Maybe and maybe not, but consider your premise for a sec.

“Going into debt today may be fiscally responsible, IF (emphasis mine, with the importance of the qualifier “may” granted) it will lead to better returns tomorrow or in a year.”

Now let’s draw a hypothetical:

Person A saves 10 percent of every paycheck, pinches pennies, and maxes out their Roth IRA every year.

Person B does not save, because they are not making much now, and will save later when they are making the big bucks, and it will have a greater effect.

Person A has a budget, and lives within it.

Person B plays Lotto, because the payoff could be huge.

Person A gets a second job, because of the benefits of compound interest.

Person B gets a tattoo.

Person A gets disability insurance… just in case.

Person B reads a book about Texas hold ‘em, and hopes to go to Vegas some time soon.

Person A decides that carrying 10 percent of their net worth in debt at current interest rates will have a net benefit due to tax deductions, and liquidity benefits.

Person B gets another credit card because they got an offer in the mail.

Now let’s say that person B puts their fortune cookie numbers on PowerBall, and wins. Does this mean that this strategy is fiscally responsible? It does not… even though it has lead to better returns for tomorrow or the year.

And while we are talking about money and Ivy League economists…

Ivy League economists are like the guidance counselors of the financial world. If guidance counselors knew so God damned much about careers, they wouldn’t be guidance counselors.

How many Ivy League economists are in The Forbes 100? None. If they know so much about money and the generation of it, why don’t they have more of it? Those that can do, do. Those that can’t go into academia.

The operating motto of my 73-year (so far) life is from the English parson and poet Alexander Pope…”Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall seldom be disappointed.”

It is a double edged motto, accounting for both the pleasant surprise and the disappointing one, I think; you were the former today.

My late mother-in-law, who spent the last year of her life with us, dying of cancer, would arise daily, come into our den, and look out the windows. If a sunny day she would say “Oh, what a beautiful day!” and if it was raining “Oh, look at that nasty old rain”, then adding, her scowl disappearing, “Oh well, the farmers need it.”

Whichever it was…was OK.

Definitely a Pope-ian approach, I think.

Thanks again for sharing your fine mind and posted thoughts. You are bookmarked.

The passage of laws to “give people rights” has got to go. We have all of the rights we need guaranteed (not granted) to us in the documents that the founders drafted, thank you very much. You (GOP) would do quite well to just stop stepping all over them in an attempt to engineer society. After all, if you guys are doing that, what will the donkeys do?

Stop talking about “the moderates.” I am not driven by the abortion issue, and think the war on drugs is both a waste, and unjust. I think tattoos, piercings, and gay sex are fine with me (at the very least, inasmuch as the government is concerned). Does that make me a moderate? Fuck. No.

If you would focus on economy and get off of the social issue kick, you might find that some of the people that you have labeled as moderates are much more conservative than you on the IMPORTANT issues.