Money may — or may not — buy happiness. I’ll leave that debate up to you.
But money certainly does buy independence. If you have your finances in good shape, you can pretty much tell anyone to shove off.
Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, also known as Independence Day, or the 238th anniversary of our telling England to shove it. But America is far less independent today than it has been in the past.
I’m not going to spend a lot of time listing all the issues that are enslaving us, except for this: The US has $17.558 trillion of debt and the amount is growing substantially every year.
Our debt today is equal to an astonishing 73 percent of gross domestic product. That’s the worst level since World War II, and double the debt-to-GDP ratio at the end of 2007.
And much of that money is owed to people, countries and organizations that we wouldn’t consider our friends — OPEC, Russia and, most importantly, China.
Today, we aren’t free to make foreign policy without worrying what our creditors will think.
Washington can’t even enact domestic fiscal policy because it might spook one of those foreign lenders who could cause interest rates to rise.
Our president can’t even meet with someone like the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet, without having to worry what China will think.
Our founders hated the Stamp Act and various other taxes paid to England. What would they think of our current predicament?
If you are going to be corrupt, it apparently pays to do so at an organization that’s more corrupt than you are.
That’s the lesson taught by the sentencing this week of Rachel Ondrik and Kirk Yamatani, two investigators for the Census Bureau who were caught falsifying time sheets and other expenses.
I’ve written about these two before. Census cut them a sweet deal in 2013, while grandstanding their arrest. But a judge rejected that agreement and threw them into jail.
Ondrik and Yamatani appealed, but the appeal was rejected by a different judge, and they were charged with lesser crimes.
This was “slap on the wrist” week for Ondrik and Yamatani. And I have to think — and hope — that they got themselves a nice plea deal by agreeing to cooperate on all the other matters that are being investigated at Census.
Both got six days in jail, which they’ve already served, and one year supervised release. They also have to serve the community for 60 hours each. The fine was $20,000 apiece. Ondrik had to pay $9,600 in restitution, while Yamatani’s tab is $11,000.
Those figures are a significant discount from the original plea deal thrown out by the first judge in 2013.
The US Attorney’s Office in Maryland, which prosecuted the two, won’t say if they are cooperating. But if they aren’t, then someone should investigate the US Attorney.
I asked Web researcher Sprinklr to “listen” on all the major social networks to find out what people are talking about as we headed into the July 4th holiday.
Naturally, much of the chatter was about food and fuel costs, the two things that the government excludes from its inflation surveys because they are too “volatile.”
But here’s one of the things I found perplexing: Only 244 people were “overheard” mentioning the Nathan’s Hot Dog eating contest over the past week, while 323 brought up the Macy’s fireworks, which are moving back to the East River amid some controversy.
I like hot dogs and I like fireworks. (And sometimes hot dogs even create fireworks in my belly.)
But Sprinklr found 8,500 mentions of Grey Poupon mustard (and not because it goes with hot dogs) and 5,400 mentions of Tabasco sauce.
Why? I mean, why? Probably good promotions.
Only 669 people were talking about gas prices. And 243 were bitching (I assume) about the cost of flying.
Now, I staunchly believe that both men and women should insist on condiments when socializing during the holiday. But why are people clogging up the wonderful Internet with chatter about mustard and such when they could be talking about hot dogs, or fireworks or even me?
Janet Yellen said once again that she isn’t concerned about stock prices. The more she says it, the less people believe her.
The Federal Reserve chairwoman would do better if she made the following statement: “Today I put every nickel I own into the stock market. That’s how much I believe there is no bubble.”
Otherwise, Yellen is just another Washington mouthpiece hoping the stock market will make people feel richer and bail out the government’s miserable financial policies.
In case you missed it, the Bank of International Settlements last week warned that the “euphoric” financial markets have become detached from economic reality.
That pretty much makes Yellen and the stooges at Wall Street brokerage firms the only ones who don’t believe the stock market is in a bubble.
Wall Street has now gone 1,000 days without a price correction of 10 percent or more. Ain’t normal, especially when the US economy is wheezing toward what could be another recession.