What's a Real Stimulus?

A stimulus planned during a recession must act quickly, if it is to be practical. It’s also supposed to stimulate the economy with minimal cost.

Any government really fully aware of how to stimulate a morbid economy would institute a quick tax cut on all types of income; that always works, Tax cuts on interest and capital gains.

Corporate tax cuts are tremendous boosts to an overall depressed economy especially when most foreign country rates are much lower than those in America. (See the Earl J Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole tweets.)

Cheaper College Tuition

There’s no reason college cannot be cheaper; that is, if colleges were under pressure to really try to reduce costs.

Take a recent study done by Christopher Matgouranis, Jonathan Robe, and Richard Vedder, a Professor of Economics at Ohio University, and the director of the Center College Affordability and Productivity group.

Reporting data at the main campus, at Austin of the University of Texas, the study says tuition fees could be cut in about half by asking 80% of the faculty with the lowest teaching loads to teach half as much as the 20% with the biggest loads. The top 20% now cover 57% of the teaching.

Many professors simply do not teach but spend time on research, much of questionable utility. Also, student-teacher ratio standards make little sense, while college bureaucracies are in need of major cost-saving overhauls and streamlining which can reduce tuition costs even more. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at twitter)

Do We Really Need More Teachers?

Let’s face it, when I was younger, ALL my classes had well over 40 students per teacher. And the students did well, far better than the graduate and drop-out crops being turned out today with a bit more than 20 students per teacher, on average.
Moreover,  we had no internet and other devices to assist teachers, other than weathered books, old-fashioned blackboards and handy rulers for law and order..
The need to “invest” in more and more teachers is the mantra from school unions who want to grow at taxpayer expense, more than any positive aid to teaching they purport to be. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at twitter)

The Uproar Over Complex Oil Pricing

For decades, the media has done a poor job in explaining how oil pricing works. As a result, the American public goes berserk whenever it costs them more to buy fuel at the pumps. When prices drop, there’s little comment, or attempts to find out why.
This ignorance is perfect for politicians who are responsible for much of American gasoline and fuel oil pricing.
The subject is too complex to fully explain here but there is one essential factor in such pricing that overrides all. The more American oil we produce, the cheaper the product will be. And The U.S. can become a major producer of the product for at least the next couple of hundred years, until we can produce alternate fuels that won’t bankrupt us. 

It’s the politicians who only imagine they see environmental problems under every rock, who are the culprits.(See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at twitter)

Securities Advisers Responsible For Loss Reimbursement?

I have no sympathy for advisers who often charge clients for services the clients may well do themselves. But why sue such advisers who have no crystal ball and who cannot see if an investment will turn down?

And yet many pension funds do sue advisers who could not see a downturn in the mortgage markets a few years back.

This lacks common sense on the part of the investors, other than a ruse to collect money from any source available. So why not sue, hoping a judge and jury will not be conversant with how legitimate securities markets work in real life?

(See the Earl J Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole tweets.)

How Much Savings Is Needed For Retirement?

It’s common to see the financial media fill up space with comments on how much you have to save annually for retirement, or how much savings you should amass in order to have comfortable retirement.

All that discussion is meaningless, except to fill that chatter.

There is no magic amount to save, as some advisers would have you believe. There are too many contingencies in life that make a pat-formula too simplistic and useless.

The practical solution to proper retirement is to save and invest all you can. And secondly, to depend on alternate sources of retirement income, other than Social Security and personal investments. 

That means the possibility of having a source of part-time income, a subject I constantly discuss. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at twitter)

Revisiting Poor Justice-- Hanging Judges and Juries

Since 1978, The U.S. Supreme Court has permitted prosecutors  to threaten defendants with even more charges and tougher penalties, at a federal trial.  

At the same time, Congress has legislated more federal crimes, many of which defendants are not aware of until they are arrested for the transgression. On average, over 56.5 new crimes have been legislated each year over the past ten years, stipulating mandatory minimum penalties which can run to twenty years.

With such official license to threaten and bully, many innocent defendants have been pleading guilty for smaller sentences, just to avoid the major sentences, once a hanging jury and judge get the case.

American politicians keep repeating “justice” but because many of the innocent victims are business men, the outrageous practice goes on. While prosecutors attain their own fame and fortune in politics. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at twitter)