Economic News Of The Day

Half of the nation’s 40 biggest publicly traded corporate spenders have announced plans to curtail capital expenditures reports the Wall Street Journal.

“Shadow banking” which can be defined as any “levered up non-bank investment conduits, vehicles and structures” has reached a record high of $67 trillion globally, reports CNBC.
If the definition doesn’t work for you, examples would be hedge funds, private equity companies, money-market funds and cash-rich organizations that lend government bonds for banks.
Shadow banking is largely unregulated and CNBC is naturally calling for more regulation of it. What CNBC et al fails to comprehend is that all “money” basically is, is a communication tool and hence is as hard to regulate as any word or idea. If the word “dollar” loses its meaning it will be replaced by other words such as “yuan” or “yen”. There will be suffering but it won’t be the wealthy, healthy and able doing it.

Thoughts On Secession

Barack Obama may be the most divisive president since Lincoln, yet has neither his intelligence, moral character, work ethic nor his willingness to bend over backwards to find common ground with his opponents.

So movements have begun in various red states calling for secession from the Union. Pretty much a joke, right?
Well the media outlets now are writing hand-wringing articles saying what a disaster it would be for the red states which is not what one does when one is laughing.
The rebuttal to such claims is that   relatively small nations do just fine and that places like Qatar, Norway and Switzerland are as rich or richer than we are. 
It is worth considering how much better off we Pennsylvanians with our new found natural gas bounty would be without the debt-laden millstones of New York and California.
Just sayin’

Cryptowit

By William W. Lawrence Sr

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Answer to yesterday’s puzzle: Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.
Proverbs

Hunters Share The Harvest

Pennsylvania hunters and sportsmen are encouraged by the Pennsylvania Game Commission to consider participating in the state’s Hunters Sharing the Harvest (HSH) program, which provides donations of venison to local food banks, soup kitchens and families in need, says State Rep. Jim Cox (R-129).

Started in 1991, HSH has developed into a refined support service for organizations that assist Pennsylvanians in need. Each year, Hunters Sharing the Harvest helps to deliver almost 200,000 meals to food banks, churches and social services feeding programs.

As part of the program, hunters are encouraged to take a deer to a participating meat processor and identify how much of their deer meat to donate to HSH. If an individual is donating an entire deer, he or she is asked to make a $15 tax-deductible co-pay, and HSH will cover the remaining processing fees. However, a hunter can cover the entire costs of the processing, which is also tax deductible.

To learn more about the program and obtain a list of participating meat processors and county coordinators, visit the Game Commission’s website or go to the HSH website.

Pennsylvania’s HSH program is recognized as one of the most successful among similar programs in about 40 states.

Cryptowit

By William W. Lawrence Sr

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Answer to yesterday’s puzzle: One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. 
Plato 

Social Change Starts With Education

 Courtesy of  John McGrane

I have heard that as much as 90% of the professors in our universities vote as Democrats.

They, of course, brainwash our children to think in the liberal manner.

Imagine if the ratio were shifted to, say, 60% Democrat! Better yet, 50-50!

How to get academia to hire more profs to tell “the other side of the story?”

It would take a grass-roots movement (Fox? Rush?) to purge academia, in which Dad and Mom would press the issue of “Balance in Education.” It’s usually the parents who pay the eductaion bills, so they should be concerned. In fact, there have been signs recently of parents looking for ways to maximize their college investments by negotiating with second-choice schools. Why not demand to know the “political environment and policies” of schools?

The purge could even find its way into high schools!

Think about what it would be like if our younger voters were not so religiously liberal. (Example: Hollywood, which targets everything to the 17 – 25 year-old market, would have to alter story plots to reflect their audiences’ tastes. Maybe now and then the bad guy wouldn’t be a bald, old white man. Maybe movies would even stop blaming America for every problem in the world!)

This would be a change we could really use.

Cryptowit

By William W. Lawrence Sr

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Answer to yesterday’s puzzle: A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.” 
― William G.T. Shedd

Ignore This Till After the Holidays


Thanksgiving’s around the corner, so I’d better get this one out of the way. Just file it away so you can start fresh after the holidays.

We are perpetually hammered with stories about how “fat” we’ve become as a society. And just as often, that increasing girth is randomly attributed to Big Macs, Whoppers, cheesesteaks, hoagies, pizza, Egg McMuffins, and just about any other fat-filled, high calorie American meal that can be had in minutes from a roadside fast-food dispensary.

But why do we ignore the other side of bodily functions? Why do we focus primarily on the fuel that goes into our bodies and give secondary consideration to the engine that uses that fuel? Simply put: I believe our “fatness” is due more to our inactivity than to the ingestion of a Big Mac.

A recent article in American Legion Magazine indicated that the average American burns 150 calories less per day at the workplace than they did 50 years ago. That’s because many American jobs today involve more sitting around (usually in front of a computer screen) and less moving around.

That means we carry around more than thirty-seven-thousand calories per year—every year. That’s fuel that we store instead of burn up. And that’s how we get fat.

And it’s not just the workplace. Think about it. Fifty years ago, if you wanted to change the channel on your TV, you had to get up from your seat, walk across the room, turn the channel selector, and walk back to your seat.

Most cars in 1960 had windows that had to rolled down manually. Even that burned a few calories at the toll both—at least a few calories more than are burned by the act of pressing a power window button. In fact, now we don’t even have to do that. We have E-Z Pass!