When any of us do financial planning, a part of the discussion may include the topic of borrowing. Do we spend only as much as we have or do we borrow from others so that we can spend more. For personal budgeting borrowing is, in my opinion, a bad idea.  Exceptions perhaps for a house or maybe education, which can be a worthwhile investment. Otherwise it most often leads to trouble.

It gets trickier with business finance as borrowing can allow for investment that will pay back many times the cost of borrowing – if all goes well.

Governments, from small villages to school systems to our federal government, face the exact same question. Spend as much as the revenue they take in, or borrow so that they can spend more. If the additional spending will be an investment that will increase revenue in future years then borrowing might be a good idea. Borrowing money to build a much needed new high school when it’s known that future revenue will pay it back may be good as well.

Otherwise, the big question of how the borrowed money will be paid back rears its ugly head. Is borrowing money to make welfare payments a good choice? Where will the revenue come from to pay that money back?

The second big question is who to borrow from. Most of us borrow from relatively reputable financial institutions – our local bank, mortgage company, or for large businesses, someone like Morgan Stanley.

What would you think if your friend wanted a new car and chose to borrow the money from the local pimp who makes the money he lends to others by enslaving women and forcing them to work in sweatshops or as prostitutes?

When our federal government spends more than it takes in, that’s what they are doing. A large chunk of the money they are borrowing to cover their overspending is coming from China and other countries who have the money to lend us because they’ve enslaved their own citizens and ignored environmental issues like pollution.

As politicians huddle in Washington to hammer out a budget these are two of the tough issues they have to address.

More here.

Those who know me likely consider me somewhat contentious and argumentative.  I enjoy arguments.  Not knock down screaming matches, but debate over various sides of an issue.  I also like to agree with people and in particular I like to find areas of agreement with people I generally disagree with on most issues.

The Obama administration, even with this week’s scare in Japan, have been supporters of nuclear energy.  Me too.  Sort of.

Nuclear energy is, in my opinion, the best of a number of not very good choices.

Coal, even supposed clean coal, comes with a number of negative issues.  Topping the list is that all coal is very pollution heavy.  There is no way around it that anyone has yet found.  As one elected official said earlier this week, “We’re working on lowering the carbon in coal and once we do that it will be almost pollution free.”  No, air is completely pollution free.  Obtaining coal is costly in human lives and in environmental damage.  Over 20 times as many people have been harmed by coal, per kilowatt hour, than by Nuclear world-wide.  Coal is also a very limited resource.

Oil can be cleaner than coal.  Well, except perhaps when you include oil spills.  Oil is also a limited resource and there are some growing concerns about the unknown impact of emptying the earth of its oil.  One of my biggest concerns with oil though is that it is money that flows out of our economy at a rapid rate and more concerning, is that this money is used to fund terrorists who are fighting against us.

Hydro-Electric dams have caused a number of environmental problems along the rivers we’ve built them on and even if we could get around that we simply do not have enough rivers to provide even a minute amount of the energy that we use.

Wind and Solar.  Economically these are not yet ready for prime time.  The cost to manufacture, purchase land, install, and maintain these systems is massively greater than the costs of other alternatives.  And even with these there are a host of concerns from ugliness (Ted Kennedy certainly didn’t want them anywhere near his properties) to the vast amount of space they take up.  These are also not free of environmental impact concerns including the impact of reducing the earth’s natural heat absorption, interfering with natural and necessary wind patterns (as large windfarms do), and impacts on plants and animals.

Check out this from the University of St Andrews

Newer technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells are still too far off in the future.

We should continue to explore all of these and other alternatives to find more efficient ways of meeting our energy needs and with less environmental impact.  And perhaps more importantly, we need to explore ways to reduce our energy consumption and encourage everyone from neighbors to industry to consumer less.  By some estimates as much as 20% of our energy use is completely wasteful.

Realistically though I’m not holding out hope of seeing massive decreases in our energy consumption or of any huge breakthroughs in energy generation.

Nuclear has a number of major problems from what to do with spent fuel rods to inevitable nuclear disasters like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Japan, and the certainty of others in the future.  It’s not perfect, but may well be the best of a lot of not very good options.

Does Pepsi’s “Love Hurts” ad that ends with someone beaning a gal in the head with a can of Pepsi and then she and her boyfriend running away, leaving the victim laying on the ground semi-conscious represent the average Pepsi drinker? I think I’d rather be associated with coke drinkers.

‘Man-Flu’ doesn’t get the respect it deserves. Women laugh about it and tease you that ‘you’ve only got a little cold, get over it bucko!’. Gobs of websites treat it as simply a joke.

