Here's part two of my extended interview with renegade supply-side economist Bruce Bartlett, including some thoughts on Medicare that might just scare the pants off you. See here for part one, and here for the less-wonky version that's running in Money's November issue.

David Futrelle: As one of the original supply-siders, you worry that supply side economics had been reduced to little more than a religion of tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts.

Bruce Bartlett: That's right. A lot of what's wrong with conservative economists today is that they still act as if we're living in 1980 — as if we're facing inflation and massively high tax rates — and they're advocating policies that were perfectly appropriate for 1980 in an environment in which they make no sense. More

Bruce Bartlett is a man of strong opinions. A supply-side economist even before the Reagan Revolution, he served in two Republican administrations and then as a policy wonk and gadfly at conservative think tanks. But in recent years he's gotten fed up with Republicans who've turned supply-side economics into a crude and sometimes cynical faith in tax cuts as the solution to whatever ails us. Meanwhile, many conservatives have gotten fed up with him: his highly critical book on George W. Bush got him fired from the conservative think tank he was working at a couple of years ago.

I spoke with him recently about his new book The New American Economy, which among other things suggests that we could learn a thing or two from economist John Maynard Keynes — yep, the guy who thought government spending was the only way to pull economies out of deep depressions. The interview, which appears in the November issue of Money, has just been posted online.

We were only able to fit a portion of our wide-ranging discussion into the tight confines of the print magazine, so I thought I'd share some more of it here on the blog. More

If you want evidence that our economy may be on the way to recovery, forget about car sales and new home starts and all that stuff — and instead look at men's underpants. If they don't have holes in them, good times may be coming soon.

That's the premise of an interesting theory proffered — at least half seriously — in a recent article in the Washington Post by writer Ylan Q. Mui. "Here's the theory, briefly," she writes. "Sales of men's underwear typically are stable because they rank as a necessity. But during times of severe financial strain, men will try to stretch the time between buying new pairs, causing underwear sales to dip." More

In the Science Fiction world of Isaac Asimov, robots are required to abide by three simple laws:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The FTC has now added a fourth: A robot must not call you up during dinner and pester you with dubious commercial come-ons. Yep, as of this Tuesday, the FTC has outlawed robocalls.

Well, some of them, anyway. This new law of robotics comes trailing a lot of fine print. Politicians and survey-takers can still robocall you, as can banks, debt collectors, and charities. For all the gory details — 42 packed pages of them — see here.

If you're not already on the national Do-Not-Call registry, or want to make sure that you are, make a quick trip to donotcall.gov. For more info, take a look here.

The open question is whether or not the new regulations will shut up one chatty robocaller named Rachel from Cardholder Services. I'm one of the few Americans, it seems, who hasn't received a call (or two dozen) from this persistent but mysterious robo-lady, who sometimes goes by the name Heather or Michelle, and who claims to be able to lower your interest rates. But she makes a lot of calls, and she's not making a lot of friends: Do a quick Google search on the phrase "Rachel from Cardholder Services" and you'll find dozens of web pages complaining about her calls.

Now, banks and credit card companies, which are outside the FTC's jurisdiction, are exempt from the robocall ban. But no one seems to have been able to track down just who "Rachel" is or (more importantly) who she works for. James Shiffer at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune has been looking for her for months. Twice he's tracked the calls back to Florida financial companies — or perhaps one company working under multiple names — but the people there have denied having anything to do with her. (See here and here for his coverage.)

Whatever is going on here, it's shady. If Rachel (or Heather or Michelle, or any other sleazy robotic or human telemarketer) gives you a call, report it by visiting donotcall.gov or by calling 1-888-382-1222.

Apparently Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has more to worry about than interest rates and financial bailouts: he and his wife were recently the victims of identity theft after Anna Bernanke's purse, containing credit cards and a family checkbook, was snatched from the back of a chair in a D.C. Starbucks.

