My credit card bill came today with one of those little notices advising me of a change in terms. This time the change is the APR. It’s going to be 29.9%.
Twenty-nine point nine percent annual interest. On someone who has enough house equity to be no serious risk.
Presumably this is punishment for my paying my bill on time every month?
Via Juan Cole, some interesting information about the management of the Iraqi dinar. Used to be you could get information like this in the Economist and sometimes even the New York Times.
If it has been in either, I sure missed it. But then again, I don’t read them as carefully as I used to — so much of the information was on blogs like Prof. Cole’s long before it made it into print…
Back in September ’03, in a more innocent time, I suggested only somewhat tongue in cheek that there might be a market-based solution to the Iraq quagmire: Rather than spend the billions in Iraq that the administration was then requesting, we just give the Iraqis $3,230 each and go home. It was more than their pre-war GDP per person, and they’d probably make better use of the money than we would.
Of course, by now we’ve spent a great deal more in Iraq than the administration ever budgeted, let on, or (I suspect) imagined. The current estimate of the US cost of the war is around $283,000,000,000 and counting and of course that ignores the personal cost to Iraq, Iraqis, and the families (here and abroad) of all the fatalities and casualties. Had we taken that $283 billion and handed it out to the 25 million or so Iraqis, that would be $11,300 or so for every man, woman and child — or 4.7 times the pre-war GDP/person.
But that’s all money down the rat hole (well, mostly — a few billion here or there was simply stolen).
Today I want to suggest a different market-based solution to an aspect of the current crisis. It’s been years that the US has supposedly been searching for “most wanted terrorist” Osama bin Laden with all its might, yet without success. (Some cynics have suggested that in fact US interests are served by not finding bin Laden since his continued freedom justifies the Long War and that the failure to find him is not entirely unwelcome or accidental; that’s too cynical even for my blood.)
The bin Laden hunt has been handled by the military and the intelligence services. Neither seems to have been up to the job. My proposal is simple: unleash capitalism.
Currently the US offers a paltry reward for the capture of bin Laden — a mere $25 million dollars (There is a separate, private offer of $2 million on the table as well.) While this amounts to a great deal of money, especially in the impoverished regions in which bin Laden is thought to have his secret undisclosed location, it clearly hasn’t been enough.
And if capitalism teaches us anything it is that if you want the goods and the other side won’t sell, then you have to raise your price.
Considering that we’ve spent some $283 billion invading a country that was no threat to us and had not recently done us any particular harm, surely we could find under a thousandth of that for the bin Laden buyout? Suppose the reward were not $25 million but $250 million — a quarter of a billion? People get very excited about powerball lotteries in that range, and a payoff that size might encourage someone to snitch.
Heck, offer a cool billion. Pay it out like lottery winnings and the present value is half that. Tax it and it’s down back in the neighborhood of that quarter billion. But still real money.
The only downside I can see to this plan is that there’s a danger that al-Qaeda will turn in bin Laden themselves, in order to get money to fund their next attack. I suppose the reward offer would have to be conditioned in some way to make this more difficult without descending into the catch-22 that anyone who knows bin Laden’s location is presumptively a terrorist or a fellow traveler and thus the sort of person we don’t want to give the money to…
I know the state of Florida has no shame, and I suppose that anyway this probably is no different from ads appearing on the sides of public buses but even so I was very surprised to have ads for satellite TV and satellite radio fall out of the envelope when I got my annual car registration renewal notice.
When the state sells off public functions we call it privatization. (When it sells or leases land we have unfortunately gotten used to calling it a ‘rip off’.) When the state takes on formerly private functions we call it a vast number of things, depending on the circumstances and how we feel about it.
But when the state lends its good offices to put an advertisement into every home (or, who knows, just demographically selected homes?), do we just call it “advertising”? Surely there’s a better word for this?
According to Think Progress | Telcos Could Be Liable For Tens of Billions of Dollars For Illegally Turning Over Phone Records, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth face huge liabilities for turning over millions of American’s call records to the NSA in violation of law. That potentially $1000 for each person whose call records were turned over. Millions and millions of people. Each.
Sometimes there really is a conspiracy:
The multimillion-dollar lobbying effort to repeal the federal estate tax has been aggressively led by 18 super-wealthy families, according to a report released today by Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy at a press conference in Washington, D.C. The report details for the first time the vast money, influence and deceptive marketing techniques behind the rhetoric in the campaign to repeal the tax.
It reveals how 18 families worth a total of $185.5 billion have financed and coordinated a 10-year effort to repeal the estate tax, a move that would collectively net them a windfall of $71.6 billion.
The report, available at www.citizen.org, profiles the families and their businesses, which include the families behind Wal-Mart, Gallo wine, Campbell’s soup, and Mars Inc., maker of M&Ms. Collectively, the list includes the first- and third-largest privately held companies in the United States, the richest family in Alabama and the world’s largest retailer.
These families have sought to keep their activities anonymous by using associations to represent them and by forming a massive coalition of business and trade associations dedicated to pushing for estate tax repeal. The report details the groups they have hidden behind – the trade associations they have used, the lobbyists they have hired, and the anti-estate tax political action committees, 527s and organizations to which they have donated heavily.
Please note: this is NOT posted to the politics:tin-foil category.
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