Compared with 20 years ago, has the number of gun crimes in America gone up, gone down or stayed the same?

56% Gone up
26% Stayed the same
12% Gone down

Showing that, as the title of the article suggests, Americans have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to gun crime.

Here’s an excerpt from her TED2013 interview:

There are 50 million 20-somethings in the US — that’s 15% of population. And Jay wants them to consider themselves adults, and know that this period is as important for their development as the first five years of life. Because the first 10 years of a career have an exponential impact on how much money a person is going to earn. Love is the same way: Half of Americans are with their future partner by the age of 30.

“Claiming your 20s is one of simplest things you can do for work, happiness, love, maybe even for the world,” says Jay. ”We know your brain caps off its second and last growth spurt in your 20s as it rewires itself for adulthood. Which means whatever you want to change, now is the time to change it.”

So what can 20-somethings do? They can own their adulthood. They can invest in identity capital—courses, skills, friends—that add value toward who they might want to be. They can work on building a wide social network, instead of a tightknit one that doesn’t allow for outside opportunities.

Jay explains, “Twenty-somethings are like airplanes, just taking off from LAX heading for somewhere west. A slight change in course on takeoff is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji.”

Investment Strategies Part 1: Rebalance into Stable Investments in an Appreciating Market | Marotta On Money…

Investment Strategies Part 1: Rebalance into Stable Investments in an Appreciating Market | Marotta On Money…

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3. Not checking your receipts, invoices, bills, and statements. Every month, I review my transactions online. Why? Because my financial life does depend on it.Sometimes, companies make honest mistakes and accidentally bill you more; other times, they’re actively fleecing you, like AT&T has done to me countless times. Whether it’s a grocery store receipt or a bill at your vacation hotel, check it line by line as soon as possible, and report any errors immediately to a customer service representative.

And yet the same author wrote an article titled If It’s Not Automatic, It’s Problematic where he writes:

When you don’t make things automatic, you run the risk of missing your bills, but the main reason to pay manually is so that you check over the bill for any unexpected charges. There are other ways of keeping track of your financial life, I check mint.com regularly so by the time the credit card bill comes around, there aren’t any surprises anyway.

I like how he walks the line. Automatic payments are okay, but beware the dangers. If you choose to automate, be sure to pay with a credit, rather than debit, card and also to look at the bills around payment time just so you know how much of your money is going where.

This way, if you pull more than that amount from your retirement account in any given year, you’ll pay a higher tax rate on the overage, but if you pull out less you won’t be hit by the higher rate. But I suspect that you wouldn’t support that idea….

The investment still grew and made money. This doesn’t provide a rebuttal against gold bugs.

Another kind of foreign investment is a direct investment, which is the kind that often makes the news. This is when a company directly buys another company, expands production into another country, or acquires some other form of active management within different borders. This is an option taken by many foreign car plants, since it is cheaper to assemble cars here than it is to ship over the much larger already assembled cars. This type of investment is the same whether the companies involved are domestic, foreign, or one of each.

I’m not sure how you think these foreign investors will hurt us or how they are different from domestic investors.

As for the benefits of free trade agreements, my understanding is that every free trade agreement is a little different, but overall they promise protection to each of the involved countries from many if not all forms of trade barriers in many if not all of the industries.

The Heritage Foundation has an “Index of Economic Freedom” that they use to evaluate all the countries of the world. One of their factors is called “Trade Freedom.” They then correlate this to several other desirable national traits. As they say in “2013 Index of Economic Freedom: No Boost in Trade Freedom“:

Countries with the most trade freedom have higher per capita incomes, lower incidences of hunger in their populations, and cleaner environments.

American special interest groups often complain that “unfair” foreign competition destroys jobs at home, but in the United States, the trade deficit and the unemployment rate usually have an inverse relationship: When the trade deficit increases, the unemployment rate decreases, and vice versa. For example, in 2009, the U.S. trade deficit shrank by 46 percent, and the unemployment rate increased by 60 percent.

