I hesitate to add to the flood of half-informed opinionating about John McCain’s veep pick that is already causing the Internet’s tubes to overflow. But by choosing a woman less than two years into her first term as Alaska governor, who just six years ago was mayor of a town of 6,000 (or so), McCain [...]

It’s just a throwaway line in a comment by Curmudgeon on my Merced real estate saga, but it nonetheless got my hackles up: This continued because the realtors and builders (and to be fair, the media – yes, Justin – and the economists and a lot of others) said that people were still working and [...]

I went to Merced and all my son got was this lousy T-shirt. I took a day of vacation from vacation (a.k.a. a day of work) when I was out in California to drive down to the Central Valley metropolis of Merced, which is by several measures (foreclosures, average price decline) the worst real estate [...]

This morning’s New York Times has a story about the “$250 billion war chest” amassed to finance a “tidal wave of infrastructure projects in the United States and overseas.” Big banks and funds want to buy your roads, bridges and airports, America—and since Congress won’t put on its big-boy pants and pay for infrastructure improvements, [...]

Journalists who write about the housing meltdown occasionally get taken to task for not laying enough blame at the feet of the individual homeowners who were signing up for mortgages they should have known they couldn’t afford. I, myself, have been accused of this. So in the interest of blaming homeowners their fair share, let [...]

So far today we’ve learned that: 1) The decline in housing prices slowed in June, according to the latest S&P/Case-Shiller data. 2) Average income in 2006, as reported by the IRS, finally topped the 2000 level (in 2001-2005 it hadn’t). 3) The number of Americans without health insurance declined in 2007, the first such drop [...]

This blog is mostly going to ignore the Great Mile-High Non-News Event (as it will the Great Twin-Citian Non-News Event). There’s other folks that can take care of that. But listening to Teddy Kennedy talk like a Kennedy tonight reminded me of the 1967 novelty hit (it rose to No. 20 on the pop charts; [...]

I’m back in New York. And while I’d really prefer to be back in bed as well, I figure I ought to signal my return with this shot of the sun setting on the Sweetwater Mountains (they’re on the California-Nevada border north of Mono Lake, we were one range to the west). When Barbara’s in [...]

In response to my post yesterday about why it’s a bad idea for schools to pay kids to get good grades, a commenter named yeah man raised a great point. He wrote: If the social norms in place were working there would have been no need for this program in the first place. This morning [...]