Posts Made By: Paul Kammueller

In my most direct commodity investment yet, I just bought a pellet stove and about 2.8 tons of pellets!

Natural gas is shooting past $.85 per therm... and it's only October. I'm not sitting and waiting for the peak in early January.

Just up 30 minutes ago, just google it it's all over the AP wire

Speaking of divides, just curious -- are your immediate families politically unified, or factionalized?

Mine has factions. Wife and I are voting the same way, but I have two sisters at OPPOSITE ends of the political spectrum from each other, and voting accordingly -- which is odd since we've all been raised more or less the same -- and my parents are preparing to go cancel out each other's votes as well. How are your folks sizing up?

This is a riot. The latest map on electoral-vote.com projection shows NEITHER candidate having 270 electoral votes (assuming Florida goes to Bush) with Michigan's and Iowa's electoral votes now hanging in the balance to tip it one way or the other.

I gotta say the closeness of this election and the strong feelings of people makies this election much more exciting than usual. It's the bottom of the 9th with bases loaded and 2 outs. Sudden Death overtime at the Super Bowl. It's coming down to the wire, folks, and it's gonna be 'by a nose'.

I've said it before, whether or not you pay the taxes, you pay the taxes.

The republicans have made much ado about Bush's tax cuts. The reality of course is that if you increase federal spending, the new money still has to come from somewhere, whether you tax or not.

So if you deficit spend, you must dump treasury bonds onto the financial markets, which means that some investors must step up and turn over their investment dollars to buy treasury bonds; investment dollars that might otherwise have been invested stocks, corporate bonds, or private business.

The upshot is that while tax cuts and deficits initially appear to improve the cash flow of taxpayers, the reality is that it comes at the expense of investment in the private economy -- which means less growth, fewer jobs, and thus, of course, less cash flow for the taxpayers.

The obvious side effect for investors is lower investment returns. The irony of course is that many wealthy investors still think Bush is doing them some sort of favor. This is largely because most of them don't understand the macroeconomics connected with federal spending and the capital markets, but only the microeconomics of their annual tax return.

I wonder how many would have supported the war if it required a 10% hike in income tax rates? Because macroeconomically, that is the effect. Because deficit spending and federal borrowing suck money out of the private economy as surely as taxes do, any increase in federal spending is an effective tax hike. And we've just had the biggest spending increases since Nixon.

That's because the two candidates we have don't really have any redeeming qualities. Pointing out how much worse the other guy is, is really all they've got to work with.

Polls open in 5 min, I'm heading out have fun all!

Will definitely check in after results!

...and stood in a long snaking line inside the building for another 30 or so. Have been voting the same place for 7 years and it has *never* been this busy. This is just nuts.

Republicans:
If Kerry wins, rest assured that the Republican Congress will keep him in check and he will be able to follow through on very few of his proposals, if any. This includes the promised tax increase. The power to levy taxes rests solely with the Congress, not the President.

Democrats:
If Bush wins, and your worst fears are realized and you believe that we have 4 more years of war plague & famine in store for us, then rest assured that by 2008 the country will be so sick of republicans that democrats will run virtually unopposed.

Bush & Kerry within 40 votes of each other. Know it's not a big state, but a very fun observation.