Not Debatable
A poll found that between 2017 and 2018, NY and NJ were one and two in terms of population decline, both losing more that one percent. Arizona and Idaho were the top two on the plus side. Seems Horace Greeley’s words are still being heeded: “Go west, young man.”
I won’t pile on the criticisms of Bloomberg’s woeful debate performance, but I have enjoyed the news reports. He’s being bashed across the spectrum, far left to far right. I don’t watch any political stuff. I vote policy, and I know where just about all the candidates stand. It’s all on record and not rocket science. I am stunned that such a successful businessman comes off as such a dullard. I used to feel the same way about Ted Turner whenever I saw him interviewed. It doesn’t seem possible that they just got lucky. There has to be more to them than meets the eye.
I was dreading reaching the age when one has to make withdrawals from retirement accounts — whether one needs the money or not. Just the thought of how it would make a tax return even more complicated made me weak. I just got great news on that front in an email from Fidelity. The age of required distribution has been raised to 72. My thanks to the lawmakers who made it happen… Also in this vein, I just spotted an article at Yahoo Finance that touts two stocks that pay a whopping 8% dividend: PAGP (Plains GP Holdings) is in the oil industry, and ARCC (Ares Capital Corporation) is in asset management. Although I’m intrigued, I probably won’t buy. I’m not paying the attention I probably should to my portfolios. My investment history is mediocre, categorized by stocks I didn’t take a chance on such as Snapple, Google, Netflix, IBM, CBS, Amazon and, the real killer, Bitcoin, which I could have bought at about $200. I probably would have sold it well before it fell just short of the $20,000 mark, but it might have been my all-time winner. That mistake seems to have finished me psychologically in terms of playing the stock market. Without any further input from me, my three accounts have made an all-time high several times the past couple of years, and the best assets have been mutual funds of dividend paying stocks. I hope the aforementioned are part of them. It would be easy to look up, but I just don’t have the interest I used to in this area. Of course, I’ll always have interest in the following type of assets:
The names are characters they played on screen. How many can you name? It would be a lot easier if the film titles were larger.
No luck selling books on the street today. I did get a great donation from a gentleman — three Broadway pictorials. I was surprised no one jumped on them or any of the DVDs on display. The inventory keeps getting bigger and better. Maybe tomorrow.
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