Reinke Faces Life

http://www.mightybargainhunter.com/2007/10/25/eight-ways-to-invest-in-yourself

Eight ways to invest in yourself
Published October 25th, 2007 in Investing.

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* Start a blog.

* Get started on a back-up profession.

* Start up a side business.

* Exercise.

* Learn a skill that helps you to be more self-sufficient.

* Learn a second language.

* Take a Myers-Briggs test.

* Important to help others.

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Feathers in with my strategy about success in the future.

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http://www.nasdaq.com/aspxcontent/NewsStory.aspx?cpath=20071024%5cACQDJON200710242253DOWJONESDJONLINE001107.htm&

UPDATE:Rangel Tax Plan’s Centerpiece Is 30.5% Top Corp Rate
(Updates with source saying all industries included in proposal to tax financial managers’ carried interest as regular income)
By John Godfrey
OF DOW JONES NEWSWIRES

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Absent a patch, the alternative minimum tax will expand to hit roughly 25 million taxpayers, up from 4.4 million in 2006, increasing their taxes by a total of nearly $50 billion, according to congressional estimates.

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Ahh good old charlie, just looking out for the folks!

“barbara streisand”

Bear in mind, that companies don’t pay taxes. Only people do!

Bear in mind, that taxes are the drag on the economy. Every dollar extracted in taxes to be wasted by the gooferment represents choices that were silently precluded!

Bear in mind, that politicians follow three imperatives: get reelected; feather their own nest; and reward friends / punish enemies. You don’t even figure in their hierarchy of values.

Any questions?

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http://www.impactlab.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=13497

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Casinos and other sponsors of poker tournaments will be required to report winnings of more than $5,000 to the Internal Revenue Service beginning March 4, 2008, the tax agency said Friday.

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Sigh!

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http://www.lewrockwell.com/greenhut/greenhut47.html

The Republican Crackup
The libertarian and conservative factions of the old Reagan coalition are marching to different drummers
by Steven Greenhut

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Grover Norquist, a prominent conservative activist from Americans for Tax Reform, called on the reconstitution of Reagan’s “leave us alone” coalition. The members of that group – gun lovers, home-schoolers, small-business owners, taxpayer advocates – didn’t necessarily like each other, he said, but they united in their desire to pursue their lives without excessive meddling from the government. “We don’t have to agree on secondary and tertiary issues,” he said. “Ours is a low-maintenance coalition that wants to be left alone in the zone that matters to them, and that’s what matters.” By contrast, the Democratic coalition is what he calls the “takings coalition – the unions, trial lawyers, the dependency movement, coercive utopians and radical environmentalists” who are promoting “a list of rules slightly longer and less tedious than Leviticus.” These groups can work together as long “as more money is coming into the center of the table.” His solution: Starve the beast through tax cuts and expand the coalition of Americans whose primary goal is to be left alone.

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Sounds like plan. Oppose every tax. Demand reductions. Oppose every debt issue. We can’t even conceive about all the taxes we are paying.

And, that makes us slaves.

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http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/moneymag/0708/gallery.20_rules.moneymag/20.html

20 timeless money rules
Money Magazine collected the best advice from some of the smartest investors (and other people) who have ever lived.
By Carla Fried, Money Magazine

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1. Be humble
When you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it–this is knowledge.
–Confucius

2. Take calculated risks
He that is overcautious will accomplish little.
–Friedrich von Schiller

3. Have an emergency fund
For age and want, save while you may; no morning sun lasts a whole day.
–Benjamin Franklin

4. Mix it up
It is the part of a wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow and not to venture all his eggs in one basket.
–Miguel de Cervantes

5. It’s the portfolio, stupid
Asset allocation…is the overwhelmingly dominant contributor to total return.
–Gary Brinson, Brian Singer and Gilbert Beebower

6. Average is the new best
The best way to own common stocks is through an index fund.
–Warren Buffett

7. Practice patience
It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It was always my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight!
–Edwin Lefevre

8. Don’t time the market
The real key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.
–Peter Lynch

9. Be a cheapskate
Performance comes and goes, but costs roll on forever.
–Jack Bogle

10. Don’t follow the crowd
Fashion is made to become unfashionable.
–Coco Chanel

Or, as the legendary financier Sir James Goldsmith has said, “If you see a bandwagon, it’s too late.”

11. Buy low
If a business is worth a dollar and I can buy it for 40 cents, something good may happen to me.
–Warren Buffett

12. Invest abroad
The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
–St. Augustine

13. Keep perspective
There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.
–Harry Truman

14. Just do it
It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.
–Eleanor Roosevelt

15. Borrow responsibly
As life closes in on someone who has borrowed far too much money on the strength of far too little income, there are no fire escapes.
–John Kenneth Galbraith

16. Talk to your spouse
“In every house of marriage there’s room for an interpreter.”
–Stanley Kunitz

17. Exit gracefully
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
–Pablo Picasso

18. Pay only your share
The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward.
–John Maynard Keynes

19. Give wisely
The time is always right to do the right thing.
–Martin Luther King Jr.

20. Keep money in its place
A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.
–Jonathan Swift

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http://www.survivalblog.com/2007/10/from_the_survivalblog_archives.html

