Way to overstate the story.

MSNBC is all aflutter, because a bogus AP Twitter feed reported that the White House had been bombed, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average took a sudden but brief drop, before recovering.

Yeah, it took a little dip. But look:

This looks really bad, until you note the scale on the left.

Pardon my French, but Whoopie Shit.

With the average at over 14,600, the Dow lost 140, briefly. That's less than a 1% drop. If you were watching an analog dial, you would barely have noticed the needle drop.

Mountains.

Mole hills.

The cost of things.

I've told you that I'm not a rich guy. I'm not hurting for anything, really, but I'm on the lower end of the Middle Class spectrum. At a rough estimate, I've made around half a million dollars in my working life.

My parents would have been considered rather well-off, had either one of them been able to say the same thing at my age (the mid 1980s.).

I have never spent so much as $10,000 on a car, although most (not all) of the cars that I've owned did cost more than that, when new. Currently, all three of my vehicles barely would make that mark.

I have never owned a house that cost me over $100,000. My current house appraises at more than that, as did my last house that I sold for a tad under that. But I've never paid so much. When I was a kid, my parents bought a nice brick 2,000 square foot 3 BR 2 BA on an acre for $35,000. It appraises for $155,500 today, to different owners. (I note that it's had a 700'² addition put on.) 

So when I see a car that brings more than $35,000, it makes me think "that thing better have a bathroom and a pull-out bed in it somewhere, because that kind of money should buy a house." Of course this is silly talk, because that kind of money would by $133,000 worth of house, in today's dollars.

When I look at the Mercedes-Benz new G63 6X6 SUV, I think of that $457,000 price tag, and consider that it's almost equal to the number of dollars that I have been paid in my career in the workforce. Dude. It's just a truck.

Well, dang. I gotta get a loan.

We at Chez G have been living mostly within our means. This means that, when it was time to start looking at newer cars, we enjoyed the hilarity of driving up in our POS worn-out commuter cars, dressed in day-off grungy, and getting very little interest by the car salesmen. When we inquired about test-driving cars on lots, they then would reasonably ask to see our driver's licenses, and go "to make a photocopy." During that 10 minute photocopy, they also quickly checked our credit rating. All of a sudden, the car salesman would literally be jogging back up to us. Big smiles. Very friendly, as he suggested perhaps that we might prefer to look at this higher end model over here? 

Break 800 on a credit rating, and that kind of thing happens. But there's a reason that we do all right in the credit rating, and it doesn't come from spending money that we don't have. In fact, we've not made a car payment in eight years, because that's when we paid off our newest car. We know that moving to a car payment is going to hurt.

We decided to buy yet another used car. My wife wanted a Subaru Outback. That was not incompatible with my own criteria for a car. Thus if she wanted it, I wanted it. We ended up finding a decent deal for and '06 Outback on eBay Motors. We bid on it, and won the auction.

Apparently, we then had to get them $2,000 within 24 hrs. Done.

Now, I've got to go get a car loan. This is basically a foregone conclusion that I'll get it. but I HATE applying for loans. I break out in hives at the word "lien."

So, here we go. Sigh. This is me, getting up.

And we're off.

To get a loan.

Okay.

Bye.

Oh look, is that coffee? Just one more cup.

You want to fix the medical system? You want reform?

I've got a very simple law that we could pass that will go a LONG way toward medical healthcare reform.

Require that, within one business day, the healthcare provider give you a straightforward answer to this question:

"How much is this going to cost?"

Mom is in rehab for her new knee, which she had put in last week. The orthopedic surgeon called it one of the worst --if not the single worst-- knees that he's ever had to replace. He told me that Mom should have come in 10 years ago to get that knee swapped out. Mom's answer (she walked 150 yards in to the pre-op room, unassisted) is simply, "Yeah, but think of how far that replacement knees have advanced, in the last ten years." Good point.

Mom's a super star at rehab, and is actually being released early. This makes her cranky elder son very happy; we've been missing her next door. (Yes, I've been visiting daily, but it's not the same.) But when her family liaison person called me to ask me if I had any questions, I asked her, "What's the cost of this? How much are we saving daily by having her come home early? What is the average daily cost of her care?"

She didn't know, but turned me over to a person at their facility who could "better answer my questions." That lady didn't know, either. "We don't do any billing here," she told me. "That's done from the corporate offices in Pennsylvania."

But she went on to assure me that the bill was to be sent to Mom's insurance companies, who typically covered most of these things, before we'd ever get a bill.

"But somebody, somewhere, knows what this costs," I protested.

