Bob Jensen's Tidbits

Online Books, Poems, References, and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Entitlements are two-thirds of the federal budget. Entitlement spending has grown 100-fold over the past 50 years. Half of all American households now rely on government handouts. When we hear statistics like that, most of us shake our heads and mutter some sort of expletive. That’s because nobody thinks they’re the problem. Nobody ever wants to think they’re the problem. But that’s not the truth. The truth is, as long as we continue to think of the rising entitlement culture in America as someone else’s problem, someone else’s fault, we’ll never truly understand it and we’ll have absolutely zero chance...
Steve Tobak ---
http://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/2013/02/07/truth-behind-our-entitlement-culture/?intcmp=sem_outloud

Jensen Comment
Relative to the CPA exam, the CFA exam does not require a fifth year of college or even a college diploma to take the Level 1 CFA part. However, there is a four-year somewhat flexible work experience requirement ---
https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/programs/cfa/register/enrollment-requirements
My point here is that the passage rate is low for Level 1 of the CFA exam partly because of lower requirements to take the CFA exam.

Whether the CPA exam is easier or harder than the CFA exam probably cannot be answered since easy versus hard is in the eyes of the beholder. Some who passed both examinations think the CFA exam was harder, but then they were better prepared for the CPA examination because of the greater college course requirements for the CPA examination.

What has changed over the last few decades is that the passage rate on the CPA exam more than doubled. Before the 1980s it was a an exam with fewer than 25% passing on the first try and less than half passing after multiple tries. After the 150 credit requirement spread to virtually all states in the USA the passage rate was allowed to rise and rise and rise. Coaching coaching courses at the same time got better and better and better.

Jensen Comment
The above article is not so misleading in terms of the subset it deals with coming into Canada --- engineers from nations other than the USA.
What is misleading, however, is that it ignores Canadian engineers coming into the USA. I don't know the immigration ratio is for engineers, but the total immigration ratio of Candada/USA is roughly 5/1. Among these some are most certainly STEM graduates who cam down from Canada for college in the USA and then stay on in the USA. It is not at all clear that engineers are leaving America for Canada in terms of net migration patterns. Employment opportunities for engineers are greater in the USA. Those with Ph.D.s certainly have many more USA colleges and universities to choose from if they want to enter the Academy.

Jensen Comment
Perhaps this is true of any discipline (think economics) built upon unproven or seemingly impossible assumptions. Science just has moved a bit further along the robustness continuum where we dare to call some derivations laws (think Kepler). In economics calling derivations "laws" is the subject of seminar humor.

Bob Jensen's Answer
In my mind the most important criteria are academic standard reputations and sustainability if the Federal government stopped paying tuition for military veterans. Sustainable online programs have reputation things and niches that make them survivors. Most flagship universities (think Wisconsin and Illinois) have online programs these days that are cash cows for the onsite programs and would survive even without Federal money for military veterans. Such flagship online programs are filling a variety of needs and are often taught by the same faculty who teach on campus. Probably the most exciting new things these days are the McDonalds new program for funding employee higher education (onsite or online) and the Purdue takeover of Kaplan University's faltering online programs.

Of course some online programs have non-traditional funding like Western Governors University and programs funded by employers like Walmart, Starbucks, etc.

Liberty University, Purdue University, and ASU may well be the models of the future for comprehensive universities.

Jensen Comment
This might put TurboTax, TaxAct, and other tax software companies out of business, but it may not eliminate the need for professional tax help and return filing by tax specialists, CPAs, and attorneys. Senator Warren's proposal would simplify filing of tax returns but not simplify most of the very complicated USA Income Tax Code that confuses so many taxpayers.

The article is critical of the present IRS free-filing program that's allegedly used only by less than 3% of the taxpayers even though nearly 50% of the taxpayers who file tax returns owe no income taxes.

Comparisons of the filing simplicity of other nations with the USA is misleading because their income tax laws are so simple compared to the exceedingly complicated USA Tax Code. Also many of those nations rely on taxes other than income taxes such as the VAT tax that's popular in Europe. Another example is the way the USA provides complicated income tax relief for medical services and medications compared to other nations with relatively simple national health care plans that do not complicate income tax filing.

Jensen Comment
By clicking the mouse I was able to read this interesting article without registering or signing up for anything.

