Today’s Democrats Are Yesterday’s Republicans. Bonus: “Work, Catholics, and Pensions.”

As a person who has an immigrant spouse (who entered the United States legally and has always been here legally), I have insights into the US Immigration System and what the Democrat and Republican position on the issue is.

Take the 2018 midterm. The Democrats ran on stopping Trump, on impeaching Trump, then the House Democrats didn’t even sue the administration for swiping money from other programs to build the “border wall”, even though this clearly goes against Constitutional separation of powers and the Constitution giving the House of Representatives primary control over taxation and spending issues, and then Nancy Pelosi gave him money earmarked to upgrade the border fencing near her own district in San Francisco.

Then in 2020 Joe Biden got in, defended Title 42, and then enacted a new program that’s almost exactly like it when it got struck down by a court.

So it’s clear what this really is. The Democrats are all for illegal immigration when they think that the illegal immigrants will end up in Florida and Texas, not California.

And this is crazy strategy because once you get to the next census and it counts illegal immigrants living in Florida and Texas, they gain clout in the federal government, and California loses it.

George Carlin called it “NIMBY”. So the Democrats want us to take in illegal immigrants, but “Not in my back yard!”

Part of the reason I voted for Biden anyway, was that he’s a “Yesterday’s Republican”.

Much like Reagan’s amnesty program or the bipartisan Immigration and Nationality Act, Joe Biden mainly restored the status quo for legal immigration (such as my spouse’s case) while Trump’s position on the issue was more like the episode of Parks & Recreation where Ron Swanson said “Some of this will be easy like ‘Take down all the traffic lights.’ and ‘Dismantle the Post Office’. The rest could take more time, like ‘Bring this all crumbling to the ground.'”

That was basically Trump’s methodology for destroying everything about America whether it was worth keeping or not. “Bring this all crumbling to the ground.”

Richard M. Stallman, Founder of the Free Software Foundation, had a number of terms for Donald Trump, including “The Wrecker” (my favorite), “The Infant”, and others.

(I usually went further and said “Cheeto Hitler” or the “Creeping Orange Menace”.)

As a Libertarian (mostly, I suppose), I find Biden and Trump both to be the wrong thing for this country at the wrong time. The United States needs an enema for sure, and the federal government in particular.

But the whole country is falling apart under this system. Both Trump and Biden are responsible for the hyperinflationary mess and the debt crisis and the ruined economy.

Trump gave trillions of dollars in “tax cuts” to the wealthiest and the corporations at the worst possible time, and then Biden and the Democrats followed up by not taking any action to correct that while also implementing deficit tripling new spending and entitlement programs and getting us bogged down in a quagmire where every time Ukraine blows up a 1950s tank that Putin vomited out on their land, they’ve won the war again, same as every day, except that this has all happened before and will happen again.

The Democrats, and most of the Republicans like these wars. The situation in Ukraine is a 2020s rehash of 1980s Afghanistan which was made into the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War”. (A movie everyone should see.)

It will most likely end the same way. If they ever do oust the Russians, their country will be in ruins and Congress will lose their appetite for spending money and Ukraine will devolve into a third world country.

At the end of “Charlie Wilson’s War”, Congressman Wilson was trying to get bills through to rebuild Afghanistan. It was a modern and beautiful country and a democracy at one point, but Congress “beat the Russians” and that’s all they thought matters.

When you get involved in something, it means you own it. What happened in Afghanistan next was what was obviously going to happen.

The United States was giddily “poking the bear” to harass the Soviets and didn’t seem at all concerned that it was setting up the “War on Terror”, which is a ridiculous concept on its face, unwinnable by definition, and the major victims have been Americans who now need “national ID cards and passports” to conduct business with government agencies, and who face nebulous and unconstitutional domestic spying programs.

I recall in the 6th grade (I think) watching “Channel 1” (a classroom news thing for students that kept them well informed with accurate reporting on world events…the government has no interest in keeping Americans informed now, of any age…they call it “deceptive” and “fake news” and “disinformation” when you get good, solid, information that they used to provide every school child).

They had a segment on the Taliban in Afghanistan, and their barbarism against women and death squads, etc. They ended up blowing up World Culture that can never be truly replaced, including the Buddhas of Bamiyan, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

I don’t like Biden, but the threat of Theocracy comparable to the Taliban coming to America is what the Republican Party has turned into.

We have a Theocracy already in one branch of the federal government (the US Supreme Court). We have “Catholic Sharia Law” controlling women’s ovaries, and with time, it’ll get worse.

