Tell It To Al

It’s a good thing taxes aren’t going up, but you don’t have to guess what is: The national debt.

I talk about it with Eric Kahnert of Denver’s NBC affiliate, 9News.

In my Nov. 28 column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal, I invited readers to email or blog me about stores they can’t believe are still in business.

Click here to read some of their responses in this week’s column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal.

Where are all the hundreds of new medical marijuana dispensaries going to advertise?

Media entrepreneur Michael Lerner is providing the solution with his regionally published Kush “cannabis lifestyle magazines” and his website dailybuds.com.

He’s also putting on one of the biggest expositions the medical marijuana industry has ever seen in Denver this weekend. He’s expecting more than 50,000 visitors at KushCon II.

Fifteen states have legalized marijuana for medical purposes and Lerner predicts it won’t be long before it’s legal  everywhere.

At a time when many publishing enterprises are filing bankruptcy, Kush magazines are growing like the weeds they advocate. Lerner projects he’ll soon be printing 120 million pages per month.

So how’d he get into this burgeoning business? Well, that’s quite a story. Click here to read my column.

More than 1,300 iconic items from film, television and music go on sale at Profiles in History, a Calabasas, Calif., auctioneer of memorabilia and historic collectibles.

Among the items for sale are the key to room No. 1 at the Bates Motel from the 1983 thriller Psycho II, for $2,000 to $3,000.

Also for sale: James Cagney’s tap-dancing shoes from his Oscar-winning performance in “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” They are listed for between $8,000 and $12,000.

I’ve got a few ideas who some of these prizes could go to as holiday gifts. Click here to read my column.

I was just complaining in my Sunday column about how Bernie Madoff steals all the headlines in America’s Ponzi epidemic, and that so many mini-Madoffs rarely get significant attention.

And, what do you know, Madoff does it again. On Saturday morning, police found his son, Mark, dead of an apparent suicide at age 46. Ponzi schemes always end tragically but not always this tragically.

Click here to read my column on the ubiquity of Ponzis in The Sunday Wall Street Journal.

Former Republican U.S. Senator Alan Simpson and President Clinton’s former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles have laid out a bold plan for reducing the national debt.

I just had to give them an earful about reducing or eliminating my mortgage deduction. This would represent a huge tax increase on me – not to mention my fellow members of the middle class.

Simpson and Bowles just laughed me off, as you can see from this photo.

Bottom line: Nobody is going to like everything about this plan, but without it, America is surely going to be belly-up broke. Simpson and Bowles hope that as they eliminate cherished deductions they can also lower tax rates and broaden the tax base.

There’s a lot of harsh but needed medicine in their plan. I don’t like it. But I am afraid we need it.

And I laud Simpson and Bowles for keeping their solution to 57, very readable pages when many commissions can’t even stop at 1,000. Click here to read their report.

And Click here to read my column on the Simpson and Bowles.

Isn’t it great: All these billionaires pledging to give away at least half of their fortunes when they are dead and no longer need them, or in their lives, while they can still attach strings and be applauded in news stories?

Another 17 billionaires, including Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, have taken the pledge led by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Click here to read more from Reuters.

They say you can’t take it with you. They say it may not be worth much in the future given the direction of country. And they say it’s better to give it away than blow it on the next big dip in the market.

Sean Mueller, the confessed Ponzi schemer who took football great John Elway for millions, pleaded humbly for a sentence lower than the 40 years recommended by prosecutors.

But it was not to be.

As some of his many victims testified, it was simply too late. He’d wrought too much damage on too many lives.

Click here to read column.

Fascinating report from WREG, Channel 3, in Memphis, Tenn., shows how high tech thieves can steal your credit card information without even touching you in a crowd. I can’t even get my card to swipe half the time at the store, but I suppose anything is possible. Click here to see what Snopes.com has to say about it. Kind of a long shot, for now but who can keep up with technology?

“Operation Broken Trust” sounds like “Operation Broken Record” to Me.

The Justice Department today put out a news release boasting enforcement actions against 343 criminal defendants and 189 civil defendants for fraud schemes. Or as I like to say on this blog, ho-hum, another day, another Ponzi.

Justice said these schemes took more than 120,000 victims nationwide for more than $10.4 billion.

All these penny-ante schemers do not add up to even one Bernie Madoff, who was alleged to have stolen several times that amount. Makes you wonder what’s out there that has yet to be brought to Justice.

“The Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force is sending a strong message,” said Attorney General Holder. “To the public: be alert for these frauds, take appropriate measures to protect yourself, and report such schemes to proper authorities when they occur. And to anyone operating or attempting to operate an investment scam: cheating investors out of their earnings and savings is no longer a safe business plan – we will use every tool at our disposal to find you, to stop you, and to bring you to justice.”

Hmm. You mean running a Ponzi scheme used to be “a safe business plan”? Apparently, so. Thanks, Justice, for finally jumping on the case.