Dale is buying a Honda

Jim loves charts so here is a good one on who owns what car companies:

Here is the link to the Map

American Idol brings hope...

My DVR watches American Idol. I just skip past the 30 mins of commercials.
My favorite part of Idol season is:
1. Vote For The Worst
2. Dial Idol

Dial Idol predicts who will get kicked off by testing the phone lines to see how often they are busy for each idol. While not as accurate as it was before the lawsuit, it saves you from watching the results show. Why do we let them drag it out for 30 mins just for the 1 min of info we actually care about?

Vote for the Worst tries to buck the system to gain support for the worst singer. This may help explain why Sanjaya was around so long.

Both of these bring me to my real point. Individuals have so much power these days (ignore 20 years of failed Rock the Vote) and the internet can help people get together. Here are some Flash Mob examples.

But our government is still a mess. They spend more time trying to stay elected than trying to get anything done. These tax rebates are a great example of this. The economy will not rebound out of a recession because we gave people some money to spend on Chinese imports. But I am beyond being frustrated with this situation because 10 years of Survivor should tell us that winners are never the most liked, most qualified, most athletic, most deserving, they are somewhere in the middle.

Traveling to Toronto and fielding questions from Canadians about our election process and why it has to take 2 years gives you a good objective view at how out of hand our system has become.

My hope for the future is that there is a web site where people can vote on the priorities and work plans for their elected officials.

This session you will:
Pass an alternative energy bill
Fix Social Security
Repeal the Patriot Act

You will not:
Hold hearings on Steroids or Spygate

And like any good W&DP, if they fall short of their goals given to them by those who elect them, then you vote them out of office.
How much more efficient would our government be if everyone went to work knowing this was their only term if they didn't get things done?

The special interest groups will continue to get their way in the government, because right now they hold the only key ($Money$) to getting these candidates re-elected.

The power people have is to ignore the money and vote out anyone catering to special interests, but we aren't efficient in getting together so we lose that power.

To help bridge the gap until that system is created, I think we need to start with VoteThemOut.com. Where we get together to vote out every single incumbent until the overall satisfaction with the government goes up (is 50% satisfaction really too much to ask of our government?).

HDTV Chart

Sick

I was in Toronto last week with some coworkers.
One wasn't feeling well on the way up and felt terrible by the time we got home.
Another started to be sick on the way back.
I managed to fight through and feel fine...until the weekend.

Toronto also had a foot of snow while we were there and the city didn't shut down.
We did have to push our rental cars out of our parking spots.

Luckily, I think I am done traveling until Mid March.

On the Road Again

Signs you have been traveling too much:

You wake up in Cleveland, drive (ride) to Cincinnati, drive to Dayton, fly to Newark, drive to New Brunswick then sleep.

Tomorrow I head back up to Toronto for a couple of days. By Toronto I mean the airport since my hotel and the plant are within 5 mins of the airport.

The worst part of traveling is knowing that Rachel and Lucy sleep better when I am not in the bed turning every 5 mins.

I know my Mom tracks my flights from home so I found a few more helpful links.

This one shows a map of turbulence reports:
Turbulence

This one tracks something a little more important:
Boo

Hopefully this will be the only trip in Feb.
Good news is I am Silver Medallion again which means... almost nothing.
I am an Emerald member with National rental car which feels like stealing. Sometimes I try to go to the counter but all they want me to do is hop in any car I want and start driving to the check out. I liked my Mazda 3 but my Impala was roomy.

"It's looking pretty good right now" that next week will be my first full week in the office in 2008.

I want to be apart of it...Newark, Newark

I spent the past 4 days in NJ for training w/ 2 guys on my project.
Here are some key learnings:

1. I really underestimated the size of the Newark airport.
2. I am glad I did not go to Rutgers (the town was dead).
3. There are too may toll roads in NJ.
4. A GPS was a great idea but falls apart when there is construction.
5. The turnpike smells, sometimes it is swamp and sometimes it is trash.

The training course was given by 2 professors who have been giving this training for 30 years (Purdue and Michigan). It was one of the best training courses I have attended. The format made the days go by quickly. Each professor talked for about 90 min on a subject then they switched so it really broke up the day and the material.

The first night we decided to hit up Atlantic City.


Atlantic City was 2 hours away but when will I ever be in the area again?
We chose the Borgata, because my friend Ken said it was the closest to a Vegas style casino. It was really nice:



They were filming a World Poker Tour Tourney but we didn't see anyone famous. I also had my first Fatburger which was OK but not great. Overall Atlantic City was bigger than I thought, but nowhere near on par with Vegas. It has the beach, but it seemed like you had to drive more to get to each casino.

The second night we decided to hit up a NJ Nets game as they played Dale's Bucks.



It became an exciting game at the end but overall each team did play well. It was like watching street ball. I had to text Dale to find out how bad the shooting percentages were. I was very close on my guess of low 30's. The stadium held 17,000 and I see why it is used a lot for the NCAA games. It was easy to get in and out and there wasn't a bad seat. This picture was taken from the 2nd to last row on the side.

