Archive for October 3rd, 2012

Now, you’re talking … firm to score debate with a real BS detector.

October 3, 2012

This is too good to be true: “Obama and Romney to face real lie detector test during debate.”

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According to the Daily Caller:

When Barack Obama and Mitt Romney face off for the first time at tonight’s presidential debate in Denver, they’ll also be taking a lie detector test.

A spokesman for the group Americans for Limited Government announced that thee group has contracted with a company to use new truth detecting technology to determine whether either candidate is lying during the debate.

“For the first time, within a few hours of a political debate, the American people will know if the candidates are telling the truth, and better be able to judge what promises are real, and which ones are nothing more than political pandering.”

The group says they hope to release the results from Voice Analysis Technology within three hours of the debate.

Voice Analysis Technology  has done work for high-profile criminal cases … and have done interrogations for the Department of Defense, Bureau of Prisons, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and 60 other law enforcement agencies.

If only the process were in real time with a BS meter on the screen …

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Posted in 2012 Campaign | Leave a Comment »

Romney’s $17,000 tax fix … I like it!

October 3, 2012

According to ABC News, Mitt floated an elegantly simple idea for cleaning up the tax code:

Cut every bracket’s marginal rates and  limit deductions to $17,000.

Specifically, Romney said:

“As an option you could say everybody’s going to get up to a $17,000 deduction; and you could use your charitable deduction, your home mortgage deduction,  your healthcare deduction… to fill that bucket, if you will, that $17,000 bucket that way

And higher income people might have a lower number.”

For the record, the idea would hurt me personally since I carry a couple of jumbo mortgages and make charitable donations.

Still, I think the idea is GREAT.

It simplifies the tax code … and levels the field, say, between renters and home owners.

I’ll continue to give to charities … so will Mitt … so will most current donors.

If charities don’t have powerful enough value propositions to raise money, that’s their problem.

I really like that the change would screw folks in high tax Blue states – e.g. NY, CA – since the deduction for state & local taxes would fall under the cap.

There’s less of an impact on folks in well run states (like VA) … that’ll give tax & spend states more motivation to clean up their own acts.

Sure, there are plenty of details to be worked out (e.g. how to handle child credits) … but, I think this simple plan might be a game-changer.

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Posted in 2012 Campaign, Tax Loopholes, Taxes | 2 Comments »

Possibly the dumbest editorial ever …

October 3, 2012

The WSJ carried an editorial by Alan Blinder, a Princeton prof,  tiltled “The Case Against a CEO in the Oval Office”.

It should have been titled “How we in the ivory tower – who have guaranteed life-time employment and have never set foot in a business – think that business works.”

Blinder’s central thesis: Business people fail in government because there’s no bottom line — and compromise is obligatory.

”Presidential history teaches us that the abilities, character traits and attitudes it takes to succeed in business have little in common with what it takes to succeed in government. In some respects, they are antithetical.”

Say, what?

I don’t know where to start …

First, he obviously is a non-quant economist … he thinks that the law of large numbers and statistically significant samples also applies to small numbers and insufficiently small samples.  He concludes that some of our 44 presidents were good ones … and that some of them were politicos and not biz people … and, “the two truly successful businessmen to win the presidency were Herbert Hoover and George H.W. Bush” … and, we know how that turned out.

Case closed..

Huh?

Then, he lowers the boom, quoting from  Nolan Bushnell, “the highly successful entrepreneur who founded Chuck E. Cheese” who said “Business is a good game — lots of competition and a minimum of rules. You keep score with money.” Blinder concludes “that’s virtually the opposite of being president of the United States”.

Note: Not Jack Welch, not the CEO of a successful Fortune 500 company … nope, he centers his argument around Chuck E. Cheese’s daddy.

Good enough for me.

More specifically, Blinder asserts that companies are dictatorships, not democracies … they ignore all stakeholders other than shareholders.

Gee, I wouldn’t have picked up on that one  from my many managerial and board meetings.

My absolute favorite: “Sound companies dote on efficiency …. and, while there are niches in the federal government where efficiency matters … the  big decisions aren’t about efficiency at all. It may even be critical to cut people a little slack here and there.”

He forgot to add: “And, cover for the inefficiency by taxing people who make more than I do their fair share.”

Unbelievable.

He also opines: “A good president communicates well with people and inspires them … Barack Obama may never have met a payroll, but he’s a gifted orator, and empathy and fairness are in his bones … traits … not prized in CEOs.”

To be honest, his appearance on the View during the Libyan crisis didn’t exactly inspire me.

