Crossposted from (http://www.ldnetwork.tv/2009/05/20/editorial-the-unintended-consequences-of-credit-card-reform/)

This week with wide support and much fanfare, the US Senate passed a bill called the “Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights Act of 2009″, touted as a measure to “protect” us against the “evil greedy” credit card companies. Let’s get the the basic facts straight though. No one is required to use a credit card. No one is required to carry balances over each month. No one is required to spend up to the limit of five or more credit cards. I do realize emergencies happen, but I have yet to see any study or report that shows a large amount of credit card use to be anything but conspicuous consumption. Our problem with credit is not that we have tons of unprecedented emergencies, but simply that we spend too much. The problem with credit card balances are not the credit card company’s: we own that one.

That is not to say that credit card companies have our best interests (bad pun, har, hard) in mind, either. After all they are in the business of giving unsecured lines of credit to the general population, and currently they are in trouble as an industry for giving out credit lines to too many people with lousy credit histories. They’ve been poorly run and I have little sympathy for their self created problems. If they can’t be responsible in who they choose as customers, then good riddance. Go bankrupt for all I care.

So now, with the economy in shambles and politicians eager to earn brownie points with consumers who on average carry around $11,000 on credit cards, comes the warm and snuggly sounding bill that gives us consumers a new “bill of rights.” Credit card companies will now be restricted in rate increases, for how long they can increase rates, be required to make the fine print more obvious, and show people how long it will take to pay off their balances with the minimum payments. In other words, this bill is designed to limit revenue generated by credit card companies and provide information that people already have access to if they were responsible with their finances. While I don’t agree that the government needs to get involved in this, let’s all be honest with what this bill is really doing. If you believe this is indeed where government should intercede, fine. I understand where you’re coming from. I just don’t agree with it, and allow to explain why.

The credit card companies are going to react in some way. They’re going to react in ways Congress and Obama certainly haven’t considered. Let’s look at a few obvious ones that have already been thrown out there:

* Return of the annual fee
* A paring back of reward programs
* Fewer promotional rates and offers
* Job cuts

However, I think there is one change that might well happen but no one seems to have discussed. Credit card companies might in fact, raise credit limits. This might seem counter intuitive, but it seems to me to play into human behavior. Consumers will not change behavior because of this bill. They might because of the economy, but not because of this bill. Credit card companies will need to make up the revenue somewhere, so why not increase limits and take the interest off of larger balances. I honestly think that is where this bill creates incentives. Instead of seeing rates of 18% on $3,000 balances, you’ll see 9% on $6,000.

Using a calculator from bankrate.com, a $3,000 balance at 18% paying the monthly minimum, will cost you $1716.00 in interest. Using the other scenario, you will pay $1355 in interest. While the credit card company took a 21% hit in revenue, you went into twice as much debt. At 11% interest rate is where the credit card company gets back to the same amount. Surely, a credit line of $6,000 at 11% will seem like a great deal compared to $3,000 at 18%. The former looks like the deal of someone who is well off and is responsible, the latter perhaps the average consumer, but they pay off the same.

I think it is an almost certainty that the credit card companies will react in some way that will in the long term be more detrimental to consumers than if the government had never gotten involved. There will be unintended consequences not listed in this article, too. The government is removing a moral hazard from the consumer-credit card company relationship, and history has shown us that usually leads to unintended disasters. I wish our legislators would take more seriously the cause and effect of changing the incentives.

On a side note, I applaud the news networks for pointing out the completely unrelated rider attached to the bill allowing loaded handguns into national parks. However, I wish they would do it more often, that is, pointing out unrelated legislation, and not just when it’s about an issue they are either strongly for (Fox News) or strongly against (MSNBC).

I received this press release from Farm Sanctuary this morning:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Tricia Barry, Farm Sanctuary, 607-583-2225 ext. 233,
tricia@farmsanctuary.org

Farm Sanctuary Issues Statement on the Swine Flu Outbreak

Gene Baur: “Factory farms are…a prescription for disaster”

WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. – April 28, 2009 – Farm Sanctuary, the nation’s leading farm animal protection organization, today issued a statement from Gene Baur, president and co-founder, regarding the current global outbreak of swine flu originating in North America:

“For more than 23 years, Farm Sanctuary has warned that cramming thousands of animals into factory farms is not only bad for the animals. These stressful, filthy, disease-ridden confines are also bad for humans. Animals packed by the thousands in unnatural conditions suffer immensely and these unhealthy, overcrowded operations are a breeding ground for disease. For too long, agribusiness and the USDA have failed to adequately address animal and human health risks – swine flu, avian flu, MRSA, e-coli, salmonella, mad cow disease – the list goes on. Factory farms are nothing less than a prescription for disaster.”

