I can’t work up any outrage over the expense of the Governor’s plane ride, dubbed “The Governor’s Very Expensive Plane Ride” by the Indianapolis Star. Mainly, I’m just glad he and those aboard took safety precautions when they made an unscheduled landing after the windshield cracked.

But, the question is, should I get worked up about the trip? Apparently the private plane cost about $1,000 per hour to operate with about 2 hours each way so the Governor could go to a National Governor’s Association meeting. I don’t know if/how much the airplane use cost for the time it would be waiting around between trips. But I did hear an awful lot about what bad people the executives of the automobile companies were because they didn’t fly commercial during these austere times. And, during these times of cutting the budget to the bone, is the National Governor’s Association (and, I believe concurrent appearance on one of the Sunday television shows) really a necessary expense? Probably not. But, like I said, I can’t work up any real emotion over the issue.

Update Paul Ogden offers his thoughts on the matter.

Hedge fund manager and derivatives trader turned CNBC personality, Rick Santelli was the author of a highly publicized rant against Obama’s plan to deal with mortgages. The gist of it was that he didn’t work so hard so that he could foot the bill for his neighbor’s bigger house or extra bathroom that caused his deadbeat neighbor to default, apparently. Said Santelli, “This is America! How many people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgages that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”

He’s right, this America, there is always room for discussion of the philosophical position of “I’ve got mine. Fuck you. It’s better for everybody (especially me) in the long run.” But really, right now, guys in the exotic financial products industry probably want to keep their heads down and shut up. Because whatever bad decisions were made at the ground level, they were magnified hugely by the financial hucksters who bundled the mortgages, removed the risk from the banks and brokers who originated the deals, slapped a AAA gold star on the financial product, and started making leveraged bets on derivative products.

These guys, if they are smart, do not want to draw attention to themselves. There is a lot of ambient anger out there looking for a place to land. Because the “financial industry” is nameless, faceless, and complicated for the “Average American” (including this one), very few individuals have taken too much heat for the economic collapse. But if a guy like Santelli wants to stand up and tell honest folks who got in over their head despite hard work and good intentions that this is all their fault, I just have to say “good luck with that.”

The moral hazard of a homeowner paying a fixed rate mortgage instead of an adjustable rate mortgage just isn’t that worrying to me after reading about how loan originators were able to remove themselves from any real risk for the mortgages they arranged. I could have missed it, but I am not aware of public statements by Santelli about the moral hazard of bank bailouts.

If anyone is going to credibly advance the pure market philosophy in the current climate, it will have to be a pure libertarian walking the talk and unaffiliated with the financial industry. A guy like Santelli is just begging to be tarred and feathered.

Local politics in The Region have always been opaque to me. I just shrug my shoulders, assume corruption, and pay more attention to other parts of the state. I first became aware of Bob Pastrick in the context of his support as a superdelegate for Hillary Clinton.

Apparently Mr. Pastrick, former mayor of East Chicago, is the defendant in a civil racketeering trial scheduled to begin in May.

The lawsuit claims that Pastrick and former aides Timothy Raykovich and James Fife used more than $24 million of city money for paving projects to buy votes in the 1999 Democratic primary election.

Pastrick was mayor for 32 years. He left office after the Indiana Supreme Court in 2004 found his campaign tainted with corruption and ordered a rerun of the 2003 Democratic primary.

C-span’s historian Presidential Rankings are out for 2009. George W. Bush, the newest addition to the pantheon, hits the charts at #36, nudging out Millard Fillmore for that spot. Herbert Hoover is two above him at #34. The top three, as you would expect, are Lincoln, Washington, and FDR.

Rounding out the top ten are Teddy Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Jefferson, Eisenhower, Wilson, and Reagan. Kennedy and Reagan in particular, seem to benefit from the nostalgia of the living. In another 50 years or so, I doubt either will fare so well. Jefferson, Jackson, Madison, and Monroe should probably be higher in my opinion — Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe probably more for what they did before assuming the Presidency than for their actual term of office, so maybe I’m just not thinking in terms of the correct criteria.

So, the stimulus bill passed. I don’t know if it will work, probably nobody does. I am hopeful. And, certainly, if we have to spend piles of money, I’d prefer that money be in the form of bridges and roads in the United States as opposed to craters in the Iraqi desert and disappearing pallets of money in Baghdad. My preference would be to go back in time, require bank regulators to regulate and also require that loan risks be better tethered to the people originating those loans so that the bubble didn’t get so far out of hand. But, that’s not going to happen.