Though it's not every day a Fed chief finds himself the victim of such a low and petty financial crime, the case was fairly typical in one regard: the information stolen was stolen not in cyberspace but in the real world. According to a recent survey by the Identity Theft Resource Center, only about 9 percent of victims have their information snatched through phishing scams and other internet skullduggery; another 13 percent lose their info through computer database breaches.

The rest are victimized in relatively old-fashioned ways: by people stealing wallets or purses or burglarizing homes or cars; rifling through their mail or garbage; poking through their desk at work. Chillingly, some 40 percent of the time the info isn't stolen by some nefarious stranger but by someone close to the victim — a relative, neighbor, co-worker, roommate or "friend." (You can see the group's press release, or download a copy of the whole report, here.)

Does that mean you should stop worrying so much about hackers, and worry more about your skeezy uncle? Well, no. While you definitely should try to protect your info from the prying eyes of disreputable relatives and perpetually broke roommates, hackers are nothing to sneeze at. Indeed, they're getting more sophisticated — and more businesslike — by the day.

As hacker-turned-journalist Kevin Poulsen put it in a recent article in Wired, the future of hacking is "professional, smart, and above-all well-funded. In the old days, hackers were mostly kids and college-age acolytes sowing their wild oats before joining the establishment. Today, the best hackers have the skill and discipline of the best legitimate programmers and security gurus. … Money is the catalyst for this change: Computer criminals are scooping in millions through various scams and attacks."

While there's nothing you can do to prevent large-scale database breeches — of the sort these recently arrested hackers were allegedly involved in — there are lots of things you can do to make yourself safer online or off.

Here are some useful resources:

Protect yourself from Identity Theft
Keep yourself safe from scams while searching for a job
Thwart ID Thieves
Protect your information online
The FCC on ID theft

These sites will give you some basic strategies that can make a big difference. Do you need to go further and subscribe to some fancy and expensive ID theft protection service? Probably not. If you're tempted to, read this article first. Prudence will do you far more good than panic.

How much do you worry about ID theft and what, if anything have you done to prevent it?

How much is walkability worth? An intriguing new study suggests that people are willing to pay considerable premiums for houses in neighborhoods that are highly walkable — that is, where you can actually get to nearby stores, schools, and parks without having to hop in the car.

The study, conducted by a group called CEOs for Cities, looked at 90,000 homes in 15 different markets in the US, mashing up home sales data with "walkability" scores from WalkScore.com. (See the press release describing the study here, or download the study itself, in pdf form, here.) In 13 of the 15 areas studied, homes in highly walkable neighborhoods sold on average for $4000 to $34,000 more than homes in neighborhoods of average walkability. The pattern held in locations as diverse as Chicago, Tucson, and Jacksonville, Florida; only in Las Vegas were more-walkable neighborhoods less desirable than less-walkable ones. To the author of the study, Joseph Cortright, this suggests that neighborhood walkability is "more than just a pleasant amenity," and deserves far more attention from politicians and other urban leaders.

Is this study simply saying that people pay more for homes in high-density metropolitan areas? Well, no; the study controls for this effect, as well as for a host of other factors (like home size, neighborhood income levels, and access to jobs) that might have affected the results.

Still, the results should be seen as only preliminary, in part because the walkability scores they use are crude at best. The idea behind the WalkScore.com website is ingenious: you plug in your address, and the site uses Google Maps data on the locations of various businesses, schools, libraries and so on to calculate a personalized walkability score.

The problem is that this Google data is incomplete: many businesses aren't in the database and those that are can be mischaracterized. When I punched in the address of my Chicago apartment, I got a walkability score of 97 out of 100 ("Walkers Paradise"), which seems about right; my neighborhood is lousy with restaurants, grocery stores, and all sorts of little shops. When I used the address of my parents' suburban home, WalkScore declared their neighborhood "car dependent," which is also correct.

