One Utah

The Los Angeles Times recently had an insightful article about what $200-a-barrel oil and $7 a gallon gasoline would do to America.

With every penny hike in the price of gas costing American consumers about $1 billion a year, sharply higher pump prices would lead to “significant bankruptcies and store closings,” said Scott Hoyt, director of […]

Do we have anything to learn from a 90 year old pandemic?
A first wave influenza swept the world in March 1918. A second, more deadly wave hit in the fall - from September to November. Finally, a third wave hit the world in early 1919. An exact death toll is unknowable but […]

Two interesting articles - one in the WaPo about Barack Obama and one at the American Prospect about Hillary Clinton - have me thinking about the idea of “the code” and how you can crack it.

The news media often uncritically report federal government national economic indicators, without explaining how they are calculated. Well, it seems Mark Twain was right when he noted (quoting Benjamin Disraeli), “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” The unsurprising truth, according to John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics (SGS): […]

The New York Times reports on March 19 that whereas the Bush administration sold the Iraq war to the congress as a $50 billion investment, the actual costs are more like–
1.) ultra-conservative Pentagon estimate: $600 billion and counting
(note: this Honest Abe estimate categorically excludes “extras” such as operations in the war zone, […]

Watching the mortgage meltdown go from bad to horrific to George Romero has got me thinking about credit in general.
Credit is an odd thing; the more credit you use the more credit worthy you become.  Even if you are making insane purchases, so long as you make your monthly payments, you can get more credit - […]

Hat tip to our good friends at Liberal Oasis for pointing us to this great article.
The broad point - as true today as in 2001 when Bush was pushing for his first round of no millionaire left behind tax cuts - is that economic stimulus from the government should to contain 5 primary components.  Tax […]

“Hands-off” government and a free market have become a popular view in the U.S., as well as in much of the free world for the past couple of decades. This view was heavily influenced by the economic philosophy of the famous economist Milton Friedman. His core philosophy can be summed […]

Over a Orcinus, Sara has a great series on leadership that has gotten me thinking about America’s history of leadership. Read it here, here, here and here.
Sara makes an important point. Political systems have a life cycle - they begin as a solution to a set of problems. They function well for […]

The increase in incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans from 2003 to 2005 exceeded the total income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans, according to data in a new report by the Congressional Budget Office.
The total income of the top 1.1 million households was $1.8 trillion, or 18.1 percent of the total […]

Via Washington Monthly, I see a great article from Steven Pearlstein.  Pearlstein’s title gives you an idea of the content of his article:  It’s Not 1929, but it’s the Biggest Mess Since. 
Some background might be in order.  The 90s, when I was in business school, was the golden age of creative financial modelling - also […]

More people need to listen to him!
According to new polls, the economy is the number 1 issue for American voters . . . The real reason is middle-class families have exhausted the coping mechanisms they’ve used for over three decades to get by on median wages that are barely higher than they were in 1970, […]

The Mortgage Meltdown is getting scary.  I see at Americablog that next year could be the ugliest yet.
The banking industry sadly has no one to blame but itself (consumers are more complex).  Banks and mortgage companies got greedy, figured they’d do anything and everything the could to get customers signing mortgage papers, and then worry […]

Okay, here’s the deal.  I have ten dollars ($10).  I’m going to pair you with someone you don’t know - call you Ike and Mike for lack of a better name.  I’m going to give the other person the $10 and tell them they have to share it with you but . . . They […]

I am pro-Union.  As a professional with a master’s degree, chances are good I am unlikely to work in a unionized job, but that does not change my basic support for Unions.
Unions serve all workers, not just their members.  Corporations hold an unfair advantage over individual workers for a simple reason - there are more […]

A new CNN poll found that, according to one percent of Americans, George W. Bush is the best president ever in American history.

Of course, 23 percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll released Thursday say that compared to other presidents in American history, President Bush is the worst ever.
Destroying the Constitution, illegal […]

This is democracy. Heck- it’s bigger than democracy. It’s life itself and just as important today as the beginning of time (whether 7,000 or untold millions of years ago). It’s called community. And that’s what the Clean Air Summit held Thursday at the Salt Lake City County building was about: saving our community. People representing […]

The Utah Education Association conference started Monday at the Salt Palace. From an environmental perspective, it’s a clean sweep for the polluters. I volunteered to staff The Nature Conservancy’s information table at the conference. We’re encouraging teachers to sign their classes up for tours of our Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve where I volunteer as […]

A new study shows that Americans are about the laziest workers in the world. Seems odd given that generations of us have grown up believing America is THE land of opportunity and the way you get ahead, especially in Utah, is by hard work, creativity and, above all, money. But in the decades following World […]

As Utah anxiously watches modern-day robber baron Robert Murray cry to his mommy over those nasty things Governor Huntsman said about him, punitively lay off our fellow citizens and shutter his death-trap mines, we all need to read Jeff Goodell’s excellent reality check on coal: The future for Utah is not coal but the extraordinary […]