Where the World’s Ultra Rich ($500+ Million) Population Lives ---
http://ritholtz.com/2018/04/worlds-ultra-rich-population-lives/
Jensen Comment
Rich does not necessarily mean rich in terms of liquidity. Some valuable assets can be hard to unload such as real estate or mineral reserves in some nations.
The richest man in the world, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, is highly restrained as to how much of Amazon's shares he can unload --- partly due to regulation and partly due to price impact of unloading large volumes of shares on short notice.
Sometimes a billionaire's wealth can implode due to a single bad strategy ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Bunker_Hunt

Jensen Comment
Textbooks are more apt to be fact check if the publisher hires experts to validate known facts such as laws, standards, and recent discoveries. Repeated editions have also been field tested for content. Errors might arise, however, in new end-of-chapter materials that are might be overlooked to save money on fact-checking.

Jensen Comment
This type of analysis is misleading for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's based on number of residents per 1,000 of a county who moved into or out of between 2016 and 2017. This makes the rankings biased toward smaller population counties. For example, the "biggest migration into a county" resulted from the 1,979 people who moved into Kendall County, Texas resulting in a 47.2 rate of migration per 1,000 residents of Kendall County. Many more people moved into nearby Bexar, County Texas but since Bexar County has nearly 2 million people ti had a negligible chance of beating the 47.2 rate of inflow per thousand. This misleading type of ranking is typical result of small sample statistics. As another example, suppose that 17 students from a small university take the CPA exam in a given month and 12 pass all four parts of the examination making this university the highest ranking in the state. A year later 16 take the exam and four pass making it the lowest ranking in the state. Such ups and downs for a small program rankings are common and very misleading when compared with larger universities that have less extreme but more consistent passage rates on the CPA examination.

There are other limitations when comparing "Where Americans Are Moving Too and From" in the above analysis. For example, we might conclude that counties with the highest positive migration rates are affording economic opportunities to new arrivals. But in the case of Kendall County mentioned above the new arrivals in Kendall County are probably working in Bexar County. Many of the new arrivals in Kendall County are simply willing to make longer commutes for more rural-type of living. The Progressive Farmer magazine ranked Kendall County as the Fifth Best "Rural Place" to live in the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Progressive_Farmer
But it's a rural county that offers urban (San Antonio) economic opportunity. It's also far less rural the closer one gets driving south toward San Antonio.

In fairness Business Insider excluded counties having less than 10,000 residents when ranking migration into and out of counties. This eliminated the extreme outliers, but there are still outliers that remain in the rankings. Of course if it merely reported numbers of people moving into and out of a county, small counties would almost never have a chance of being recognized.

Jim Martin's summary of some of the Chapters in Christensen, C. R., D. A. Garvin, and A. Sweet. (Eds.) 1991. Education for Judgment: The Artistry of Discussion Leadership. Harvard Business School Press ---
http://maaw.blogspot.com/2018/04/education-for-judgment.html

Jensen Comment
These rankings ignore the variances of programs within universities, especially professional programs. For example, universities like Harvard and Pennsylvania have very high student-faculty ratios in business, law, medicine, etc. relative to music programs. It's not uncommon at the Harvard Business School to have classes of 90+ students while some research professors in science have zero or only a few students.

Having a low student-faculty ratio does not guarantee small classes. Many universities have large lecture classes for elementary core courses in order to free up faculty for advanced courses.

There's often a huge difference between graduate and undergraduate class sizes, also this is not always the case in professional studies such as the Harvard Business School example mentioned above. Prestigious law schools sometimes have very large classes.

There's sometimes a huge difference between onsite class sizes and online class sizes (think University of Florida)

Some universities are embarrassed by low student-faculty ratios that they wish were ten times greater (think of the struggling Chicago State University that is close to bankruptcy and empty classrooms).

There's also a huge difference between how to define "faculty," especially "faculty" teaching in huge online programs that are much more likely to be adjunct non-tenured faculty who have their primary careers in the professional world rather than in academe.

What is the difference between warranty service on a lawn tractor purchased on Amazon versus Sears?

Jensen Comment
Gangland Chicago is no longer a safe place for anchor stores in some shopping malls, although Sears troubles extend well beyond security (think Amazon online competition). What's really sad about the demise of Sears is having to rely on other local retailers or Amazon) that do not repair what they sell in the boondocks.

For couples, extreme personal finance should most often be a shared decision with a deep commitment on behalf of each partner. Living in a van day-in-and day out and having to use public bathrooms can take a lot of the romance out of a relationship. Health risks such as unsafe diets should obviously be avoided. There's a difference between living in a van in a Silicon Valley parking lot and dining each day on employer-provided gourmet meals versus living in a van in Des Moines, Iowa and living on cheap fast food. Life should be filled with happy memories rather than years of hell followed by years of more comfortable exhaustion and bad health.

