Financial Mines

Even though I’m not a Cablevision customer and didn’t risk missing the Oscars because of the cable company’s squabble with ABC, I was inspired to explore alternatives to my cable TV service and the ever-higher bills.

So I made an antenna out of a couple of pieces of wire cut from an old telephone extension cord and a bit of cable coax with an RF plug attached. Hooked it up to the back of the set and let it scan the over-the-air channels, and hey, I’ve got free, crystal-clear, high-definition signals from ABC, CBS, NBC, CPTV, Fox and a couple of independent channels. There’s also a digital program guide and lots of digital extras like 24-hour weather, an NBC sports feed and, saints preserve us, QVC and its incessant Dooney & Bourke shilling.

OK, now the nearly $100 per month I’m paying for cable TV includes a wonderful whole-house DVR, lots of Law & Order reruns and some cable-only programming that I watch. But I’m having a really hard time justifying the cost when I never even look at 90-plus percent of the service I am buying.

I’m seriously considering cutting the cable and saving myself $1,000 bucks a year. Any advice from those who’ve already switched back to good old antenna-based — make that new improved over-the-air digital — TV would be most welcome.

The chances that Ken Feinberg is going to mine down far enough in the economy to set my salary are exactly zero, but the pay czar and his bosses in the current administration are becoming a little too controlling in what is now a purely political, punitive pastime.

Yes, some people’s earnings can seem obscenely high, and yes, some people were rewarded handsomely for doing things that almost trashed the world economy. Some things may need to be reset, and that will be a function of regulation and the marketplace.

But it’s now to the point where even the established regulators in DC, at Treasury and the SEC and the Fed, are telling Feinberg that some people have to be paid more than his stiff limits. The government has to protect its interest in the bailed out firms, they’re saying, and salary caps will drive the talent to the unregulated competition.

In other words, the market will continue to set the real salaries, no matter how much the regulation hawks want them established by federal fiat.

It was awful this morning shortly after 5 a.m. at Best Buy. The line outside moved well, and my wife and I were inside the store by 5:15. But there were more lines inside Best Buy, and they weren’t moving very much at all.

While many of the early birds had been given tickets guaranteeing a laptop or LCD TV, they were herded into a line with others like myself, there to buy some computer accessories advertised at good prices.

People behind me with early bird tickets were fretting at the delay, and those without the tickets had no idea whether the items they were there to buy would be available when they finally reached the spot to make their purchases — in maybe an hour or two, given lack of movement. The man in front of me gave up after about 25 minutes, and I lasted just another minute or two before heading home for a nap before work.

Despite taped arrows on the floor to lead shoppers in their desired direction, store personnel were giving conflicting information — or sometimes no information at all — about the location of the great sale items. Perhaps Best Buy did a good job of maximizing its Black Friday doorbuster sale, but they blew it on good customer service.

Word is that the Merritt Parkway is on an list of endangered and at-risk sites published by the World Monument Fund, among the criteria being neglect, dilapidation and vandalism.

I don’t know about you, but I feel endangered twice a day driving under the Talmadge Hill Metro-North bridge in New Canaan. Driving westbound down the hill toward Exit 36, you get a birds-eye view of the deteriorating concrete on the train bridge, and can even catch a glimpse of the rails where parts of the bridge have gone missing.

The bridges on the Merritt are more than mere parts of a monument, they are physical structures whose condition is directly related to public safety. I hope somebody official is taking a close look at the Talmadge Hill bridge.

It would seem logical to blame United Technologies Pratt & Whitney jet engine division for hurting Connecticut with its decision this week to close repair operations in Cheshire and East Hartford and move 1,000 jobs to Georgia and Asia. The workers’ union and the state allege that Pratt had made up its mind some time ago and did not give serious consideration to their efforts to help the company drive down costs and keep the jobs here.

They probably have a point. However, given the tax-and-spend mentality of many of Connecticut’s leaders, and their unwise tax increases enacted to balance a bloated budget, the numbers may never have worked out for the company. Our General Assembly just doesn’t get it that Connecticut is competing with the rest of the country and the world for its economic survival … and we’re losing the battle.

I was struck this week by the news budget at one of our papers, which noted that the town of Ridgefield had received a $200,000 state grant for a ballfield project, but had not asked for the money and was confused by the grant. The story reported that the state had just been mistaken in its press release, and that Ridgefield had requested the money for improvements at another athletic facility.

The story also listed the following grants to other Danbury-area towns:

Small Town Economic Assistance Program grants Bethel: $200,000 for road repairs. New Fairfield: $250,000 for an emergency communications system. New Milford: $200,000 for road construction; $50,000 for a facade improvement program downtown. Newtown: $100,000 for a new animal control facility. Ridgefield: $200,000 for site improvements at Venus Municipal Center. Southbury: $200,000 for the Ballantine Park pool house. Sherman: $200,000 for the renovation of a historic barn that will be used in conjunction with the renovated Sherman Library.

While I can buy the necessity of road repair or an emergency communications system, I’m having a hard time with sprucing up a Southbury pool house, renovating a barn in Sherman and improving downtown facades in New Milford in the middle of a recession and a state budget crisis of unprecedented proportions.

Instead of tightening its belt as its citizens are doing, the state is acting as if the fat times continue and spending its taxpayers’ money on unneeded frills. Meanwhile, lawmakers have raised virtually every fee the state imposes and stuck corporations like UTC with a 10 percent surcharge on their taxes for the next couple of years.

So the state is taking money from you and me and UTC and spending it on pool houses and facade improvements even as its citizens lose their jobs to workers in other, cheaper locations.

The message is that Pratt is protecting its shareholders, while Connecticut casts its workers to the winds.

Anyone who cares about business in the state of Connecticut should read the lead editorial in Saturday’s (8/29) Wall Street Journal.

According to the well-researched and written piece, since the enactment of the state income tax in 1991 by then-Gov. Lowell Weicker, the Connecticut has seen zero net job creation, and a population outflow of 113,000.

The income tax and all the other myriad taxes and fees in the state make Connecticut No. 3 in terms of tax burden on its individual citizens.

With proposed new taxes on wealthy individuals and businesses to balance the state budget, Connecticut will make itself even less competitive. And it’s pretty obvious which way the jobs and people will flow.

Hearst Connecticut personal finance columnist Julie Jason brought highlights of her new book,
The AARP Retirement Survival Guide: How to Make Smart Financial Decisions in Good Times and Bad, to a standing-room-only crowd Wednesday afternoon at Barnes & Noble at the Stamford Town Centre.  There will be video if I can ever figure it out…

A few years ago I traded in an SUV for a Pontiac Vibe, and upped my fuel efficiency from about 18 MPG to 28.5 MPG.  I got $1,500 for the trade in because my Blazer had pretty high mileage and with gas prices going up the value of a gas hog was going down.

But maybe I should have held onto the Blazer.  I would have tripled what I got for the trade under the cash for clunkers program.  Of course, I would have spent the difference on the inflated tab for gasoline over the past couple of years, not to mention taking a month or two off the lifespan of the McMurdo Ice Shelf with all the extra carbon I was releasing.

Instead, I did the responsible thing and spent my money — not a government handout — on a smaller, fuel-efficient car, only to see people being rewarded today for hanging on to their old gas hogs. Once again, a bit of public policy that seems relatively benign has the downside of rewarding people for  doing the wrong thing.