Tuesday Tweets: August 28th, 2012 ? 6400 Personal Finance

Always something worth keeping in mind when conducting any sort of transaction. ?Remember, the other guy doesn?t necessarily have your best interest at heart and he certainly doesn?t want to lose money just to get you to like him.

Short version: think stocks are high? Bonds are high too and are going to get smacked by rising interest rates at some point in the future. ?I offer these charts from last week?s Carnival of Financial Discipline for visual stimulus:

Stocks

Bonds

If you?re young now is the time to assume some risk. ?Don?t go to heavy into an asset that is virtually guaranteed to drop in value between now and your retirement.

Oh c?mon, really dude? Here is where we get to have some fun, if by fun we mean using Google to measure just how unoriginal a topic is:

15,000,000 results (give or take a few). ?Suppose we searched for something a bit more aggressive and effective at achieving financial independence?

3,040 results. ?Or 0.02% of the result list of ?how to budget.? ?Care to guess the ratio of people who budget obsessively compared to those who are millionaires? ?I bet its something similar.

And now we come to the post that pissed me off the most:

Dreck like this is just like the crap the left put forward during the surge in Iraq: no kidding we took more casualties, its because we had more boots on the ground! ?I got back four months ago from an area of Afghanistan that used to be covered by one brigade. ?When I left it was covered by eight. ?Guess which sized force was more effective in developing the security situation? ?Guess which sized force took more casualties?

This is the kind of thing that drives a wedge between the military and the civilian populace it is supposed to protect. ?Either you feel pity for us because you watch talentless twits prance around on TV while we fight a war you?ve forgotten about or you use our deaths to push your own agenda. ?Yes, the military is ultimately controlled by a civilian, as it should be in a free country. ?You might even know some people in the military, or, even worse, be a military spouse. ?Neither of which means you know what the hell you are talking about when it comes to strategic or tactical military operations. ?Hell I?m a (junior) officer and I could give a damn about strategic ops, what makes you think you know how to translate body counts into accurate policy analysis?

Now that I think about it there was a post I saw that also pissed me off. ?I?m in rant mode so bear with me for a few hundred more words:

I found one of those very rare un-decided voters! You know, the people who don?t watch TV, don?t use the internet, don?t read the newspaper, don?t talk to friends about politics, and thus wait until the last week before the election to figure who is running and who they want to vote for.

Or they actually are tuned in and are just so incredibly indecisive that they haven?t made a decision yet. ?Isn?t it good to know there are enough of them to swing a national election one way or the other? Go America!

As it turns out the un-decided voter in question is He Who Has?Diarrhea?Of The Mouth, Trent from from the Simple Dollar. ?I?ll let his own words from his reader mailbag post speak for themselves before I go into my apparently widely known ?jerk/asshole? mode:

Q10: Endorsement for President
Are you prepared to endorse Mitt Romney or Barack Obama for president?
- Alan

For starters, I don?t think the president has a lot to do with what actually happens in America. I think Congress has far more power than the president, to the point that I think one?s local Senate and House campaigns are more important to the future of the country than the presidency.

For another, my feeling is that Obama has not been as good as the Democrats often say, nor has he been as bad as the Republicans often say. At the same time, I have no idea what Mitt Romney stands for other than being ?not Obama,? which isn?t enough for me.

So I have no interest in ?endorsing? either one. I actually haven?t made up my mind fully about who I will even vote for when it comes to the presidential election.

Let me take you back to American Government 101: No branch of government has ?far more power? than the other. ?Public perception notwithstanding checks and balances do tend to work in keeping all three branches in line. ?You know all those bills that Congress signs that waste your money? ?Who do you think signs them into law? ?Yeah, its the guy in the White House. ?Also, and of more direct importance to me, is that the President has the final say in determining where our military gets deployed. ?So yes, please pay more attention to your local two-bit congressional race instead of the race that actually determines where the next generation of Americans will go to fight and die.

Also, and while I?m still refraining from making my own presidential choice known on this blog (the?choice?has been made, that I assure you), how is it possible that a man who makes his living off of the internet has no idea what Mitt Romney stands for? ?Really? ?Kind reader, I can almost guarantee that if I asked you to give me the basic bullet points on POTUS and Romney?s positions on taxes, domestic spending, and Israel that you would be able to give them to me with a high degree of accuracy. ?So if that is true how is it that dear Trent is lost in the sauce? ?Remember he hasn?t just made a decision,?he doesn?t even know what one of the two major candidates stands for.

But if you want to know how to save a couple pennies by making your own toothpaste then Trent is your guy.

Folks, this s**t matters to me because the guy in the White House has a significant impact on where my friends get to spend their summer vacations. ?For others among you presidential elections matter because it directly hits your pocketbook in the form of taxes and the government?s level of intervention in the marketplace. ?The list of reasons why these elections matter is quite long when you consider that more than 100 million people are going to pull the handle in November. ?When you go into the voting booth who you vote for is a decision that rests entirely with you. ? Just do us all a favor and put some mental effort into the decision before you make it. ?Ignorance is not a virtue.

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Source: http://6400personalfinance.com/2012/08/28/tuesday-tweets-august-28th-2012/

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