Cakewalks

Awhile back my roommate and I held a cakewalk-themed party. We decided that we ought to come up with special themes for each cakewalk that we held, so we spent the night before the party thinking up clever names instead of making a shopping list for cake ingredients. It was time well spent, as we produced a fairly exhaustive list of possible cakewalks. Feel free to use any of the following themes for your future cakewalk parties.

Almost everyone one of these is a reference to a famous movie or song title/lyric, so we would recommend using that song as the music or making people do something thematic while participating in the cakewalk. (Example: everyone has to crabwalk during the Crab-cakewalk; winner receives a crab cake).

In no particular order (beyond the order that we thought of them):

• Cakewalk like an Egyptian
• Giant Steps are What You Take, Cakewalking on the Moon
• I Would Cakewalk 500 Mile
• Dead Man Cakewalking
• Cakewalk of Shame
• Cakewalker, Texas Ranger
• Random Cakewalk
• These Boots were made for Cakewalking
• Cakewalk this Way
• Intentional Cakewalk (hint: BB)
  
• Crab-cakewalk
• Paddy-cakewalk
• Cakewalk On (hint: U2)
• Cakewalk the Line
• Cakewalking in Memphis
• Cakewalk on the Wildside
• Cakewalk a Mile in my Shoes
• Cakewalk the Plank
• CakeSkywalker
• Pancakewalk Breakfast
• Hotels on Park Pl and Cakewalk
• Under the Cakewalk (hint: "we'll be having some fun")
• Cake Love, Not War
• Christopher Cakewalken
• Cakewalk on Water
• Cakewalk Off (hint: Zoolander)
• Cakeflock of Seagulls
• Let them eat Cakewalk! (the winner of this cakewalk should receive a loaf of bread)
• Candlelit dinners and long cakewalks on the beach
• Kegwalk (suitable for keg parties only)

That's probably not an exhaustive list, but it was all we could come up with...any other ideas?

Quote of the Day

I'm killing some time on the internet and I just found a really great quote in the Washington Post. The article itself is not that all interesting, I suppose it's around the tax deadline so editors feel compelled to print this sort of story. However, Shankar Vedantam lost me when he paraphrased Kim Bloomquist of the IRS:

"[Bloomquist] said the IRS plans to conduct random audits in a more systematic fashion in the future..."

Is it just me, or is that sentence screaming for some clarification?

I'm a Nerd

Whenever I get my car serviced, I write it down. I also record the mileage, because that can be important too. I happened to do this in Excel, so yesterday I was curious...what if I plotted the mileage of my car over time? Turns out it's pretty linear over the nearly 3 years that I've owned my car. In fact, it's kind of surprising how the linear regression lines up to the data. That is probably strongly influenced by the fact I'm only sampling every couple months so it ends up being dominated by my daily commute to work. I haven't really changed my commute over this time period, so I suppose I shouldn't be very surprised I drive about the same amount each day throughout the year.

Actually, you can see one big aberration that causes the linear regression to overestimate most data points - I went on an ~3,000 road trip over Christmas/New Year's last year. It doesn't make a huge impact on the average, about 2 miles per day it seems like.

Since I purchased my car, it appears that I drive 41.2 miles per day. This is obviously skewed by that road trip and a trip to Ottawa last summer; the data also shows that over periods without a long road trip I trend closer to 29 miles per day. Since I drive a pretty fuel efficient car, that's average Marylander uses like 415 gallons per year (2004 data). Some math tells me that I'm driving almost exactly 15,000 miles per year. History tells me that 32 mpg is a reasonable average for my car. That says that my car is using 470 gallons of gas per year. I could argue that for all of the long road trips (>150 miles round trip) that I've taken, I've had passengers, so they aren't all my gallons, but that's splitting hairs I guess. Wow, that puts me at the US average (~464 gallons per year (also 2004 data)).

This discovery really concerns me because I like the environment; that's why I bought a fuel efficient car! I'm going to have to try harder not to drive on the weekends (since I can't really control my need to drive to and from work). Now I'm sad, I had thought that I used less than the average amount of gasoline for an American. Turns out I'm part of the problem after all...

