"Ask yourself, 'Are you better off now than you were four years ago?'” implored Ronald Reagan in his debate against President Jimmy Carter on October 28, 1980. Maybe it seems like the United States is on the cusp of a second recession, but in one key measure the US is finally starting to outpace inflation and population growth.

That measure? Real Personal Income - personal income deflated by the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index - is on a definite upswing. The personal income component is defined as all income earned from production and from transfer payments from both business and government.

You all know what time it is! It's time to parse the option trader tea leaves and guess where the options market thinks we are headed in the near to somewhat not near future. As always, we are taking options data from Yahoo, and using contracts which trade more than .5% of the daily volume to make our targets. We're also using the ticker SPY (a S&P 500 ETF) as our proxy for the S&P - all numbers you see are multiplied by 10 to get the conversion to actual closing prices.

Olympics and blog warfare!

About a month ago, my colleague Cameron penned an article about the Mortgage Interest Deduction - namely, whether it is a good idea or not. For an itemizing taxpayer in the 25% bracket, he pointed out, "The bank receives 4.0% interest, the homeowner pays 3.0% and the taxpayer is left footing the 1.0% difference." Right - and the bank ends up pocketing the subsidy.

The multi-payer system sets up the incentive for those without their own insurance to be unhealthier. Car accident deaths increased after the seatbelt law was instituted. When I finally have to foot some of the bill, do I still want to see Americans wolfing down their Wendy’s?

Thoughts and prayers go out to all of the victims (and their families and friends) of the shooting in Aurora, […]

I know the title sounds like I'm about to sell you some snake oil, but bear with me for a second here. Some bloggers have discussed the inherent unfairness of the Roth IRA's contributions - namely, being capped at $125,000 for a single filer and $183,000 for a joint filer in 2012. Other have discussed the backdoor IRA - building on a 2010 rule change which allowed people of any income to convert IRAs (and other eligible accounts) to Roth IRAs. We're going to bypass both of those and talk about how you can contribute over $30,000 to your Roth IRA - with the only requirement being that you have access to a 401(k) with certain features. Read on...

In a case of great timing, DQYDJ's article guessing how Mitt Romney has so much money in his IRA is now the third most popular article on the site! While I hold no belief that this situation will continue past November of this year, I think that, in the moment, it's interesting to ask how a retail investor (read: the rest of us) might have fared had we contributed as much as the Romney family must have during Mitt's 24 year stint in the public sector (whew). So, how much out-performance did Mr. Romney achieve?

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In the pilot episode of NBC's self-referential 30 Rock, the new boss accurately stereotypes a member of middle management after meeting her just thirty seconds before.
Parody? Undoubtedly. Is it a thing? Yes, it's a thing.