concerned that capitalism itself is a form of a ponzi scheme? I haven’t put too much philosophical thought into it, but something about it nags at me. Namely, absent growth, the system seems to break down entirely.

Also, what growth is real? As the rug gets pulled out of the last 8 years, we are seeing alot of castles made of sand. How far back does this fake growth go I wonder? The early 80’s? 60’s? WWII?

See Steve Keen's site, 'Debt(de)flation' for an interesting economic analysis of the role of lending in creating artificial 'growth' over several decades -- http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/ -- current long article about Ponzi schemes in particular, but I'm thinking about his article titled something like '40 years of increasing debt' -- debt started hiking in the late 60s, leading to the early 70s crash and recession, for instance.

As for GDP growth, I dunno, a lot of it seems to come from digging new stuff out of the ground, technological breakthroughs and efficiencies, and just plain old inflation...or debtflation...

DS,

We can agree that the Federal Reserve had a large and significant role, also internationally by spreading the gospel and indeed being the enabler of other central banks setting of low interest rates around the world.

Can you believe this!

http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/article950391.ece

# Different Sean Says:
I understand SF Bay Area prices are down 45% this year????

Only the median. Last year, the low end was stalled and mostly middle and high end properties moved, so the median in Nov 2007 was artificially high. This year seems to be the reverse - foreclosure sales are fattening up the low end (at lower distress pricing) while the high end is stalled because there are not enough buyers to make transactions happen at the ridiculous asking prices. As a result, recorded sales in Nov 2008 are mostly low-end - which when compared with the Nov 2007 median seems like a huge drop.

I think the YOY comparisons will flatten out from this extreme in a few months - giving realtwhores and that joker at Dataqueef a chance to claim that the market is bottoming out...

Also, In the areas where most of us would actually _want_ to buy, wishing prices are down only about 15%. The 'fortress' has cracked, most people I meet are silently worried, and the fools who chanted 'it won't happen in crappertino' have mostly shut the fuck up - but panic is yet to take hold.

SP,

Here's to 2009 !

>> The ‘fortress’ has cracked, most people I meet are silently worried, and the fools who chanted ‘it won’t happen in crappertino’ have mostly shut the fuck up - but panic is yet to take hold.

I wish utter distress to these people in 2009...

Health care is going to be a big topic in 2009.

On that note, does anyone here have some health care BLOGS to recommend? The ideal would be to find a blog that was the "Patrick.Net of Health Care".

I'm especially interested in the "inside view" from the medical profession, the health insurance profession, the dental profession, optometrists and so on. Just as with the housing market, I suspect that the information one can glean from mainstream sources is not very good or insightful.

I'm also interested in patient-centric blogs, but there seem to be more of those readily available out there.

O'Brien: Nine predictions for Silicon Valley in 2009
By Chris O'Brien, Mercury News

As we look ahead to 2009, I wish I could predict lots of bright, sunshiny days ahead. But who are we kidding?

The Silicon Valley economy is now officially on the ropes. Unemployment is up to 7.2 percent, and rising. Layoffs are accelerating. And perhaps in the biggest sign the apocalypse may be upon us, even Google is cutting back on perks.

So, not much holiday cheer to predict. But here are nine things I predict will happen in 2009:

1 Twitter will be sold. And that's good. There is no business model here, so it's time to move along. And I say this as an absolute Twitter fanatic. It's a truly innovative form of communication that is better off as part of a larger company.

Best bets for a buyer are Yahoo or Google (even though Twitter has also talked to Facebook). In my mind, Yahoo makes the most sense, given its focus on content, though most valley insiders will probably root for Google.

2 There will be no IPOs in Silicon Valley. The good news here is that there have been so few IPOs since 2001 that the valley's economy has become much less dependent on the flow of money from initial public offerings of stock.

The bigger blow will be psychological. With mergers and acquisitions also slumping, hopefully this will put the spotlight on innovation rather than the quest for a pot of gold.

3 Yahoo will sell its search business to Microsoft. And that will bring an end to one of the valley's biggest dramas. The cash from the deal will buy Yahoo some time to implement its new strategy of opening up its platform to outsiders.

4 The South Bay will give up all the jobs we've regained since the dot-com bust. Employment peaked at 1.08 million in December 2000 and then fell to 849,500 in January 2004. Job numbers peaked again in June 2008 with 916,500, but fell to 911,100 in November.