The results I got all seemed more or less accurate. But the way WalkScore generates these results is still somewhat problematic. Looking into the data they used for my neighborhood, I noticed that it omitted countless restaurants, including most of my favorites, and miscategorized a bunch of different performance venues as "movie theaters."

The authors of the study are well aware that WalkScore has what they call "both conceptual and technical limitations." But it is still pretty good as a rough-and-ready guide to walkability, and as Google's data gets better, so will WalkScore's results.

The implications of the report? In the broadest sense, as Cortright notes, the results seem to confirm that many urban residents agree with urban guru Jane Jacobs that dense, mixed use neighborhoods are more vibrant and interesting than soulless planned developments or suburban sprawl.

In more practical terms, CEOs for Cities head Carol Coletta argues in her group's press release, the study's results "tell us that if urban leaders are intentional about developing and redeveloping their cities to make them more walkable, it will not only enhance the local tax base but will also contribute to individual wealth by increasing the value of what is, for most people, their biggest asset."

For more discussion of the report, see here and here.

So how walkable is your neighborhood? How much is walkability worth to you?

How hard is it to stay retired? As you've no doubt heard, football legend Brett Favre just came out of retirement — for the second time. But it isn't just sports figures who see retirement as little more than a passing phase: Polls suggest that anywhere from one-half to three-quarters of working Americans plan to return to some sort of work after they retire — that is, if they expect to retire at all. Some can't imagine life without some kind of work; others simply need the money. For many people, especially Gen-Xers, the notion of working after "retirement" may almost seem a given, especially for those who are struggling to save enough in the current recession.

But as it turns out, unretirement can have as many complications as retirement. There's a giant gap between what people say they're going to do after retirement and what they actually do: A 2009 study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) found that 72 percent of workers planned to work after "retirement" — up from 66 percent in 2007. But in fact, only 34 percent of retirees said they'd actually gone to work at some point during retirement. (A recent poll by the Longevity Alliance, conducted by Harris Interactive, found much lower percentages for both those who planned to work and those who actually did, but the gap between what people said and what they did was still there.)

There's a similar gap — if not quite as dramatic — between the age at which people expect they'll retire and the age when they actually do. While many say that the current economic mess has led them to delay retirement, the effect of these planned delays is hard to find in the data. As EBRI notes, among the people who have changed their expected retirement age within the past year

the vast majority (89 percent) say that they have postponed retirement with the intention of increasing their financial security. Nevertheless, the median (mid-point) worker expects to retire at age 65, with 21 percent planning to push on into their 70s. The median retiree actually retired at age 62, and 47 percent of retirees say they retired sooner than planned.

Why is this? Well, when you get older, to borrow a euphemism from Donald Rumsfeld, stuff happens. You may have health problems that keep you from working; getting a job may be harder than you thought. Heck, you might even decide that a life without paid work isn't quite as boring as you thought it would be. If you've already started getting Social Security, you may face reductions in your benefits if you go back to work (though this is only the case if you started your benefits before you reached your "full retirement" age). The AARP has a very useful page that can help you to sort out some of the costs and benefits of going back to work. And you'll find some helpful advice in this CNNMoney story.

You shouldn't count on being able to work enough in retirement to make up for a significant lack of retirement savings. But if you're healthy enough to work, the benefits of working in some capacity after you hit retirement age can be considerable. I suspect the percentage of those who actually do work after the age of 65 — as opposed to just saying they will — will increase considerably as the boomers and then the Gen-Xers hit that age.

Are you planning to work after the age of 65? If you're already past that age, are you working, or do you plan to return to work at some point in the future? If so, why? Money? Self-fulfillment? Health care benefits?

If you're looking for ways to cut your expenses, take a look at Money's September cover story, "Cut Your Spending by $500 a Month." I admit to being a little biased here, as I was one of the contributors to the story.

As such, I can tell you that coming up with money-saving tips that actually work is tough. Not all of my ideas made it into the story. And frankly, not all of them really deserved to. Here are some of my ideas that I or or my editor decided were too silly, stupid or trivial to make the cut. Bear in mind that I actually do all these things.

