John T. Reed’s news blog

In yesterday’s Armed Forces Bowl, Army waited until :03 to call timeout for the winning FG kick. That is straight out of my book Football Clock Management. You may think I cannot take credit for that. . Before my book, coaches called such FG timeouts in high single digits or even with double digits left on the clock. I’ll give you a famous example. In the 1982 Cal-Stanford Big Game, Stanford QB John Elway got his team into winning field goal range and called time with :08 left. After the good kick, there were :05 left. Also, Stanford excessively celebrated...

In his hamfisted, mandate- and majority-less efforts to out-FDR FDR, Biden is likely to out-Hoover Hoover. . Hoover was a GOP Stanford Engineer, international miracle man who was assigned to several thorny messes and fixed them in the 1920s. Unfortunately, his main trick was to use a massive US government project approach. He was not involved with the building of the Panama Canal which was completed in 1914, but he used that approach to everything. . After being elected president in 1928, he DID help start the Depression in 1930 by signing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Once the Depression started, he...

In today’s Wall Sreet Journal, Burton Malkiel, says I bonds are a great hedge against inflation. I pause to let many readers genuflect at the mention of Malkiel. He is the author of the great book A Random Walk Down Wall Street. However, I think he is full of crap on I bonds. Like TIPS, they adjust for inflation twice a year. You do not get the adjusted interest until maturity at 30 years or when you cash them in. You have to pay a penalty for cashing them in before five years. . If they had existed in the...

I saw a Reddit reader say he had some sort of 4-year exclusion on home gains tax because he is in the military. “The second rule is the military extension of the capital gains exclusion. This allows active-duty military members who are away from their property due to permanent change of station orders to extend the 60-month period up to an additional 10 years. This means that eligible military members may exclude their capital gains as long as they occupied the primary residence for two of the previous 15 years. “There are special limitations for situations in which a homeowner...

One of Chris Cuomo’s problems, it seems to me, is he wanted to be cool. And that is more of a problem because it is a middle school/high school impulse and the target audience is the former kids with whom you went to middle school and high school with and their birth-year peers at all the schools you did not attend. This desire to be thought of as cool by your old middle- and high-school classmates and those birth-year peers is common, but it usually goes away when you go off to college or out into the post-school adult world....