Preparing for Singapore

Published on March 17, 2010 in Travel. 2 Comments

As of tomorrow evening, I will be out of the United Kingdom until 10 April. This will embark a long nearly-full month of travel. The first leg of the journey will start heading out from London to Singapore. There, I will meet Bill and we will spend a few days there and then head to Bangkok, Thailand. (Yes, the recent political uprisings concern me). From Thailand we will make our way toward Vietnam.

Blogging will likely be scarce in this time period, but I should have some amazing pictures to post up afterward.

After returning from SE Asia, I’ll be in the UK for less than 24 hours and head to Italy for Paganello to play ultimate on the beach. That will last for several days, then I’ll meet a few of my flatmates and do a bit of travelling within Italy.

See you on the other side.

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Paris – A Brief Overview

Published on March 15, 2010 in Sports, Travel and Uncategorized. 0 Comments

A week ago from last Thursday I took the Eurostar over to Paris for some sight-seeing and the Paris half-marathon.
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I arrived several hours earlier than my friends travelling with me. I took this free time to check-in at the hotel and start wander around a little bit, one of my favorite travelling activities. The wander started with heading toward the Eiffel Tower and grabbing the above picture. After that, I’m less certain of my exact direction, but I took a good 3 hours and thoroughly enjoyed seeing the city on foot.

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Health Care Battle

Published on March 11, 2010 in Politics. 0 Comments

Link:

[Coburn and Burr's] own bill overhauls the tax code, currently stacked in favor of corporate employees, to provide a tax credit to every American to purchase insurance. It expands health-savings accounts. It creates state health-insurance exchanges, where private insurers compete to cover Americans, including the uninsured. (This is partly modeled on the Medicare drug program, which has provided seniors with choice and held down costs.)

More broadly, it seeks to reorient financial incentives so that the system is no longer focused, as Mr. Coburn puts it, on “sick care,” but on preventing the chronic diseases that eat 75% of health expenditures. These incentives would be used to lower costs and discourage insurers from cherry-picking patients. The bill also dives into Medicare and Medicaid reform.

Digging through my drafts and wondering whatever happened to this? With all of this talk of bipartisanship and summits in DC, it seems like a lot of good ideas from ages ago (last May) just went ignored.

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Starting to Make Taxes Fair

Published on February 23, 2010 in Economics and Politics. 0 Comments

A bipartisan bill to reform the tax code is making its way toward the floor of the Senate. I have not read the full bill, but an editorial today by its co-authors in the Wall Street Journal leaves me with hope:

There is an important issue looming on the congressional horizon: how to address the expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of this year. We believe there is a consensus way forward, which is why we are introducing the Bipartisan Tax Fairness and Simplification Act of 2010.

By streamlining and modernizing the outdated tax code, our proposal would eliminate many of the specialized tax breaks that currently benefit one group of Americans over another. The changes we propose will create policies that benefit everyone. They include: fiscally responsible middle-class tax cuts, business tax breaks to help American companies compete globally and create jobs, and a fairer and simpler tax system for all Americans.

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Team USA Curling – Representing Minnesota

Published on February 21, 2010 in Minnesota and Sports. 1 Comment

Upon hearing that the US curling team is predominantly composed of Minnesotans, I couldn’t help but write a blog post about it.

Minnesota and Wisconsin represent the mecca of curling in the United States, with thousands of people playing in everything from mixed-doubles leagues to elite-level bonspiels. The St. Paul Curling Club, with more than 1,200 members, is the largest club in the country.

Of course, I’m certain our similar climate and border with Canada are no coincidence.

Curling’s popularity in Canada is second only to hockey; tournaments are frequently televised, top-notch skips are big stars, and it’s estimated that a million of the sport’s 1.1 million participants live in this country.

Besides having a slight affinity with respect to accents and a love and long history of hockey, it appears that we share a strange and mostly unpopular sport (as far as the U.S. is concerned). I have never curled before, but I do remember that Northwestern had a team for graduate students. An interesting phenomenon that just hasn’t really spread south of Canada or out of Europe.

