Papa John's Founder Finds His Car

Now this is a pretty cool story that has a happy ending.

With the help of a $250,000 reward, the founder of the Papa John's pizza chain has finally reunited with the muscle car he sold years ago to help keep his family's business afloat.

John Schnatter sold the gold-and-black 1971 Chevrolet Camaro Z28 for $2,800 in 1983. The money helped save his father's tavern in Jeffersonville, Ind., and he used the rest to start what would become a worldwide pizza business.

I have always like Papa Johns Pizza and it is cool that he was able to get reunited with the car that pretty much launched his corporation. Hmm, if I were superstitious I would go long Papa John's stock right now because that car might bring his company good luck. That is from the Scrooge McDuck school of Number One Dime talismans.

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How to Recognize a Speculative Bubble

I hope this article is tacked on the bulletin board of the FED and the Treasury because I think it should be required reading. I'll go into this article through my lens of the great comic bubble of the 90s that the industry still hasn't recovered from. This bubble slowly formed from 1985 and finally popped in 1997

1. The biggest bubbles appear to develop during periods of rapid and radical innovation, which may leave us more vulnerable to accepting the bizarre rationalizations that often accompany financial speculation.

The comic book bubble happened during the heady time of the Clinton years when America was growing like a weed due of the collapse of the Soviet Union and pro-investor policies were everywhere. During this time there were great leaps in technology and PCs became fairly ubiquitous. In the case of comics investors were looking for a way to "diversify their portfolios" and comics of the 40s and 50s were certainly a scarce asset.

2. The second, more obvious thing about booms is that lots and lots of people get on board, pushing prices up. Initial skepticism gives way to curiosity and then escalates into a kind of frenzy, a feeling that you may be the only person on the planet who isn't part of the fun, and you'd better scramble to get in.

Yup this is the ramp up when the bubble slowly grows and takes on heady dimensions. In the comic industry it happened around the time of the Death of Superman storyline. This is when the comic industry went from catering to readers to catering to collectors.

So during this time we see all sorts of gimmicks like Tri-fold and metallic foil covers and pre-bagging the comic in a plastic cover to keep them in perfect condition. The black bag copy of the Death of Superman comic is a case-in-point. I remember seeing that thing going for $100 or more and it was not scarce like an a Golden Age title.

3. As prices climb to eye-popping levels, two more things happen: Some experts insist that this time is different�and virtually all warnings are ignored.

This is about the time that X-Men #1 came out to the tune of 8 million copies. Any speculator should have understood that most comic print runs are about 65,000 or so and some really expensive books like Action Comics #1 has only a few dozen known copies in existence. So when Marvel rolled out 8 million of one comic you know the wave had crested. The comic still jumped up in price contrary to all reason.

4. At some point, the bubble reaches a point that is so ridiculous that greed takes over and all common sense must be suspended to continue the myth.

This about the time when anyone says something like "I can send my kid to college by selling a pile of X-Men #1's." In the comic industry this is when there were more speculators then readers. These speculators were buying up multiple copies (sometimes 100s) at once thinking that they will all go up to $100 each like the Death of Superman Black Bag mentioned above.

I think the time when any bubble is about to burst is whenever someone says that they can send their kid through college or retire on the funds that they will get from speculation. This is always the point where greed has passed common sense.

5. The last typical feature of bubbles is a life lesson in itself: The party may be dangerous, but trying to keep the party going�the after-party, if you will�is what really hurts you. You can never predict when a bubble will actually bust. Some of them can continue for a remarkably long time. But when they do, they almost always do so quickly and dramatically.

This comic bubble nearly crippled the industry and caused Marvel to declare bankruptcy in 1997. It also cost the industry most of its independent publishers as well. The comic industry is a pale shell of what it was in the early 90s and if not for movie licensing we might see a comics industry that is very similar to the newspaper industry. An industry that is slowly dying as their product becomes more expensive to produce with little or no return to show for it.

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The White House Turns on the Press: They Just Ran Out of People to Blame

Yow, these people are lashing out at anyone withing lashing distance.

When asked recently about the administration�s endless evasions on the public option, Gibbs instead opted to define a monopoly.
�If you had one place to eat lunch before you came to the briefing, do you think it would be cheap?� Gibbs demanded of CNN�s Ed Henry.