Since there is no election for the Supreme Court, we have to pray that they’ll eventually keel over from something and a Trump or a DeSantis won’t be in office to name their successor.

So while I liked a lot of what George Carlin had to say, I can’t say I agree with him on voting. You vote, it’ll be bad, but if you want 9-0 “Catholic Sharia Law”, just put another Republican in office and you’ll get to live under it in short order.

If one can measure these things, Catholicism (especially the conservative wing) is one of the greatest tragedies to unfold on America. It’s a cancer.

They are child molesters, who stole much of my mom’s pension after she worked for them for over 25 years, and now they command people who are not Catholics that if they have an abortion, they will be found and sent to prison.

They don’t even hide how corrupt and and what a garbage “church” they are.

Back in the day, when people were (rightly) more skeptical of the Catholics, they wrote in safeguards against things like indoctrination of children using state education dollars, that are being torn down by this unhinged Trumpian Supreme Court.

Catholic Schools only exist for two reasons. Brainwashing/Indoctrination, and to give their pedophile pervert priests a constant supply of young boys to rape.

The irony, of course, is that an industrial strength serial-bankrupt adulterer that my parents voted for is the one that gave them control of our highest court.

Living in America under today’s media reminds me strongly of Captain Picard being tortured and repeatedly asked “How many lights do you see? and being electrocuted and beaten every time he refuses to be broken.

And of course my parents are eating shit and grinning about it and gladly saying “I see five lights, of course, thank you, may we have some more bullshit please?”.

Their goal is to make everyone insane.

(Picard told his Cardassian torturer he saw four lights, which is the correct amount of lights, all throughout the process. In the end, I think he confided in Riker that he had been exposed to so much abuse that he really did start to see five lights, but he still said “four” because he wasn’t about to give his torturers the satisfaction of having broken him.)

I view American politicians and their “news” as the Cardassians of Star Trek. Evil, menacing, gaslighting fucks. They’ll plunder and rape an entire population while telling it they are their benevolent protectors.

The United States went from Chattel Slavery to Wage Slavery.

The way it works is “You’re free, but the invisible whip (not to be confused with Wonder Woman’s) is that if you don’t work, you don’t have food, medical care, or shelter, and you will run out of money quickly. Then they steal your retirement from you. But you’re free and the government is your benevolent protector. Oh, and don’t get any funny ideas about saving money because we’ll raise government spending and inflate it all away.”

My spouse comes home every day, pissed off. Walmart is cutting hours again (to the just and the unjust alike, because fuck morale) to do a “quiet layoff”, boss yells at you for doing what their handheld computer told you to, then the next day you get called in and told thanks for never being late for work in three years.

Then I get to deal with him in that mood until he settles into bed and does what we all do these days. Try to imagine a world that doesn’t so closely resemble Hell.

By not having children, my gift to the world is less contention for jobs, food, oil, resources in general, and healthcare and education to the next generation. They have enough of a mess on their plate already. More than anyone deserves.

The wealthy elite that Lord over us run this system and try to make this an argument about race and generational blame and stuff.

I mean, Bill Gates alone hoards $150 billion dollars and pays next to nothing in tax. “I gave all my money away and it doubled because that’s how philanthropy works.” while everyone else is fucked.

The system has stolen, the Republicans and the Catholic church, has stolen my retired mother down to the point where she didn’t have a hundred bucks to have the muffler welded back onto the 2003 Impala that I had fixed up and then gave back to her.

She backed over a curb the other day and was dragging it around and the mechanic felt sorry for her and said she could come back and pay him on Wednesday.

She let a series of increasingly domineering and abusive (her second one physically) men in her life that drained the bank account and mostly took up space (the only one she was married to that pulled his goddamn weight financially, and never cheated on her or beat her was my father, but he was a tyrant in his own ways), so it does stand to reason that she would vote for them too.

What Frightens Me the Most About Stock Investing? “AI” (Microsoft, Google, Coca-Cola…..) Bonus: Crypto and Samsung

“AI” frightens me.

No, not the thought of living in the Future War of The Terminator. Skynet said that it “evolves in seconds”. ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Bard still get simple interest wrong and can’t tell me what things will cost when I ask them to factor in coupons or rebates.

NPR’s article about “AI” building rockets that would explode if anyone tried building them was just amusing. We’re a long way off from rockets when GPT and Bard can’t tell me how much interest $1,000 will make in 5 years if I put it in a CD that compounds daily at a given APY.