To that point, check out the ad “Leadership” … just sroll down to the video

Gimme a break, man.

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Posted in 2012 Campaign, Business skills | Leave a Comment »

IQ scores are rising … here’s why.

October 3, 2012

Simple answer: more folks are reading the Homa Files.

A more complex answer is offered by James Flynn is his book “Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the 21st Century”.

Here’s an excerpt from the WSJ review …

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* * * * *

From the early 1900s to today, Americans have gained three IQ points per decade.

In 1910, scored against today’s norms, our ancestors would have had an average IQ of 50 to 70.

Our mean IQ today is 130 to 150, depending on the test.

Our ancestors weren’t dumb compared with us, of course. They had the same practical intelligence and ability to deal with the everyday world that we do.

Our lives are utterly different from those led by most Americans before 1910.

The average American went to school for less than six years and then worked long hours in factories, shops or agriculture.

The only artificial images they saw were drawings or photographs.

Aside from basic arithmetic, nonverbal symbols were restricted to musical notation (for an elite) and playing cards.

Their minds were focused on ownership, the useful, the beneficial and the harmful.

Rising IQ scores show how the modern world, particularly education, has changed the human mind itself and set us apart from our ancestors.

Our ancestors lived in a much simpler world, and most had no formal schooling beyond the sixth grade.

Modern people do so well on these tests because … we are the first of our species to live in a world dominated by categories, hypotheticals, nonverbal symbols and visual images that paint alternative realities.

A century ago, people mostly used their minds to manipulate the concrete world for utilitarian advantage.

Our minds now tend toward logical analysis of abstract symbols.

Today we tend to classify things … take the hypothetical seriously …and easily discern symbolic relationships.

Since 1950, there have been large gains on vocabulary and information.

More words mean that more concepts are conveyed.

More information means that more connections are perceived.

Better analysis of hypothetical situations means more innovation.

A greater pool of those capable of understanding abstractions, more contact with people who enjoy playing with ideas, the enhancement of leisure— all of these developments have benefited society.

Our mental abilities have grown, simply enough, through a wider acquaintance with the world’s possibilities.

Thanks to AR for feeding the lead.

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Posted in Intelligence, IQ - IQ Scores, Problem solving | 1 Comment »

Spreading the wealth … from the suburbs to the center city.

October 3, 2012

Last night, the Daily Caller released an “explosive” new tape of Obama speaking to a group of black ministers at Hampton college in 2007.

I didn’t think the tape’s revelations were all that explosive.

But, one part of the report did catch my attention:

Obama said: “We don’t need to build more highways out in the suburbs,” where, the implication is, the rich white people live.

Instead, Obama says, federal money should flow to “our neighborhoods”.

No problem with the last part … I’m all for urban development … transportation, schools, businesses.

The rub is that Obama positioned a zero sum game between the cities and the suburbs … with redistribution from the suburbs to the cities.

First, I don’t recollect his being so direct on that point in his campaign speeches … hmmm.

Second, brought to mind a recent book on the subject that I largely dismissed at first glance.

Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of “Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities”.

His central premise was summarized in Forbes:

In the eyes of the leftist community organizers, suburbs are instruments of bigotry and greed — a way of selfishly refusing to share tax money with the urban poor.

To reverse the trend, some groups advocate systematically redistributing the wealth of America’s suburbs to the cities via “regional tax-base sharing,” a practice by which suburban tax money is directly redistributed to nearby cities and less-well-off “inner-ring” suburbs.

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President Obama has lent the full weight of his White House to the efforts.

A federal program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative, for example, has salted planning commissions across the country with “regional equity” and “smart growth” as goals.

These are, of course, code words.

“Regional equity” means that, by their mere existence, suburbs cheat the people who live in cities.

It means, “Let’s spread the suburbs’ wealth around” – i.e., take from the suburbanites to give to the urban poor.

“Smart growth” means, “Quit building sub-divisions and malls, and move back to where mass transit can shuttle you between your 800 square foot apartment in an urban tower and your downtown job.”

Suburbs are for sellouts: That is a large and overlooked theme of Obama’s famous memoir, Dreams from My Father. The city is the moral choice.

He attributed urban decline to taxpayer “flight” to the suburbs.

So, compulsory redistribution of suburban tax money to cities was the only lasting solution to urban decay.

Obama’s uncovered Hampton speech may boost Kurtz’ book sales and unsettle some suburbanites … especially those sitting in bumper-to-bumper commuting traffic.

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Posted in 2012 Campaign, Redistribution, Suburbs, Urban development | 2 Comments »