Category: Politics

I’ve posted before about the importance of the fiduciary standard for investment advisors. It would seem like an obvious statement, but when your advisor isn’t required to put your interests first, bad things can happen.

This is a horrible story of how teachers get screwed in their investments due to the lack of a fiduciary. Teacher retirement plans are 403(b) plans like 401(k) plans, with two key differences. a 401(k) plan is managed by your employer and the plan managers are held to the fiduciary standard. They must put the employees interests first. Teacher 403(b) plans are sold directly to the individual teachers, and more importantly there is no fiduciary responsibility. So salesmen can sell whatever generates the most commision.

It starts with a social studies teacher who was a former currency trader. Other teachers asked him to look at their investments and he was horrified:

He couldn’t believe what he saw. Many of his fellow teachers were in high-cost annuities, lured by tax-deferred growth and a lifetime stream of income. It made no sense—savers don’t need income; they need growth. And they don’t need tax-deferred products, since their retirement plans were already tax shelters. For these unnecessary “features,” the annuities imposed high sales charges on every paycheck withdrawal. And a 2% annual management fee. And large surrender fees of, say, 7%.

It’s a good, but very sad read.

If you need a primer on what fiduciary means, watch this:

This article is painful to read. When people talk about Canada or the UK rationing health care, keep this in mind.

Clark had to decide: Should she take Lily to the emergency room?

She called a poison control hotline and the answer was yes: A Dramamine overdose could lead to seizures. The little girl should be monitored. When Clark asked what doctors would likely do, she was told they would likely give her activated charcoal and possibly pump her stomach.

But Clark knew that the emergency room can be expensive. A few months earlier, she’d gone to the emergency after falling down her friend’s stairs. She ended up with a $1,200 bill that she still hadn’t paid.

“I’m weighing my options,” Clark says. “She could have a seizure at any moment. It felt terrible, as a parent, to be in the position of having to do that.”

Clark and her husband decided to give Lily some activated charcoal at home and drive to the emergency room. But they wouldn’t go inside.

Instead, they pulled their car into the second row of the parking lot, about 100 feet from the entrance.

https://twitter.com/cbaisa/status/1123400061143126017?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1123400061143126017&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Fhealth-care%2F2019%2F5%2F10%2F18526696%2Fhealth-care-costs-er-emergency-room

Offered without comment…

And I follow politics…

https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/1123336986276847616

I wasn’t expecting to find a graphic design seminar on the conservative political site The Bulwark, but I did and it’s good. Jonathan V. Last has a compelling discussion of campaign logo design.

The tl;dr; version is Beto and Mayor Pete good, Kamala and Biden not so good.

Beto:

Total consistency for the product mark.

And the mark itself is incredibly striking. Designer Tony Casas took the candidate’s uncommon nickname, rendered it in a strong, ALL CAPS Abolition font. This gave him roughly a 16:9 ratio block to play with, so he stuck the whole thing inside a rectangle. And then he did something radical: Stark black and white.

Mayor Pete:

There’s a lot to like here.

• We have a central design—”Pete” inside an abstracted bridge.
• That design has been pre-adapted to three different formats: landscape, circle, and square.
• The designer has an entire color palette for the brand, relying on soft and earthy colors: Primarily blues with a yellow, an orange, and tan/brown/gold.

Kamala Harris:

On paper, Harris, like Rubio, looks pretty formidable. And like Rubio, she has rolled out her campaign with a dumpster-fire logo. Seriously: It might be the worst political graphic design job in a generation.

This is part of a good article discussing various logos (and how good Obama’s was). Remember Obama’s?

Why is the Obama logo so great? Let us count the ways:

• It subverts your color expectations by using a warm, engaging pale blue.
• It conveys two types of motion: (1) The red road arching ahead into the distance moves your eye along the z-axis while, (2) The haze on the blue “O” gives the sense rising along the y-axis.
• It gives you pleasing, perfect symmetry: The circular “O” on top with the “Obama ‘08” tag on the bottom framed by the overhanging “O” and “8.”
• It can be used anywhere: On hats, yard signs, bumper stickers, pins—you could even substitute the logo for the “O” (or the design elements) in any word you wanted to mate to the campaign.

And finally, today we got Biden’s:

If you believe Biden’s launch video, he decided to run for president in August of 2017. This logo looks like it was thrown together last night.

Leave aside the red-striped “E” (which is an off-the-shelf element) and the color palette (which might as well be called “American Politics, Generic”) and just look at the positioning of the circles in this trainwreck. We have four of them—the outer circle, the “O” in “Joe,” and then two zeroes in “2020.”

These circles should either be balanced or pointing in some sort of thematic direction. Or giving a sense of movement. Instead, they’re arranged haphazardly, like someone just threw darts at a board:

This scattershot arrangement is why your eye positively hates this logo.

…

So many questions. “Am I the only one who thinks this logo makes it look like his name is Jo?” has been posed by multiple people on Twitter.

I love this stuff…

I know, clickbait headline. Some interesting charts from Brad DeLong. It would appear that reducing the top marginal tax rate increases income inequality.  Go figure.

This one is just interesting for historical reasons. Michael Dell (of Dell computers) was asked about a 70% top marginal tax rate at Davos a day or two ago and said, “where has that ever worked?”. The interviewer, to his credit, said “the United States?”. People forget that we had a 90% top rate during the extremely strong 50’s.

 

Alexandra Petri may be the funniest political writer around these days…

Lone guy at Fox News still worried about caravan, embarrassing colleagues

The “Fox & Friends” producer, accustomed to checking the screen every minute to watch the familiar ominous footage as hosts asked creepy, leading rhetorical questions about it, was shocked to see it was no longer there. “What about the diseases and terrorism?” he kept asking as his colleagues tried to avoid making eye contact with one another so they would not burst into laughter. “My whole family is in a bunker! We went to the polls explicitly because of this issue and the president’s effective messaging on it.”