Ideas, Opinions, Genealogy, and Book Reviews
If your ancestors may have owned or leased property in Ireland you may want to check out the Registry of Deeds Index Project. There are over 110,000 records indexed now and with more being added by volunteers. The index is searchable by name, location, and other ways. This is a wonderful resource for those of us with an interest in Irish genealogy.
Recently I’ve had several posts about gun violence and possible solutions. See Let your government know what you think about gun control, Americans for Responsible Solutions: start a dialog to address gun violence, and Crazy Idea: the NRA stimulus that might save the economy.
Since I am in Pennsylvania, I would like to point out there is a state-wide group concerned with gun violence. The group is CeaseFirePA. Please check out their website for more information on this group.
We’ve all heard many different things about Social Security and its effect on the deficit. Well, it is not that complicated but it is a bit confusing so contradictory things can be said. One side (mostly Democrats) says Social security does not add to the deficit because such a large surplus was built-up and it is now being spend so we don’t need to worry for now but there are long-term problem. The other side (mostly Republicans) say there is a problem now and we need to correct it because it is contributing to the deficit.
Fact Check has had a series of articles about various claim on Social Security. Although they find inaccuracies on both sides, they have said on several occasions during the past few years that Social Security does contribute to the deficit.
So why the confusion? Often political claims are made to scare you into voting against the other guy. And quite often they are distortions or in some case outright lies. But in this case, both sides have some truth on their side. But neither tells the whole truth. Or at least that is how I look at it.
The fact is our government is paying our more than it takes in Social Security taxes. But the side that thinks this is not a problem points to Social Security having a cushion in saving from all those years of surplus. This is true, but as I see it, that is the confusing point.
The surplus is invested in US treasury bonds. Seems a reasonable thing to do as US treasury bonds are considered very safe investments. But when Social Security cashes these it, we need to borrow the money to pay Social Security for the bond.
So Social Security does contribute to the deficit.
But I guess you could say the same about any bond holder. Say Mr X has a US treasury bond. And the bond’s term is up and he cashes it and uses they money elsewhere. Is Mr X a contributor to the deficit? Say he decides to reinvest in treasury bonds. He will collect interest. That would also contribute to the deficit, too.
So is the fact that Social Security contributes to the deficit meaningful? Not in itself, I think. As we see in the above paragraph, paying our debts to investors also contributes to the deficit.
But it seems to me (but I am neither an economist or politician) that cashing-in US treasury bonds would increase the deficit but not cause an increase in the national debt. Confusing, isn’t it! The bond that was cashed it no longer a debt and even though we need to borrow to pay off the debt, the over all debt is the same. Of course interest is incurred in the new debt but it would have also been incurred with the old debt.
The real difference is we can chose to stiff our senior citizens but not other investors. If we refuse to pay back investors or pay them less than agreed, we go into default and nobody wants to lend us money (and we do need to borrow.)
But we certainly have a moral, if not legal, debt to seniors who have paid their taxes for years. The question is do we cut payments to them or adjust the system other ways. Remember this as we have our endless budget talks.
Today I have contacted my Senators and Representative. As a nation and society we are facing a huge problem and we need to discuss it and arrive a a reasonable and responsible solution. Or at least take a few steps in that direction. So contact your federal elected officials. Let your government know what you think about gun control.
They all have websites now and you can contact them through those sites. You could also call or send a letter but the important thing is to let them know what you think.
This is my letter:
Dear xxx,
I believe guns have become a huge problem in our society. There are too many gun deaths and too many mass shootings. I realize this is a complex issue. Today President Obama mentioned a few common sense solutions that should help.
I believe that Congress should ban semiautomatic weapons, particularly assault rifles. It could be argued that only a small portion of gun related deaths are due to semiautomatic weapons. But these mass shootings are horrible. And I know of few, if any, uses for these weapons beside murder. We do have a right to bear arms but if we can restrict automatic weapons, why not these.
I believe we should eliminate loopholes in our background checks. Background checks help to prevent criminals and the mentally ill from getting weapons legally. Why are there gun sales not subject to background checks. How does this interfere with our right to bear arms.
Similar arguments could be made for banning high capacity magazine for these weapons.
I think there should be serious discussions of these issues and hope congress can overcome pressure from the gun lobby in evaluating these problems.
Don’t forget to send yours. You can add a comment here if you want to share your opinions with other readers.
Americans for Responsible Solutions is an organization founded to help and encourage our lawmakers to stand-up to the powerful forces that prevent our lawmakers from serious considering and putting into place any laws that will restrict gun ownership in an attempt to prevent the serious problem of gun-related violence in out society. Check out the website of Americans for Responsible Solutions.