Through its Anti-Confinement Campaign, Farm Sanctuary is urging the introduction and passage of legislation that would eliminate the use of some of the most common confinement systems in place on factory farms – gestation crates for breeding pigs, battery cages for egg laying hens and veal crates for calves. The organization is also urging passage of federal bills H.R. 1549 and S. 619 that would eliminate the use of sub-therapeutic antibiotics on factory farms. More information on pending legislation can be found at http://www.farmsanctuary.org/issues/legislation/.

Note: Photos and video b-roll footage of pig factory farms from Farm Sanctuary investigations are available by request. Please contact media@farmsanctuary.org.

About Farm Sanctuary

Farm Sanctuary is the nation’s leading farm animal protection organization. Since incorporating in 1986, Farm Sanctuary has worked to expose and stop cruel practices of the “food animal” industry through research and investigations, legal and institutional reforms, public awareness projects, youth education, and direct rescue and refuge efforts. Farm Sanctuary shelters in Watkins Glen, N.Y., and Orland, Calif., provide lifelong care for hundreds of rescued animals, who have become ambassadors for farm animals everywhere by educating visitors
about the realities of factory farming. Additional information can be found at farmsanctuary.org or by calling 607-583-2225.

One of the worse commentators on CNN has to be Roland Martin, and this week he did nothing to change my mind. I don’t want to rehash the whole Miss USA gay marriage answer debacle. If you’re against gay marriage, you might be thrilled at the answer Miss California gave, even if she sounded as inarticulate as she did. If you’re for gay marriage (or rather against state sponsored discrimination when it comes to marriage), you were probably appalled by both her answer and Perez Hilton’s douchey demeanor afterwards. Personally, I think beauty pageants are idiotic, and Perez Hilton is a lowlife purveyor of celebrity gossip trash.

However, it did indeed make news, so I’ve had to listen to a lot of gabbing about it on CNN. Today I noticed a commentary on how he appreciated the honesty of her answer (http://bit.ly/GWiQC). He defends her by comparing her position to Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, calling them the four of the biggest liberals in the country.

Yeah, whatever, Roland. I’m sure if she had said “The Bible tells me the races shouldn’t mix, so I’m against interracial marriage” you would be smiling and celebrating her honesty. Please. You’d be calling her a small minded racist Republican emblematic of the continued race problems in the United States. Because of your own religious beliefs, however, you’re just smiling and thanking her.

Look as a libertarian, I don’t think the state should have anything to do with marriage, however, that pipedream isn’t going to happen. The state has been in the business of regulating marriage too long to go back, so gays should have the right to marry, period. I don’t care what anyone’s particular translation of a 2,000 year old arbitrarily chosen set of fictional books says, gays have the Constitutional right to be treated equally under the law. If you don’t like that, well, you have some soul searching to do, because it was just two generations ago that people used the Bible to argue against interracial marriage, and even just interracial dating. As repulsive as that sounds now, I hope opposition to gay marriage sounds as repulsive when I’m old and gray and long retired.

Reference:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/22/martin.miss.california/index.html

I’m horrible about keeping in contact with my family. I’m of the generation who doesn’t believe in calling home or writing letters. I’m all about instant messaging and email…and I’m bad at doing that as well. So, I’m going to attempt to keep family members up to date with the old blog here. Most of you (you dont’ have to tell me Josh) will this boring I bet, so I’m just warnin’ ya.

So..what have I been up to?

Well, my job always has me busy, and it’s almost been twelve years since I started my current job. It seems like a long time to be at one job these days, but working in online world, the business and technology changes so much, I’m always doing something different and learning new stuff. I might have the same boss as I did twelve years ago, but I don’t have the same job.

At home, Kelly and I have finally gotten around to purchasing some major items for inside the house. We bought our new sectional for the living room. It seats 7 or 2 people and maybe 8 dogs. The dogs love it because they can all sit on the couch with us, and because it’s very comfortable. We also purchases shades for our office. We have three large windows that face directly west, and while we love the view, when the sun comes down, it sucks. My laptop overheats all the time, and the glare is horrible. So yesterday, we had three roman shades installed that block the sun completely. They work great. In full sun, I can even play games without losing anything to glare (I consider it a good test of glare to play a game with darkly lit scenes). My second office/studio also has a newly installed roller which covers the entire window, and allows me to work in there as well.

We’re also working on our garden. The weather hasn’t cooperated so much, as we’ve had a lot of rainy weekends. However, it’s looking like this week we’ll be able to get it setup. We’re using a combination of cardboard and carpet to keep the weeds at bay. Combined with the series of soaker hoses we have, we’re hoping this year is the year we achieve little or no weeding and easy watering. We have great soil and had a good crop last year (we still have stuff left over and frozen) and hope this one does as well.

