popular logistics

“The bailout package is far better than the absurd proposal originally presented to us by the Bush administration, but is still short of where we should be. If a bailout is needed, if taxpayer money must be placed at risk, if we are going to bail out Wall Street, it should be those people who have caused the problem, those people who have benefited from President Bush’s tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, those people who have taken advantage of deregulation who should pick up the tab, not ordinary working people.”

Sanders proposed a five-year, 10 percent surtax on families with incomes of more than $1 million a year and individuals earning over $500,00 to raise $300 billion to help bankroll the bailout. Senators, however, set aside the amendment on a voice vote.

The original Teddy bear can be found at the Smithsonian Institute National Museum of Natural History.

The Law of Diminishing Returns: Teddy Bear Corollary:

“A child will be love one stuffed animal. And will also love two. He or she will give them names. With 10 or 20, however, there will be the one or two named favorites on the bed, and the rest will gather dust in boxes, drawers, shelves, under the bed, etc.”

Once people have enough food to eat, and a warm clean bed in which to sleep, additional things don’t make people happy. Or, as Bill McKibben put it, in Deep Economy, “Up to a certain point, more really does equal better.”

Below $10,000 money buys happiness, and as Ed Diener and Martin Seligman quantified in “Beyond Money,” University of Illinois, etc, (click here) “Above U. S. $10,000 per capita income … there are virtually no increases … in well being. Moreover, health, quality of government, and human rights all correlate with national wealth, and when these variables are statistically controlled, the effect of income on national well-being becomes non-significant.”

McKibben tells the story of Du Pei-Teng, who by age 20 had managed to save $12,000 yuan over the course of two years in a shower curtain factory. This is about half of what Du would need to build a small house in his hometown. McKibben reported that Du was able to save this sum by giving up Coke-Cola, even tho it only costs about 8 or 9 yuan, because one can of Coke each day, over two years, would amount to about 6,000 yuan – half of what he had saved, and one fourth of what you need to build a hosue and start a family in China.