Also taking financial risks should be a shared decision for couples. Playing the commodities and stock markets (think options and futures contracts) is a pretty sure track to divorce court.

Jensen Comment
This begs the well-known question of whether patients themselves, when given all the known clinical trial outcome facts, should be given more choices than to just be denied this option entirely due to risks some of them are willing to accept.

Upon her return home, her father yelled at her, "Where have ye been all this time?

Why did ye not write to us? Not even a line! Why didn't ye call? Can ye not understand what ye put yer ol' mother thru?"

The girl, crying, replied, sniff....sniff.... "Dad, I was too embarrassed for I became a prostitute."

Ye what?!! Out of here, ye shameless hussy! Sinner! Ye're a disgrace to this Catholic family, so ye are."

"OK Daddy, as ye wish... I just came back to give Mommy this luxurious fur coat, a cheque for 2 million pounds and the title deed to an eight bedroom mansion. For me little brother Shamus, this solid gold Rolex.

And for ye, Daddy, the sparkling new limited edition convertible Mercedes parked out front plus a life membership to the Limerick Country Club."

She takes a deep breath and continues, "And an invitation for ye all to spend New Year's Eve on board me new yacht in the Caribbean."

The girl, crying again, said, sniff...sniff... "A prostitute Daddy." sniff...sniff.

"Oh! Me goodness! Ye scared me half to death girl! I thought ye said ye had become a PROTESTANT! Come here and give yer ol' Dad a big hug"

Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting educators.
Any college may post a news item.

For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for free) go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm

AECM (Educators) http://listserv.aaahq.org/cgi-bin/wa.exe?HOME
AECM is an email Listserv list which provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets, multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc.

Over the years the AECM has become the worldwide forum for accounting educators on all issues of accountancy and accounting education, including debates on accounting standards, managerial accounting, careers, fraud, forensic accounting, auditing, doctoral programs, and critical debates on academic (accountics) research, publication, replication, and validity testing.

~~CPAS-L (Practitioners) http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/~~ (Closed Down)
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments, ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed. Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or education. Others will be denied access.

Yahoo (Practitioners) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA. This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA.

AccountantsWorld http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and taxation.

Business Valuation Group BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag [RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM]

FEI's Financial Reporting Blog
Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, March 2008 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/mar2008/smart_stops.htm

FINANCIAL REPORTING PORTAL
www.financialexecutives.org/blog
Find news highlights from the SEC, FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board on this financial reporting blog from Financial Executives International. The site, updated daily, compiles regulatory news, rulings and statements, comment letters on standards, and hot topics from the Web’s largest business and accounting publications and organizations. Look for continuing coverage of SOX requirements, fair value reporting and the Alternative Minimum Tax, plus emerging issues such as the subprime mortgage crisis, international convergence, and rules for tax return preparers.

The CAlCPA Tax Listserv

September 4, 2008 message from Scott Bonacker [lister@bonackers.com]
Scott has been a long-time contributor to the AECM listserv (he's a techie as well as a practicing CPA)

I found another listserve that is exceptional -

CalCPA maintains http://groups.yahoo.com/taxtalk/ and they let almost anyone join it.
Jim Counts, CPA is moderator.

There are several highly capable people that make frequent answers to tax questions posted there, and the answers are often in depth.

Scott

Scott forwarded the following message from Jim Counts

Yes you may mention info on your listserve about TaxTalk. As part of what you say please say [... any CPA or attorney or a member of the Calif Society of CPAs may join. It is possible to join without having a free Yahoo account but then they will not have access to the files and other items posted.

Once signed in on their Yahoo account go to http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxTalk/ and I believe in top right corner is Join Group. Click on it and answer the few questions and in the comment box say you are a CPA or attorney, whichever you are and I will get the request to join.

Be aware that we run on the average 30 or move emails per day. I encourage people to set up a folder for just the emails from this listserve and then via a rule or filter send them to that folder instead of having them be in your inbox. Thus you can read them when you want and it will not fill up the inbox when you are looking for client emails etc.

We currently have about 830 CPAs and attorneys nationwide but mainly in California.... ]

Please encourage your members to join our listserve.

If any questions let me know.

Jim Counts CPA.CITP CTFA
Hemet, CA
Moderator TaxTalk