Also, all the dogs and cats are doing well.

Well, that just about sums it up for this week. Enough of the familial Ambien!

Larry King is an enigma to me. He has somehow become an institution on CNN despite being one of the world’s worst interviewers and continuing to book peddlers of nonsense. He has given reptiles like Sylvia Browne a far bigger platform than someone of her (barely passable) cold reading skills deserves. This Friday, though, old Larry is reaching a new low. He is having Dr. Jenny McCarthy and Dr. Jim Carey on his show to talk about autism. Oh, wait, did I say doctors? Sorry, I meant, actress Jenny McCarthy and actor Jim Carey. It’s so hard to tell doctors and actors apart after all.

Thanks to the anti-vaccine movement, we are now seeing pockets of measles and polio rise out of places that had previously been free of those diseases. Nigeria, a country suspicious of western medicine, has had immunization boycotts and now is an exporter of polio to countries around it. In the United States, the only people who die of tetanus are those who aren’t vaccinated.

There is little debate in the scientific community that the world wide vaccination efforts mark one of the greatest achievements in modern medicine. Just a couple generations ago, smallpox, polio, measles, etc were commonplace. Our lifespan has increased because of this.

And now, we have Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carey, armed with nonsense and enough scientific sounding jargon to appear reasonable, telling parents to reject one societies greatest accomplishments. There isn’t a single study that I could find that has ever, ever linked vaccinations to autism. The one study, back in 1998, that got everything started has been debunked and discredited. Study after study since then has shown there is no link between vaccines and autism. None. Please, let’s get past this.

Now Jenny and Jim will be on Larry King, being interviewed by someone who probably won’t bother to read anything about vaccines, who will toss softballs all night, and who will unlikely challenge any of the drivel Jenny and Jim spout. Enough of this garbage from Larry King. Time to let him go off to pasture. Time to fire Larry King.

This past week Kelly was telling me about a contest she found on the Vegan Soapbox website, where readers were challenged to walk into a convenience store with ten dollars, and come out with ingredients to make a vegan dinner.

Here are the official rules:

The rules:

1. Go into any convenience store with ten bucks.
2. Choose vegan food.
3. Take it back to your house or motel room, add water, spices, herbs, or nutritional yeast if you like, to make a meal that serves one or more.
4. Add nothing else.

That’s it. The meal does not have to be super-healthy, low-fat, low-sugar or anything like that. It does need to be something that most of us would recognize as a meal, not a snack.

Post your pictures or at least your description of what you got and what you made here and tell us what convenience store you bought from. OR post your meal on your blog and give us the link here. [edited Mar 2, 2009: can post your meal on your blog and put the link here]

Deadline: March 31, 2009

On Thursday night, while we were out, we hit up a few convenience stores, but it was only on the third try (QuikTrip), that we found success.

Kelly had an idea to use Bisquick that would have worked, but we had a question about whether or not the egg replace was allowed under the rules. Looking at the ingredients available, and based on something Kelly mentioned at a previous store, a recipe came to me. To top it off, with a $1.36 left to spend, I found a 99 cent bag of vegan doritos as “dessert”. The following is the recipe (as written up by Kelly):

Shane’s Spicy Sweet Spaghetti

Ingredients

16 oz. pasta (we used thin spaghetti, American Beauty brand)
16 oz. salsa (we used medium, Don Pablo brand)
15.25 oz whole kernel corn (we used Green Giant brand, and only half a can)
5 oz Spanish / Manzanilla olives (we used Best Choice brand, and only 1/4 of a jar)
2 1/8 oz bag (or more) Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos
salt to taste

Directions

1. Prepare the pasta according to the directions on the package.

2. While the pasta is cooking, empty the entire jar of salsa into a medium saucepan and bring to a simmer. Add corn and quartered Spanish olives.

3. When pasta’s done, top with salsa sauce, season with salt to taste, and top with a Dorito(s) for decoration. Enjoy!

Makes: 2-3 servings of pasta. (The Doritos won’t last but five minutes!)

It was pretty good actually. I often times put Frank’s Original Red Hot on pasta, so the spicy factor is nothing new to me. I would definitely eat this again.

From some stupid report done for Missouri cops:

“It is not uncommon for militia members to display Constitution Party, Campaign for Liberty, or Libertarian material. These members are usually supporters of former Presidential Candidate: Ron Paul, Chuck Bladwin, and Bob Barr.”

