Financial stuff

Five Radical Ways for the U.S. Government to Raise Revenue

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The federal government is running a humongous deficit but politicians don’t want to raise taxes or cut services since that would be unpopular.   Here are a few of my ideas for new sources of revenue for the government.

  1. Legalize Marijuana- And then tax it.  The government is already making money off tobacco and alcohol it might as well make money from marijuana also.  This should also result in a large savings for law enforcement since they would no longer have to expend money to enforce the marijuana laws.  If legalizing marijuana worked then legalizing more drugs could be considered.
  2. Legalize Prostitution- And then tax it.  They would need to come up with a workable system for this.  The Nevada system with the brothels taking 50% of the prostitute’s income is not a good model.  The prostitute should be the only way making money off her(or his) work, except the government of course.  This also should result in savings for law enforcement.
  3. Legalize Internet Gambling- And then tax it.  People are doing it anyway the government might as well make some money from it.  So far my ideas have all been about legalizing vices and thus moving money from the underground economy to the tax coffers.  I have a couple ideas that don’t involve vices too.
  4. Put Advertisements on Money- Just replace the back of a bill with an ad and the government would have a large source of revenue.  Alternatively, they could also replace the $1 and $5 bills with coins and eliminate the penny.  That would not be too radical though and it would save money rather than generate revenue.
  5. Sell Naming rights to public sites- Professional sports teams make big money selling naming rights to their stadiums.  The federal government could cash in on this too.  Perhaps they could have the Washington(Mutual) Monument or the U.S. Capitol(One) building.  I’m sure you can come up with better examples than that.

As you might guess I’m not entirely serious about these ideas but I do believe there are some sources of revenue out there that the government has yet to tap.

My Stock Portfolio is Up

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My portfolio of individual stocks I started investing in last year is finally showing a profit.  Not much of one but compared to the 30% loss in my Roth IRA it looks pretty good.  This doesn’t matter much since I won’t be using the money for several years but it is good to see it heading in the right direction.  I wish I could say that the superior return of my stock portfolio compared to my Roth IRA was due to my investing skill but it is mostly attributable to luck.  I didn’t start investing in my individual stocks until late October/early November after the stock market had already declined steeply.  This wasn’t because I was timing the market but because I didn’t have the money to invest before then.  Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good.

WaMu Canceled My Credit Card

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As I was warned might happen WaMu canceled my credit card due to inactivity. I hadn’t used the card in over a year and utilized the account only for checking on my credit score. Although I was warned the card might be canceled for inactivity I decided to not use the card and let WaMu close it if they wanted to. I wasn’t going to use the card just to keep getting the free credit score. As it turns out this decision was irrelevant because my account had already been closed. I didn’t know it yet because I get all my correspondence for that card at my mom’s address. It was my newest card so the closing shouldn’t hurt my credit score much and I won’t know how it affects my credit score because I don’t have access to my free credit score anymore.

Excuses

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It seems lately that whenever I read a personal finance article dispensing financial advice people are quick to leave comments as to why the advice won’t work for them. Since I don’t know the people leaving the comments I don’t know if they are legitimate excuses or not. Financial advice is not one size fits all and you can’t expect what works for one to work for everybody. That being said I still think there are a lot of people just making excuses for why they can’t improve their finances. It appears when they read financial advice they think of why that wouldn’t work for them rather than how to make it work for them. They may want to improve their finances but they don’t really want to make any changes in their life.

I am guilty of this myself. I have done a poor job of meeting goals I have set for myself this year. Making excuses to yourself doesn’t work very well since you know they are BS. With that in mind I’ll be making some more goals for next year that I’ll post soon. And next year there will be no excuses.

Keeping Urges From Becoming Splurges

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My method to keep urges from becoming splurges is to give in to my urge but in a controlled manner.  This makes my urge go away but doesn’t have the same negative consequences as a full-blown splurge.

Here is a recent example.  I’ve been a little depressed lately and being depressed makes me want to gamble.  This doesn’t make much sense because I lose money when I gamble which makes me even more depressed.  Irrational as it is, the urge to gamble exists and has to be dealt with.  My solution was to take $100 to the casino and gamble it away.

It does suck to waste $100 like that but I know if I ignore my urge I’ll eventually give in and go on an unplanned bingge – which would likely cost me much more than $100. After losing the $100 my urge to gamble was gone and my mood has gradually started to improve.

This method has worked for me for years.  After going backwards the past couple of years the time between giving in to my gambling urge is gradually increasing again.  This is probably because now that I’m with my GF I’m much less prone to depression.  If you want to try a variation of this method for your own urge please note that it only works if you know that you will only give in to the urge as planned.