• Water down your shampoo. From personal experience, I can tell you that Pert Plus not only lasts longer but works better when it's watered down a bit. I don't know the scientific principle underlying this discovery, but using this tip can save you literally hundreds of cents a year.
• Stop buying so many shoes. You know who you are. You can only wear one pair at a time, unless you wear them on your hands, too. How many shoes do you need, anyway?
• Buy pet toys in the human toys department. Pet toys can be ridiculously expensive. Instead of buying a couple of tiny balls for your cat to chase for $3.99, buy ping pong balls for a buck. Or just wad up pieces of paper. Cats don't care. They'll get bored with whatever you buy for them within a few minutes anyway. Ungrateful jerks.
• Listen to tapes. Once upon a time, in the age of boomboxes and Walkmen, tapes were the hottest selling music format around. Now that they've been kicked to the curb, first by CDs and then by digital downloads, no one seems to want them anymore — which means you can find perfectly fine tapes for fifty cents or a dollar at any decent thrift store. If you've still got a working tape deck, let your analog freak flag fly. Sure, you can't easily skip tracks, but who needs to skip tracks when you're listening to Slim Whitman's Greatest Hits, like I am right now? Slim Whitman rules!
• Don't get tattoos. They're expensive going on, and even more expensive coming off. If you want to impress that rocker chick at the bar, draw something on your arm with a Sharpie before introducing yourself to her. It doesn't matter if it looks convincing. She's not going to be interested in you anyway.
• Don't buy groceries until you've absolutely run out of everything, and are reduced to eating nothing but pickles for lunch. To be honest, I'm not actually sure this will save you money. It's just how it always seems to happen in my apartment.
• Stay behind the times. Wait until books come out in paperback and until movies come out on DVD. Don't buy the latest electronic gizmos; see if you can mooch gently used digital cameras and not-all-that-lightweight laptops from your friends and relatives when they upgrade to the latest models. Don't bother changing your hair or clothing styles until people giggle and point at you whenever you leave the house. Speaking of which …
• Never leave the house. Doing stuff outside the house tends to cost money, so avoid the outside world whenever possible.

Hey, at least none of my tips are quite as stupid as those in this list from Cracked.com. Got your own bad good good bad ideas? Leave a comment and let the rest of us learn about it.

It used to be that the mythbusters at Snopes.com were the go-to-guys for refutations of weird rumors. These days, though, those diligent debunkers can barely keep up. It seems like only yesterday that tongues were wagging about Obama's alleged non-citizenship — a false rumor the site addressed earlier this month with a typically withering takedown of the forged birth certificate that purportedly proves Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

Now the air is thick with talk of "death panels" hidden in the health care reform bills — a monumentally absurd notion endorsed by assorted Republican politicians, ex-politicians and talk show hosts, as well as by more than a few angry citizens at town hall hall meetings. (Not only are the claims untrue, but the wholly innocent, even laudable provision at the root of the myths that would have reimbursed doctors for counseling patients who wanted advice on living wills and other end-of-life issues has now been stricken from the Senate bill.) Snopes, which took on similar claims back in July, hasn't yet gotten to the latest round of rumors. So others have had to jump in and do a little mythbusting themselves.

Like, for example, AARP. Now, if there were anything to all this talk of "death panels," you'd think the AARP would be raising holy hell. After all, the nonprofit devoted to people age 50 and over has what you might call a vested interest in keeping America's elderly alive and well. But there isn't any substance to these "death panels," so the group has instead taken aim at the rumors. "Much of the debate is being driven by special interests that are deliberately kicking up clouds of dust to obscure the facts," the group notes on a page set up to combat the "misinformation and fear-mongering" that now clouds the debate. AARP's site is eminently useful for anyone who wants to make sense of what's really at stake in the health care reform battle, offering the group's own detailed refutations of the myths and lies, as well as links to mainstream press coverage of the scare tactics adopted by some opponents of reform.