With layoffs just kicking in, that number will fall sharply in the first three months of the new year. And with no recovery in site, expect the valley's job count to get close to the January 2004 level.

5 The competition between Facebook and Google will emerge as the year's dominant Internet theme. In recent years, it's been Google vs. Yahoo, or Google vs. Microsoft. When it comes to search and advertising, though, Google has left both in the dust.

But as that growth slows, Google has been rolling out services to get users to spend more time on its site (Gmail, Android, Docs, video chat). While Google still gets far more traffic, Facebook has narrowed the gap on the amount of time spent on its site. According to comScore, people worldwide spent 33.9 billion minutes on Facebook in October, compared with 41.6 billion minutes on Google.

More important, Facebook's time on site is growing faster than Google's (up 19 percent compared with 3.6 percent from September). And the Facebook Connect initiative, letting users take their Facebook identity to other sites, will considerably extend its reach. If Facebook ever figures out how to create a better advertising service, Google could face a serious threat for the first time in several years.

6 The green-tech revolution will continue. If you're looking for a bright spot, here it is. Green-tech companies will continue to draw the most venture capital, they will continue to hire, and they will continue to see sales growth. By the end of 2009, we all may be wondering whether it's time to change our name to Green Valley.

7 Tesla will turn off the lights. Here's the biggest exception to the green revolution trend. Tesla is a bold, ambitious idea that is going to get squashed by the economic tidal wave. Someone is going to figure out how to turn electric cars into a viable business, and it won't be anyone working in Detroit.

Unfortunately, it won't be Tesla, either, because the San Carlos company will get lost in the shuffle as the government bails out the old automakers.

8 The biotech industry will experience a wave of consolidation. No other industry needs as much capital to fund product development that lasts so many years. At the same time, many of the largest pharmaceutical companies haven't invested enough to keep their pipelines filled with promising new drugs. They'll try to solve this by gobbling up biotech startups much earlier in their development cycle than usual, which increasingly has taken on the role of drug development for big players, anyway.

9 Steve Jobs will be fine, but Apple's sales will not. The great consumer spending juggernaut has finally run out of steam. Sales of iPods and iPhones will take a big hit. But that's OK. Because we'll learn that all this hubbub about Jobs' health problems was just idle chatter. Jobs has given Silicon Valley some of its most thrilling moments over the past 25 years. Here's hoping he makes it another 25.

There you have it. I'll check back next December. And if I get them all right, I'll post a video of myself online doing a victory dance.

Happy New Year.

PermaRenter,

I wouldn't worry about those fortress people. For the most part they're rich Asians, lotsa money from Asia they can patriate here to cover their standards of living. Valley tech firms' parking lots are jammed with their recent issue Lexuses and the like, and private schools like Harker and jammed with their kids. Many of them need to work to keep their immigration status, but many of them don't, they're US citizens even.

PermaRenter,

Just because some smartass says that he can solve transportation problems by being more entrepenneurially SiliconValley like and less dinosaur like doesn't mean he can change the physics of the universe to make some VaporWare electric car.

Duh!

Economists expect a grim 2009 in Silicon Valley
By Pete Carey, Mercury News

Across the valley's tech sector, companies are cutting earnings estimates and forecasts, laying off workers and hunkering down as spending shrinks on many of the goods and

"We are going to have a tough downturn, and everybody's going to have to tighten their belt," predicted Bill Coleman, president and chief executive of software infrastructure company Cassatt. He suspects valley companies will have more layoffs early next year, after the holidays.

Already, there have been major layoffs at Sun Microsystems, Yahoo, KLA-Tencor, Adobe Systems, Hewlett-Packard, eBay and Advanced Micro Devices. Even mighty Google has cut back on hiring.

"I don't think anybody knows what's happened," said Seagate Technology Chief Executive Bill Watkins. He said he expects credit to remain frozen for six more months, shrinking the market for the valley's goods and services.

There was a "tremendous underlying demand" for digital products that should have produced double-digit growth over the next two years, he said. "Then we created this credit crisis that has just frozen everybody. We're all trying to hunker down. ... We're all going to have to restructure and get capacity in line with what current demand looks like, and then get back when growth opens up."

Weaker chip demand

Demand for products related to semiconductors, the valley's bellwether industry, is weakening. SEMI, the industry trade group, expects a 21 percent decline next year in equipment sales, following a 28 percent decline this year.