Headline: Dumping of US Dollar Could Trigger ‘Economic September 11’

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There is a potentially fatal flaw at the heart of the global economy: the strong possibility of financial meltdown following a collapse of confidence in the greenback, Clyde Prestowitz tells Bruce Stannard
29 August 2005

THE nightmare scenario that haunts global strategist Clyde Prestowitz is an economic September 11 — a worldwide financial panic triggered by a sudden massive sell-off of US dollars that would lead inexorably to the collapse of economies around the world. If that happens, Prestowitz predicts: “It would make the Great Depression of the 1930s look like a walk in the park.” Australia would be sucked into the vortex of such a recession, which would cause great hardship throughout the world, he warns. Prestowitz is not a doomsayer, neither is he alone in his views. As president of the Economic Strategy Institute, a Washington think tank, he is in regular contact with the most influential US business leaders, several of whom — Warren Buffet and George Soros included — have taken steps to hedge their currency positions against the possibility of a cataclysmic plunge in the greenback. “Right now,” he says, “we have a situation in which the US is running huge trade deficits — about $US650 billion ($766 billion) in 2004 — which are financed by borrowings from the central banks of Asia — mainly the Chinese and the Japanese. All the world’s central banks are chock-full of US dollars — they’re holding many more dollars than they really want. They’re holding those dollars because at the moment there’s no great alternative and also because the global economy depends on US consumption. If they dump the dollar and the dollar collapses, then the whole global economy is in trouble.

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Sigh!

TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It) is postulated by a hyper inflation in Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse by James Wesley Rawles — the editor of SurvivalBlog.com.

So clearly his blog is sensitive to this issue.

But that doesn’t make it “impossible”.

When money is no longer a “store of value”, what does one do?

Beats me, but I’m open to suggestions.

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Bloomberg: First baby boomer asks for Social Security benefits

“The first Baby Boomer applied today for Social Security benefits, a milestone marking the approaching retirement of a generation of Americans whose eligibility for government payouts threatens to overwhelm the federal budget. ‘This is the first drop of rain in the flood,’ said Bob Bixby, head of the Concord Coalition, a Washington-based advocacy group that promotes balanced federal budgets. ‘It’s the beginning of an era. It’s symbolic but it reminds us that we’re not doing anything to prepare for this.’

“The demands on retirement programs by the estimated 80 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 combined with spiraling health-care costs will eventually overwhelm the federal budget unless lawmakers change government policies, Bixby said.’

Source: Brian Faler, Bloomberg.com, October 15, 2007.

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Here comes the tidal wave of more people on the dole!

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http://www.lewrockwell.com/french/french59.html

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The Fed has been creating money at a phenomenal clip all year with the M-3 (that government no longer reports, but economist John Williams does on Shadowstats.com) growing at a 14-percent rate, a 34-year high.

***and***

Although it appears for now the Bernanke Fed is way behind Mugabe’s Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe in the inflation race, the man tracking the numbers at Shadowstats, believes “the onset of hyperinflation [in America] remains most likely at least several years in the future,” an unappetizing prospect.

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Seems like preparing for higher inflation makes sense.

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http://www.smartmoney.com/taxmatters/index.cfm?story=20071016

Tax Matters
Will Your Social Security Benefits Be Taxed — Again?
By Bill Bischoff
Published: October 16, 2007

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THINK YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY benefits are always free from federal-income tax? Think again. In fact, depending on how much income you have from other sources, you may have to report up to 85% of your benefits on Form 1040 and pay the resulting federal income tax hit.

When this happens, you’re effectively getting taxed twice on the same dollars. The first time is during your working years when you pay federal income taxes on Social Security taxes that are taken out of your salary or self-employment earnings. The second instance occurs later on when you have to pay federal income taxes on your Social Security benefits. To make matters worse, depending on where you live, you may suffer the same double taxation fate under your state income tax rules, too.

While this is unfair, if not downright scandalous, it’s pretty much par for the course in the tax world.

{Extraneous Deleted}

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Surprise, the gooferment lied and the politicians got away with it. Careful calculation and planning is need to steer the minefield of taxation.

Bottom line: You’re not as well of as you think.

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http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north574.html

Wall Street vs. the Middle Class
by Gary North

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There is a price for this upward access to greater wealth: the possibility of a fall into poverty. This is a greater threat to the rich than to the middle class. The rich are at the far right edge of the bell-shaped curve. There are few of them. Their position is insecure, for good reason. The free market rewards those sellers who serve consumers efficiently, wasting few scarce resources. Consumers are a fickle bunch. They keep asking sellers, “What have you done for us lately?” There are always many competitors trying to get rich. They are ready to replace today’s rich people. Today’s rich people know this. They are therefore ready and willing to pull up the ladder that enabled them to replace yesterday’s rich.

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I love his metaphors. It sounds like the poor swap places with the rich. (Yeah, I know it doesn’t work like that, but it looks that way.)

The inflation hurts the middle and the bottom disproportionately. That’s why you would think that sound money (i.e., Ron Paul wanting to nuke the Fed; not Iraq, Iran, North Korea, or the Republic of Where-The-Heck-Is-That-is-tan!) would be a winning economic policy. I don’t understand the sheep.

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