For an even more thorough factchecking of what is and isn't true about health care reform, you can turn to Polifact.com, an online project of the St. Petersburg Times. For a quick overview of some of the disinformation that's being spread around, check out the site's health care Truth-O-Meter page. (Or simply look at the the health care "Greatest Hits, Vol. 1.") If you get tired of reading about what isn't true, and want nothing but the truth, Polifact.com's "simple explanation" of the health care bills now under consideration is the clearest I've seen anywhere

Polifact.com isn't partisan. In addition to refuting some of Sarah Palin's wild Facebook assertions about "death panels," they've also factchecked various pronouncements from Obama himself on health care and found some of them highly questionable — such as his claim at a town hall earlier this week that AARP had endorsed his reform plans. (In fact, the group, while supportive of many elements of reform, has not officially endorsed any of the plans now out there, as a spokesman for the group quickly made clear.)

Oh, and in case you're wondering, that video that got forwarded to you earlier this week of the guy shooting off a waterside and landing in a tiny pool — it's fake, too.

So is Craigslist a handy free alternative to newspaper classifieds — a sort of virtual flea market and community bulletin board — or is it a haven for criminals and creeps looking to rip you off or worse?

What's gotten me thinking about this perennial question is a lurid and depressing expose of the Craigslist criminal underworld in, of all places, Maxim magazine, generally more known for its exposes of the scantily clad bodies of Hollywood hotties.

The story, by Frank Owen, delves into some of the more notorious crimes associated with Craigslist, spending the most time on the case of accused "Craigslist killer" Philip Markoff, who allegedly targeted victims for robbery in the site's "Erotic Services" section. But Owen also delves into the less sensationalistic scams that proliferate on the site, interviewing one scammer who says he collected thousands of dollars from an ingenious bed-and-breakfast bait-and-switch:

[The scammer] wrote a carefully worded posting [advertising] an "amazing bed and breakfast in the heart of Paris.” The address he gave was a nondescript apartment building where he’d once stayed. Then he downloaded a picture of a cozy-looking interior from a magazine, clicked on a button, and, presto ….

Immediately Church was inundated with queries. People wanting to book a room were instructed to send a 50-Euro nonrefundable deposit to Church’s PayPal account. On receipt of the money, Church e-mailed a fake invoice. More than 300 people fell for the scam.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Owen describes all sorts of other scams, and a quick Google search will bring up countless others; this site keeps an ongoing tally.

Of course, as fans of Craigslist point out, the vast overwhelming majority of Craigslist posts don't lead to fraud or murder; they lead to the same sort of person-to-person bartering or buying that newspaper classifieds lead to. As Owen himself acknowledges, "Craigslist is an indispensable resource for tens of millions of people worldwide: With 40 million posts a month and sites in 570 cities and 50 countries, it is one of the icons of Web 2.0, as recognizable a brand as Facebook or Google."

So the answer to the question I started out with is, then, both: Craigslist is floor wax and a dessert topping — a handy free alternative to newspaper classifieds and a haven for crooks and creeps.

For some, who have a basic trust in human nature, buying and selling stuff on Craigslist makes perfect sense, especially with the economy in its current parlous state. It's an easy way to pick up new (well, new-to-you) stuff on the cheap or to make a little extra money unloading stuff you no longer need or want.

But I'm not buying it. Literally: I've never bought or sold anything on Craigslist, nor do I plan to anytime soon (and yes that includes "Erotic Services"). It's not that I'm scared to buy from strangers online; I do that all the time, through eBay and Half.com and Amazon Marketplace. The difference is that, on these sites, I'm dealing with sellers who are accountable for their actions; they have reputations (and feedback scores) to protect. That doesn't guarantee they'll behave honestly or in a businesslike manner — I've dealt with a couple of bozos — but it vastly improves the odds.

