TGIS! (The 'S' stands for Saturday...) You've made it to another edition of the DQYDJ weekender. Of course, we reserve the right to post this post whenever we please...
Batting leadoff this week? A plug for my buddy's Android App!
He wrote an application which leverages Yelp! and your GPS to plan out your date night for you. Newlywed? In the doghouse? Either way it can help you plan a night you'll never forget (and put/keep you on the right path!). Download it here (it's free... and again, it's for Android devices).
It must be the apocalypse, because we were the target of two separate sites this week!
On Monday, our friends at The Free Financial Adviser had a series that featured us in a prominent position. As our expertise dictates, we created two graphs for the Joes (and the other guy). In the first, we used all of the devious tricks at our disposal to show a trend line headed to 6.8% unemployment at election time. Newsflash - if unemployment is 6.8% at election time, it had nothing to do with the graph! (Also check out Joe's comment - he fingered us as a secret member of the Obama reelection campaign!)
Of course, all good lies (and statistics...) must come to an end, so our fake mea culpa came in the second part of the series, where the unemployment graph for the entire Obama Presidency was revealed.
On Wednesday, we found ourselves in the crosshairs of our friend Shaun at Smart Family Finance. Shaun admires our ability to shift blame for our faulty S&P 500 predictions to nebulous entities like 'The Market'. With his input we're going to try to pull in the bounds for the next edition of the S&P 500 predictions - just wait for the third Friday of the month, options expiration day!
We appreciate the attention, and we fully expect our readers to keep us honest - so whether you want us to create fake graphs like Joe, or you don't like our 'real' graphs like Sean, keep it coming! Also, read the sites I linked...
Carnivals and Featured Links
And much love to the sites that picked us out of the whole internet to send links our way! As always, click through and check out awesome sites...
- Thad's Thoughts
- Financial God
- Invest it Wisely
- 101 Centavos
- Net Worth Protect - Who incidentally owes us a quote on a post of ours, haha!
Featured Links
And as always, we use our king-making abilities to pick out some of the most interesting stuff around the web...
- Jonathan Chait doubled down on his first inaccurate take-down of Ironman's Gini Coefficient work... which prompted a second followup. How long until Chait responds to the response?
- Bring back the bulls (being based in Silicon Valley, I don't mind at all!). Facebook is preparing to IPO at a 100 price to earnings ratio. The Novel investor has the dirt.
- Evan at My Journey to Millions wonders how much extra you would pay for American made goods. Don't be shy, go respond!
- An EVO 4G may be the official phone of this writer, but Thad talks about re-purposing old iPhones.
- How do you treat a guru's advice when their situation no longer applies to you? Ask Jeff at Money Spruce, of course!
- Barb Friedberg asks if Twitter is a time waster... Maybe so, but follow us anyway!
On Campaign Finance Reform, Ron Paul, and Third Parties
Surely you heard this week about President Obama's reversal on accepting Super PAC funding. We here at DQYDJ think he is making a good move.
In the recent past (2008..), Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain decided to accept public funding rules in his general election matchup with Barack Obama... when Obama already had a massive campaign war chest. That miscalculation allowed then-Candidate Obama to outmaneuver him, decline public funds (making a huge show of it), yet still outspending Mr. McCain in the General. We'd say the mistakes of Mr. McCain will only be made once, and it was only a matter of time before Mr. Obama embraced the Super PAC.
So, here we are in 2012 with these huge entities which can accept unlimited donations. Personally, I think Super PACs are a horrendous Rube Goldberg political spending contraption. Money will always find a way in politics, and a preferable solution to this whole 'lack of transparency' issue would be to allow unlimited donations directly to candidates. When a Super PAC allied with Mitt Romney attacks in the Republican Primary, only keen political observers know who is funding the attack. With names like "Saving the Future PAC", it is impossible to see exactly where the attacks are coming from - at least not without a trip to your computer to search.
Candidate spending, on the other hand, has to be 'owned' by the candidates. After a commercial airs, you'll hear "This message was approved by <insert candidate here>". Instead of wishy washy debate lines about candidates not being able to directly control Super PAC spending (legally, this is true), you would force candidates to confront the ads that are aired on their behalf.
Remember, political speech is still speech, and the First Amendment clearly states we have a right to free speech. Missives have been written about the corruption of speech for money. The Constitution may outline the right to free speech, but it certainly doesn't guarantee that everyone can reach the same audience (an apt comparison might be "not everyone can speak at the same volume").
Limiting campaign donations to candidates also have an unintended (well, maybe it's intended) consequence of freezing out third parties for President. With individual donations limited, a third party candidate doesn't really have much of a choice to advertise - yes, they have to self-fund. Basically, to be a serious candidate for President in 2012, you can:
- Be a Democrat
- Be a Republican
- Be so wealthy you don't care that you have to self-fund (See Perot, Ross and possibly Bloomberg, Michael)
(Prepare yourselves... staccato sentences ahead...) So no, I don't think Ron Paul is going to run as a third party candidate. I believe that any changing of the Republican guard is going to be done within the Republican camp. If not from Ron Paul? Whomever is his ideological heir will get a run. Yes, it might be Rand Paul. No, I haven't written a full article yet. Bear with me, I'll get to it!
And now, an incisive quote from a cartoon from 1996! (Text based, for SOPA/PIPA purposes)
From The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror VII:
Kodos: It's true, we are aliens. But what are you going to do about it? It's a two-party system... you have to vote for one of us!
Man 1: He's right, this is a two-party system...
Man 2: Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate!
Kang: Go ahead, throw your vote away!