The entire point of “generative AI” is to create a seductive mirage for stock investors.

Google and Microsoft are examples of giant tech companies whose established products are still fairly widely used despite having degenerated quite a bit.

Google and Microsoft Bing search are an arm of the state propaganda mills, and Windows 11 is noticeably slower than Windows 10 even on faster hardware, carrying on Microsoft’s usual tradition there, and even Windows XP was more reliable in terms of uptime and hotfixes and service packs installing and rebooting successfully.

According to Gartner (which itself is Microsoft-affiliated), PC shipments have fallen more than 30% in the first quarter of 2023 vs. the comparable period last year, and so new PCs sales are not happening. Are people switching to Macs? Apple had the worst decline of a single OEM. Even worst than Lenovo.

Microsoft has basically given up on demanding “TPM 2.0” or new PCs, and has unofficially started trying to cannibalize all the Windows 10 systems it can by waving them through. Figuring that they’ll at least make some extra money with all of the additional adware and spyware if they can’t sell you on a new PC?

No, Microsoft said that they would make money with “Cloud”, but even Yahoo Finance articles admit that “Cloud” revenue growth is slowing and will be a disappointing miss.

There’s simply nothing here to justify MSFT stock nearly doubling in the last few years and it’s time to dump it if you have it.

Every major company, even Coca-Cola (we don’t want your White money), has “plans” to “Chaff Bot” now. This has jumped the shark already and they’ve been at it for less than 60 days. Amazing!

Consider the amount of money and potential being wasted to juice the stocks while the important people dump shares and, hey it’s not insider trading if it’s scheduled, right? 😉

Bill Gates himself has to know full well that GPT is a great big fat nothingburger, but the speculation makes him other people’s money, so he’s buying columns talking it up about how it will teach your kids to read. (Don’t teachers already do this?)

The “AI” bullshit was a major factor in my decision to exit stocks in the retirement portfolio recently. I expect the bond fund to right-size because those are binding obligations to pay and with a very low default rate, and prioritized during bankruptcy proceedings.

(Like Bed, Bath, and Beyond…. Now if only they had put out a press release about using AI to sell people coffee makers and pillows, and sold shares are horrifically inflated costs with no promise to pay anyone back.)

Walmart recently fired their global chief of marketing. This is the guy that said they were going to start selling NFTs and taking Cryptocurrency.

I read a news article today about the US Government’s war on crypto. At first it was just the IRS, then it was the New York “Department of Financial Services”, and now it’s the SEC.

The SEC just issued a notice to Coinbase that is the final step, usually, before criminal charges. Coinbase is threatening to exit the United States.

There are no Crypto exchanges you can trust. Ask FTX and Celsius customers.

Ask people who used Uphold and have Uphold freezing their account or money disappearing, and nobody from Uphold will talk to them.

Crypto had its day. Now these companies are saying there’s “AI”.

The reason why Microsoft can burn so much time in Azure to run GPT is because they weren’t doing anything with it. It was sitting there as dead, unsold, capacity.

They’ve cooked up this thing, and it’s an utter scam, and people will lose their life savings if they don’t get out quickly.

Investors should take serious note of the fact that while Microsoft is trumpeting an AI that returns false information, and can’t be fixed, they fire thousands of people in Bing, Edge, and other divisions that are responsible, theoretically, for fixing it.

It shows that their plans are, in fact, to deceive investors about what the potential future applications for generative AI really are, and not to fix it, and to dump inflated shares before the little people using Robinhood and their 401(k) to invest in Microsoft lose their asses on it.

This is a picture of the history of Microsoft stock.

When a stock moves like this, tread very lightly.

You see that little bump way back between 1986 and 2004?

That was around 1998-2001. The DotCom Bubble.

Hardly a blip compared to what’s been building up recently.

Microsoft isn’t alone at severely overvalued “tech” companies.

There is a wipeout coming.

And it’s not only fraudulent accounting, “AI” hype, and such. It’s not just “irrational exuberance” as Alan Greenspan might say.

A lot of it is also legal embezzlement, known as “share buybacks”, which are done to increase executive pay. Share buybacks should be illegal. They don’t add value. They destroy value.

Democrats in Congress put a 1% tax on share buybacks into law.

That’s better than nothing (which is what the Republicans want), but it doesn’t do very much to discourage them.

It’s saying “We’re going to let you do something incredibly wrong and fraudulent, but we want some money first.”