Many critics of trade deals such as NAFTA and the WTO agreement argue that free trade benefits big multinational corporations and “the rich” at the expense of everyone else. In fact, poverty rates are much lower in countries with low trade barriers than in those where trade is restricted.

They have also written several other articles on the topic that you might find interesting like FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS: Long Overdue, Free Trade Agreements: Heritage Foundation Recommendations, and Free Trade Agreements Are A Win for Prosperity.

I hope that helps.

A lot of your other points will be covered in the next several articles coming out. To ensure that you see them, you can subscribe to our newsletter or check back here on Sundays.

Some of the arguments that are left out here include:
- Moral and ethical issues regarding comparative advantage
- Benefits of local capacity to stability/security (e.g., a comparative system of trade works well if there are no major crises in the world, but if you import most of your food or energy . . .)
- The question as to how well this works for other countries that are not the U.S. My wife, for instance, comes from a small developing country whose banking and large retail sectors have been bought up (Ok, not necessarily a bad thing). A notable amount of manufacturing operations also are foreign-owned and often avoid paying taxes and negatively impact the environment (hence, loss of benefits/costs to the nation). There is competition with neighboring countries for low-cost labor that keeps manufacturing wages down and creates a context that encourages emigration.

I’m not saying I disagree with the author’s basic premise, I just think an honest assessment is that it works quite well to a certain point and beyond that it has some clear flaws. We can get a little to ideological here in the U.S. Let’s just explore these issues in depth and try to be as honest as we can . . .

(1) The rationale behind the money grab is just bad financial planning.

(2) It breaks the implied contract. If you think Social Security is a contract with citizens why aren’t the rules about contributions a contractual obligation? Government enforces all contracts except their own, and those it feels free to chance on the whim of wanting more money. If this were a private company trying to change the rules we would be rightfully outraged.

What you are saying by suggesting that this is “no big deal” is that government intentions and promises when legislation is put in place are absolutely worthless because government ought to change the rules whenever it feels like there is an advantage to change them.

(3) It discriminates against people just because they have their savings in a retirement account. As we said in the article, government workers such as the President himself, have much more tax free value in their pensions and yet they are allowed to have both. This is primarily a discrimination against private sector businesses who use defined contribution accounts exclusively.

(4) If the only rights we have are enumerated in the constitution, the Ninth Amendment is meaningless.

The point is that contributions to tax-preferred retirement accounts are already capped. As of 2013 the maximums for IRA and 401(k) accounts are:

	Under 50	Over 50
IRA	$5,500	$6,500
401(k)	$17,500	$23,000

So this proposed cap on retirement account balances will only effect the growth of money already capped on contribution.

An individual who obeyed all the rules for contributions, yet invested their assets wisely and started saving for retirement early, will be guaranteed to hit the cap. Then, their savings will be stolen off the top. There is no way to avoid this tax except by saving for most of your retirement in taxable accounts from the start or investing your retirement money badly.

Funny how pro-government people insist that others should be taxed just because they saved and invested their money wisely.

[0:19] “There is no such thing as Gun Conrol, there is only People Control.”

[1:03] “I never in 15 plus years of doing this have ever arrested or investigated someone on a gun crime who had that gun legally.”

Well I found the average price of gold in 2005 as $444 per ounce. Today’s price is $1459. The ratio is 3.286 so there’s actually a 228.6% increase.

But as % returns compound year to year, you would not divide the increase by 8, instead you take the ratio and compute the 8th root. Thus (3.286^(1/8) = 1.16 thus it’s a 16% annual rate of return.

When you consider compounding with returns this big, it makes a HUGE difference. 26% annual returns for 8 years would have pushed gold to $2820.

I am not a fan of gold either, but buying low and selling high 8 years later at that rate of return would be considered a good investment in my book. “An investment is something that pays you money” – that would have definitely paid you money.

I’m trying to find better arguments against the gold bugs I deal with.

Thanks David!