Now I am glad to be home. I haven't had a full week at work yet, too much travel and training (Toronto, local training, NJ, and Toronto next week).

Ticker GOVT would be a SELL

This started with finding a link to this poster for Geeks:

2008 Federal Budget in a Poster

If you were the government you would:
Be spending 110% of your income.
Be spending 10% of your income on debt interest (credit cards?)
Be 4 years of your salary in debt.
Suze Orman says you can declare bankruptcy if your are more than 1 year of your salary in debt.

Incase you don't spend as much time looking at this as I did here are some interesting notes:
Taxes from Corporate Profits -8%
Taxes from Income +7%
Corporation for Public Broadcasting -25% (was Amanda leaving PBS most of this savings?)
Int'l Labor Affairs -81%
National Science Foundation +3%
Housing for elderly -23%
Safe and Drug Free Schools -38%

Since I had never seen a poster like this, I have never thought about our government this way so I started thinking about a few things. I usually think in terms of my goals for retirement and that for other workers.

First Comment: This is a mess!

1. What would I cut to balance the budget?
This didn't get very far, I don't know enough about the Bureau of Land Management to know if $1.845 Billion was enough. But I can only assume there is a lot of inefficiency in every single department. But spending 25% of the budget on Military / National Defense seemed a bit much.

2. If I started over how would I allocate government money?
This would be a fun civics final project. In looking at the sources of revenue, most of it comes from individuals not companies (but where is sales tax and property tax lumped in?) so it seems to makes sense you would want people to be prosperous to have a lot of money to tax. In this case, I would think spending more money on education and maybe even free college would be a good investment for the government if you end up with well paid, educated people paying you taxes. The flaw in this game is who would ever say we should budget for road and bridge repairs (boring) but needs to be done. Which brings up a whole other topic that would be blogs onto itself...

3. What things should be privatized and what should be government regulated?
My latest book on CD (Thanks Zach) thinks too many things have been privatized for profit to companies in the name of capitalism (Iraq Defense / Blackwater, Charter schools to rebuild New Orleans, etc).
I won't go too much into this here but what things should the government control or overlook and what things are OK to outsource to companies for profit?
Health Care and Health Insurance are big topics now.
What about
Energy
Oil
PBS
Medical Research
Weapons Research
Food safety

4. What changes could we make to the current system?
#3 is a hot topic so what could we do to the current system (I'd need a lot of help from Jim on these)

A Encourage Companies to bring money into the US
I was surprised to see Corporate profit taxes were only ~10% of revenue and 1/4 that of income taxes. If you read my other blogs you'd know I'd say we need more corporate taxes. But it looks like that won't help much unless we double them, and then we'd need more data to see the effect of reduced profits on unemployment rates and salary. If we doubled those taxes tomorrow companies would certainly layoff some people or hold back salary or move out of the US, and that would take more money away from income taxes. SO, I think we need to encourage US companies to bring in money from outside the US. This would bring in more money to hopefully grow more US jobs to run these businesses and encourage the US to buy more companies (everyone seems to be buying our companies). Like w/ P&G buying Wella, we now need people in Cincinnati working on that stuff. How do we encourage them?

Have lower corporate tax rates on money earned from outside the US.
I think corporate tax rates are currently a flat rate (Jim?) so I'd have some amount of progressive tax w/ %profits so that companies have to focus on top line growth as well as bottom line growth to keep wall street happy, but constantly look for more money to bring into the company to hopefully be spread to more employees at higher wages.
The first obstacle I can think of would be to prevent companies from just buying a German company and letting them run it w/o US employees. In this case I would impose a social security tax on the corporations for payrolls outside of the US. Make it more expensive to the company to have foreign workers and help fix a US employee problem.

B Do not raise Capital Gains and Dividend Taxes.
These are easy political targets since they do honestly favor the wealthy. However, the big problem with this approach is that most of the money people have put away for retirement is in stocks etc that are subject to capital gains. Raising those taxes won't really hurt the super wealthy that much but it will really hurt avg workers who may have to work for years more to make up for that loss in retirement savings. This would put more strain on Social Security etc since people would have to rely on that even more in retirement.
If you want to stick it to the rich get them to pay more in income tax. To do that you have to make it more expensive for their companies to pay out a dividend to them. Tax the corporation for paying dividends so that it is more appealing to pay salary to the rich. This will hurt avg people a little too if companies pay less dividends in conflict w/ my goal above, but most benefit more from capital gains than dividends.

C Allow people to fund govt programs of their choice w/o the United Way allocation scam. This may only work in small tax increases.
Lock the federal budget, then allow people to pay some amount a tax to a specific agency of their choice. Ideally this would be direct and blind to the overall government so they can't pull the old switch-a-roo with general funds to make up for things getting too much money when they wanted more to go to wars etc.

This is a hard balance.
You need corporations to provide jobs to get income tax.
You need profits to keep wall street happy to give companies money.
You need capital gains on stocks to fund people's retirement accounts.