Author: Eliot Lear

Happy Passover!

Is there such thing as a healthy passover diet?  Let’s see.  What are we eating?

  • Egg water.  Egg, salt, and water.
  • Matzoh Ball Soup, which contains at least part of an egg in the matzoh ball, and probably some chicken fat and salt.  (Mine were absolutely floaters, by the way).
  • Haroset.  Apples, walnuts, cinnamon, and wine.  Not so bad.
  • Four cups of wine.  We did a 1994 Chateau Musar.  Forgive me, but if I’m going to have four glasses, they’re going to be good glasses of wine, and this one was VERY good.
  • Farfel.  Yumm.  Matzoh, egg, salt, and maybe carmelized onions.
  • Spring vegetables and perhaps a salad.  This is perhaps the healthiest part of the meal.
  • A meat or two.  Lamb provides easy access to a lamb shank.
  • Lots of sweats for dessert.
  • Matzoh-bry for breakfast.  More matzoh and egg.
  • Matzoh meal pancakes.  That’s 3 eggs, 3/4 cup water, salt, 1 tbsp sugar, and 1/2 cup matzoh meal.  Then sour cream or apple sauce.

No wonder there are so many Jewish doctors.  And we really need cardiologists!

Here’s hoping you had a huge seder and a grand old time, and that there was lots of help cooking and cleaning up.

Latest GM SUV: Big and 30MPG

I don’t have all the details, but a quick look at this article shows that GM’s plight was, at least in part, avoidable.  The base model comes with a 182 horse power 2.4 liter engine, and gets you 30 mpg.  There is no reason in the world that GM could not have produced this vehicle two years ago.  In doing so, they would have seen demand shift from some of their other lines, but also from Ford, Toyota, and Dodge.  In addition, they could have easily picked up some gas guzzler trade-ins.  Why did they wait?  It’s quite simple: they have absolutely no foresight.  The GM motto could be “what works today will work tomorrow”.  Of course, that motto doesn’t work.

This to me supports the Obama position that if these guys want help they have to change.  I remain uncomfortable about the government running a company, and when this administration can force out long time CEO Rick Wagoner, that is what is happening.

Where then is the balance?  When should the government not use its coercive power when it doles out money to broken companies?  When should it let them fail?  And what does one do with the thousands upon thousands of individuals who have been mishandled by bad leadership?  I don’t know, but somewhere somehow they have to shoulder some of the burden.  Some of this is their poor decision to tie their fates to people like Wagoner, who really did need to go.

Time to change time

Welcome to International “Screw up your calendar week”, otherwise known as the changing of the clocks to Daylight Savings Time (DST) in America.  For those elsewhere, or if you happen to live in Arizona, Hawaii, or certain parts of Indiana, or if you happen to live elsewhere in America and have appointments with those living in AZ, HI, or IA, or anywhere else in the world, be sure to check that your appointments haven’t shifted by an hour.  For the next two weeks, though, America will be one hour closer to Europe.  Oh, and then check again in two weeks.

This debacle is brought to you by the last Republican U.S. Congress who somehow thought that shifting DST would actually save energy.  It didn’t, according to one blog and a report on NPR.  Whatever.

My beef with this semi-annual nonsense is simply this: don’t change the rule again.  Doing so causes chaos to everyone’s schedules, requiring software updates on numerous platforms.  It’s a mini-Y2K bug that gets periodically legislated into our programs.

Misadventures with taxes

I began my tax preparation this year with my mind on President Obama looking to tax the wealthiest Americans a bit more to pay for a reduction in taxes on the rest of us.  For expatriates, taxes are a sore subject.  American expatriates, unlike citizens of just about any other country, are required to file tax returns no matter where we live in the world, an we have to claim back foreign taxes, as either a credit or a deduction.  The notion behind all of this is that you can’t simply move off shore to avoid paying U.S. taxes.  Fair enough, except that of course you don’t get to avail yourself of nearly any of the services you are paying for.

The way this works is that we get a deduction for housing and a credit for tax paid.  In the end the idea is still that if you’re not working in the U.S., you shouldn’t have to really pay much. The deduction for housing was limited based on where you lived. This year, we in Europe are treated to an extra insult.  Because the American dollar did so poorly overall in 2008, we all expected that the Department of Treasury would adjust the housing limit accordingly – but they didn’t.  That amounts to about a 10% additional tax on us.  And of course there are penalties for not prepaying based on the currency fluctuation.

I might not mind so much, except that as an American citizen I still cannot buy mutual funds, just because I live outside the U.S.  There are many other services I don’t get, that perhaps I would enjoy.  Like courtesy at the American consulate in Zurich.

In Donald Trump’s Book, There Is Only One Chapter: Eleven

Another day, another Trump bankruptcy.  The Wall Street Journal reports that, once again, TrumpDonald Trump’s organization will screw its creditors out of their investment.  This time it’s the Trump Entertainment Group that includes Trump Casinos.  It’s their third appearance in bankruptcy court in four years.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think individuals and companies need bankruptcy protection laws, and I was opposed to the changes in the law that were made earlier this decade that made it harder for individuals to declare bankruptcy.

But this is a clear case of abuse, this from a man who scrutinizes other peoples’ business plans on live TV.  It leads to the question, if you actually win at Apprentice, what lesson are you actually learning?  And one has to wonder, what kind of morons would invest in this guy’s businesses?  I mean really.  One bankruptcy normally all but kills a consumer’s credit for many years.  Where does he get the suckers?