Some further research shows that I pay ~$86 in federal and >$100 in state taxes each year (it would be $110/year if I bought all of my gas in Maryland).

I still feel much worse about all my gasoline consumption than I do about finding out I pay an additional $200/year in taxes...and by now you know how I feel about paying taxes.

A Response to a Comment

In response to my last post, someone claimed that they disagreed with me saying that "poor=stupid." That hit me kind of hard, because that is not at all the message that I intended to get across. Perhaps I am not skilled enough writer, I seem to sometimes get carried away sometimes and over-stress certain points that screw up the overall message. Then again, maybe it is not the performer that is flawed, but the venue. Either way, I don't mean to say that all poor people and stupid or that stupid people deserve to be poor.

In fact, I don't see my viewpoint as disrespectful to low-income households; I find the paternalistic viewpoint of many activist organizations to be much more insulting to the working poor. To set a double-standard for low-wage earners and high-risk borrowers is to discount the achievements of those who work their way out of poverty. To say that great numbers of people are victims of "their socialization and education" often implies that only the middle and upper classes have free will; poor people are victims to their emotions and desires and can not be trusted to enter into financial contracts as adults.

My philosophy is that low-wage earners and high-risk borrowers are not society's J.V. squad, but an important, integral part of the economy and should be respected as full-fledged members of society. A natural conclusion is that this means they must also be held to the contracts they sign, just like anyone else. What people like that National Fair Housing Alliance are advocating amounts to a sort of "positive discrimination" in the housing market. It's still discrimination, artificially setting one group of people aside because of education, race, or income and telling lenders, "Ok, now you have to treat these people differently." Lenders will treat them differently all right, they'll probably stop making loans to them because regulations will make it much more expensive (compliance is time-consuming) and unprofitable (because they'll be forced to offer lower interest rates if the NFHA gets it's way - see this blog).

Also, my portrayal of NPR is intended to point out that while they often produce interesting news stories, sometimes the editorial bias can be a little heavy-handed. An example of this would be their coverage of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath. The typical tone of the man-on-the-street interview was "New Orleans is national icon, clearly a national treasure, and I was doing the country a great service by living New Orleans, so obviously you, the American taxpayer should buy me a new house." My favorite news stories were the ones where civil liberties groups would complain that although people were going to get checks from the government, it was taking too long to process the claims and this was somehow infringing on someone's natural rights.

My opinion is that if you live below sea level, in an area known to have the occasional hurricane, and you don't buy flood insurance, you should be grateful to get tent and one hot meal per day. If you excuse it and say "Oh, but those people are really poor and unable to properly assess the risk and couldn't afford flood insurance anyway, what can you expect?" you are only enabling further inefficient use of resources. Perhaps the fact that flood insurance is ridiculously expensive is a secret message from actuaries that there's a high likelihood of a terrible disaster in an area? If you set up a market to manage risk, then allow people to ignore risk with impunity because you've judged them unfit to make such decisions, how fair is that to people that did play by the rules? One of the assumptions in a market is that once the rules for something are set, they will not change drastically. If you live in a hurricane zone, why would you buy flood insurance? If something really bad happens you can probably get enough CNN cameras to extort some "disaster relief" money from the government.

People in areas of the country not prone to weather disasters (i.e. San Diego, Indianapolis, etc.) should be super-pissed about government-subsidized flood insurance much less hurricane relief. Government-subsidized flood insurance a wealth transfer program designed to encourage people to live near water. It masks the true cost of living in a hurricane zone or on a floodplain using money taken from people living on hills or plains.

Anyway, one more argument to address: socioeconomic background. I'm not discounting the phenomenal hurdles one must overcome if you're growing up in East or West Baltimore, but neither does it give someone in that situation carte blanche to explain away their actions. At some point, you have to say to someone from that background, "You're a human being, you have a faculty to reason not dissimilar from the population as a whole, you can no longer use your socioeconomic background to excuse your actions." I think that most non-profit, activist-type organizations agree with me that such a point exists, it's more of a debate as to where that point is located.

