I just received my tax refund. In the envelope was a cheaply printed solicitation to have something called the Office of Investor Education and Advocacy, which is part of the SEC. The card was quite amateurish.
If you then go to the SEC website you will find http://investor.gov/ (I am not going to hot link this because I hope this nonsense will not be utilized much.)
There are two things that annoy me here. First, why in the world would anyone go to the federal government to learn about investing. It kind of makes you wonder (what with the shortage of doctors which will be exacerbated by Obamacare) if the HHS people are preparing a site called http://doingyourownappendectomy.gov. There are already a ton of well done free sites to help people learn about investing - with glossaries and informative pieces. Why should the feds think it necessary to add to their stuff? This is not the first time the feds have duplicated something which was already serving the need. For example, under Margaret Spellings the US Department of Education created a site to help people find colleges and copied a form that colleges and universities had created on their own.
The second issue burns me even more. In the White House site (and in the Third Way site that created the concept) there is a program called the Federal Tax Receipt - which purports to estimate, using your tax data, the cost of running the government by program. For the SEC they estimate that the SEC actually pays for itself. For example, the sites estimate that my tax bill was reduced by $9.29 as a result of all the good things the SEC does for me. That estimate is complete BS - of course it does not estimate any of the excess burden that agencies like the SEC cause for investors and financial institutions.
From my perspective we should begin with Investor.gov and along with other nonsense like NPR and the National Endowments - begin to reduce the budget by eliminating these utter wastes of my resources. Nickels and dimes soon become $14 Trillion.
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