Intel is cutting discretionary spending, reducing travel and limiting but not freezing hiring, said company spokesman Chuck Mulloy. "We're reducing factory loading — how many wafers we put through fabs — where necessary," he said. "We're in pretty good shape competitively, but you have to see how the economy plays out."

"The outlook for San Jose is pretty rough in 2009," said Luke Tilley, senior economist with Global Insight, an economic forecasting company headquartered in Massachusetts. He said he expects the valley to shed 26,000 jobs and post a negative 1.5 percent growth rate next year.

One major problem is that the valley's products suddenly became more expensive for foreign buyers because of the stronger dollar, just when those economies are struggling with the global recession. That is compounding the effects of the spending slowdown among U.S. consumers who are watching their home values and retirement accounts dwindle.

Cassatt's Coleman says the drop-off in capital spending will make this recession more serious in some ways than the dot-com bubble's aftermath, when the valley lost 231,400 jobs, or 21 percent of its workforce. A lot of those jobs were in dot-com companies that had no business existing in the first place, he observed. This time around, capital spending — the tech industry's oxygen — has become scarce.

"Every company in this valley, particularly the bigger ones, is going to be dramatically impacted," Coleman predicted, whereas in 2001 the fallout was limited to a smaller range of companies.

.....
.....

"It's not going to be a fun year, but it's not going to be a disaster," said Richard Carlson of Spectrum Economics in Palo Alto, who recently prepared an economic forecast for the San Jose Redevelopment Agency.

Carlson said he thinks there's a chance of a snapback early next year if Americans don't "pull in their horns" and stop spending on the tech products the valley makes. He is predicting fewer than 10,000 jobs lost in 2009, and a 1 percent negative growth rate in the overall valley economy.

"We will not get a non-automobile, non-construction major recession," he said. "There will be a mild slowdown in Silicon Valley, but nothing close to what we've seen when we've had specific problems in the high-tech sector. We didn't go crazy this time. We didn't finance 10 startups where two were justified, and we didn't build 10 buildings where two were justified. We're still an area where if we build it, they'll still come," Carlson said.

Levy says the global nature of the recession will damage Silicon Valley because "the foreign customers we used to depend on when the U.S. economy was weak are also cutting back on their purchases." He thinks there is hope for growth in the near future.

"Toward the middle to the end of the year, we begin to see much more tangible evidence of investments in alternative energy, at least from government. These should spark an increase in venture capital investment in the valley, though not enough to get growth going in the near term," Levy said.

Michelle Cardinal, 37, formerly a customer service specialist for Searchme.com, also has landed a new job after being cut in October. "I've been laid off twice in 2008," said Cardinal, who lost one job in February at Flickr, the photo-sharing subsidiary of Yahoo.com, then landed the position at Searchme in April.

The October layoff came during the week when Cardinal and her husband were about to close on a house in San Francisco. They managed to back away from the deal, and within a few weeks, a former co-worker had put her name through to Redroom.com, a San Francisco startup developing an online community for authors, agents and the literati.

"I was ridiculously lucky," said Cardinal, who also had gotten some leads from Santiago before landing at Redroom after only a few weeks of joblessness. Her take on the startup lifestyle after more than a decade of job-hopping: "With the potential for great rewards come great risks."

Michelle Cardinal, 37, formerly a customer service specialist for Searchme, also has landed a new job after being cut in October. “I’ve been laid off twice in 2008,” said Cardinal, who lost one job in February at Flickr, the photo-sharing subsidiary of Yahoo.com, then landed the position at Searchme in April.

The October layoff came during the week when Cardinal and her husband were about to close on a house in San Francisco. They managed to back away from the deal, and within a few weeks, a former co-worker had put her name through to Redroom.com, a San Francisco startup developing an online community for authors, agents and the literati.

“I was ridiculously lucky,” said Cardinal, who also had gotten some leads from Santiago before landing at Redroom after only a few weeks of joblessness. Her take on the startup lifestyle after more than a decade of job-hopping: “With the potential for great rewards come great risks.”

Deflation:
"Complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year",
-Electronics, 38 (8), 1965.

Another way to increase complexity per minimum component cost by a factor of two per year is to cut the labor cost.

Think about it. Moore's Law.

Tesla. Bad name. Call it Edison and perhaps it might have a chance. LOL.

I still don't understand why anyone would pay $100K for that.

For that price, you can get a 750i.

