Category: editorial

A few months ago, George Carlin performed in Fort Worth. Knowing that he was getting older, I figured we should go see him while he was still around. We did — he was great — but now he’s dead, which is a bummer.

With the 4th of July coming up, and Carlin now dead, I thought it appropriate to post some video of Carlin talking about various things like the Bill of Rights, corporate ownership of the country, etc.

If there was bullshit around (and there always is), you could always count on Carlin to ask loudly “What stinks?”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWiBt-pqp0E]

I don’t normally post links to anything even remotely political, and I never argue politics with anyone – it is rarely a good idea.

However, I discovered this site today — it is the site of former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Reich is, without a doubt, one of the smartest people in the country. He also possesses a great internal bullshit detector. He’s a guy who likes a good idea, and while a democrat, he would certainly support good ideas from republicans too (I realize such a thing is unlikely, but it isn’t a complete statistical impossibility).

http://robertreich.blogspot.com/

His posts tend to long, but well written. I have checked him before, and his numbers are accurate.

Do yourself a favor and read his blog.

Here is a note from the Quorum Report, a Texas Political Website. 

The Kucinich for President campaign is filing a lawsuit against the Texas Democratic Party to stop the Party from excluding Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich from the Democratic primary election ballot. A co-plaintiff in the lawsuit is legendary entertainer, longtime Kucinich friend, and Texas voter, Willie Nelson.

The state party notified the Kucinich campaign today that its application for a place on the Texas primary ballot was rejected because Kucinich refused to “swear an oath” to “fully support the Democratic nominee for President, whoever that shall be.”

I’m not surprised by this. During the last presidential election, I served as a county delegate to the Texas Democratic Convention. I did not find the membership of the party to be very progressive (though there were some exceptions), and frankly I thought throughout most of the post-precinct-level activities I was strongly encouraged to NOT vote my conscience. I’m sure the same is true on the Republican side.

Anyway, I hope Kucinich wins this lawsuit.

My first job, and arguably the best one ever, was mowing yards. This is what I did for money during the summers when I was a teenager. The great thing about mowing yards is that you can pretty much do it whenever you want.

I think that video games were really the start of my need for money. Before Pac-Man, I really didn’t need money. But when I decided that I wanted to feed quarters into a machine and receive absolutely nothing in return, I found that I needed my own source of dinero.

At the beginning of the summer I’d find maybe 2 yards. I’d do this by riding my bike around the neighborhood and finding the shittiest looking yards. Even at 15 or 16 I was a good analyst of human character. I figured if the yard looked like crap, the owner was probably lazy.  To a lazy person, spending $15 to have a 15-year old cut your grass once a week is a pretty sweet deal. And for a 15-year old, getting $15 for about 2 hours work was pretty good, especially in the early 1980s. That’s $7.50 per hour — more than double minimum wage (which was either $3.10 or $3.35 per hour, depending on the year), with no boss, no schedule, and by using the family lawn-mower, no real overhead.

So you’re looking at about $30 a week. Enough for some movies (which I believe were about $5 back then — or $1 at the dollar movie), and a little spending money. Not bad.

Landscaping can be a bit of a pain for the teenaged yard mower. Mowing around fancy landscaping takes extra time. Same with pools. While a pool reduces the amount of grass you have to cut, it increases the pain-in-the-ass-to-cut-around factor by about 300%.

Then there’s dog shit. Yes, some people just leave their dog’s shit in the backyard stinking the place up. As you can imagine, the lazy people I sought out as customers were particularly prone to this kind of sloppiness. There’s nothing quite like running a mower over a nice dog turd, or stepping in a turd while mowing. Yum.

Most of my customers payed me by check, so I’d give the check to my Mom and she’d get them cashed for me at the bank. I don’t think any of them ever bounced.

But even with the small problems of landscaping and dog excrement, mowing lawns was a pretty good gig. Seriously, I should have stayed with it. The next job — the summer before my senior year — was not so great.

Interestingly (to me at least) — as soon as I had to actually earn my own money to waste playing video games, my desire to spend that money on video games decreased by about 100%. The lesson: it is easier to throw away someone else’s money than your own. To this day I stink at video games.

I frequently hear people say that they will probably always have a car payment. They buy a car, finance most or all of it, and then trade it in sometimes as early as 2 or 3 years later.

Dealerships will tell you that you can get a better trade-in value that way. Maybe you’ll get a few thousand dollars more for your trade in, allowing you to get a nicer car the next time.

I’ve alway felt that this kind of thinking is rubbish — something promoted by the car companies and banks. But lets analyze this situation. Keep in mind I’m rounding some of the numbers slightly.

If you start buying cars when you are 22 (when you get out of college), and you purchase a car every five years, on five year loans, and do this until you are 72, that means you’ll buy 10 cars over 50 years.

We’ll assume a moderate, small car – $19,000 per car.

First, that means without interest, you’ll be spending $190,000 on cars over those 50 years. Thats a lot of money. If you buy big cars or SUVs, you’re of course looking at even more.

A $19,000 loan (I’m going to ignore trade-in value and down payment on your car), at 6%, has a monthly loan payment of about $367.

Over 50 years, that is 600 payments. For a total spent of $220, 200.

If you bought a car, payed it off in 5 years, and the drove it for 5 years before buying another, here is the breakdown:

5 cars purchased
Total purchase price, without interest: $95,000
Total money payed including interest (300 payments): $110, 100

I guess that is obvious — half as many car purchased, half the expense. But what’s the additional cost? Once you have payed off that car, you can then invest that $367 every month. So every alternating 5 years, you can invest $367 every month.

So, after car 1 is payed off, you start investing. Assume a 6% return. You will invest a little over $22.000. At the end of that 5 years, the account is worth $25,501. So you would have $3501 in those second five years. Now, if you leave that money invested for the remaining 40 years, in the end it will be worth (and this is scarey): $262,296, for a gain of $236,795

So to sum up, the money you invested for the second 5 years, and leave invested for 40 years afterward, makes you a total of $240, 296 of EARNINGs.

I’ll do the same for the next 4 investment periods.

Period 2
Earnings during investment period $3501
Earnings over 30 years: $120,964

Period 3
Earnings during investment period $3501
Earnings over next 20 years: $56,284

Period 4
Earnings during investment period $3501
Earnings over next 10 years: $20,167

Period 5
Earnings during investment period $3501
After this investment period you have hit 50 years.

Total earnings by investing for every alternating 5 years: $451, 715

So not only have you spent over $100, 000 more on cars over that 50 years, but you’ve cleverly avoided $450,000 in earnings on that money — for a total loss of over $550, 000. Over half a million dollars.

Now consider if you are in a 2 car family. If you got married at 22, and stayed married for 50 years, and did that with 2 cars — your family has lost over $1 million. And THAT is assuming a very, very modest 6% rate of return.

THAT is $1 million dollars of your family’s money that the bank and its investors get, rather than paying for your retirement.

Still think the idea of always having a car payment is smart or inevitable?