Participation in America's Business

I started cleaning out my e-mail (Hotmail) today, and I found a number of notices from Charles Schwab about annual meetings of companies in which we own stock. I have never gone to an annual meeting, even though Forest Oil has its shareholder meetings up the road in Denver. But the annual meeting invitations also include an opportunity to vote my shares. Not that I have enough shares to swing an issue, but I do try to vote my shares every year. It's my way of helping to keep American business a little participatory.

I rarely vote against the nominees for the Board of Directors of any company. For a while, I was voting against board members who were over 70, on the ground that the companies needed to bring in some new blood once in a while. And I always voted against John Deutsch for the board of Citigroup; Deutsch was a former head of the CIA, and not a particularly distinguished one. Well, distinguished by incompetence.

This year I waited too long and missed my chance to vote my shares in Citigroup and Pfizer, but there's always next year.

Reading List Changes

Good morning! Of course, it may be evening where you are by the time you read this, but so it goes. In the virtual world, it's always morning somewhere.

I note that I have a couple of books sitting in the Current Reading list that I finished back in March, so they aren't all that current now. I'm going to be removing some books, and I'm going to be adding some books as I go today.

The first one to remove is Majestrum by Matthew Hughes. This one was a (2009) Christmas gift from a friend, and it was a good read. It's a science fiction novel set in the far future, with a couple of nice twists. For one thing, the powers of magic are rising, and this makes our ultrarationalist hero anxious. For another, he has another consciousness sharing his brain.

Hughes is a good writer with a wicked sense of humor. Both my wife, Helen, and I enjoyed reading Majestrum, and another Hughes book, The Spiral Labyrinth, is a prospect for future enjoyment.

Reporting World War II

Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938-1946. New York: The Library of America, 1995, 2001. xxiii + 874 pages. Preface by Stephen E. Ambrose. Introduction by Samuel Hynes. Chronology 1933-1945. Maps. Bibliographical Notes. Note on the Texts. Acknowledgments. Notes. Glossary of Military Terms. Index.

This is not a review of this book, because I haven't finished reading it yet. But it's been on my current reading list since February, and I wanted to assure you that I've been reading it. It's a big book. There are some 65 news articles, radio reports, and bulletins in here, from William L. Shirer's account of the cession of the Sudetenland to Germany in 1938, to John Hersey's account of Hiroshima after the bomb fell. There are some very famous journalists represented here: Edward R. Murrow, Ernie Pyle, Margaret Bourke-White. There are also some who have been almost forgotten.

And no wonder. World War II was a long time ago. I graduated from high school 19 years after World War II ended. This May we'll celebrate the 65th anniversary of V-E Day, though I doubt there will be much of a celebration; everyone's forgotten about it, most of the people who lived through it are dead, and they don't teach history in the schools anymore.

The thing about Reporting World War II is that this isn't history. These are stories written during the action by people who were witnesses to these events, or who spoke with actual witnesses when the grime of battle was fresh on their uniforms. It takes us back to when defeating the Germans and the Japs was not dead history but a matter of life and death.

I'm nearing the end of the book (as of this morning I had read just over 70% of it), so I can say that it's worth reading for anyone with an interest in World War II, in how America was sixty-odd years ago, or even in what your grandparents did when they were young.

By the way, this is the one-volume paperback edition issued in 2001. It was cut down from the two-volume hardcover edition published in 1995.

Catching Up with April Posting: Republicans

Is the Republican Party sticking its collective head in the gas oven? Are Republicans swallowing the tailpipe of an idling Lincoln Continental? Is the conservative movement so blinded by its hatred of the left and its own self-righteousness that it is failing to see clearly?

I would say "Yes!" to all of the above. David Frum, former Canadian, former Bush speechwriter, conservative policy wonk was apparently fired by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) for saying something like this. And Ron Radosh, in this reflection on l'affaire Frum, is singing to the same sheet music. Tactically speaking, American political parties must appeal to the broad squishy center of the political spectrum. Frum questioned Republican tactics in the healthcare debate, and he no longer works at AEI, because conservatives don't want to hear that they need to change. If they wanted to change, they wouldn't be conservatives, would they?

Next time you see a stegosaurus in the park, ask him how that refusal to change thing worked out.

(The title of this piece? It's April 4 and this is my fourth post in the month of April. Now I have to go do my daily Bible reading.)

Are We Nostalgic for 1934?

In general, people may not have a lot of fondness for 1934. It was smack in the middle of the Great Depression, and things were pretty bad. But, as Daniel Gross points out, it was better than in 1930 or 1932, and the economy was growing. So Mr. Roosevelt's party, the Democratic Party, the party of Woodrow Wilson, didn't lose seats in the House and Senate, as conventional wisdom says the president's party must in the off-year. No, the Democrats gained seats, increasing their majorities, and positioning themselves to carry out the "Second New Deal."

Can this happen again? A lot depends upon just exactly how much the numbers move between now and November, but the Republicans should beware of counting their chickens before they are hatched. Of course, it the Republicans are disappointed in the fall, think how unhappy the Tea Party patriots, Fox News, Sarah Palin, and members of various armed militias are going to be!

Saving the Opposite of Debt

Some of you might have found the title of my last post obscure, or even confusing. I hope not, but just in case, here's the deal. In economics, debt is negative savings (and savings are negative debt). This makes perfect sense is you think back to Mr. Micawber, who pointed out that if your income exceeds your outgo, you have a happy situation, but if your outgo exceeds your income, you will be in misery.

So, if you started out with neither debt nor savings, and you make $100 per week more than you spend, you will save $100 per week. If you make $100 per week less than you spend, you're going to have to borrow $100 from somewhere.

Where it gets a little tricky is if you already have some debt. Suppose you have a mortgage in the amount of $150,000. All other things being equal, if you reduce that mortage by $10,000 per year, this is the equivalent of saving $10,000 per year. So, when people pay down their credit cards, pay off their car loans, and accelerate their mortgage payments, they are increasing their saving just as if they were pouring that money into a savings account.

Remember: Saving Is the Opposite of Debt

Daniel Gross' column notes that corporate debt has declined to the level of 2006. Households are also relying less on credit, and more on cash. Gross mentions a family that has gone "all-cash." He doesn't mention Dave Ramsey, and, indeed, the envelope system wasn't invented by Ramsey. Back when I was working at Money Concepts, we would sometimes talk up the idea of paying all your bills in cash. Budget a certain amount each month for each category, put that amount in a labelled envelope, and don't spend more than is in the envelope. One of the "enforcers" is that, as the food envelope, say, gets emptier, you'll shy away from blowing it all on dinner out, and you'll eat rice and beans at home.

I haven't gone all cash, and I don't intend to. I do use my debit card for a lot of purchases. I generally use only one bank credit card (and one gasoline credit card), and I keep the others in folders in a file cabinet. And I pay the balance every month, so I'm not paying out any finance charges. The key here, if there is a key, is that one should never use credit to buy something one cannot afford. That is, one should use credit to buy things for which one could have paid cash (with the exception of a house or, I would say, an automobile), and then use the cash to settle the borrowing immediately. A credit card should be a convenient way to pay, not a means of supplementing one's income.

Now, if we could just get the federal and state governments to go all-cash!