U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords was severely wounded and 18 of her constituents killed or wounded by a gunman about 2 years ago. There have been 11 mass shootings since then. Rep. Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly founded Americans for Responsible Solutions to encourage a national conversation to address gun violence. Check out their website and let your Senators and Representatives know your beliefs on this issue.
Brooklyn Bones begins with an incident any parent can relate to. A teenage daughter calls about something terrible and, of course, it is all your fault. The terrible thing gets your attention and then the story slows down a little but definitely keeps your attention as the main characters are fleshed-out.
Then the action speeds up and never stops until the end. The book is Brooklyn Bones and the author is Triss Stein. This book is the first in a series featuring Erica Donato. Continue reading “Brooklyn Bones by Triss Stein”
I wrote about this a few months back but wanted to repeat that Jon Huntsman would be a good choice for Treasury Secretary . Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has announced his intention to leave. Now that we have settled the fiscal cliff issues in part (but also put off parts for a few months), President Obama must work with the Republicans in Congress to continue the recovery and improve upon the economy of the United States.
Both sides have very different ideas about what we should do and there is a lack of trust. Trust would certainly improve the chances of finding some middle ground that both sides can agree on. Perhaps one way to improve that trust is by naming a new Treasury Secretary that both sides can trust. Continue reading “Jon Huntsman would be a good choice for Treasury Secretary”
Once upon a time, the Republicans seemed to be the more fiscally responsible party or at least that is what they told is and it seemed reasonable. Now they seem to make a lot of noise about being fiscally responsible but clearly they are not.
The latest outrage is their behavior in the government response to SuperStorm Sandy. Because parts of the United States can be badly flooded, we have a National Flood Insurance Program. Property owners can pay a premium and if the property is flooded, they can file a claim, and collect insurance money to repair damages.
The problem is the National Flood Insurance Program is a federal program and there wasn’t enough money in it to pay all the claims. So it was a case of pay your premium and hope the claim is processed before the National Flood Insurance Program runs our of money. And it did run out of money quickly.
So several weeks back, the Senate passed a bill which adds this money plus more more. Because the bill has provisions that do not directly address Sandy relief, the House refuses to vote on it and the bill dies in the last Congress.
But House members probably don’t want to seem like total jerks so they introduce a bill in the new Congress which will authorize more funds to pay flood insurance claims. The good news is that is was passed by an overwhelming majority. Even more good news is that it will probably quickly pass the Senate and be signed into law by the President.
The bad news is that is does not address any problems other that adding money to the National Flood Insurance Program. The other bad news is that 67 Republicans from the House of Representatives voted against this bill. You may see the previous link for the full list of names.
A good number of us have homeowner insurance , renter insurance, car insurance, or life insurance and we know how this idea works. These Republicans apparently believe it is OK to take premiums for an insurance program without paying the promised benefits when they are needed.
Fiscally irresponsible, untrustworthy, or both?
After the tragic child murders at Sandy Hook Elementary, the NRA proposed a plan to put armed guards in each school. There are about 99,000 public schools in the country according to National Center for Education Statistics.
NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said:
I call on Congress today to act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation and to do it now to make sure that blanket safety is in place when our kids return to school in January.
A few days later (on December 23) he added on Meet the Press:
If it’s crazy to call for putting police and armed security in our school to protect our children, then call me crazy. I’ll tell you what the American people– I think the American people think it’s crazy not to do it. It’s the one thing that would keep people safe.
And the N.R.A. is going to try to do that. We’re going to support an immediate appropriation before Congress to put police officers in every school. And we’re going to work with Asa Hutchinson, who has agreed to work with us to put together a voluntary program, drawing on retired military, drawing on retired police, drawing on former Secret Service, and all these people that can actually go in and make our kids safe.
So he clearly calls for both volunteers and armed police. It is unclear how the numbers will work but with almost 100,000 schools we are clearly talking about a large numbers of jobs and a big federal expenditure.
There would be details to work out and these are by no means trivial. How do the volunteers work with the police? How volunteers will be recruited? How will they screened so we are not creating a worse situation by putting armed people into schools who may themselves cause a problem?
Could there be problems with students or others taking guns from the guards and shooting? This may sound crazy too but a weapon was taken from a police officer is the police station and 3 officers were wounded. (see Police station shooting story).
Just a few months ago, police shot 9 bystanders while killing a lone gunman. Since these were trained police officers, we cannot dismiss the possibility that students or teachers could be shot accidently by the guards.