So far, the men’s curling team has not won a single match to my knowledge. Maybe if we have an incredibly successful team that could turn the sport around in America.

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American Olympic Success (So Far)

Published on February 20, 2010 in News and Sports. 0 Comments

Just a little Vancouver update:

Perhaps most impressive is that America is winning medals in traditional sports often dominated by Europeans, such as alpine skiing, figure skating and long-course speedskating. Noting that the number of Winter Olympics events has risen to 86 from 46 in Calgary, Olympic historian David Wallechinsky said, “We’re expected to do well in new events like freestyle skiing and snowboarding. But this week is not just a new-event phenomenon for the U.S.”

Link

Not too jinx things, since there are still a lot of medals yet to be one, but I think we can all be proud of the athletes representing America in this year’s Winter Olympics. Let’s hope the leadership in both overall medals and gold medals continues this week!

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Austin Plane Crash – The Wrong Way to Protest

Published on February 19, 2010 in Life and News. 3 Comments

Yesterday, a Texas man crashed his small plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas.

A pilot slammed his small plane into a seven-story building that housed the local office of the Internal Revenue Service Thursday, apparently killing himself and one agency employee, in what federal officials described as a deliberate suicide attack amid a long-running tax dispute.

He left a note on his website which isn’t worth the time to read or repeating here. Needless to say, we all have feelings about paying taxes and politics, this just isn’t the right way to deal with that. Sadly, one IRS employee lost their life. Hopefully, his/her family will hold strong even after this senseless crime.

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Econ 101 – Government Spending

Published on February 17, 2010 in Economics, News and Politics. 0 Comments

In the first year of macroeconomics I don’t think there is a single student who doesn’t leave with some understanding of fiscal and monetary policy. One controlled by legislators and the other by central bankers. Furthermore, even an elementary reading of Keynes or a brief quote in a textbook makes it clear that government spending (a component of GDP) can be an effective way to encourage growth. Although there are negative effects like crowding out private investment and national debt, the argument goes that these temporary short term problems are worth the long term stability hopefully spurred by government intervention.

The lesson that reality has shown is that there is only an extremely weak multiplier effect for government spending, meaning a dollar spent by the government does not spread throughout the economy in the way originally modelled by Keynes. Moreover and a lesson made clear from the 2009 stimulus bill – getting legislators to allocate money quickly and then spending it is nearly impossible. The tendency is for government spending to dovetail recoveries. This seems to be what is happening now:

The approach this week of the stimulus program’s one-year anniversary sparked a fresh round of dueling partisan statements, as Democrats sought to credit the effort with averting a deeper recession and Republicans said the program deserved a failing grade. But in terms of spending, the stimulus is largely incomplete.

As the economy is recovering, the influx of the majority of the U.S. stimulus money will make the recovery look stronger and more swift than it would be absent extra government spending.

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More Analysis on the Euro Mini-Crisis

Published on February 17, 2010 in Economics, News and Politics. 0 Comments

This morning via Adam I read a great article by the nobel laureate Paul Krugman who happened to win the nobel prize for his work on international finance.

I’m going to walk through this article and try and break down some of the points because I think it is worthwhile to understand the workings of a currency and a federal-style system.

Click to continue reading “More Analysis on the Euro Mini-Crisis”

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What Have Governments Learned from the Financial Crisis?

Published on February 11, 2010 in Economics, News and Politics. 0 Comments

Lesson #1 – Tax Banks

Wait….what?

Fresh from the FT:

Gordon Brown said on Wednesday the world’s leading economies were close to agreeing a global bank tax, amid hopes in Downing Street that a deal can be concluded at the G20 summit in Canada in June.

The prime minister said those with the “broadest shoulders” should pay more, and insisted that the tax would raise “a substantial amount of additional money”. He admitted: “It’s not as high as you would like it to be because of avoidance.”

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