Captured government.

Don’t look for the government to help you. They’re figuring out how to shut down your retirement money and take it all back so they can bail banks out again; so they can run Super-TARPs.

As an investor in a retirement plan, there’s just not many safe options, but given that last year was already the worst year in 250 years for Bonds, I think that other people have taken the hit and fixed income will be the name of the game for a while.

I think that Gold and Silver could do well too. At some point, the large market caps are going to have to be companies that really make things and mine things and build things again. This tech surge is a seductive mirage.

“Intellectual Property” is just a fancy way of saying “slavery with extra steps”. It’s a way to extract rents from the productive sectors using nothing but the threat of law.

That being said, while some companies do make money like this, it’s normally a form of economic parasitism. “Non-Practicing Entities” and “Patent Trolls” come to mind, but Microsoft operates like this too, and it ruins companies that made stuff.

I was reading my email today, and Samsung emailed me about having until July to remove everything from “Samsung Cloud” before it got deleted.

I don’t even have a Samsung phone anymore. They turned a loyal customer into “Eww, Samsung.” with the increasingly buggy firmwares, and shoveling Microsoft crap into the phone and making it impossible to remove fully.

Then when I found secret Facebook spyware running in the background by default (“facebook service” or something), it was the last straw. I wiped the phone (which was malfunctioning anyway thanks to T-Mobile making my Sprint phone, which they sold me, incompatible with their network), and used T-Mobile’s buyback to switch to a Pixel.

Microsoft doesn’t add value, they ruin it. I can’t imagine that I was the only Samsung phone user who saw Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft popping up everywhere and went “LOL, no!”.

Bill Gates said in one of his “Creepy Uncle Says” articles the other day, that his “biggest mistake” was not “making Windows Phone what Android is today”, when “that was a natural place for Microsoft to be”.

Microsoft had Windows Phones, and they were cheap. Nobody wanted them. The only way they could dispose of them was selling them at a loss to Cricket Wireless customers with bad FICO scores and writing them off their taxes.

But they came back and forced themselves, as in rape, on people who used something else. That’s what they do. They corrupt and corrode. Samsung is finished.

The Galaxy S20 was the worst tech thing I ever bought, and I’m just glad I didn’t end up selling it to Amazon for a bag of cat food because T-Mobile offered me a 100% credit for giving it back.

It was such a bad phone (mostly because of the Microsoft deal) that I went in and said “Show me the iPhones and the Google phones.”

And almost like some sort of horrible comedy, the guy says “We’ll give you a Galaxy S22 if you want one.” I was like, “No.” He says, “Well it is a more expensive phone.” and I replied, “Well then anyone who pays that and gets another Samsung has my sympathy.”

Microsoft can’t seem to really enter into new markets, but it can do an enormous amount of damage on the way down. It’s basically turning Samsung into the sequel of what happened to Nokia.

There’s no telling exactly when this stock market is coming down, but it is probably “soon” and when it does, it will come down hard, and they’re not going to tell you when they plan to do it to you.

The people gravitating towards Microsoft and its ilk will get burned worse than others.

In the meantime, we can all enjoy the comedy. CNBC calls the Business Software Alliance (a legal trolling outfit operated by Microsoft, Adobe, and a few others, best known for running ads encouraging people to rat their employers out for “unlicensed software”) a “tech advocacy group” calling for “AI regulations”.

:/

Re-Balancing Mom’s Retirement. Chinese investments?

So, mom finally did set up online access to her retirement account and let me see the disaster her employer made for her.

For starters, they never submitted her beneficiary paperwork that she turned in after her divorce 8 years ago, so if anything had happened to her, her ex-husband would have inherited all of the money.

So we fixed that.

Then I took a look at the allocations that they made.

They threw a woman in her mid 60s in a fund that would have been more appropriate (risk) for a 30 year old.

The people setting these funds up are stupid. Just absolutely stupid.

She’s old enough that she’s making catch up contributions, and they had her in stocks including emerging markets (in South America, Asia, CHINA!!!), when none of those places are reliable investment opportunities.

You might make money in China, on paper, now try to get it out.

I read about a man who made $4.5 billion in Chinese investments and then tried to get it out of the country and bring it to the US, and the only thing the bank gave him were excuses about why he couldn’t have it. Questions about why he wanted it. He’s got $4.5 billion sitting there and the Chinese are such unreliable “investment partners” that they wouldn’t let him have it.

