Is your favorite team as inept as the Pirates? It could earn you easy money.

So you buy low and sell high, you diversify, you talk to Chuck, you even listen attentively to the E-Trade baby.

And still your retirement account is pulling returns like a 5-year CD.

There are easier ways to build a portfolio. All you need is a really bad sports team.

Take the example of longtime Pittsburgh Pirates fan Gary Mercer. His investment strategy was to bet $20 against the Bucs every game of the season.

Those of you who viewed Pirates highlights on "Sports Center" and "Baseball Tonight" might assume this to be a surefire moneymaker. But Vegas bookmakers were very aware of the Bucs' shortcomings, so a successful $20 bet might pay only $10.

After 162 games, Mercer earned 9.98 percent on a $3,250 investment. A season-high five-game win streak in mid-September really cut into the profits.

If only we had known this before the 49ers' season began!

Spreadsheet of Pirates bet

Posted By: Mike Moffitt (Email) | October 05 2010 at 12:42 PM

via sfgate.com

This is pretty funny. There has to be a business idea here somewhere..

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Third Way, a self-described "leading moderate think tank of the progressive movement," recently put out a plan for reducing the deficit, which included this embarrassingly obvious idea. Maybe taxpayers should get a breakdown, receipt-style, that explains where their money went each year.

Here's what one might look like:

Here's the rationale, as explained by David Kendall and Jim Kessler, the authors of the policy memo:

For many Americans, the amount they pay in taxes is larger than any purchase they make during the year, but studies show they know almost nothing about where that money goes to.

This contributes to ridiculous beliefs, like the view that 20% of government spending goes to foreign aid, for example. An electorate unschooled in basic budget facts is a major obstacle to controlling the nation’s deficit, not to mention addressing a host of economic and social problems.

This is a very, very good idea, and now that it's been suggested, it seems almost crazy we don't have something like it already.

One can already calculate this information pretty easily, of course. But providing it in the form of a receipt, upon payment of taxes, would really help people understand the government's expenses and how they relate to one's personal finances.

No taxation without information!

Fantastic idea..

Everybody wants a free pony, and there's no easier way to get votes if you're a politician than by buying them with pony promises. But you can't promise ponies to everybody at the same time because you'd run out of ponies, and no one would believe that you had so many ponies to hand out anyway. So each politician, or pony handerouter, picks a few groups and promises them ponies.

Of course, that just makes more people want ponies because if one guy gets a free pony then the next guy thinks it's only fair that he gets a free pony too. And the people who do get free ponies just want more free ponies because after you've finagled the first one for free, the finagling begins to feel a bit like being paid what you're owed. You're a good guy, right? If the world is handing out free ponies, why shouldn't you get yours?

Unfortunately, there aren't enough ponies. And ponies are never free. That's the reality. But politicians don't get elected easily by dealing in reality. They get elected easily by promising ponies.

Take Social Security for instance. The government said it would take ponies from everyone, breed the ponies, and then give everyone his ponies plus some extra ponies at retirement.

But politicians being politicians, they couldn't stand to see all those ponies sitting idle in the government stables when they could be trading those ponies for votes. So they opened the stables and traded all the ponies.

People got angry that all their ponies were gone, but the bureaucrats said, "Don't worry. We'll just take even MORE ponies from your children, and we'll give the ponies to you!" People like ponies so much that they thought this was a pretty good deal. "Surely our sweet children won't mind giving us all those ponies," they thought, "and besides, we don't have to ask them."

And so it went on.

But even that wasn't enough ponies for the politicians' pony trading appetites.

The Chinese politicians had plenty of ponies, and they didn't have any votes to trade them for. So the American politicians borrowed a few trillion ponies from the Chinese politicians and handed out the Chinese ponies to their American friends. The American politicians promised that American babies would grow up and work very hard to collect lots and lots of ponies to give back to the Chinese politicians.

You probably think that you can't sign contracts for ponies with the names of people not yet living. But you aren't a politician. The politician says, "Enslave the babies and the babies of the babies and the babies of the babies of the babies! Chinese ponies for everybody!" And he usually gets elected.

So what will future generations think as they toil and toil and toil to pay off our "free" ponies? "Yes, life is now very hard, but at least our ancestors had free ponies." Is that what they will think?

I doubt it. 

I think we all know they'll take us for horse thieves. I guess we're counting on not being around to suffer the traditional penalty for that. Too bad. Because if we keep going on as we are, we'll deserve it.

Funny how you can replace "ponies" with "money" and this sounds a little more absurd.. it probably shouldn't though.

via articles.moneycentral.msn.com