Common Cents Blog
Last night, I made a presentation to the Tuscaloosa Estate Planning Council, in person, about the prospects for the US economy given different election outcome scenarios. In other words, I broke one of my public speaking…
This week, I will start Common Cents with a passage from George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984. “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold…
This week, I went to lunch with a couple of co-workers at a place in the Cahaba Heights section of town called the Olive Branch. As the name implies, it focuses on what we consider Mediterranean…
If you don’t like politics, you are really going to hate the next several months and absolutely loathe October. With the run-up to the election and the Supreme Court nomination process, it is going to get…
One of my more favorite songs by the American punk/rock group Greenday is “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” Indeed. Next Wednesday can’t happen fast enough, even if a change in the calendar is nothing more…
Long years ago, I asked a friend of mine from Bombay why arranged marriages were still prevalent in his native culture. While he seemed a little embarrassed by my question, I didn’t let him off the…
Last night, the NFL kicked off its regular season in Kansas City. I didn’t know it was going to do so until yesterday afternoon, and I had forgotten about it by the time I got to…
This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the “The Employment Situation – August 2020” report at 8:30 am EDT. Frankly, it was pretty good. The BLS estimated employers added 1.371 million net new jobs…
How many of us have ever paid ‘cash’ to have someone perform a task, work, or job of some sort? Perhaps it was for a babysitter or the kid down the street to occasionally mow the…
This past week, my daughter asked if we could watch the movie “The Big Short” at the house. Although I lived through the crisis, have read Michael Lewis’ classic book twice, and had previously seen the…