Joanne Muller over at Forbes did some interesting digging on the car buying habits of Americans. Less than 40% of rich people (defined in this case as those making $250k+) actually buy luxury cars. And about 8% of people earning less than six-figures do. Now that doesn’t sound all that crazy but Thomas Stanley extrapolated [...]

What does it look like when you can no longer sell a product based on any actual qualities? This is what happens when a company stops innovating. The Nissan Frontier was once a really cool truck. I remember during the Bush presidency everyone had the 4-door Nissan truck. They were awesome, even I wanted one. [...]

I’ve always been the kind of person that prefers to pay someone to do something for me. In the strictest sense, I like to pretend every waking moment is worth the amount of money I make driven down to the hour. So rarely have I considered it worth my time to take care of some [...]

Germany builds 2 times as many cars as the United States does every year.  Considering the relative size and populations of these countries that’s pretty impressive.  But what makes it even more so is that the average German autoworker makes twice as much as the US worker.  So that’s 2 times as many cars, and [...]

Picture it. You’re sitting at a traffic light, 15 cars are in front of you, work is 20 minutes away and you’ve got a meeting in 10. The light turns green but it seems like no one is moving. Have you ever wondered why everyone doesn’t just go at the same time? We often think [...]

The following charts come from research by Exxon.  They paint the picture of where we’re headed in terms of energy use and consumption in 2040.  For the most part, things seem to look pretty good.  But the caveat is the research could be biased given the source.  I doubt very much that is the case, [...]

There is no shortage of examples out there of government waste.  Fiscal conservatives believe that government, especially the federal government, just gets in the way.  In some cases, this is very true. When governments fund programs or initiatives, they often come with a number of strings attached.  This is likely a result of paranoia over [...]

“Call it a consumption tax, a luxury tax, or whatever. The name doesn’t matter. It’s a tax on buying more than you actually need. Taxing for the sake of taxing is bad, but taxing items with externalities on the surrounding world may not be a bad idea. The best example of this, especially in the [...]