And the hits this site gets keep going up even though I stopped marketing it. On the one hand people got used to the recession-depression starting in 2008, and when a new stock market fall hit interest renewed. But on the other hand the economic situation continues to slide. It keeps trending down and more and more people feel interested in figuring things out for themselves.

About the “Money Question” and alternative economics I think no other site even comes close to offering the resources on here. Just take a look at the 62 articles on the Articles page.

Even better I still stand by my book released in December 2008. I think the very first and best book to tackle the crash. Some things now I might like to revise or add, but the fundamental situation hasn’t changed. If you’ve got the interest buy the book. It comes with free shipping worldwide and a 365 day guarantee. If you don’t like it just send it back within a year.

And…I hate blogging. A lot. Some people love it. I don’t. It makes me think of the dentist. Currently working on another book which will tackle some of the same topics as National Economy but much more briefly and go into many other topics. Probably come out within a year. And I may start a daily email but don’t expect much in the way of blog updates.

If you want free quality content check out the Articles Page.

And if you want the best new economics  book around, with free shipping worldwide and a year long guarantee,  and the only one based on the lifelong work on a Nobel Prize winning scientist, grab a copy of my book. And click here to learn more about it.

The element of dishonesty is what make something a scam. Con artists say things they know are untrue to make money.

Here are the two most common investment scams:

Pump and Dump
The classic example of this scam in Enron. Use phony news, info, and stats to pump up the value of something temporarily and dump your shares in it while the price is still high. When the bubble pops everyone else will be left holding the bag and you’ll be sitting pretty.

Trash and Stash
This is the reverse of the pump and dump. A good example of this took place on August 25, 2000. A college student created a false press release and spread it on the internet. The release said Emulex would not meet earnings expectations. The company’s share price fell 62% in less than an hour. The scammer shorted the shares of Emulex and covered his short position with the temporarily cheap shares of Emulex to make his money.

Unless there’s a general rising tide you’ll never make money when you are part of the stampede. If you want to profit you have to set yourself apart from the crowd and do something different.

Getting paid to watch movies and surf the net isn’t half bad. Most of the Umich student jobs are like that, and they all pay over $9 an hour.

Thing is, the majority of the graduates from Umich aren’t going to be able to find jobs as good as the student jobs when they graduate.

My friends brother graduated from a very expensive film school a year ago. He had a part time contract film job for a couple months and since then nothing. He now works at BestBuy.

All that expensive college to get a job a 16 year old could have, and it doesn’t pay as well as a Umich student job and he actually has to do things other than sit in one place and read.

It goes to show how utterly worthless college is for most people when the jobs they can get working for the university while they’re students are better than the jobs than can get when they graduate.

My brother drives a bus and thought it had something to do with a really drunk man that had been on the bus the night before. I thought he shouldn’t call back the detective at all but he decided to call him back and we the call on speakerphone.

Was he calling about the drunken man? Nope. There had been a drive by BB gun shooting at the bus stop and he wanted to know if my brother had heard or seen anything.

BB shooting? This is what detectives spend their time on?? I shot my friend multiple times with a BB gun accidentally when I was a kid. Consequence: he got a little welt. I think he was wearing a t-shirt. This is Michigan. It’s cold. People are wearing winter gear. Worst case scenario getting shot with a BB stung a little. The only way it’s worth investigating is if someone got shot in the eye.

It just boggles my mind that the detective is actually paid to investigate this. Personally, I don’t think it needs to be investigated at all. If I was shot with a BB gun, not only would I probably not go through the large hassle of reporting it to the police but if the person got prosecuted I wouldn’t want to bother having to show up in court and be a witness. It’s much easier just to let it go.

What’s the point of keeping police around that have nothing better to do than to track down the BB Gun Bandits. Soon to be a major motion picture.

The shoe company Clarks is my first example. Wanted to get some Wallabee Clarks. Of course I can’t buy shoes retail, because they’re all cheaper online, but it’s always good to get them sized at a store. Nobody carries them, though one woman told me people ask for them all the time and last year they sold out. Go figure. Maybe they should carry them then.

Journeys has Clarks Padmores. They’re identical to the Wallabees except the sole is made of a different material. The salesman says Clarks run a little large, and I size them. I’m a 10. Now, you would think that the sizing between Wallabee’s and Padmore’s would be about the same as they’re almost the same shoe. Nope. I get the Wallabees in the mail and it’s like I’m wearing boats. I think the correct size for me would have been a 9.

Here’s the thing. I have over 15 pairs of shoes. They are all either size 10 or 10.5. To me, a half size range among all the manufacturers doesn’t seem at all unreasonable. And yet Clarks sells shoes that would be a 9 on me. A full size smaller than the lower end of my range. They clearly don’t like to make money. Why not conform to the American shoe size standard? Every other company manages to do so. They certainly don’t benefit in any way by inventing their own sizing system and pretending like it’s the same as everyone else’s. End result: Clarks pissed me off and I returned the shoes. Sale lost.

