Cash is burning holes in our pockets. Hence, a new brilliant idea: Open a bank account which pays real interest. Which ones?
I went to Bankrate.com, a semi-useful site for finding out who’s pays the most on a savings account. These are:
When I started this quest, it showed Ally Bank and GSBank (Goldman Sachs) at the top. Since every bank seems to be FDIC-insured, pick the one paying the most. So far, I’ve opened accounts at Ally and GSBank.
What I learned: Opening an account is awful. Funding it is even more awful. I’ve linked Ally and GSBank to my day-to-day JPMorgan Chase account (which basically doesn’t pay interest on my money).
For Ally and GSBank to suck money out of JPMorgan Chase is convoluted, and will take days, or longer.
If your pocket holes are bothering you, here’s a nice way to spend quality time speaking to Sara or Jackie, or Bob or John or whoever you get, to walk you through their online idiocy. Good luck.
Frankly, I wish JPMorgan would pay me a miserly 1%, instead of their 0.01%, or maybe it’s 0.001%? I can’t find what it is on their web site.
Joy in the new health care plan.
The structure of the Affordable Care Act comes out of a straightforward analysis of the logic of coverage. If you want to make health insurance available and affordable for almost everyone, regardless of income or health status, and you want to do this through private insurers rather than simply have single-payer, you have to do three things.
1.Regulate insurers so they can’t refuse or charge high premiums to people with preexisting conditions
2.Impose some penalty on people who don’t buy insurance, to induce healthy people to sign up and provide a workable risk pool
3.Subsidize premiums so that lower-income households can afford insurance
So that’s Obamacare (and Romneycare before that): regulation, mandates, and subsidies. The result has been a sharp decline in the number of uninsured. … Roughly speaking, 20 million Americans gained coverage at a cost of around 0.6 percent of GDP.
Republicans have nonetheless denounced the law as a monstrosity…
Which it is. (This is now Harry speaking). Everything about it is wrong, namely:
1. It encourages everyone to be “poor” — not to get a real job and to be paid in cash . Every vendor/contractor/worker I’ve met recently wants me to pay in cash.
2. It’s open to fraud — now big and getting bigger. Scamming is becoming very creative. No one sells or buys anything because they don’t want it on the books and taxable.
3. Insurance companies don’t like to lose money by insuring people they wouldn’t ordinarily insure — like bad risks (e.g. sick people with pre-existing) conditions (aka diseases.) Hence insurance companies drop out of the pool (e.g. UNH). As more insurers drop out of the pool, there’s less competition, and insurance premiums skyrocket. More hate mail for more politicians, more insureds will stop buying insurance, putting even more pressure on hospital emergency rooms — expenses for which come out of taxpayer pockets (different pockets).
4. Rich people (Republican donors) don’t like Obamacare because it taxes them to pay for poor people’s health care. From my friend yesterday:
The new Republican health care plan is fabulous for rich guys like us. It completely eliminates the 3.8% Medicare tax on investment income and capital gains and the 0.9% surtax on income above $250,000.
Reasons not to drive in China. Wonderful, sick video. Sort of funny.
Click here.
Favorite recent New Yorker cartoons.
Harry Newton, who is impressed how many people in God’s Waiting Room (California’s Coachella Valley) spend their time aggressively trying to be healthy — exercising, eating moderately, , napping and eliminating stress. Stress elimination is a topic for a another column. Today, I’ve played tennis, napped, written this blog and am about to take Rosie to the Doggie Park, where she will pay with other small dogs and I’ll pick up after the Big Dog owners who are irresponsible.