Do you have enough faith in human nature to use Craigslist, or do its unsavory aspects keep you away?

Nobody likes telemarketers. Heck, most telemarketers probably don't even like themselves. But no matter how much they annoy you, it's probably not a good idea to threaten to burn down their offices and kill them.

One Ohio man was arrested and charged with making a "terrorist threat" for apparently doing just that.

The story is a little complicated, but what evidently happened was this: The man, Charles Papenfus, got an allegedly deceptive notice "warning" him his car's factory warranty was about to expire. Angry about the notice — the Papenfus family says they've never had a warranty on that particular car — Papenfus, it appears, called up the company (a hawker of "extended warranties" that had settled a lawsuit over using similar tactics in the past) to voice his outrage. At some point in this phone call (or in a subsequent one initiated by the company), Papenfus allegedly made the threats that got him jailed.

After spending several weeks in jail, Papenfus is out on bond now, but still faces charges that could send him to prison for up to four years.

Whether you think he actually is a terrorist, or some kind of folk hero, he's gotten himself into some serious trouble.

Fortunately, there are many ways you can fight back against telemarketers and sleazy marketers in general without putting yourself in legal jeopardy. The best way, of course, is to put yourself on the National Do Not Call Registry.

But if you find yourself still getting calls, try these tactics, which are guaranteed to annoy the callers at least as much at they annoy you:

1) Tell them you've got the Glengarry leads, and they can't have them.

2) Simply repeat back everything they say, in a high squeaky voice, the way you did when you were a six-year-old trying to annoy your older brother.

3) Talk in a ridiculous fake accent.

4) Don't say anything; just make fart sounds into the phone.

5) Take a tip from Jerry Seinfeld, and ask them for their home phone number so you can call them back later.

Hey, if you're going to engage in non-violent resistance, you might as well have a little fun, too.

There's no question about it: When you go to a doctor nowadays, you're more likely to be diagnosed with something, and sent home with a prescription, than you were a generation ago. A much tougher question to answer is whether or not these new diagnoses, and new tests and treatments that come along with them, are actually worth all the money they cost you and/or your insurance company.

As Darshak Sanghavi points out in an interesting piece in Slate, there are certainly plenty of people who think that they aren't. Sanghavi cites a New York Times op-ed by a couple of doctors who complain that our country has been overrun by an "epidemic of diagnoses." Over the last few decades, they argue, we've seen a "medicalization" of everyday life, in which "physical or emotional sensations we don’t like [that] in the past [were] considered a part of life … are [now] considered symptoms of disease. Everyday experiences like insomnia, sadness, twitchy legs and impaired sex drive now become diagnoses: sleep disorder, depression, restless leg syndrome and sexual dysfunction."

But, Sanghavi asks, is this really such a bad thing? Many of the things now being diagnosed are real medical problems, and treatment can make a world of difference. "As a child, I coughed myself to sleep for years," he writes. "(T)oday, it's clear I have allergic asthma." I can certainly sympathize: A couple years back, I was wheezing and choking all night every night, and awakening in the morning seemingly as tired as when I'd gone to sleep. Then I was diagnosed with sleep apnea; now I sleep with a breathing machine, which has quite literally changed my life. A generation ago, no one had even heard of sleep apnea.

Is it really fair, Sanghavi asks, to "blame people with dyslexia, erectile dysfunction, or restless leg syndrome for the [health care] mess[?]"

Well, no. But in making this case, Sanghavi misses the broader picture: Researchers at Dartmouth, led by Jack Wennberg and Elliot Fisher, have demonstrated clearly and unequivocally that while health care has improved over time, as things stand today, higher health care spending does not in fact correlate with better care.

As Fisher explained in an interview I recently did with him in Money, some regions in the US spend much more per capita on health care than others. "More health care doesn't necessarily mean better health care," he told me. What it means, rather, is "unnecessary days in the hospital, unnecessary referrals to specialists, and unnecessary diagnostic tests." All of which can be hazardous not only to your wealth, but also to your health: Because of the risks of infections and medical errors, "hospitals are dangerous places to be if you don't need to be there."