Obviously they don’t care about making money otherwise they’d make shoes the correct size like every other company does, but instead they choose not to and it only loses them money.

Example 2, Walmart:

Wanted to go to Walmart the other night. It’s around 10pm. Not every Walmart is open 24 hours, so I check online to see their hours, except…Walmart doesn’t list its hours online. Yup, largest retailer in the world doesn’t put up its store hours online. Just wow. Didn’t answer the phone either. So I went to Meijer’s instead, because I was sure they were open. Obviously Walmart is highly profitable and doing just fine, but why? Why would any retailer not put its hours online, especially the largest one in the world. It boggles my mind. Every other business does and it would certainly help them.

They just must not like to make money (or maybe too much money).

Microsoft is my final example. Recently Bing and Yahoo merged their pay-per-click businesses. I had a balance in my Yahoo account and it was supposed to be transferred to Bing. I checked a couple of times and my Yahoo account would show a balance of zero and my Bing account also had a balance of zero. I thought they must still be straightening things out. After a couple months I finally called. What the hell happened to my money? And the person in India or Bangladesh or wherever tells me to look in my billing history and have it show the past 90 days of history and it shows a $49 credit three months ago, so the money was transferred to my Bing account. And yet when I click on my account and go to balance it shows zero. Yup, I have money in my account but my balance is zero. Makes a lot of sense to me.

How can Microsoft be so stupid that it lists account balances as zero while simultaneously having money in the account? I have never encountered another business that uses this practice and frankly it’s stupid. Defeats the purpose of “balance.” And just maybe, I might have spent money on their service if my account didn’t have a zero balance the past couple months. I’m sure thousands of other people have experienced the same thing.

People think Google is so smart and that’s why they dominate their competition. I don’t think so. Their competition is just retarded.

And Microsoft doesn’t like to make money.

More and more I think Dan Kennedy is right that the bigger they are the dumber they are.

P.S. Just checked Walmart.com and as of 2/26/2011 they still don’t put up their store hours.

I was delighted when I read the article Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds. All the quotes below come from it. While the author thinks the Greeks suffer from a unique moral disease. I think they’re simply farther along the road to collapse than us.

Greek government bonds are rated as junk bonds. This isn’t a problem for Greece, because it can still borrow money from other governments. Greece is now a ward of other states.

Here’s what a senior IMF official said about Greece, “Our people went in and couldn’t believe what they found. The way they were keeping track of their finances—they knew how much they had agreed to spend, but no one was keeping track of what he had actually spent. It wasn’t even what you would call an emerging economy. It was a Third World country.”

That reminds me of Enron. This kind of thing is much more common than you think and getting worse. It’s only the rare case that you hear about. The economy is like Swiss cheese. Mostly empty space, when everyone thinks it’s solid.

“In addition to its roughly $400 billion (and growing) of outstanding government debt, the Greek number crunchers had just figured out that their government owed another $800 billion or more in pensions. Add it all up and you got about $1.2 trillion, or more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek. Against $1.2 trillion in debts, a $145 billion bailout was clearly more of a gesture than a solution. And those were just the official numbers; the truth is surely worse.”

Reminds me of our bailout in America. If you’re going to try to have the government stimulate the economy through deficit spending then spend enough so it matters. If you’re not going to do that there’s no point.

“The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job.” Also a trend in America. Especially, as the average pay of private sector jobs sink. Never mind the additional benefits of not having to work hard and of being almost impossible to fire.

“The Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finland’s.” We keep spending more and more money on the schools in America and the results are worse and worse.

“The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as “arduous” is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on.” This is exactly like government worker retirement in America, especially California where their pay in the last couple years is artificially inflated so as to receive a higher pension.

The state railroad system runs at a huge deficit. “Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece’s rail passengers into taxicabs: it’s still true.” This is true of so many services in America. Private schools would be better and cheaper than public schools.

“Where waste ends and theft begins almost doesn’t matter; the one masks and thus enables the other.” I just love this statement.

“Oddly enough, the financiers in Greece remain more or less beyond reproach. They never ceased to be anything but sleepy old commercial bankers. Virtually alone among Europe’s bankers, they did not buy U.S. subprime-backed bonds, or leverage themselves to the hilt, or pay themselves huge sums of money. The biggest problem the banks had was that they had lent roughly 30 billion euros to the Greek government—where it was stolen or squandered. In Greece the banks didn’t sink the country. The country sank the banks.” This is hilarious.