It’s time to lay down like a man and defend it. I’ve had it for the past day. It sucks. On the surface it doesn’t sound all that bad – a sore throat, cough, achy body. Reality, is far more sinister. I don’t have the energy of a Mexican jumping bean. Even just pressing keys on my laptop takes perseverance.

I think I’ll go lay down now. And hope I live to see my wife one more time before I die.

There are rumors circulating that the British teen drama Skins is likely to get pulled by MTV executives due to advertiser pressure. This is good news. What little I’ve seen of the show and heard, pro and con, leads me to believe this is likely the raunchiest show to ever air on U.S. TV.

The really sad thing about this whole episode though is that Skins is all people are seeing, or at least all that they’re talking about.

MTV and Skins is not the problem, just an easy target. Anyone who wants to watch Skins can easily do so on the Internet (or BBC America), and many teens in the U.S. have been, long before MTV. Pushing MTV to pull it from its lineup may reduce viewership for those over 40, but will have little impact on anyone younger. If anything, those making all the noise have only increased interest and viewership (and likely of the original British version on the web).

The really stupid thing is that what people have been getting bent over is MTV showing reality. And it’s the reality that we should be concerned about, not that MTV shows it. We should be saying ‘Hey, look at this show. Is this reality? Are there real issues here that we need to address?’

If MTV pulls Skins at least we don’t have to be offended by it anymore. Of course, we’ll strain our necks getting them back in to the sand so deep.

Just comparing our real problems to England, where Skins originates, we have 30% higher use of drugs among teens and a 50% higher abortion rate among teens. A teen in the U.S. is about twice as likely to become an unwed teen mom than a teen in England and is almost three times as likely to be raped. And England is worse on these than all of Western Europe.

Well, Skins and MTV are easier targets after all. And tougher targets are, well, tougher.

[Soapbox ON]

We’ve become poor wimpy leaders and poor wimpy parents. We’re afraid to address our problems honestly and openly.

We won’t admit that our wars on vice; drugs, prostitution, gambling, and alcohol, are failures and may actually cause more problems than they solve (it’s debatable if they solve any problems).

We’re afraid to talk to our sons and daughters honestly about drugs and sex and tell them that it’s not un-cool and is OK to say no to both. In fact, a rather good idea to say no.

On the other hand, we say that everyone should wait until marriage to have sex and they should wait to get married. Guess what, not very many are going to be sexless until marriage at 30. It’s simply not going to happen. That’s not the way God made us. Not even Christians.

We’re afraid to teach our children how to drink responsibly, so they do so irresponsibly. Even those at our vaunted Christian high schools and universities are going to drink – with us or without us. Personally, I’d rather they drink with us (and I’ve enjoyed many a pint with my son, including when we traveled to Europe while he was in a Christian high school ).

We treat our teens (and adults?) like kids and then wonder why they act like it.

[Soapbox OFF]

Well, the good news is that Skins will likely not be on MTV much longer unless some advertisers come along to support it. We’ll be able to go back to our sandy hole and our kids will continue what they’re doing (including watching Skins on the web).

Please note that I resisted numerous bad puns in the writing of this article.

Crusty Logic is best viewed with Mozilla Firefox. Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome work well too. Have not yet fully tested with Opera. It does not work as well in Internet Explorer though I hope this will be fixed in a future release of Explorer.

If you haven’t already, I urge you to try Firefox. There’s a reason it is the browser of choice within the computer industry, has recently become the number one browser in Europe, and is continuing to grow its usage throughout the world.

As I have time this week and next I’ll post some analysis on the TSA survey. I am also learning new blog software and experiencing some growing pains, particularly with images, so please bare with me 🙂

Today’s post includes some overall results as well as some comparisons of business vs leisure travelers.  Later we’ll look at differences by gender and maybe other areas and then delve in to more details, including peoples specific TSA experiences, if anything is particularly interesting.

Surprisingly only one person criticized the survey itself.  Typically a well designed survey like this one will involve at least a couple of hundred hours of design and validation (and often multiples of that), tens of hours of coding (or much more), and perhaps thousands of hours of analysis.  On this survey; design, validation, and coding were about three hours total and analysis will likely be less than 20.

Perhaps the biggest error was one of bias that likely permeated many questions.  In particular using the word ‘terrified’ to describe people’s feelings about being seen nude or groped by a TSA agent.  Speaking of, using the word ‘grope’ is potentially biasing.  I should have maybe said ‘felt up’.  In the biz vs leisure question I should have worded it ‘10% or less’.

How did biz vs leisure look overall?

Note: For further comparison here we’ll say that a business traveler is someone who responds that 60% or more of their travel is for business and a leisure traveler is someone who says that 40% or less of their travel is for business.  We’ll look at the 50% middle folks separately.