Henry should have asked Gibbs to define monopsony: a market in which one buyer is so large that it can control suppliers and ruin competitors. Henry could then explain he�d rather pay too much for the sandwich he wanted than have to eat at a government chow line opened across the street to encourage �competition.�

Gibbs is so crabby because, incredibly, the administration blames the media for the president�s problems.

The funny thing is that they blamed almost everyone one after another and all it did was cost them at the polls.

It tried blaming Republicans, but the GOP is too far out of power. When the leader of the free world is complaining about a posting on the former governor of Alaska�s Facebook page, he�s got problems.

Yup, Sarah Palin's Facebook page is probably read daily by White House staffers so that they could counter the "lies and misrepresentations." Of course it all just musing from a former governor that holds no actual power whatsoever and cannot block even a single piece of legislation. If the Dems think America will just fall in love with ObamaCare they should just write some single payer boondoggle bill and cram it through with 51 votes. The GOP will be powerless to stop them.

Team Obama tried blaming special interests, but that was a bust too. The president�s deal with the pharmaceutical industry gets him $150 million worth of ads to boost his plan, whatever it is.

Yup, the White House made a sweetheart deal with Big Pharma. So Obama really can't malign the people that are running a $150 million ad campaign for his pet project. Imagine if Bush made this same deal with Exxon Mobil to pass his Energy Bill? There would be calls for impeachment from every Democrat in Congress.

Democrats tried blaming the �mobs� of �un-American� protesters and �evil mongers� who were giving raspberries to members of Congress at town halls.

I think the White House realized it wasn't the Brooks Brothers Brigade carrying Nazi placards but instead it was a Senior Citizen Army that may have actually fought Nazis in 1945. The White House had to back off immediately or they would have lost the whole debate.

I think they are still damaged to the core by going after the protesters at these town halls. They should have just said "I support their right to question ObamaCare. I will do my best to allay any fears that they might have."

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Obama's Summer Reading List

Well the White House released Obama's summer reading list. I was expecting more for some reason:

� The Way Home by George Pelecanos, a crime thriller based in Washington, D.C.;
� Lush Life by Richard Price, a story of race and class set in New York's Lower East Side;
� Tom Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded, on the benefits to America of an environmental revolution;
� John Adams by David McCullough;
� Plainsong by Kent Haruf, a drama about the life of eight different characters living in a Colorado prairie community.

So we have 2 crime thrillers, a preaching to the choir book about America leading the Green Revolution, a Presidential Biography, and a book about people living in small town Colorado. For some reason I was expecting something different than 4 fiction novels and a biography.

This is supposed to be President Spock the Intellectual so I was expecting some weighty tomes about obscure topics. Something that I would need to rush to Amazon just to see what these books were about.

Maybe an Indian poetry book written in the original Sanskrit or an obscure novel written by a Portuguese existentialist that nobody has heard about. Hell, even Bush read Camus during his vacation. Maybe Obama is saving Dirichlet Branes and Mirror Symmetry for his Spring Break reading list instead.

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The Young Put Obama in Power But they Can Care Less About Health Care Reform

Anyone could have told you this was true.

Add this to President Barack Obama's problems in selling his health care overhaul: A lot of the tech-savvy activists who helped put him in office are young, feeling indestructible and not all that into what they see as an old folks issue.

It's a crucial gap in support and one the White House may have to correct if Obama is to regain the momentum and get Congress to act on his top domestic priority.

Well, the young will be strait-up robbed by any public plan. They will be paying in for decades into a service that they will rarely be using. Right now they have the option to forgo insurance and spend that $200-$300 on something else that would benefit them right now. If ObamaCare passes they will be be forced to pay for some other guys insurance for decades and get very little benefit from it. Maybe if ObamaCare paid for medical marijuana then more young people would become engaged again.

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The Difference Between Progressives and Everyone Else: They Still Trust the Government

I was reading Krugmans anti-Reaganomics article and came to the realization that the difference between Progressives and everyone else is they actually still trust the government after all the failure and incompetence exhibited by it in the past few decades.

The debate over the �public option� in health care has been dismaying in many ways. Perhaps the most depressing aspect for progressives, however, has been the extent to which opponents of greater choice in health care have gained traction � in Congress, if not with the broader public � simply by repeating, over and over again, that the public option would be, horrors, a government program.

Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism � by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.

Why Reaganism is so powerful is that he believed that a smaller government just didn't have the sheer weight of money and power to damage things too badly. He believed that government should stay out of people's lives most of the time and will only be there to reign in the worst things.

So a firm national defence can only be done by the government as well as firm regulation of the markets with entities like the SEC and the FED. There will be failures and bubbles so intervention will have to take place but in moderation. I can easily see Reagan bailing out the banks and doing something like TARP in order to prevent the meltdown of the entire world economy. (Taking over car companies will probably be where he would draw the line.)

The problem is that progressives, no matter what, believe that the government will make things right in the end. This is contrary to the fact that there has numerous failures of government in the last 20 years alone whether it is a GOP or Democrat administration in power. We are in record debt, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are all going to be broke in a few decades, the Post Office is a mess, and the two biggest mortgage companies in the world (Fannie and Freddie) both nearly died simultaneously and are still on life support.

The failures of government led us to the Vietnam War which was started due shenanigans by the LBJ White House. Then we had Watergate, Iran/Contra, a President lying about an affair with an intern in the Oval Office, letting Bin Laden escape from Sudan, the incompetence of extending the Iraq War for 6 years due to Bremer dismissing the Iraqi army, Katrina and its aftermath, and now the failed Stimulus. Even Cash for Clunkers ran out of money in a few days when it was supposed to take months. About the only government program that came in over budget and was generally well liked was the 50 State Quarter Program.

So that is where the rest of the population comes from when they hear about trillion dollar government program to "fix" their health care. They think of money wasted, corruption, lies told by Congressmen, giveaways to corporations, and their taxes going up to pay for some other guy's insurance. They are afraid that the same government that gave them Amtrak will be giving them health insurance as well.

A Progressive thinks that it is morally right to have the government provide health care for every American without thinking about costs or consequences. The progressive thinks that the government can run 1/5th of the economy without losing medical innovation, without rationing, or without the rich still buying gold plated insurance and the poor being stuck with Post Office-brand Health Insurance. The progressive thinks that government can still get things done even though its track record has been one dismal failure after another. Progressivism is simply the triumph of the heart over common sense.

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Don't Blame Obama if ObamaCare Fails; Blame Congress

Well I have to say that there is just a lot of blame to go around.

If the Congressional Democrats can�t get a health care package through, it won�t prove that President Obama is a sellout or an incompetent. It will prove that Congress�s liberal leaders are lousy tacticians, and that its centrist deal-makers are deal-makers first, poll watchers second and loyal Democrats a distant third. And it will prove that the Democratic Party is institutionally incapable of delivering on its most significant promises.

That is why I think something will pass even if it is watered down because they cannot fail for a second time and still be credible on the issue. The problem is that it isn't the GOP or Sarah Palin or these other people standing in the way. I mean the Dems can ram ObamaCare through with a strait party line vote if they want to.

What is holding things up is their inability to get their own party members to buy into a far left agenda and still allow them to hold onto their seats. I think the leftists in their party thought America had changed in 2008. Or maybe they thought that 100% of the popular vote was for Obama or something. They should realize there are still 59,934,814 people that voted for the other guy.

Contrary to what they think we are still a center, right country that is leery of government taking care of something as important as health care. I mean there are so many government failures in the past that it is hard to think that a "public option" will not just be the Post Office of Health Care in 5 years time.

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Do You Want a Test Case for ObamaCare? Maine Has Already Done It and it Sucks

I think the failure in Maine is ObamaCare's destiny in a few short years. The Maine version of ObamaCare or the so-called "public option" is called DirigoChoice (sounds like a hot-air balloon retail outlet or something.)

The program flew off track fast. At its peak in 2006, only about 15,000 people had enrolled in the DirigoChoice program. That number has dropped to below 10,000, according to the state's own reporting. About two-thirds of those who enrolled already had insurance, which they dropped in favor of the public option and its subsidies. Instead of 128,000 uninsured in the program today, the actual number is just 3,400. Despite the giant expansions in Maine's Medicaid program and the new, subsidized public choice option, the number of uninsured in the state today is only slightly lower that in 2004 when the program began.

