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If you’re nervous about your finances today, wait until the Obama tax plan kicks in.

From Ned Barnett at The American Thinker, who by way of background notes that over the past 10 years, he’s earned from $50,000 to $100,000 per year — so he’s not in the category of the “more than $250K ‘evil rich’”:

I’ve worked as the state level media and strategy director on three Presidential election campaigns — I know how “promises” work — so I analyzed Senator Obama’s promises by looking for loopholes.

The first loophole was easy to find: Senator Obama doesn’t “count” allowing the Bush tax cuts to lapse as a tax increase. Unless the cuts are re-enacted, rates will automatically return to the 2000 level. Senator Obama claims that letting a tax cut lapse — allowing the rates to return to a higher levels — is not actually a “tax increase.” It’s just the lapsing of a tax cut.

See the difference?

Neither do I.

When those cuts lapse, my taxes are going up — a lot — but by parsing words, Senator Obama justifies his claim that he won’t actively raise taxes on 95 percent of working Americans, even while he’s passively allowing tax rates to go up for 100% of Americans who actually pay Federal income taxes.

Making this personal, my Federal Income Tax will increase by $3,824 when those tax cuts lapse. That not-insignificant sum would cover a couple of house payments or help my two boys through another month or two of college.

Barnett encourages us to go to this page on the IRS website, look up the tax tables for 2000 and 2007, and check his assumptions for ourselves.

In addition, Obama plans to eliminate the income cap on Social Security tax. So, for example, individuals making more than $94,700 will now pay an extra 12.4 percent tax on every dollar earned above that figure.

And he’s going to raise Capital Gains taxes. Too bad for you if you are one of the 50 percent of Americans who own stocks in, say, your 401K, and the market turns around.

Ah. No worries. What’s important is that 67 percent of Americans BELIEVE Obama is going to cut middle class taxes.

I bet he can keep insisting he’s cutting taxes, and his adoring public will continue to “know” that he has. Just like they “know” so much else about him. Democracy in action!

Yeah, I know it makes no sense. But look at it. So big and . . . bricky. Those gorgeous windows, can you imagine how they frame the view when you’re inside looking out?

And right there on main street. Nothing would go down without my knowing about it. Nothing!

Technorati Tags: old brick building somewhere in Upstate New York

Of all the things I’ve read lately about our current coaster ride, the most revealing was this couple of paragraphs, way down in a January 15 piece in the Wall Street Journal by Susan Pulliam and Serena Ng, titled “Default Fears Unnerve Markets.”

The article is about a class of derivatives called credit-default swaps. If you’ve never heard of them, it’s because they aren’t the sort of deals available to the the likes of you and me. The article does its best to explain them by analogy: they “work like a side bet on a football game.” Institutional traders place bets based on the perceived odds that other parties will default on bonds or loans. Then they buy and sell their bets amongst themselves.

Here’s the bit that opened my eyes:

With no central trade processing of credit-default swaps, defining trading-partner risks can be a Herculean task. Mr. [Warren] Buffett learned the difficulty of unraveling such complex instruments in 2002 when he directed General Re Corp., a reinsurer that had been acquired by his Berkshire Hathaway Inc., to pull back from the business of these swaps and other derivatives. It took General Re four years to whittle the business from 23,218 contracts to 197 by the end of 2006.

Doing so involved tracking down hundreds of counterparties to General Re’s trades, many of which Mr. Buffett and his colleagues had never heard of, he says, including a bank in Finland and a small loan company in Japan, to name just two. One contract, Mr. Buffett says, was designed to run for 100 years. “We lost over $400 million on contracts that were supposedly” safe and properly priced, “and we did it in a leisurely way in a benign market,” Mr. Buffett says. “If we had to unwind it in one month, who knows what would have happened?”

We’re about to find out “what would have happened” because it’s unfolding right now. Bets are getting called. People are finding out that liabilities they pushed out the door a long time ago have invited themselves back in and are licking their lips, ready to start biting arse. The stock market makes the headlines but it’s only a proxy for the real bloodbath.

Keep your fingers out of the way if you can.

Technorati Tags: economy, stock market

Technorati Tags: NYC skyline, September 11

Yes, replacing aging bridges before they fall apart is important. But in some cases that means we’re losing bits of history, not to mention personality to yet more dull old concrete.

I wish I’d gotten pictures, for example, of the old Hoxie Gorge bridge on Route 81, near Cortland, N.Y., before it was demolished last fall. I can’t even find any stats on how high it was (some locals nicknamed it “the mile high bridge” though, to give you an idea of how high it seems when you’re on it). It spans a gorge along the Tioughnioga River valley. It’s being rebuilt now and will be safer as a result, of course. Before we’ve lost that gorgeous arched steel forever, and nobody seems to have noticed.

I did take the time yesterday to get some pictures of the bridge across the Chenango River in the town where I grew up, Oxford, NY, because this one is slated for replacement as well.

Just another backwater steel bridge, yeah, I know.

It’s got a connection to Oxford beyond just the practical, however. The design uses a “Burr arch truss” that was invented by Theordore Burr — a cousin of Aaron’s — who was an Oxford, NY native around the turn of the 19th century. Burr’s design made our bridges strong enough to support heavier vehicles, including trains. He built the first bridge across the Chenango in Oxford and also a gorgeous house which, today, is the town library.

From the piece linked above:

The “Burr arch truss”, used two long arches, resting on the abutments on either end, that typically sandwiched a multiple kingpost structure. Theodore Burr built nearly every bridge that crossed the Susquehanna from Binghamton, NY to Baltimore, MD in those days. His successes made him the most distinguished architect of bridges in the country. Today’s modern bridges with their graceful arches can be traced back to Theodore Burr and his contemporaries.