"No, we won't really know, until we bill the insurance companies, and see what they pay," she told me.

This is ridiculous.

The attitude that it doesn't matter, because there is insurance, is the reason why the costs are spiraling.

On the first of this month, I changed over from my old PPO to a new Health Savings Account*. Thus, when it's medically-oriented, I want to know what EVERYTHING costs.

I know what I make per hour. I know what the overhead is for my job. I could, after checking a few figures, answer the question "How much does it cost to run the police department in Matt G's little town for a single day?"

Why is this so hard?

________________________________
*I've got a $3000 deductible to fill each year, before my account turns into a classic PPO. My job kicks in $180 a month to a savings account that I pay out of.

That's not fair! You've got more!

It's not fair that I don't have a new car, but you do.
It's not fair that my house is old, but yours is bigger and newer.
It's not fair that my hair is receding while I'm still in my 30's.
It's not fair that I can't fit in the same clothes as you.
It's not fair that I have a size 18 boot (when I can find one) without FULL compensation elsewhere.
It's not fair that, as a child, I had an allergy to wheat.
It's not fair that I had to work when my friends played.
It's not fair that I work nights while my friends work regular shifts.
It's not fair that you have more money than me.
It's not fair that you have more than I do, and I have less than you do.

It's not fair.

And now you're telling me that we don't have enough money to give me more, when you clearly have more than me? That's not fair.

First, we are not either broke. And second, it's not fair that you have more than me:

As Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) pointed out in a little-noticed but powerful speech on the economy in December, “during the past 20 years, 56 percent of all income growth went to the top 1 percent of households. Even more unbelievably, a third of all income growth went to just the top one-tenth of 1 percent.” Some people are definitely not broke, yet we can’t even think about raising their taxes.

Well, duh! There's PLENTY of money-- it's just that you elites* have taken it all.


This, my friends, is how we delude ourselves into giving up capitalism for socialism.

__________________________________________
*Defined as "those who have more than I deem to be appropriate."

Ridiculous off-duty.

Pretty much, every day this next two weeks that I'm not at my day job, I'll be working off-duty. I've signed up for 80 hours' worth.

The good news is, this is one of the sweetest off-duty gigs that I've ever had thrown my way. I wish it could go on for many more weeks. If I get every single shift that I've signed up for, I will be set for this semester and next semester for my grad school (this should finally end this lengthy ride), and pay for my wife's school this semester and next, along with paying off a lingering credit card debt that we haven't been able to retire since our vacation last year.

I didn't set the rate. I would have been embarrassed to ask for that much, given how easy the work is.

Go listen, learn, and be disgusted.

This American Life put together the most concise and easy-to-digest explanation about how the housing mortgage crisis came about that I've yet heard. It's seriously worth a listen:

And so Mike noticed that every month, the guidelines were getting a little looser.Something called a stated income, verified asset loan came out, which meant you didn't have to provide paycheck stubs and w-2 forms, as they had in the past. You could simply state your income, as long as you showed that you had money in the bank.

Mike Garner: "The next guideline lower is just stated income, stated assets. Then you state what you make and state what’s in your bank account. They call and make sure you work where you say you work. Then an accountant has to say for your field it is possible to make what you said you make. But they don’t say what you make, just say it’s possible that they could make that."

Alex Blumberg: "It’s just so funny that instead of just asking people to prove what they make there’s this theater in place of you have to find an accountant sitting right in front of me who could very easily provide a W2, but we’re not asking for a W2 form, but we do want this accountant to say 'yeah, what they’re saying is plausible in some universe.'"

Mike Garner: "Yeah, and loan officers would have an accountant they could call up and say 'Can you write a statement saying a truck driver can make this much money?' Then the next one, came along, and it was no income, verified assets. So you don't have to tell the people what you do for a living. You don’t have to tell the people what you do for work. All you have to do is state you have a certain amount of money in your bank account. And then, the next one, is just no income, no asset. You don't have to state anything. Just have to have a credit score and a pulse."

Actually that pulse thing? Also optional. Like the case in Ohio where 23 dead people were approved for mortgages.

Shorter version here.

For those of us who rage at the public perception of this "crisis," it's nice to get confirmation of where the problems originated.

Oh look. Free money.

Well, that just fixes everything, doesn't it?

My little family is scheduled to receive, two weeks from now, almost as much money as we got in our tax return.

I should shred the check, in accordance with my feelings on the whole silly stunt. (Or actually, make a withdrawal of the cash, because it's being direct deposited to my bank account, and then shred it.)

But no, I'll stick it in my savings, where I put my tax return money last month. So much for an economic stimulus.