This all being said, I support the hell out of things education, especially things like low-cost community colleges and adult GED programs. Education changes behavior and improves your economic standing, something wealth transfers have been shown, again and again, to be unable to do.

Predatory Lending is for Schmucks

Today, one of my favorite shows on NPR thoroughly disappointed me. Typically I can count on Marketplace to be a bit of a haven, a place where you can get decent economic news on NPR. It's a pretty typical complaint, but for the most part, Morning Edition and All Things Considered have not met a net welfare reducing program they didn't like.

Announcer: "Economists argue that this program is unnecessary and will cost billions of tax dollars. However, if you ask an activist like Jim McSocialist, Chief Policy Officer of the non-partisan Union of Concerned Public Policy Majors:"

Dumbass Activist: "We're the richest country in the world and capitalism has clearly failed stupid people, so it's time to try something different. What we propose is a massive transfer of wealth."

Announcer: "Economists have a bunch of facts and figures that show this isn't a real problem, but we've got some anecdotal evidence to the contrary."

Uneducated Man/Woman on the Street: "I ain't got no education anna I gotta three kids anna I cain't affor no house."

Dumbass Activist: "The deck is just stacked against them. It's time that our lawmakers acted to reshuffle the deck."

Announcer: "Back by studies that show children living in houses outperform children living in gutters by 25% on standardized tests, activists are lobbying Congress this week to sign this bill into law."

Actually, it's not always that bad. Occasionally NPR does overcome every journalist's (apparent) natural fear of economics and do a story based on such wild ideas as "subsidies are a bad idea" or "trade makes everyone richer." Concepts that are somehow still hotly debated around this country.

Anyway...Marketplace. So today they did a story on "Predatory Lending," a trend that is sweeping the nation. (Not that predatory lending is sweeping the nation, news shows doing stories on predatory lending is spreading like wildfire). Unfortunately, they treated "Predatory Lending" like it is a thing that actually happens and that we must be vigilant to keep it bay. Very successful PR from "non-partisan" organizations has more or less convinced journalists everywhere that predatory lending exists.

I'm a bit of a skeptic. Call me crazy, but if you enter into a contract that you can not perform against, I call you an idiot, not a victim. Anti-predatory lending organizations have a great argument for this - the victims of predatory lending are uneducated or not financially literate enough to understand what they're signing. Once again, if you enter into a contract that you can not understand, I'll call you an idiot. Here's a simple idea, don't agree to things you don't understand. If you can't figure out the loan document, then don't take out the loan. The loan agent says you can afford it? Congratulations. I say you can totally jump across that shark tank. Based on the documentation I've seen of your athletic ability, you can totally do it. Go for it, your dream is attainable right now, no need to train for it, just jump!

I suppose what frustrates me about it is the assumption that contracts with dumb people are not as binding as contracts with everyone else. Somehow being uneducated or earning a low income means that you are not subject to the same rules as everyone else. You have to get special treatment, because if we don't hold your hand, you'll do something dumb.

So, I decided to find out a little about predatory lending from someone with a little less of an agenda than ACORN. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, predatory lending sounds a heck of a lot like plain, ol' fashioned loan fraud. Under their definition, I'm sure it exists. Mortgage brokers convincing people to overstate their incomes so that they can get a bigger fee? I'm sure it occurs.

If someone lied to you or broke a law, then it's loan fraud and they should be prosecuted. However, the idea that banks and institutions are trying to make loans that people can not afford and drive borrowers into bankruptcy seems a little ridiculous.

Finally, here's the real reason I published this post - an economist has put out an interesting paper examining payday lending and attempting to determine if it is a "predatory" practice. It's pretty approachable, I highly recommend you read it. I'll hit you with a highlight:

"Thus, higher prices are neither necessary or sufficient to conclude that a certain class of credit is predatory."

Interested? Check it out - Defining and Detecting Predatory Lending