I wouldn’t worry about those fortress people. For the most part they’re rich Asians, lotsa money from Asia they can patriate here to cover their standards of living.

MIRAGE is a myth.

Asia will be in free-fall any time now. I am sorry, but we all have to pay the piper, Asians or not.

SP Says:
# Different Sean Says:
I understand SF Bay Area prices are down 45% this year????

Only the median. Last year, the low end was stalled and mostly middle and high end properties moved, so the median in Nov 2007 was artificially high. This year seems to be the reverse - foreclosure sales are fattening up the low end (at lower distress pricing) while the high end is stalled because there are not enough buyers to make transactions happen at the ridiculous asking prices. As a result, recorded sales in Nov 2008 are mostly low-end - which when compared with the Nov 2007 median seems like a huge drop.

I think the YOY comparisons will flatten out from this extreme in a few months - giving realtwhores and that joker at Dataqueef a chance to claim that the market is bottoming out…

It's very similar here re the convenient representation of medians when the market is stalling and sales volumes are down. REIC reporting tactics seem uncannily similar.

Except for this bit:
Also, In the areas where most of us would actually _want_ to buy, wishing prices are down only about 15%. The ‘fortress’ has cracked, most people I meet are silently worried, and the fools who chanted ‘it won’t happen in crappertino’ have mostly shut the fuck up - but panic is yet to take hold.
I'm still waiting for 40% declines in real value going forward -- Steve Keen as mentioned above predicted this figure over a few years, and even sold his central city apartment in order to walk the talk, claiming he'll pick something up again after the crash...

justme Says:
December 28th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Health care is going to be a big topic in 2009.

On that note, does anyone here have some health care BLOGS to recommend? The ideal would be to find a blog that was the “Patrick.Net of Health Care”.

Not offhand, but a sizeable proportion of the OECD has some kind of 'single payer' medical system, aka socia1ised medicine, aka universal healthcare, so there are plenty of models to choose from. People in those countries receive benefits as a social guarantee though so they don't need to blog about it. The challenge to Obama is to come up with a solution that works that isn't going to be kyboshed by HMOs, insurers, big pharma, Republican and Democrat Congressmen receiving kickbacks, etc, due to too much change and taking away all the fat that's fed them for so long. The Australian PBS system delivers pharmaceuticals even cheaper than Canada, and has been a formidable and longstanding foe of big pharma. Ubiquitous 'bulk-billing' medical practices see all patients for free. Private health insurance is still far from a necessity, it made more sense to go public in an emergency, but the system was being whittled away by the last govt...

The availability, stability and value of traditional defined benefit pensions are diminished. Americans are experiencing dramatic losses in 401(k) and I.R.A. retirement savings accounts. Home equity is shrinking. Employers have been bailing out of retiree health plans. Unemployment is increasing and now, faced with mounting pressures, some employers are reducing contributions to 401(k) plans.

This unfortunate state of affairs serves to remind the nation of the importance of the core mission of Social Security — to provide widespread and basic protection against loss of income due to death, disability or retirement.

Although this comes as a surprise to some, Social Security is fundamentally sound, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. Projected financing problems, though real, are relatively modest, manageable and many years in the future.

For those of us fortunate enough to have retirement savings, we can only wish that the value of the other assets in our portfolios are as well positioned to withstand the current economic uncertainty.

DS,

Fair enough, and I am familiar with all the single-payer models etc.

However, I still feel like there is a lack of understanding (on my part and in general) on how the current system REALLY works, in terms of how the different Actors in the system behave and WHY.

E.g., what are the main incentives and motivating factors, how do they affect patient care, what are the economics of care delivery (and non-delivery), etc etc etc.

It is kinda' like this:

We all thought we knew on a basic level how the mortgage business works, but then it turned out upon closer scrutiny (as delivered by CR and Tanta et al) to be much more complex and multi-faceted that the average person had ever imagined.

My postulate is that the health-care business is much the same way. And I would like to understand it.

I would google 'us health care system inefficient' for starters.

While you can go into all the ins and outs and why and wherefores of how the US healthcare insurance model is structured, at the end of the day it is just that: an insurance system, attempting to deny claims and in many cases denying claims in the interests of profiting shareholders. It doesn't particularly intrigue me to try to decipher how any particular insurance business operates, to be honest.