One of the biggest problems, he told me, is that doctors and hospitals who've invested in expensive diagnostic equipment — like CAT scanners, for example — have huge financial incentives to use these machines whether they're necessary or not. Whether or not you get a CAT scan often depends less on your medical condition than on whether or not your doctor owns a scanner. Changing the incentives, and reducing these unnecessary tests, could save the country an enormous amount of money.

If you want to see just how these perverse incentives can affect the care you get, take a look at Atul Gawande's astonishing New Yorker article about a small Texas town where "Medicare spends three thousand dollars more per person here than the average person earns." It's a piece that reveals far more about what is wrong with our current health care system than you'll ever learn from watching talking heads squabble over health care reform on TV.

Peter Lynch famously told investors to "buy what you know" — that is, to invest in the companies that made what they personally used and liked. But Lynch wasn't afraid to rely on the intuition of people he knew and trusted when they found something in the marketplace that they simply loved: It was Lynch's wife who clued him in to the appeal of L'Eggs pantyhose. (Or at least that's how Lynch tells the story.)

Unfortunately, it's not always so easy to find someone who can so smartly assess the appeal of something you don't personally know much about. How, for example, can we make sense of new technologies when we aren't even remotely in the demographic these new new things are aimed at? (It would be a bit like asking grandpa to evaluate the appeal of the Jonas Brothers.)

Some recent research out of Morgan Stanley attempts to answer the question of what the kids are into when it comes to media and technology by doing something that seems so obvious that it's a wonder no one tried it before: They asked a kid. Specifically, Morgan Stanley's European media analysts turned to a 15-year-old intern to explain just how British teens make use of all their new media options. And when the intern, Matthew Robson, turned in a report that actually made more sense than a lot of adult-penned investment bank research, they went ahead and published it.

It's hard not to be reminded of one memorable scene from the Depression-era classic Duck Soup: Groucho Marx is handed a baffling financial report. "A four-year-old child could understand this," he declares, before turning to his assistant and adding, in a stage whisper, "Run out and find me a four-year-old child, I can't make head or tail out of it."

Is Robson's report worth reading? Well, yeah. Robson's a sharp kid, with some interesting observations: he's fond of Facebook, for example, but down on Twitter, because British teens evidently prefer to use their phone credits not to twitter but to directly text their friends. On his "hot" list: "Really big tellies," iPhones, and "anything with a touch screen." On the "not" list: "Anything with wires." Robson also declares that old-fashioned paper Yellow Pages are useless to teens because they "contain listings for builders and florists, which are services that teenagers do not require."

Is the report a useful guide for investors? Well, here's where it gets a bit more tricky. It's clearly more useful for British investors than American ones, since a lot of the specific issues it raises don't really apply in the US. But more importantly, it doesn't actually attempt to assess any individual companies or stocks.

When Lynch invested in companies he "knew," he only did so after getting to know not only their products but also their balance sheets pretty personally. Investing in what you "know" — or what someone else with good gut instincts tells you about — is a lot harder than it looks, which is why so few people who read Lynch's legendary investment manuals managed to score anywhere near as many ten-baggers as Lynch himself by investing in things they thought they "knew."

Bloggers are buzzing over what one writer has called "Taibbi's Scream" — that is, Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi's muckraking takedown of Goldman Sachs in the latest issue of that magazine.

Well, "muckraking" isn't perhaps the best word for it, for Taibbi doesn't so much rake the muck as fling it. The article starts off, after all, by describing the investment bank as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." In the rest of the article, which is full of such invective, Taibbi argues that Goldman Sachs was at the center of — and a prime beneficiary of — every financial bubble in America from the market crash of 1929, to our millennial Internet madness, through the housing market collapse and the subsequent bailout. Heck, he even blames the firm for a bubble that doesn't yet exist: what he foresees as the cap-and-trade boom and bust.

