I'm routinely told by detractors to stay off politics. "What does this have to do with boomer retirement?" is a frequent retort to a particular piece that has their ire. I treat the question as self-evident, too obvious to answer. If an advisor doesn't know how health reform could possibly affect their clients' retirement, I've nothing to say (except to pray for their clients). Ditto with cap-and-trade and the financial services overhaul. That will, hopefully, blunt some of the criticism surrounding my comments on Climate-gate (or Clima-quiddick, which I like much better).
Never been much of a believer in human-induced global warming. The fact that a politician, not a scientist, was the "pro" camp's point man told me all I needed to know. They've been wrong on every major doomsday scenario of the past 30 years. The consensus view in the 1970s was that of global cooling and a white Christmas in Miami. That same decade produced the Club for Rome, where "leading" economists got together to conclude that global economic growth would fall to zero in the 1980s, preventing food stuffs from being shipped and leading to worldwide starvation. In fact the exact opposite happened, and the 1980s were the greatest decade of global growth the world had ever seen. They weren't just a little wrong, or partly wrong, they were completely wrong. In the same vein, hear much about the hole in the ozone layer lately? We were told to shut off our air conditioners and stop using aerosol deodorant in a ban of chlorofluorocarbons that cost billions. Of course, the hole closed on its own and turned out to be a naturally occurring phenomenon.