The difference when you switch to a so-called 'single payer' model is suddenly that you don't spend all day trying to think of ways of knocking back claims, you suddenly become *twice* as efficient as you get on with the core business of delivering healthcare, and payments are streamlined and it simply becomes a case of administration. In the case of a GP consult, they type in a couple of entries on a standard form, the patient signs it, and the govt reimburses the doctor. Very simple. Then it is simply up to the tiers of govt to determine how to py for and run the hospitals, e.g. Federal sales tax here gets returned to the states, the states run the hospitals and pay everyone. Nothing to it.

Scrap social security and use the money for universal health care. How about that?

you don’t spend all day trying to think of ways of knocking back claims, you suddenly become *twice* as efficient as you get on with the core business of delivering healthcare

We still need a mechanism to knock back unnecessary medical procedures.

I really won't say the people in fortress are mostly rich Asians, I have met plenty of not-so-rich-oh-so-in-debt Asians, particularly in Palo Alto, because it is such a mecca for Asians with its reputation spreading far and near in India, China, Singapore, Hong Kong etc., some Asians see it their lifetime goal to own a piece of Palo Alto. What if you cannot really afford it? Borrow it. Living in Palo Alto being a "neighbor" to Steve Jobs is a huge bragging right.

South Palo Alto is full of people like that. I know of a guy who took on $1.2M loan to get into an Eichler home. If you are rich, you won't take on any mortgage loan beyond $1M because beyond that magic number you lose mortgage interest tax deduction. People who borrowed $1.2M really need that amount of money. Think about how fragile that family's financial situation is? What if 2 incomes become 1 income, even briefly?

On top of this, Asia is deeply affected by our recession, when American consumers poop out, who is going to buy their exports? I really won't count on fortresses being immune, although I think the key determinant for fortress to crack a big way is the job market, which is quite ok for these worker bees.

When Google starts to lay off 10% of its full-time workforce, fortress will easily lose 30% of its value.

If we scrap social security, that will take care of the Medicare problem in about 2-3 years.

Nothing against Facebook, but where does the dough come from? In a more polite term, what is their biz model and how do they expect to be cash flow positive just based on operations?

Any companies that are not cash flow positive will be wiped out in a year, because no VC (VC cannot close fund raising rounds) will have enough resources to pour money into a black hole. I personally think LinkedIn will do much better, because now that job market has gotten tough, I see TONS, TONS of activities from acquaintances on LinkedIN, and they are definitely willing to pay for service if that is how they can access their job leads from friends and ex-colleagues. LinkedIn has reached the critical mass for pricing power.

What do I need Facebook for? None of my friends or colleagues are on Facebook for constant maintenance, the active users of Facebook are either in college or graduated without a job (trend of 2009). Very soon, because of the education loan crisis and credit crunch, many small private colleges will be closing down, and students cannot get loans for their college education. The Facebook target customers are so dead.

If we scrap social security, that will take care of the Medicare problem in about 2-3 years.

Very well. Soon, we will realize that retirement is unnatural and extending welfare to retirees is against Nature. We will learn this lesson hard.

RE: Facebook

I have small-business-owner friends who love Facebook. It is a good social-networking tool.

Medicare and SS are the biggest Ponzi schemes in the world. Worse still, this is the ONLY country in the world where ONLY the elderly get such lavish treatment on the dime of everyone else.

Because of Medicare and SS, lots of Americans falsely believe that their retirement are taken care of and squander to no ends while they are young, and rely completely on the rest of us to fund their retirement and lengthen their life span. Well, there won't be enough of "us" around to support these people because of a simple fact - population structure.

Self-funded retirement is admirable, and that should be the goal of everyone. I am ok with providing elderly with food so that they don't starve to death, but it is disgusting that we are giving an 85-year old cancer treatment

but it is disgusting that we are giving an 85-year old cancer treatment on taxpayers' money, while many younger people are without medical insurance or on insufficient medical insurance coverage.

I agree!!!

It is an upside-down ponzi scheme. Life past 70 is a luxury and medical care for elderly should not be free. In fact, we should slap a luxury tax on them.

Self-funded retirement is admirable, and that should be the goal of everyone.

Again, I agree.

I am ok with providing elderly with food so that they don’t starve to death, but it is disgusting that we are giving an 85-year old cancer treatment

We should feed the children before we feed the elderly.

I propose tying voting power to your marginal tax rate. If your tax bracket is 30%, you should have twice as much vote as someone who pays 15%.

People who do not pay income tax should NOT be allowed to vote.