TGIF

It's the day after and the greater part of Obama's plans are now disclosed. The pundits are screeching or yahooing, depending on whether they are of the right or left species. Part of modern discourse seems to require that everything be a momentous event. Maybe this is a psychological need to think one lives every year in historical times. Yet most of these characterizations are just buncombe.

Observations on "Le Plan d'Obama"

1. The proposed tax rises on capital gains and dividends are less than feared - 20% is fair.
2. The change to the estate tax is fair: exemption for up to $7 million.
3. Ordinary income tax on hedge fund managers' pay is long overdue.
4. He is not gutting the military (yet).
5. The tax rises on the "quartaires" sound large, but AMT offsets mean those are less than one might think except for incomes around $1 million or more.
6. The health care plans are just a continuation of the long term trend of the past 50 years.
7. The discontinuation of the nuclear waste facility is troublesome and foolish.
8. The carbon cap & trade is stupid and likely to fail.
9. The alternative energy push will fail, just as it did in the 1970s.
10. The mortgage deduction limits are a continuation of the trend to consolidate the income tax system into a more muscular AMT.

So except for the greenie shift, I must yawn and say it's better than feared. It's certainly better than the lurch that we lived through from Bush I to Clinton. And it's better than Carter or Nixon or LBJ. Not as good as Reagan.

Markets

Lurching continues.

On Wednesday I bought some GOOG, CCJ and GE for Fido Fund. About the GOOG, is it not clear from the demise of daily newspapers that more and more advertising moves to the Internet, hence to GOOG ? More and more local ads move there, too. CCJ is uranium. Even if the US is foolish about adding to nuclear power, the rest of the world is not. GE is just too cheap - the nonfinancial parts of its business are being given away.

On Thursday I bought a wee bit of CX, EEFT and CETV for Obama Fund. The restaurant stocks I want are still too expensive to let me hit my profit target of 3x gains.

Word of the Day

"Captious" - adjective [$10] from the card file
Captious means given to finding fault or raising petty objections.
Sentence: One might say I am being captious by listing my observations on the Obama budget, but I think it's more of a course correction than a revolution so am urging calm, not more fear. Let's hope Congress makes it better, not worse.

Le Mot du Jour

"Marqué" - adjective; this word is the past participle of the verb, "marquer" which has a regular 'er' conjugation.
Marqué means marked, stamped, pronounced.
Marquer means (transitive) to mark, brand, label, stamp; to show; (intransitive) to stand out.
La Phrase: Le plan d'Obama est marqué par plus de modération que j'ai craint.
Sentence: The Obama plan is marked by more moderation than I feared.