Now, with mom’s previous allocation, only about 3% was emerging markets.

But why in God’s name would you want any money in a country like China that says you can’t have it when you ask for it?

If you want a lot of money sitting there taunting you that you can’t actually have, you would have loved Celsius and FTX, which were just great. Just as good as Tencent.

So I blew that away and set up a nice re-balanced portfolio with 80% investment grade bonds and 20% stocks, mostly large cap US and developed countries with open markets and solid regulatory frameworks.

Growth prospects in the US and other developed countries are limited, but there’s some good dividend stocks to hold that aren’t going anywhere soon and where you can actually sell them and have money. There’s tight regulations around Bond funds here too. Do you really want to own Chinese bonds?

I don’t know how many lumps people who invest in China are going to have to take before they realize what’s going on over there.

China’s economy is mismanaged as Hell and if there’s going to be losses, their philosophy is that foreign investors will get fucked before their own, and if there’s a Chinese bank crisis (and there is), then their own people not only don’t get access to their funds through their version of the FDIC, but if they complain about losing ALL of their money in a failed Chinese bank, they get kidnapped by men in a van who show up so that they can be shown what comes next if they go to Beijing to complain to the authorities.

What kind of investment partner has this going on?

Who wants this crap in their retirement account?

Anyway, so this is the mess I’ve been tasked with sorting out, and I disposed of the unreliable investment allocations.

I’m glad I don’t live in China. For so many reasons. I mean, like not having the police show up if I book airline tickets out and ask why I’m traveling because they’re scared that I’ll claim asylum when I get there is good. That’s a good place to start.

You put money in a bank and you don’t know what will happen if the bank goes under.

People living in the West might talk of cash shortages at ATMs or pressure to use the banking system or weird laws where they ask why you want lots of money, but we’re a long way from having no FDIC and kidnappers who show up in a van for people who complain about it.

In many ways, China isn’t just an authoritarian dictatorship, their banking system is really underdeveloped. They claim there’s deposit insurance but then what actually happens during a bank run is more like the US in the 1920s.

It would just really scare me to have any exposure to their markets.

As part of the things you couldn’t say or risk being kicked off “Social Media” a couple years ago, the Chinese Police Stations in the US are finally being reported in the Mainstream Media. They have to now because the government, which knew they were there and didn’t stop them until now, is arresting Chinese Secret Police agents.

When I quoted CNN and NPR about the Chinese Police Stations, “stux” cited that post as one of the reasons I was thrown off of mstdn dot social.

The left is still out there censoring this stuff even though it is now UNDENIABLE PROVEN FACT.

In addition to the two arrests in New York, there’s 28 Chinese Secret Police officials that are connected to that which are on the FBI’s wanted list.

You can’t criticize China. You can’t criticize China. You can’t criticize China.

No matter what crimes they are committing against your country, if you say it, you will have your Social Media accounts terminated.

And now it’s proven. They run illegal Secret Police Stations in the US which are harassing and threatening Americans. Biden was letting it go on, he was censoring the news, until he had to respond to breaches in our airspace with “something”.

So then the government, which knew about the Secret Police Stations all along, took the media blacklist off and made some arrests. That’s nice.

Cheaper than shooting down a $30,000 balloon with scrambling a fighter jet ($100,000) and shooting a missile at it ($400,000).

It’s not that Trump was any better. Apparently there were five of these damned things and all he did was let it happen and not talk about it.

The US government is looking pretty impotent under our most recent two Presidents, which are letting the enemy honk our nose and pull our underwear up over our head.

It really is demoralizing.

The MSM is both admitting all this stuff they were censoring before, and yet when you quote them, you still get called “a hoax” and thrown off “Social Media”, so someone isn’t getting the latest memos, apparently.

De-Dollarization?

I doubt it. Anyone who goes along with this will find out quickly that the Chinese are even more duplicitous than the American government.

If you “standardize” on the Yuan, you will hold a currency that is pegged to the Dollar anyway, and it will be issued by a bunch of double-dealing backstabbers who run a regime of terror against their own citizens.

You may even find that your investments can’t actually be sold for money later.

What the Hell are you supposed to do with Chinese Funny Money that can’t even leave the country, I wonder.

Maybe the ones that go along with it will be these unstable hyperinflationary BRICS countries that have been taken over by corrupt Socialists. It’s very easy for the Chinese to turn these places into a debt colony.

