SMI Visitor's Weblog

Welcome to the SMI Visitor's Weblog. Below you'll find selected excerpts reprinted from our Member's Weblog, plus occasional posts created especially for our visitors.

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Politics and the SMI Weblog

Over the past several months (and culminating in the comments of a post a few days ago), there has been some feedback from a handful of readers that they would prefer we "stick to investing" with our weblog posts and steer clear of the political issues of the day.

Believe me, we'd like nothing better than to be able to do that.

If you go back and peruse the history of the SMI weblog, you'll find very few politically-oriented posts from the weblog's inception in May 2003 until about a year ago. We purposely ignored most political material, wanting to keep our blog focused on investing issues.

However, with the events of last fall and the unprecedented government responses, the lines between investing topics and political topics began to blur. It's our opinion that, due to the magnitude of the political issues currently in play, we can't responsibly cover what you need to know about investing without also covering what's going on with the political landscape.

Today, we're not witnessing politics as usual (which we used to be content to mostly ignore, figuring you'd pick up your political info elsewhere). These are potential game-changers. If you want to know how to invest now and in the future, you'd better know what's going on with these major issues.

Some have pointed out that what they don't like is when we talk about these political issues without offering specific investment advice tied to that commentary. (Although others request that we keep political posts completely separate from any investment advice; it's hard to please everybody all the time.)

The problem with that is these are evolving issues that we largely try to cover in real-time. We aren't going to try to flesh out the full investment implications of every single twist and turn of the health-care or cap-and-trade legislation, nor are we going to necessarily try to cover every angle whenever we want to delve into a specific principle or the background of an issue. This is a blog, one of the advantages of which is that it allows us to sometimes hit things briefly, sometimes share a link without much commentary, while other times writing long in-depth posts on a given topic. We're not going to give up that flexibility by agreeing to always attach specific investment advice to every post.

However, that said, it's not as though we are just lobbing political grenades and not getting around to the investment implications. You haven't seen it yet (but will within just a couple days), but we've got a very in-depth cover article coming your way this month with an extremely practical investment focus. In fact, it's so detailed we had to split it into two-parts (a rarity for SMI cover articles) so we can do justice to the implementation part of the issue. These two cover articles follow the pair that Austin and I wrote in April and May that also dealt with the investing implications of the recent shifts in government policy.

In other words, once these next two cover articles are out, four cover articles in a six-month span will have been written specifically regarding how to best position your investments given the huge changes going on in the political/economic/investment climate. Obviously we think it's important.

Now you could just read those cover articles and get the "big picture." But we know there are many SMI readers who want all of "the backstory." That's where the weblog posts on these various topics come in.

To sum up then, I want to assure any readers who are tired of the political topics in the weblog that frankly we're tired of them too. We'd like to quit writing so much about them. But until we feel like we can separate the investing world from the political world again (as we've been more easily able to do in the past), we feel obliged to continue to cover these issues and stories. Rest assured, we rarely break huge new investing advice in these types of posts, so you can skim them if you're not interested in all the details, or if you have the time to get your political news elsewhere.

We do try to be fair with our treatment of these issues. While we tend to lean pretty conservative, hopefully we've been able to stay respectful of other points of view and keep the discussion on a pretty high level. We ask that commenters follow that example in posting comments.

Changing times sometimes require changing approaches, in investing as well as in our approach to the weblog. Our preference would be to ignore the political and focus solely on the investment world. Unfortunately, that's not an option right now, as the two are overlapping to a great degree.

Policy disputes, not partisan personal attacks

The times, they are a changin'. And not for the better.

It's increasingly apparent that the people at the financial controls in Washington are guessing their way through the rescue/repair/recovery process. It doesn't inspire confidence.

Because these are momentous times when ambitious federal government policy prescriptions are being debated, I expect a number of our blog links may gravitate in that direction.

None of our comments, I trust, will be disrespectful of our president or congressional leaders as individuals (and we ask that your comments avoid these sorts of attacks as well). But, when appropriate, our posts will take issue with their policy prescriptions which we believe, based on historical precedent, are misguided.

All this is to say that, while we don't intend these to be partisan posts, they might come across that way due to the stark lines now being drawn between the two political parties. Don't interpret our disagreement with policy proposals as a personal attack on any individuals.

Personally, I'm an equal-opportunity critic. The eight years of spending and government expansion under President Bush were, in my view, a disaster. On balance, congressional Republicans were complicit in the pork barrel spending, and many of those who lost their seats in recent election cycles deserved to do so.

Unfortunately, the congressional Democrats, in control since 2006, are proving to be as spendthrift, as corrupt, and worse. And President Obama has started his term with spending decisions that will haunt the country for many, many years to come. So long, "change we can believe in." Hello, "spreading the wealth around."

The articles we'll be sharing in the coming weeks/months reflect our free market perspective. Consequently, they will often focus on the specific dangers and weaknesses inherent in the "solutions" being proposed (and enacted) because we believe it's important you be informed of opposing viewpoints.

Naturally, in addition to these matters, we'll continue to comment on the market and other financial topics. But the changes being proposed for our economic system - to our tax system, Social Security, health care - are so significant that they merit our concentration and study as they come to the fore of the national debate.

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