Interestingly, there was a minor bit of gender split with females falling towards the leisure category and males the business category.  While leisure travelers were largely from Tripadvisor and business from Flyertalk (and thirtythousandfeet and other), there didn’t appear to be a correlation between female leisure from tripadvisor and male business from flyertalk.

In light of the new TSA screening procedures, what changes, if any, do you expect to make with regard to future air travel?

I think we’re seeing far more of an emotional response of what people would like to do than what they will do.  Not surprisingly there is a very strong correlation between this response and biz/leisure.  47.1% of those whose travel is 10% or less business[1] say they will curtail future travel until things change while only 9.2% of those who travel solely for business plan to do so (though both groups lean towards reduction).  It will be interesting to see if there is a noticeable decrease in airline travel, particularly from airports with backscatter machines.

On the following scale, rate your feelings or level of concern regarding the following (note that the TSA has stated that viewing of full-body scanner images will not be gender specific and due to employee demographics is most likely to be a male):

Clearly people are least concerned about themselves, next about their spouse, and very concerned about their daughters. Leisure travelers were a bit more likely than business travelers to fall towards the ‘terrified’ end BTW. Male/Female differences on this are quite interesting.  We’ll look at those later this week.

Do you believe that the full-body scanners and enhanced pat-downs will increase security over the methods in place prior to November 2010?

This was fairly evenly split with 48% saying no increase in security and 47% believing that the new machines would actually decrease security (eg, metal detectors are better).  Only 5% believe there will be a slight increase, and nobody thought there would be a significant increase.  That there is huge selection bias in this question as nearly all respondents came from travel related websites and are likely far better informed than the general public.  And, we know that the general public generally believes that the new machines will increase security and that many believe that they will significantly increase security.

The more someone travels for business, the more they are likely to believe that they will decrease security.

If you have experienced the new TSA procedures multiple times, do you believe, from an emotional standpoint, that it is getting easier, staying the same, or getting more difficult for you?

56% of respondents answered this question.  Not surprisingly they are all fairly frequent travelers averaging 18 round trips per year and 31 encounters with TSA per year.  On average they’d ‘opted out’ 1.52 times (given the timing of this survey coming just a few weeks after people really began to opt out, this is fairly high).

Nobody thought it gets easier.  23% responded that it’s stayed the same, 77% that it gets more difficult.  Leisure travelers were far more likely to indicate that it stayed the same.  There appeared little correlation between this and how people rated their feelings.  Three people stated in their comments that they thought it would get easier, didn’t, and that they are now (only after several new TSA experiences) re-evaluating future travel.

In 2010 the U.S. federal government spent about $3.6 trillion, on revenues of about $2.2 trillion (income taxes, etc.).  In other words, we spent about $1.4 trillion more than we could afford.

When our government was founded it’s priorities were (somewhat in order); national defense, provision of a national currency and interstate trade rules, interaction with other nations, establishment of roadways, and provision of a federal justice system (supreme court, federal district courts, and federal law enforcement).  Today these account for about 28% of federal spending, or about $1.02 trillion.  About half of 2010 revenues.

If you add in NASA, and the entirety of the Dept’s of Energy, Commerce, Education, Agriculture, and Interior you get up to about $1.4 trillion.  Still well below income.

The rest of our spending is for welfare entitlement programs.  Programs that didn’t exist during the first 140 years of our country’s existence, but since the first one 78 years ago, have grown to account for about 64% of federal government spending and all of our annual federal debt.

Approximately half of every dollar spent on welfare, unemployment, Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlement programs is borrowed.  We DO NOT have the money to pay for these programs (nor, by the way, does any country on earth).

Our largest creditor is China.  We’ve borrowed about $1 trillion from them and expect to borrow another $1 trillion in the next 18 months.  China must be doing something right to have so much money to lend us.  Right?

Citizens of China are not free like those of the U.S. or other western democracies.  They are effectively slave labor.  And while U.S. companies spend trillions of dollars on environmental regulations, China doesn’t have these costs, they just pollute away.

So, the next time you think that our entitlement programs are a good idea, consider that it’s China’s slave labor and human rights abuses, and our tacit support of China’s pollution that provide those entitlements to us.

We’re co-pimps with China.  China’s citizens are our whores.  Proud?

It’s taken some time, but we’re finally up and running!

As stupid as it may sound, the biggest holdup was getting the about page written. It should not have been so difficult. But it was. I tossed several versions and made numerous edits before arriving at the current version.

Big Huge Major thanks to my son who built this for me as a Christmas Present!  By every measure the best and most unexpected present I received.

Good job Auburn!