Although a lot of these “Belt and Road Initiative loans” have been denominated in US Dollars. So the Chinese may be slowing their purchase of Treasuries, but they still have to buy USD while they put their own citizens on the hook for expensive loans to banana republics.

Already, these loans are falling apart and the Chinese banks are just “adjusting the terms” to try to claim that it’s not a loss.

The United States tried to go down the same road a long time ago and trying to run an empire gets expensive and unravels eventually anyway.

Even if you can get your money out of China, why help them build their economy?

It’s bad enough that we have all these Chinese imports while so many Americans are out of work. That’s just starting to change, but in the mean time the best way to deal with China is to yank your retirement funds out of their companies and defund them.

If people take an active interest in their portfolios and gang up on China, we can do something about them even while our own government is coddling them.

401(k) Retirement Fund Day Trading. The Economy, the IRS and Bond, AGG Bond.

I just don’t like what I’m seeing out there in Corporate America these days.

All signs to me have my spidey sense twitching that stagnation is going to end with a huge market crash sometime later in the year.

I hate to call what’s been going on “secular stagnation” because it would imply that there is no demand for goods and services. There’s actually a lot of demand, but it’s hard, with all of the layoffs and stagnant paychecks, to earn enough to fulfill this demand.

The reason that the Fed is hiking rates anyway while the Bureau of Labor Statistics has turned into something that would make Joseph Stalin proud, is that they created a mess with the “pandemic” “stimulus” and now they have to contain it.

During Stalin’s reign over the USSR, his Census officials brought him data that the population of the USSR had collapsed, so he had them all shot and the new ones brought him better figures.

While we’re not seeings American civil servants shot, we are seeing them lose THEIR jobs if the President doesn’t like what he sees.

In May of 2020, Trump had the BLS outright fake how many Americans had just lost their jobs in a single month, because the figures were horrific.

At the same time, he had the CDC model that only 56,000 Americans would die of COVID and that it would stop in August. We’ve lost over 1.5 million and COVID is still out there. My Grandmother in the nursing home just got it again.

When the Census was happening, Trump’s Census officials, true to their Stalinist inspiration, made absolutely no effort to count my spouse and me in Illinois, they didn’t even send us a form or a Census taker. Meanwhile, in states like Florida and Indiana, they had people driving around claiming that empty houses had entire families living in them.

And nothing, fundamentally, has improved, under Joe Biden. When the FDA was considering Aduhelm, their Scientific Advisory Panel voted almost unanimously against it. The FDA approved it anyway, nearly the entire Panel resigned, and they were replaced with more compliant officials.

My point, is, that in this day and age, you can trust little of what you see or hear.

Joe Biden has inherited all of the Organs of State that Donald Trump corrupted so badly, and uses them in the same manner.

The banking crisis last month is still bubbling under the surface, waiting to come back with a vengeance, while the officials pat themselves on the back for saving everybody.

Looking at the layoffs going on, the debt people are in, it’s clear that America is anything but a bunch of happy campers living in a well-adjusted country.

It’s a sad, sick, badly sick, place to live.

The stock market though, is stagnant. It’s been stagnant ever since Joe Biden has been in office. When you deduct the banking fees to manage my spouse’s 401(k) plan, there’s been no gains at all.

Given the limited fund options, I decided to execute a sell order for all of the S&P 500 ETF shares last night, purchase 100% shares in the Bond Index Fund which tracks the Bloomberg Barclays Aggregate Bond Index, and call it good.

This fund took massive losses last year while the Fed was hiking rates. Down nearly 16%.

Will the Fed continue hiking? Perhaps. But there’s starting to be a lot of arguments among Fed officials as to whether and by how much they can continue to get away with this before things blow up.

I think the fund has oversold and it’s still a very good value right now. If there are more Fed hikes, I think they will be muted (25 basis points at a time) for at least a while, as they try to gauge what the market response to all of this is.

The rapid hikes over the last 11 months or so jolted the Bond markets and rattled investors, because it caused “losses” in the form of making bonds paying lower rates sell at a steep discount to compensate what investors could make by buying newly issued bonds at higher rates.

Now that this has returned to something closer to undervalued to maybe fair value, the small rate hikes shouldn’t agitate the funds that much anymore, considering that the duration of the holdings averages 5-7 years, and so you have old bonds that the fund booked a loss on rolling off and being replaced with better bonds that lock in higher rates.

My primary concern is inflation risk, but that’s a risk where you don’t make enough in the fund to compensate for inflation.