In April, 1818, he advertised in the Oxford Gazette, that he had “devoted eighteen years of his life to the theory and practice of bridge building exclusively, during which time he had built forty-five bridges of various magnitude, with arches from 60 to 367 feet span.”

Back in those days, small towns didn’t carry the stigma (often undeserved of course) of being home to small minds. It was perfectly in keeping with the vision of the time to found an Academy here, for instance — it was expected that the best and the brightest would be out in “the wilderness” and would look for ways to get a classical education.

The building is the town’s middle school today. For now. It’s on the river flats, and was flooded badly last year. The town isn’t sure they’ll be able to fund insurance on it any more — and so it may well be junked in exchange for some cheaply built ugly modern thing. Hopefully someone will find some other use for the building. It’s a treasure, but unfortunately small town upstate NY resources don’t always allow the luxury of preserving treasures.

Technorati Tags: Oxford, New York, Chenango River, bridges, Burr arch truss

That’s been my motto lately. Because I’ve felt like I’ve been pretty boring. At least on the outside, lol

It’s not that I haven’t been busy. I’ve been reading a ton of books — all kinds of interesting books — like I just finished-but-one-story “The New York Stories of Henry James” — which I picked up while in NYC of course. Only I haven’t felt inspired to blog about it — more fun to immerse myself and not assume the arm’s-length relationship that writing about it would require.

I’ve been working on revising my last-novel-but-one, which like my most recent novel got some passing interest from agents but wasn’t good enough to get anything more.

It’s been a painful process, the revision, because I’ve been confronting my own . . . naivete, if I want to be nice about it — incompetence, I think to myself in my less rosy moods. How could I have written so stupidly and not realized it? Sigh. Writing novels is without question the most difficult thing I’ve done, ever. Having to do major surgery well after I’d hoped The Thing Was Done only brings that point home all the harder.

I’ve been golfing a bit more lately, which has been nice. Will blog about that some more in the next few days.

And I’ve been writing for another site I’ve launched, WomenGolfApparel.com. I undertook this venture as an experiment: can I monetize my writing by creating a content-rich site and then run Adsense ads? I’m happy to say results so far are promising, although it has nowhere near the traffic I’d need to, you know, buy that nouveau-Italian palazzo-style McMansion with the the spinning hot tub in the back yard that I’ve had my eye on. ha ha ha

But it’s been fun, and IMO satisfies a real need, also. Especially if you don’t live in a major market, finding fun, stylish golf apparel — if you’re a woman — can be a pain. Many pro shops don’t carry much women’s clothing (due in part to their general focus on male golfers, but also because women’s shopping habits are different, according to an acquaintance who ran a pro shop with her husband for awhile. Men do things like notice it’s raining and buy a raincoat on their way out to the first tee. Women want to shop shop — and don’t combine that with their trips to the course to play.)

Even general sporting goods stores like Dick’s shortchange the women in their golf apparel sections — at least that’s been my experience. You might find one or two racks of women’s golf clothing. And it gets picked over fast, so you finding your style can be a problem.

Another major hole: it’s really really hard to find out what, exactly, the LPGA pros are wearing. I’ve been trying to hunt that info down, and it’s not easy. In some cases, it’s probably because they aren’t wearing endorsement-deal stuff. But as I wrote here, I think it’s also because the media is hesitant about covering what pros are wearing. We don’t interview Tiger about how cute his shorts look — wouldn’t it be insulting to focus on a woman pro’s clothes instead of her game?

But the fact is, when women see a golfer on t.v. and like what she’s wearing, they want to know how to buy that piece for themselves. At least according to the anecdotal evidence I’ve encountered.

So the site will, I hope, help women in a couple of ways — it will help them find opportunities to buy golf apparel online (I try to find news about deals!) and it will help them track down what the pros are wearing.

I’m putting the finishing touches on a women golf apparel newsletter now as well, which features an interview with Geoff Tait, one of the founders of Quagmire Golf. The interview discusses how golf styles are changing, partly because LPGA pros are breaking old style conventions. I plan to send the newsletter out within a few days — if you want to be on that mailing list, drop me a note or sign up here. If you’d rather just read the interview online, it’ll be published on the main site sometime later in August.

So yeah, I’ve been busy. Just not blogging. But that’s one of the nice things about having a blog, if I don’t post, what does it matter! I have only myself to please ;-)

Technorati Tags: women golf apparel, writing, blogging

That just struck my funnybone.

“Your privacy is very important to us. Now do tell us all about yourself.”

LOL

(Okay, okay, maybe you had to be there!)

Hi, all — I’m having a fantastic time :-)

Yesterday was Paris — the Louvre and Eiffel Tower — the only downside to the ET was that the lines were so long, it ate up several hours so we ended up having to catch the last train back to London instead of the 7:19 Eurostar like we’d planned. But the view was fantastic — sunset from the top of the ET!

In London — where to start? Victoria and Albert Museum, National Portrait Gallery, John Soame Museum, the Thames, Big Ben, House of Parliarment, British Museum, Hyde Park, Albert Memorial, Albert Hall, Covent Garden. Wednesday night we saw Madame Butterly at the Royal Opera House, which was fantastic, possibly one of the single most beautiful things I’ve ever experienced.

There’s still lots on the list to go — we’re going to do the British National and the Tate sometime in the next couple of days. And today my host has promised me we’ll take one of the tour buses — drive by photo ops, hooray!

Back soon!

Back in a week. I’ll post pictures!

:-)