Goldman's devious formula "is relatively simple," writes Taibbi. "Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again."

Goldman, naturally, has denounced Taibbi's article as "hysterical," a "compilation of just about every conspiracy theory ever dreamed up about Goldman Sachs." Unfortunately, that's not too far from the truth. It's not that Taibbi's article is a collection of lies; it's, that, like most conspiracy theorists, Taibbi dramatically exaggerates Goldman's role in all the bubbles, and, perhaps more importantly, exaggerates the firms supposed omniscience. Like most Wall Street firms, Goldman has done plenty of sleazy stuff over the years, but Goldmanites aren't the diabolical masterminds Taibbi thinks they are, creating and deflating bubbles at will and cackling with glee as they rip off the rest of us.

You can find excerpts of Taibbi's screed on RollingStone.com, but if you're really interested you should probably read the whole thing in the magazine. (Look for the Jonas Brothers on the cover.)

If, however, you're looking for a more sophisticated — and ultimately much more enlightening — look at the financial skullduggery behind our current crisis, you'd do far better to turn to Michael Lewis's take on the AIG collapse in the latest Vanity Fair. (You can find the whole thing here.)

"Nearly a year after perhaps the most sensational corporate collapse in the history of finance, a collapse that, without the intervention of the government, would have led to the bankruptcy of every major American financial institution, plus a lot of foreign ones, too, A.I.G.’s losses and the trades that led to them still haven’t been properly explained," Lewis notes. His article is an attempt to explain just what happened. A onetime bond trader salesman who's been a perceptive writer on the money culture for decades, Lewis talked to those who'd been there at ground zero, at AIG's Financial Products division.

The story that he tells is a complicated one, impossible to easily summarize; even the villain at the center of it all, former AIG FP head Joe Cassano, turns out to be more of an egotistical jerk than a diabolical mastermind — as trapped as anyone else in the bubble he helped create. Though Taibbi may find it hard to believe, that's how it usually is.

President Obama is a pretty good persuader, but he's been having a hard time selling his health care reform plan. His health care town hall meeting on ABC last Wednesday drew dismal ratings, garnering fewer viewers than a rerun of CSI: New York (and drawing gleeful responses from many of his non-fans). Meanwhile, some of his putative allies in the Democratic party have been sniping away at the plan, and negotiators in the senate have been slashing costs by lopping off some of the plan's most progressive elements, like subsidies for lower-income Americans to help them afford to buy insurance. (Huh? Wasn't helping the uninsured get insurance one of the main reasons for the plan in the first place?)

Cost isn't the only stumbling block for the plan. The other biggie is Obama's advocacy of the "public option" — that is, a Medicare-like public insurance plan that would compete with private insurers. While some have made alarmist claims that such a plan would drive private insurers out of business, others simply complain that it would cost too much. Indeed, some note, when the Congressional Budget Office added up the costs of early versions of the bill, arriving at a total cost of $1.6 trillion, they did so without including the cost of a public plan. Just imagine, critics say, how much Obamacare will cost with the plan included!

These critics are looking at it backwards, say researchers at the liberal Economic Policy Institute: Including a public plan will actually reduce the overall costs of health care:

While a public plan would indeed likely raise the level of federal government health spending, it is just as likely to reduce total national health spending. Independent research evaluating proposals produced by EPI and other sources has consistently found that a public plan would save money and result in better health outcomes by providing all Americans regular access to health care.

Indeed, they point out, one independent analysis found that having a public plan could actually save the US up to $1 trillion over ten years, while providing health care to all. Some of the elements of the plan contributing to that figure include increased competition among health care providers and lower administrative costs.

It's a compelling argument, and one that deserves to have a more central place in this debate, lest we nickel-and-dime ourselves into an anemic health care plan that ends up costing us more in the long run, while abandoning the goal of health care for the currently uninsured.