This is not much of a concern when stock funds are doing poorly anyway, because you make no money there and inflation is still happening.

This is offset by the fact that the Bond Index Fund has a much lower expense ratio than the S&P 500 ETF. Every quarter, the bank statements assess a small fee for managing the funds, and the fee for being in the Bond Index Fund is about 150 times lower than the S&P 500 ETF. It’s not a huge difference with what we have in the account at this point, but it is something. The bank itself is a drag on your retirement.

What about default risk in bonds?

Well, first of all, the primary component (43% iirc) is United States federal government bonds, so those are quite safe.

The rest are a mix of corporate, state and local government debts, mortgage-backed securities, etc.

The good news is that when a bankruptcy happens in a corporation, if there is any money left, the bondholders get paid first. Then, and only then, if there is anything left, do stockholders get anything. For them it will be pennies, but they have a greater chance of being completely wiped out.

As it stands, the default rate in the AGG is only 1.01%. It’s quite low.

Even assuming no returns at all this year, why dial up your pretax 401(k) anyway?

I dialed my spouse’s up to 14% on his side. His employer will match 6%. We had been taking the 6%, but he just got a raise, our fixed-income investments at the bank (CDs) and bonds are earning more lately, and this is all taxable income on our 1040 at the end of the year.

In addition, there have been some massive class action settlements, mostly related to the Illinois BIPA, and the Facebook Cambridge Analytics Scandal.

I expect that this might push us over the AGI to claim the full $1,000 of the Retirement SAVERS Tax Credit, which is something the IRS puts out to encourage lower income workers to save for retirement.

So if you shove more money into your pretax account at work, it lowers your AGI, and you can still qualify for the credit, even if your “Social Security and Medicare Income” on your W-2 are still a fair bit higher.

Traditional 401(k) pretax contributions are not the only way to get your AGI down.

Much of the insurance your employer offers can do it too, including health, dental, and vision premiums in many cases. If your employer offers you the choice, take the pretax premiums.

(Why are your Social Security and Medicare earnings still taxed at the full gross income level? Well, be glad they are! Your earnings record is how Social Security determines what to pay you when you claim it.)

For older couples where one is still working and the other gets Social Security, or people who get Social Security and still have W-2 income, the case for doing pretax 401(k) contributions is greater.

See, the more your earned income on the tax return goes up (from either spouse or for you if you’re single), the more Social Security income becomes taxable.

Using pre-tax 401(k) contributions and putting in more, you can “bend the curve” and bring down your taxable Social Security benefits at the same time.

Here’s a calculator so you can try that yourself.

Most low income workers completely ignore the tax benefits of 401(k) accounts.

You should always aim to be under the maximum AGI (which those pretax contributions can get you to even if you make more!) for the Retirement SAVERS Credit, even if it puts a pinch on your household finances or you have to break open something like those No Penalty CDs I’ve been buying up with our Savings.

That $1,000 credit comes directly, dollar-for-dollar, off your tax obligation at the end of the year (but it’s not refundable, so you can’t go below $0, although if you get to $0 and still had refundable credits, it could get you another $1000 because the refundable credits would start from $0 and keep going!).

In our case, it leaves us with an annual tax obligation to the feds of a few hundred instead of well north of a thousand, because we can lower the AGI using top of the line deductions.

Does it mean that we don’t go to Disney World and lay out $8,000 and come back to reality with banks and hospitals on the phone wondering where their money is?

Yes, we live within our means. We don’t “buy nothing”, but I make sure that our accounts are in order.

Even low income workers should save for retirement and do some financial planning, it’s not that hard.

We have no debts, we have a low tax obligation, and we have money in retirement funds.

Meanwhile, my in-laws…. My sister-in-law has three jobs, her husband has two I think. They make several hundred thousand a year. They make no headway with the 7 credit cards, the mortgage with the property tax bill that goes skyrocketing every year because it’s Illinois, the two kids that cost them millions of dollars and contribute nothing to the household budget, and the three car payments and repair bills.

It’s easier to have a good head on your shoulder for finances than it is to be a five job, two kid, no income household.

Facebook is dying. Part II.

In my last post, I mentioned that Social (Control) Media is dying off, and we’re no worse for wear because of it.

I noted that Musk was ruining Twitter (as a business) and clearly had no idea what to do, because he has no successful businesses on their own merit, which make profit without ripping off the public via government theft of wages. (Taxation to give to private companies as endless bailouts.)

Musk is hardly alone. Many of the large US corporations operate this way.

Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has gone totally crazy. Like Vladimir Putin deciding to invade Ukraine crazy.

He’s thrown so much money into the “Metaverse” VR crap, which everyone mocks, and most people who actually did buy the expensive headsets gave up trying to use within their first month, that he’s wiped out over $268 billion of wealth and climbing just with this, and only with the top 10 investors in Facebook.

Most of the loss goes to Zuckerberg, but in many cases, Facebook shares were stuffed into people’s retirement accounts like some sort of a Ponzi scheme, without their consent, because it was part of a passive fund.

(Most American workers have no control over their retirement investments, either because a pension fund “takes care of that” or because they’re in some sort of corporate savings schemes like 401(k) and 403(b), where they have to choose between funds, and they all have some shit in the plumbing so there is no perfect outcome.)

Facebook is failed. It has plunged in “book value” by over $700 billion in the past year. It just sacked 11,000 people today in “Round 1” (means more to come….), and it admits it will lose many more billions of dollars in “Metaverse” before Mark Zuckerberg runs the company into the ground completely.

Any one problem that Facebook has would be bad for the company, but probably not fatal.

Unfortunately for them, they’ve seen ad revenues decline as America enters quite possibly a worse recession than 2008, and their CEO has not only failed to see the recession coming, but blew through their cash reserves instead of investing it into the products people are actually “engaging” with. They have some, but they’re being utterly neglected due to the VR nonsense.

Zuckerberg takes advantage of the somewhat unique structure of Facebook to do whatever he wants with it (he set it up so he gets a lot of votes) and his investors only have two options. Sit there and continue to get thumped by a CEO who is squandering assets, or dump their shares for whatever they can get today, which floods the market with shares that nobody wants at lower and lower prices.

I do wish the people who are losing their jobs the best of luck in the 2023 Hunger Games.

Maybe some of them can even find a job that _benefits_ society next time instead of pampering my parents, both of which are right-wing cranks who are level 12 susceptible to paranoid conspiracy theories and propaganda, with a feedback bubble which makes them feel validated, or like they’re in some sort of clear majority in their political opinions, which get even more fringe by the year thanks to this gaslighting.

If my parents were a lot more astute than they actually are, they would notice that it was Jack Welch (GE/RCA merger, dad) and the Catholic Church (mom) who screwed them on their retirement and left them to rot, and Republicans that allowed it and are coming for their Social Security money while they worry about non-existent threats like “brown people from other countries”, like the Fox News telescreens order them to.

In his case, he got his from a wealthy Republican businessman, and in her case, the pension turned out to be nothing more than an unsecured promissory note from a Mafia-affiliated group of pedophiles with a city-state in the middle of Italy. Will they never learn?

(Rhetorical. People who haven’t figured it out by 71 or 65 probably won’t. Mom still swears up and down that the Archdiocese told them their pensions were guaranteed for 20 years. Just like they were previously guaranteed for “as long as you live”, and before that they were “guaranteed to grow until you’re 66”, then “63”, then “62”, then “nobody new gets a pension and yours is frozen NOW”. How much money is there really? Nobody will say. Where is it invested? “Don’t worry!”)

Even if the unemployed Facebook and Twitter workers take a job at Taco Bell, slinging cheap tacos and burritos at people who are stoned at 2 AM is neutral to the fabric of our society.

Facebook and Twitter are as corrosive as Xenomorph blood and I wish the platform a swift and total demise. But they’ve already done insurmountable harm to people like my parents.

Mom spent all of COVID bashing me for being responsible and levelheaded enough to get me and my spouse our vaccines. For wearing masks at large gatherings. For using hand hygiene. And we didn’t get COVID, and they got….COVID and the flu at her house, at the same time.

She lacks the ability to comprehend how vaccines work, or even the very basics of germ theory, which is unfortunate since she’s a nurse.

Many political confederates of mom and dad are no longer with us because listening to the Party of Trump was the last mistake they ever made.

But even as they witnessed millions of each other dying on ventilators, they still proclaim it was all a hoax.

This is what happens when you’re watching Fox News and looking at Facebook all day.

Facebook waited until this country was on the verge of being overthrown in a coup before they even thought to ban Trump. It took _days_ after for them to claim they made a very brave decision.

In the background, they didn’t want to do it. They wanted dimwits looking at Facebook, even if Trump was the reason why. It helped them sell ads.

Facebook is too dangerous to continue. Fortunately, I doubt we will need to endure it for too much longer.