Many schools will need multiple guards as one person can’t see everything and may not be sufficient to repel the attacker or attackers. Should we depend exclusively on volunteers or police here or have a mix?
Should we think about something similar for other places where the public gathers? Does the private sector need to add an armed presence in shopping malls, private schools, movies theaters, churches, etc.
Do governments need to post armed guards at other facilities open to the public? The Post Office and motor vehicle offices come to mind but there are many others.
This plan is clearly a dilemma for many politicians. Some will like the idea of armed guards in schools as proposed by the NRA but will not like the idea of a large federal program particularly one that uses federal money to create jobs and stimulate the economy. Others will like the idea of a federal stimulus but oppose armed guards in schools.
But it gives each side a bit of what they like. So maybe it is a potential route for compromise. Maybe throw a few more contentious issues into the mix and we’ll have something.
I think the plan will not work but rather than dismissing it as crazy, we should think it through.
While reorganizing the site, I looked around and realized I hadn’t posted much on genealogy lately. But I have been updating my genealogy pages so I suppose I’m not a total slacker in genealogy.
But while I was looking for some updates for my Irish surname page, I ran across a new blog I had not seen before. GenealogyGirl’s Weblog has some interesting posts. She has Co Antrim and other roots in and out of Ireland.
She doesn’t seem to post often but when she does the posts could be well worth your time as she sometimes posts transcriptions which may not be of general interest but are a great find if it happens to be the area your ancestors came from. Check this blog now and then. You may find something merely interesting or something priceless.
I am looking for a short diversion and I read about this short story that seems to fit. I always enjoyed the television shows and movies featuring Lieutenant Columbo and along comes a short story with Lieutenant Columbo.
This could be good, I think. But then again maybe not. I also enjoy Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and some of the newer stories featuring this fictional detective are quite good. Some are disappointing.
So I take a chance. A short story is not much of a gamble anyway – either in terms of wasting time or cost.
And I’m glad I did take that chance. Turned out to be a great story. Plans for that perfect crime. And the case is assigned to the bumbling Lieutenant Columbo. And of course the perfect crime becomes the imperfect crime as Columbo solves it.
I totally enjoyed it. I suspect those who are not familiar with the character would also like it but perhaps not quite as much. In either case it is well worth the small investment to find out if this is your type of story.
This story is one a series of mysteries offered as low cost ebooks. You might want to check several of them out.
The blog covers several categories and you may be interested only in some of the posts. I’ll be working on a page to help you find your way to general categories of posts.
Last year we had a big standoff on raising the national debt ceiling. It was very strange in that Congress has repeatedly passed budgets with deficits over the past several decades and suddenly decided that the national debt had grown too large. Then they decided the best course was just to stop borrowing money.
An apparently simple solution to a growing problem. But perhaps was too simple. People with bonds would like to be paid when the bonds come due. Soldiers and civilian employees both like to be paid. There are quite a few valid concerns raised by this approach.
So in recognition that the problem was a bit more complex then just not spending, Congress agreed to allow debt to rise but mean while would appoint a Super-committee to decide on both revenues and budget cuts which would once again bring fiscal sanity to our federal budget. And to make sure the job was done right, Congress proclaimed that there would be draconian budget cuts and tax increases if we did not have a plan in place by the beginning of next year (which is just a few weeks away now).
So one of the sticking points is income taxes. President Obama is pretty insistent on raising the tax rates on households making over a quarter million dollars per year. Republicans are insistent that this rate won’t be raised.
Everyone would like to see tax cuts continue on for households making less than a quarter million dollars per year (About 98% of us). But Republicans say they won’t agree unless the households making over a quarter million dollars per year are included (about the top 2%).
If there is not an agreement taxes rise on everyone which combined with the draconian budget cuts might be enough to throw this weakly recovering economy back into recession.
So a compromise is needed. Both sides like to repeat their position and do insist that it is the correct position. But there is some movement behind closed doors toward the compromise we need. Some days the reports are promising, other days not so much. Let us hope both side can show some flexibility.
A few days ago, I was adding to this blog and mentioned that Mitt Romney had 2 good ideas and how one of them might help solve the fiscal cliff problem. But I didn’t mention that other idea.
And nobody asked. I was wondering if nobody was paying close attention. Maybe they were just in awe of my explanation of the first idea and didn’t think about that second idea that I just left out there. Or maybe they just didn’t care. But I do. So I’ll tell you about that second idea.
It was just a matter of seconds between the first idea (which I though was absolutely brilliant and may solve that pesky fiscal cliff problem) and that second idea. In itself, the first idea won’t cause the economy to boom but it may help us from sliding into a second recession.