More about it here:

http://www.reason.com/blog/show/132250.html

(crossposted from http://www.ldnetwork.tv

Note: Show is on Tuesday this week, 2/17 8:30 PM CST

Shane and Jonathan welcome author Adam Shepard to the show to talk about his book, Scratch Beginnings. From the book’s description:

Adam Shepard graduated from college in the summer of 2006 feeling disillusioned by the apathy he saw around him and incensed after reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s famous works Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch—books that gave him a feeling of hopelessness over the state of the working class in America. Eager to see if he could make something out of nothing, he set out to prove wrong Ehrenreich’s theory that those who start at the bottom stay at the bottom, and to see if the American Dream can still be a reality.

Shepard’s plan was simple. Carrying only a sleeping bag, the clothes on his back, and $25 in cash, and restricted from using previous contacts or relying on his college education, he set out for a randomly selected city with one objective: work his way out of homelessness and into a life that would give him the opportunity for success. His goal was to have, after one year, $2,500, a working automobile, and a furnished apartment.

But from the start, things didn’t go as smoothly as Shepard had planned. Working his way up from a Charleston, South Carolina homeless shelter proved to be more difficult than he anticipated, with pressure to take low-paying, exploitive jobs from labor companies, and a job market that didn’t respond with enthusiasm to homeless applicants. Shepard even began donating plasma to make fast cash. To his surprise, he found himself depending most on fellow shelter residents for inspiration and advice.

Earnest, passionate, and hard to put down, Scratch Beginnings is a story that will not only inspire readers, but will also remind them that success can come to anyone who is willing to work hard—and that America is still one of the most hopeful and inspiring countries in the world.

Show Links:

http://www.scratchbeginnings.com

(cross posted from The LD Network)

When President Obama ran for president, he ran on few solid issues or theories. He promised “Change” and told us to have “Hope”. Whether I liked the few policies he talked about or not, I had to hand it to him, he ran a great campaign. He was the right candidate at the right time with the right rhetoric. The press has swooned over Obama, repeating his calls for “Change” and “Hope”, while glossing over his lack of experience among other faults. No one could exactly call Obama a champion for gay rights, or a real sincere sounding voice for women’s rights, or a real stickler to keeping religion out of politics. The press didn’t call him out, but we at the Libertarian Dime did.

And now we have his presidency, a time for “Hope” and “Change” so goes the rhetoric. However, on the day after Obama was elected, I began telling people how disappointing he was going to be for those who either were looking for a far left agenda and/or the promise of change. For those on the right, I predicted Obama would “disappoint” them in the sense, that Obama will be far more centrist than the right was “hoping” for. I think on all counts I’ve been correct.

Obama has not been as liberal as some thought he would be. He has reached out to Republicans, he has increased the Faith Based Initiative programs, he has already put off for now allowing gays into the military, and in a moment of real symbolism, he waited until the day after the anniversary of Roe v Wade to overturn the “Mexico City Policy” that Republican presidents have enacted. When it came down to a stimulus package, those on the left were disappointed in the amount of “tax cuts” (I put that in quotes because there were no tax cuts in the bill, just tax credits). Some were disappointed that family planning funding was so easily cast aside to appease Republicans.

As for “Hope” and “Change”, well, Obama has failed to deliver either. From the first day of his presidency, he has been using the language of fear to ram the stimulus bill through Congress. When he speaks of the economy, he doesn’t talk about “Hope”, but instead tells everyone he can that unless we do “something” now, that the economy will become a catastrophe. Instead of inspiring Americans or educating Americans on how to deal with the recession, instead of talking about the great things that can come out of recessions, Obama has relied on fear, same as the Bush administration, to convince Americans to support his policies.

The Patriot Act was passed by using fear. The debacle known as TARP was passed by scaring everyone. Obama (and the Democrats) have not brought “change”. We’ve had eight years of encouraging people to buy by going into debt, eight years of budget busting spending, and eight years of “hit you over the head with it” fear mongering that has done little but expand the scope and power of government. Maybe the beneficiaries under Obama have different names, but from this libertarian’s seat, it all blends into the same non-change, non-hopeful blur.

This past Thursday, I took Ozzy back to the vet for his three week check up following his hell week of dealing with bladder stones and two surgeries. The purpose of the visit was to make sure he didn’t still have an infection and to x-ray him again to see if he had any remaining stones.

He came out with flying colors on both accounts. Everything appears back to normal. His appetite is voracious and his activity level is way up. I’m assuming he was somewhat sick for a while, and only when he was completely blocked up, did it finally show. He’s one tough little bastard though. The concern for kidney damage is no longer there, as he was able to process massive amounts of toxins in less than 48 hours. The only difference for him going forward is to keep him on a special food to prevent stones from forming again. He’s not on any special food related to kidneys. I’ve had him for ten years, and while I don’t really expect to have him for another ten, I could easily see him around when I turn forty.