So in other words this thing was supposed to cover the 128,000 uninsured and ended up covering just 3400? Hopefully that same thing happens to ObamaCare. They want to cover 47 million people and end up covering 10% of that. That would actually keep costs down. Here is why the Maine plan failed though:

Why did this happen? Among the biggest reasons is a severe adverse selection problem: The sickest, most expensive patients crowded into DirigoChoice, unbalancing its insurance pool and raising costs. That made it unattractive for healthier and lower-risk enrollees. And as a result, few low-income Mainers have been able to afford the premiums, even at subsidized rates.

This problem was exacerbated because since the early 1990s Maine has required insurers to adhere to community rating and guaranteed issue, which requires that insurers cover anyone who applies, regardless of their health condition and at a uniform premium. These rules�which are in the Obama plan�have relentlessly driven up insurance costs in Maine, especially for healthy people.

Yup but Maine doesn't have the equivalent to deficit spending like the US Government so the State legislature was forced to jack up premiums to cover the shortfall. So in other words ObamaCare will need to blast the deficit in order to keep these premiums in check.

So in other words this Maine program hardly covers anyone and has high sky premiums that have to be paid for out of the pocket of healthy people. That sounds like ObamaCare in a nutshell. But unlike people from Maine who have a choice to get out of this boondoggle (by moving or taking out private insurance) US citizens might not have a choice.

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The GOP Has no Health Reform Bill: No Wait They Do (It is called House Bill, H.R. 2520)

Just in case some liberal pundit says that the GOP does not have a health reform bill here is the proof that they actually do. Here is what it the Republican Bill (H.R. 2520) does:

1. It sets aside money for prevention of illness, outcome based prevention, changing the food stamp program to promote nutrition, and sets aside money for immunizations. (That food stamp thing might be great unintended benefit since nutrition and brain development go hand and hand.)

2. Creates State Based Health Exchanges. (Not sure if they are non profit or not)

3. Creates tax credit so Americans can afford health care. ($2290 per adult, $1710 per child with a cost of living adjustment. I'm not sure how this is paid for though.)

4. Modernizes Medicaid and provides assistance for low-income families.

5. Cuts Medicare for wealthy seniors, expands Medicare advantage, reduces fraud, waste, and abuse.

6. Gets rid of lawsuit abuse by creating state grants for health court solutions. (Too bad it didn't just cap all malpractice lawsuits at $250,000 unless there is proof of gross negligence like cutting off the wrong foot or something.)

7. Increases funding for health information technology. (Hopefully this codifies everything online so doctors and patients all work from the same set of assumptions.)

8. Creates something called the health care services commission. Their job is to promote transparency of price, quality, appropriateness, and effectiveness of health care. Hopefully they will print a list of how much each procedure costs and how much each plan covers all in one place. (It would be great repository of research for health care investors.)

9. Creates health care choice for Vets, American Indians, gets rid of the Council for Competitive Effectiveness Research, and compels the HHS and GAO to create a study about which 5 medical conditions have the greatest impact on health care in terms of cost. (I hope this study has some guidelines on how it will force those costs down.)

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Now We Are $9 Tillion in the Red?

It seems that Obama low-balled another economic number.

I wonder: How many economic projections has Team Barry utterly cocked up so far? Is anyone keeping a list? Off the top of my head, there�s this one, the infamous guesstimate that the stimulus would keep unemployment under eight percent, and the Cash for Clunkers funding that was supposed to last three months and ran out in a week.

I feel a little bad for the Red Chinese. Their debtor is so bad with money that they are not even sure how much they are down at any given time. The bill was once $7 trillion. No wait, I found another bill under the couch. Now we are down by $9 trillion.

I'm glad Obama could deliver this news right before he headed off of vacation. I just got a mental image of Obama in shorts and an aloha shirt with Michelle gunning the car behind him saying "Oh by the way we are another $2 trillion in the hole. Sorry about that folks!" and hops into the passenger side door as the car streaks away.

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Obama's Popularity at an All Time Low

It seems that he blew all of his political capital on ObamaCare and has nothing to show for it but terrible numbers.

The Washington Post-ABC News survey found that less that half of Americans � 49 percent � say they believe the president will make the right decisions for the country. That's down from 60 percent at the 100-day mark of the Obama presidency.