The second idea won’t cause the economy to boom either. It won’t even stop a second recession. At least I think not. But I have been wrong before. I don’t think it happens that often but I know people who disagree.
The second idea probably is not even in the ball park of modest middle class tax relief when it comes to saving money on your taxes. But it is huge in reducing the middle class a pain-in-the-ass aspect of doing your taxes.
What is the idea?
Here it is:
… every middle-income taxpayer no longer will pay any tax on interest, dividends or capital gains. No tax on your savings. That makes life a lot easier.
If you’re getting interest from a bank, if you’re getting a statement from a mutual fund or any other kind of investment you have, you don’t have to worry about filing taxes on that, because there’ll be no taxes for anybody making $200,000.00 per year and less, on your interest, dividends and capital gains.
Of course you want to be sure I am just not making this up. So if you are not the trusting type, you can look it up at ABC News: Debate transcript.
So how does this reduce the pain-in-the-ass aspect of doing your taxes for us middle class types. I do my own taxes so let me give an example. I’ll just make up some stuff here so some over-zealous IRS agent doesn’t want to check my taxes.
Say for a wedding gift someone gave someone else (not me certainly) 1 share of XYZ corporation which the gifter thought was going up (after all everyone needs XYZs) and would make the giftee and spouse rich by their 10th anniversary. To make it more likely this one share would lead to a fortune, it was enrolled in a Dividend ReInvestent Plan (or DRIP) which would reinvest dividends and so forth in additional shares.
By that 10th anniversary the happy couple now own 2.583 share of XYZ with an approximate market value of twenty bucks. Then XYZ get new management and someone figures out that the company is spending way too much money administering these small DRIP accounts.
So the couple gets a letter from XYZ saying that the plan will be terminated unless the stock holder has at least 50 shares in the plan. So their options are to take the $20 or invest hundreds of dollars more. Not surprisingly, they take the money.
Then come tax time, they get a statement from the company. And then they realize that they need to fill out a tax form.
But the IRS doesn’t ask for much – just when they bought the shares and what they paid.
The problem is they misplaced all those quarterly statements they have been getting for 10 years as their dividends reinvest. So now they need to creatively come up with some figures that make sense. They could look up the value of the stock each quarter or maybe just make up numbers that seem to make sense. But how do they figure out how many shares or what fraction of a share they bought each time?
So it is just a matter of figuring which quarters the company paid dividend and how those reinvestments compounded to give them a total of 2.587 shares. Now they wish they paid a bit more attention to their math teachers.
Then after spending a few hours on that, they figure that they made a profit of $ 1.87. But they are not finished yet. They have to figure out how to apportion this between long and short term capital gains. This doesn’t take too long, just adds a bit of insult to injury.
But if Congress had only taken Mitt’s suggestion and modified the tax code, tax-time would be so much easier. After all if you have such a large tax code, there is really not much of a reason not to tack on a few pages that may relieve some of the pain.
In defending his tax plan which many analysts thought impossible Mitt Romney did come up with 2 good ideas, one of which may be a partial solution to the fiscal cliff we are facing.
President Obama is pretty insistent on raising the tax rates on households making over a quarter million dollars per year. Republicans are insistent that this rate won’t be raised. This standoff is over the temporary Bush tax cuts which should have expired but were temporarily extended 2 years ago and are now set to expire again at the end of this year.
The Democratic view is that these tax cuts should be kept in place for those households making over a quarter million dollars per year and allowed to expire for those earning more. The Republican view is that the tax cuts should be extended for everyone, regardless of income. Let us just call this the tax rate standoff.
Certainly there are many other tax issues – the estate tax, payroll taxes, dividend taxes, capital gains taxes, carried interest to name a few – but I think Mitt Romney may have suggested the solution to the tax rate standoff.
So here is Mitt’s good idea :
And so, in terms of bringing down deductions, one way of doing that would be say everybody gets — I’ll pick a number — $25,000 of deductions and credits, and you can decide which ones to use. Your home mortgage interest deduction, charity, child tax credit, and so forth, you can use those as part of filling that bucket, if you will, of deductions.
So if rates are kept the same on everyone (as the Republicans want), Congress can still limit deductions to a number which will not adversely effect those households making less than a quarter million dollars per year but would still raise taxes on those households making over a quarter million dollars per year (as the Democrats want).
Of course, it won’t be a sharp divide at a quarter million dollars per year but it meets the spirit of what both sides want to do. I’m not sure if the number picked is the right one and if there should be additional rules but this caps could be the start of a discussion.