ThinkOOB

The biggest ripoff in consumer lending is the refund anticipation check. Tax preparers offer their clients +/- 90% of the value of the anticiated refund, on the spot, a very high implied APR. This posting shows how the government can replace this with loans at much better terms, get the money into people’s hands faster and — in conjunciton with the Stimulus Gift Card — even ofer MORE than the value of the refund in an immediate gift card. Economic stimulation AND profits for the government AND a windfall for consumers.

Why don’t hotels have no-frills “green rooms” ? Here’s how it would work. First, instead of those little disposable bottles of shampoo and conditioner and body lotion (who the hell even uses the body lotion?), they’d have a dispenser. Second, if you want changes of sheets and towels you’d pay extra. In fact, maid serivce [...]

Like Norman Bates’ mother, your gas and electric meters are never seen outside the basement. But this does not have to be the case. (About metering, that is.) Think Outside Of the Box for a minute. What if every day an email appeared on your computer [...]

Pharmaceutical costs in the United States has been rising significantly in recent years (other than 2008) at a rate higher than inflation. A portion of these costs are due to price increases, but a significant portion is due to the ability of the pharmaceutical companies to increase market [...]

A restaurant which insisted on giving us more food than we wanted, and wouldn’t let us leave until we ate it all, and sent the other diners the check for our extra portions, would go out of business within hours.
Yet, that is exactly what happens when it is time to die. In [...]

Be careful before assuming that prevention is the key to lower healthcare costs. Like with most things in life (1) you need to look at the data and (2) as HL Mencken said, “For every problem, no matter how complex, there is a simple and easily understood solution, and it’s almost always wrong.”

From time to time I have had the urge to try figure out which between the two different models of health systems in the developed world, namely the USA health system in one side or the UK, Canadian, Australian, New Zealandian, Danish etc. in the other, is better or worse than the other.
It is [...]

Many commentators have lamented the fact that people did not spend their stimulus checks in 2008, but saved them instead. Obviously, the “stimulus” only works if people spend it. Recent examples of those commentators would be Bruce Bartlett (New York Times 12/24/08), Ed Glaeser (Boston Globe 1/5/09), and Scott Lehigh (Boston Globe 1/9/09). No one has suggested the solution proposed below, which would hugely incentivize spending a tax cut or stimulus check, while at the same time providing a windfall to consumers at no additional cost to the government. So to those commentators and everyone else, we offer the following lesson in the new field of “stimulus economics.”