The poll published Friday says Obama's overall approval is 57 percent, 12 points lower than it was at its peak in April. Fifty-three percent disapprove of the way he's handling the budget deficit and his approval on health care continues to deteriorate.

I think some of this might be due to Obama's overexposure. I was watching a cable news show about new digital photo advertising that they were putting in an upcoming issue of Entertainment Weekly. Just as I was getting into it it cut off mid story. Of course it was "breaking news" about Obama from the Rose Garden shilling for ObamaCare or who knows what. I immediately changed the channel.

I'm at the point now that I cannot even go to the comic store without seeing Obama staring back at me from some comic or another. I think for this whole vacation week coming up he should have total radio and TV silence unless a major crisis develops. He needs to get out of the public eye for a while just so we can actually care about things he says again.

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While Wounded Warriors Wait for Checks the VA Serves up the Bonuses

This is brought to you by the same government that wants to go into the health care business.

In scathing reports this week, the VA's inspector general said thousands of technology office employees at the VA received the bonuses over a two-year period, some under questionable circumstances. It also detailed abuses ranging from nepotism to an inappropriate relationship between two VA employees.

If they can't take care of people that served this country in battle then how do you expect them to take care of the 47 million or more people that might suddenly have government health insurance? Government has failed in just about everything it touches and can't even keep corruption out of the IT department of the VA. Now they want to take control of 1/6 of the national economy? Good luck with that.

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A Real Jobs Bill: Or How to Make the Remaining Stimulus Work

Now this is something that should be considered on the use of the rest of the stimulus money that hasn't been frittered away yet. We already know how the stimulus was a dismal failure simply because it was targeted at the wrong areas:

Shierholz says policymakers should begin thinking about a second stimulus package focused on a jobs program. "If we passed a $200 billion jobs bill, that could create roughly 4 million jobs paying between $40,000 and $50,000," she says. "Four million temporary public sector jobs, for a year or two in duration, would bridge the employment gap while the economy recovers." Voting against the $787 billion measure, GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said, "There are so many things in the package completely unrelated to creating a job in the next 18 months." Only 11% of stimulus money was targeted toward infrastructure, and less than 10% of the jobs created have been public sector jobs.

Hell, we still have more than $200 billion left in the stimulus so they could scrap whatever that money will be wasted on and just create a 21st century version of the WPA. An injection of 4 million public sector jobs paid for by the government would be just what we need to get out of the recession. Couple this with a payroll tax holiday for a year or two and we would have that unemployment back to 4% in no time.

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Why is Health Insurance Different then other forms of Insurance?

This is a great common sense article that advocates that health insurance should be more like home owners and car insurance.

And there lies one of the problems with the health insurance reform debate. State government mandates and favorable tax treatment in Washington have so distorted the market for health insurance that a generation of Americans now look on medical coverage as something very different from other kinds of insurance that we buy. While we will pay several hundred bucks out of our own pockets to have a plumber come repair a leaky pipe, we'll balk at deductibles and a $50 co-pay for a doctor's visit. We've been schooled in this attitude by politicians who have mandated that health insurance do things that we'd never expect from other kinds of insurance, and by consumer advocates who will demand our legislators do something about a health insurance company that doesn't cover some optional procedure that has nothing to do with life and death.

Yeah, I think if more people had to actually pay out of their own pocket for some of this stuff they would demand that prices go down. Most of the time if you have insurance you have no idea what different tests and procedures cost.

If you had a high deductible plan and a certain amount put into a health savings account by the government that would be carried over from year to year it would be just like the Whole Foods health plan where you would be asking about every test to see if they were absolutely necessary.

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What Obama Needs to Explain About ObamaCare

I think this article sums up exactly what questions he needs to answer in order to sell the rest of the country on ObamaCare.

The proliferation of Obama�s gaffes and non sequiturs on health care has exceeded the allowable limit. He has failed repeatedly to explain how the government will provide more (health care) for less (money). He has failed to explain why increased demand for medical services without a concomitant increase in supply won�t lead to rationing by government bureaucrats as opposed to the market. And he has failed to explain why a Medicare-like model is desirable when Medicare itself is going broke.

Yup all this talk about Death Panels and slashing 30% from Medicare is just smoke and mirrors. He needs to sell us on how more people can be covered by insurance with less money and how much rationing there will be. Those are the questions that are not being answered before anything else.

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