When the new finance minister came in the estimated budget went from 7 billion euros to over 30 billion in a week. Rather than being shocking it’s quite understandable. If you’re only worried about the short term and simply fabricate whatever numbers are necessary there’s no need to keep track of such things.

“The party in power simply gins up whatever numbers it likes, for its own purposes.”

“The first thing a government does in an election year is to pull the tax collectors off the streets.” This is just the next step to promises made by politicians. Every election they promise and don’t deliver. Obama promised to fill the country with magical rainbows. He didn’t deliver.

“The Greek people never learned to pay their taxes. And they never did because no one is punished. No one has ever been punished. It’s a cavalier offense—like a gentleman not opening a door for a lady.”

This is the same as America applied to the small scale. The big guys get away with whatever, while only the small guys get nailed. In Greece no one gets nailed.

Intel CEO, Paul Otellini, says executives are most concerned with uncertainty. He says the government needs to, “Take the uncertainty out. Businesses can’t invest until they have fewer variables and right now there are just too many variables.”

Companies like Intel continue to invest because their future requires it (technology), but he says, “A lot of companies are sitting on the side lines.”

The economic environment is very uncertain. Otellini asks, “What are the ground rules? Give me some certainty.”

For example there is a significant R&D tax credit that must be renewed every year. Companies don’t do R&D for a year. As Otellini puts it, “You need to know the credit is going to be there if you’re going to make this investment.”

Individuals face this same uncertainty. Will the Bush tax cuts be extended? What about the death tax? If you don’t know what the rules are going to be it makes it hard to plan and take action.

Talking about the Obama administrations Otellini says, “I think this group does not understand what it takes to create jobs.” “Decisions so far have not resulted in increased job growth or confidence.”

It’s true. So far the Obama administration has only succeeded in keeping the “Too Big Too Fail” banks from failing and the stock market from crashing. There hasn’t been any significant job creation. Unemployment is getting worse.

“When what you’re doing isn’t working, you rethink it.” Let’s hope the Obama administration does. I won’t hold my breath, because I’m pretty sure I’d die.

“It still costs a lot more to operate in the United States.”  “Corporate tax rate is about half of what it is here in France [38% here].” America isn’t doing well at the Globalization Game. Thing is, the “rich” countries can’t actually win the Globalization Game. Globalization is all about leveling. The top is coming down and the bottom is coming up, thus the “rich” countries don’t have anywhere to go but down. Instead of trying to get better at the Globalization Game we should play a different game. A game that benefits us. A game we can win.

About half of American workers have no employer-provided retirement plan. Less than 10% of workers who don’t have a plan contribute to IRAs. And because Congress cares so much about people (really because they smell money) they’ve decided to force workers to contribute to IRAs. Isn’t that sweet?

The Automatic IRA Act of 2010 has been introduced by Representative Richard Neal. Under this bill if you don’t contribute to an IRA starting in a couple of years the government will hijack 3% of your paycheck and put it into an IRA. The bill gives the Treasury the option to change the amount “(ii) such other percentage of compensation as is specified in regulations prescribed by the Secretary which is not less than 2 percent or more than 6 percent.” That’s up to 6% of your paycheck in a couple years and there’s nothing to stop the government from raising the amount even higher.

Government deficits are only going to be going up in the coming years and this is one way they plan to finance the deficits, by forcing you to buy bonds. Expect this legislation to be followed up with rules requiring current IRAs, 401k’s, and all retirement plans to buy government bonds that will be called Guaranteed Government Annuities.

You might think, “That’s not so bad. Making people save money. They’ll get more back someday.” In my view, the system will have collapsed/be radically different by the time I retire, so any money put in accounts like these I might as well burn the money. Plus it’s likely in coming years that the government will cause so much price inflation that the money saved will be worth little.

Making retirement investment decisions for you to benefit itself. That’s your government at work for you.

Genius Congressman, Chaka Fattah, has proposed the ironically titled bill “The Debt Free America Act,” which would have the effect of putting Americans deeper into debt. Fattah proposes imposing a federal tax of 1% anytime cash, a credit card, a debit card, or a check is used. That’s not all also any sale of stock, bonds, or any other financial instrument or simply transferring money.

Taxes are already too high. If people are going to spend more money, which would help the economy, they need to have more money to spend. Taking money away from people for conducting business definitely isn’t the way to fix the economy. All higher taxes will lead to is a deeper depression.

These idiots in Congress really have no idea whatsoever how to solve economic problems. All they know how to do is raise taxes and give away money to Wall Street, banks, and sundry other tax feeders.

Thank God there are no cosigners for this bill. This is the full text of the Debt Free America Act.

While it is unlikely this bill will pass it goes to show the mentality of the people in Congress. The government needs more money…let’s tax people more! None of their energies are directed toward finding an actual solution to the depression.

They just want to keep feathering their own nests at the people’s expense for as long as possible.