Very few Republicans voted for the stimulus. And, politically, there was probably very little upside for them to do so. If it works well, they probably won’t get any credit. But, they could have staged things a little better. Boehner was telling House Republicans to vote against the thing before Obama went in and talked to them. As a practical matter, the biggest downside they face is the potential that constituents might regard “tax cuts” and “no” as insufficient responses to the current economic crisis.

Now, I wonder how many conservatives and libertarians (and anyone else, I suppose) are opposed to this sort of spending for pragmatic reasons and how many for ideological reasons. By which I mean, let’s say for the sake of argument that large scale government spending enhanced the well-being of a substantial majority of the population while leaving the already well-to-do remainder earning a comfortable but not a lavish income. Let’s further hypothesize that the government intervention curbed the excessive crashes and booms of the market while leaving a vibrant, growing productive economy. Would conservatives and/or libertarians support such a system? In other words, I know that plenty of folks oppose government intervention such as that in the stimulus bill for the very practical reason that they don’t believe it will work as well as the government doing little to nothing.

But for how many is unfettered or almost unfettered liberty and lack of government intervention and end to itself; even if the price of liberty is increased human misery?

I’m not framing this question as a foregone conclusion, by the way. This question or echoes of it are present in Dostoyevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter of “The Brothers Karamazov” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” for starters.

In any event, John Cole figures that, politically, this was not a good move by the Republicans and explains why.

I honestly have never seen a party go so far out of their way to marginalize themselves, and folks who study groupthink are going to look at the last few months as a veritable gold mine. Why the Republicans have decided to, in the middle of numerous crises, ignore the outcome of an election and run headlong against a popular new President into opposition for opposition sake is beyond me.

And look, there are very legitimate reasons to oppose the stimulus bill. . . .
Additionally, spending that kind of money shouldn’t be easy, and an opposition that didn’t spend every day running around yelling ‘No’ and ‘Tax cuts’ probably could have built a more effective case against the stimulus bill. Sadly, that would have required counter proposals and arguments that didn’t start and end with tax cuts. But it is the way the Republicans are going about opposition that is so ridiculous. Their unified vote is so transparently just political gamesmanship, especially when you consider that immediately after the vote, Republicans were issuing press releases touting the benefits of the bill for their district.

Deanna Martin, writing for the Associated Press, has an article on Lawrence Central High School Teacher, Daniel Jackson, and his personal finance lessons. Seems like I could have done without my shop, cooking, art, or sewing classes for better education in personal finance. But, I don’t recall learning much of anything about mortgages, credit cards, checking accounts, utility bills or any of that nuts and bolts of running a household.

Soaring foreclosure rates and credit-card debt are spurring some states, including Indiana, to consider requiring personal finance classes to get a diploma, sparking criticism that parents should teach financial basics at home instead of schools packing life lessons into an already tight schedule.

God forbid schools teach life lessons. I’m not an advocate of the legislature micromanaging curriculum. I’m also not a huge fan of vocational courses — preferring instead the more general kind of thinking classes: science, math, english, literature. But money management is a lot more important than a lot of the crap I remember sitting through during my school years. For some reason, I remember getting stuck in two different 9 week classes of sewing. Those are hours of my life I’ll never get back. If schools are still forcing kids to take that kind of class, they need to ditch it and teach kids the basics of managing money.

In the course of debt collection, I don’t know how many crash courses I’ve had to give in the concept of interest.

Debtor: How much do I owe?
Me: $2,000.
Debtor: But it was only $1,500 when the judgment was entered.
Me: Yeah, but that was like 5 years ago.
Debtor: But I’ve been making payments and the balance never goes down.
Me: Your payments have generally been about $20 every 2 or 3 months and you haven’t made any payments in 6 months.
Debtor: But the balance hasn’t gone down at all, it has gone up.
Me: Every judgment in Indiana accrues interest at the rate of 8% per year.
Debtor: That’s not fair!
Me: Sure it is. First of all, my client isn’t a bank and didn’t agree to make you a loan. Second, interest just reflects the fact that money is more valuable now than it is later.
Debtor: Huh?
Me: Well, tell me this, would you rather have 100 bucks now or 100 bucks in ten years?
Debtor: Well, right now of course.
Me: There you go. All you have to do if you want to avoid more interest is pay the balance in full right now.