* * *
Too many people do not read a daily newspaper, and too many don’t bother with the extensive reporting major papers post on the internet. This results in their not being familiar with the news that affects their daily lives, and of course, the nation as well.
They sometimes seek out a shortcut to being informed and often select the wrong one. Here is one I feel might be ‘right one’ for many. It’s short and very informative, and provides links for those who might want to explore something in greater detail. It’s provided by local NPR stations. I check it out each day and you can too, by visiting
but that's a pretty long URL so why not just CLICK RIGHT HERE
 |
JL
*
* *
Polling Elects No One - Voters Do!
I just do not believe the recent poll (FAU Political Communication and Public Opinion Research Lab - PolCom Lab - Mainstreet Research polling) that shows Rick Scott far ahead of Debbie Muscarel-Powell in the Florida senatorial race. Other polls have the race as much, much, closer.
As the Biden campaign gets into full gear, and as the legal system removes the curtain of lies blinding most Republicans, each day sees more and more voters beginning to realize that voting Republican means voting for Donald Trump, with all of his baggage and lies, and for those who remain in his shrinking camp, and that includes Rick Scott.
Six years ago, Scott was elected by only 10,000 votes statewide, despite coming off of his two terms as Florida’s governor. Since then, he has done nothing in the Senate whatsoever than be among the chief obstructionists to constructive legislation there, besides voting for Donald Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees, the crew that reversed Roe vs Wade. I don’t know precisely who was polled in the polls that have him far ahead, but let’s look at two voting groups.
Seniors: Debbie should be an easy choice for seniors (even the ones who are registered as without party affiliation, independents and Republicans), considering Scott’s historic opposition to Medicare and Social Security both of which he wanted to put up to a fresh vote in Congress every five years. He has shut up about that right now, but if re-elected, believe me, it remains high on his agenda. There are many seniors in Florida. Scott’s positions directly attack their pocketbooks where it hurts, the cost of their health care and their retirement income! Democrats must publicize this!
Women: Scott’s opposition to women’s
abortion rights should bring many women into Ms. Muscarsel-Powell’s camp. The presence on the ballot of an amendment to
enshrine abortion rights in the Florida Constitution should augment this too! Democrats must publicize this, too.
However, Democratic strategists must be careful because that amendment is included along with a bucket full of other ones, and too many voters are in the lazy habit of voting ‘no’ on all questions on their ballot, assuming ‘yes’ votes will cost them money. Clearly, voters for the amendment guaranteeing abortion rights will not vote for Scott, so publicizing its importance deserves the very highest priority.
In addition, Scott’s efforts to make voting more difficult, aimed at minorities and immigrants (Debbie is one), should bring the votes of Latinos and those of color to the Democratic column as well. Remember, polling elects no one. Voters do!
I know Floridians are far from being the brightest folks in the nation, their repeated choices of awful governors proving that, but I don’t think this applies to a majority of seniors there and most women too! And they might be just enough to turn the State blue, and that could include the legislature in Tallahassee and several congressional districts as well!
For more information about Debbie Muscarel-Powell, visit https://www.debbieforflorida.com/ or just CLICK RIGHT HERE. You might want to join me in setting up a monthly donation to her campaign.
Let me repeat: ‘Polling elects no one. Voters do!’
You must do your part to make that happen.
And while on the subject of polls, I have little faith in the New York Times/Siena University polling that still puts Trump slightly ahead of President Biden. Americans are just not that sick. That poll might be.
JL
* * *
Life Insurance
Seeing those ads on TV (or in the AARP
magazine) about life insurance for seniors with no health questions asked leads
me to share some information with you about life insurance. I’ve included this before on Jackspotpourri
but its repetition never hurts. (My experience in the life insurance industry
spanned over four decades, most of which was in non-sales activities.)
1. All life insurance
policies, regardless of company, are based on the same or very similar
mortality tables that tell insurance companies how many individuals at a given
age will die within one year. There are no exceptions to this.
2. These mortality
tables assume that the insureds are healthy, having at least answered health
questions before being issued a policy.
If this not the case, the number expected to die is arbitrarily increased,
as explained below.
3.
The insurance company must collect enough ‘premiums’ to
cover the anticipated number of deaths that these mortality tables indicate
will occur within that one year.
4. The same procedure
follows for each succeeding year, during which, simply because of aging, an
increasingly larger number of insureds will not survive the year, and more
premium dollars must be collected to pay that year’s death claims.
5.
This kind of insurance is known as one-year-term
insurance. Individuals at younger
ages can purchase it, usually in one, five, ten, or twenty- year packages. Insurance companies, however, use that one-year
term cost at all ages internally in structuring the premiums for all of the
policies they sell. All of them!
6. Because
life insurance policies (excluding term policies), especially at older ages,
are usually sold with premiums that remain the same, insurance company
mathematicians known as actuaries, figure out a ‘level’ premium to be paid each
year. It is far in excess of the
‘one year term insurance’ premiums required to cover deaths in early years, but
far less than the ‘one year term premium’ needed to pay death benefits in later
years. Taking interest rates into
consideration, this amounts to overpaying in a policy’s early years and underpaying in its
later years. (Paying premiums
using cash values, dividends, and loans does not change the fact that the cost
of one year term insurance at a given age is at the heart of determining
premiums.)
7. The idea of ‘whole
life insurance’ with a level premium lasting ‘forever’ is just a
combination of the early years’ overpayments, saved up in what is called the
policy’s cash value, internally supplemented by enough one-year-term insurance
to add up to the policy’s death benefit each year. Ultimately, in a true
‘whole life’ policy, no one-year-term insurance at all will be needed at very
advanced ages, its cost then being prohibitive, with the cash value alone then sufficing
to be the entire death benefit. All
varieties of life insurance are variations of this approach, including
endowment policies, universal life policies, and stripped-down term policies that usually run out before becoming death claims.
8. Policies
offered to seniors with no health questions being asked usually have two
safeguards that insurance companies include so that they don’t issue policies
to those on death’s doorstep. These are:
(a) the full death benefit is not available for
the policy’s first two years, with that death benefit usually graded down to
the actual premiums paid plus interest during that period, and (b) because the insurance company is insuring
individuals about whose health they know nothing,
the premium for the one-year-term insurance portion of the death benefit, as
determined in 3, 4, 5, and 6 above, is significantly increased. For example, at an age when 20 deaths during the year per 1000 among insureds who have answered health questions, is anticipated by the
insurance industry’s established mortality tables, the actuaries might double
that number of anticipated deaths to perhaps 40 per 1000 to account for those
whose physical condition is unknown to them, anticipating that using that increased number of deaths will provide enough to pay for the portion of the death benefit not
available from the cash value, as explained above in number 7 above. This
increase in the cost of this ‘term insurance’ portion of the death benefit
will, of course, continue through succeeding years. That
is the way these kinds of policies are internally structured, although the
premium paid is a level one. The smiling pitchman on TV doesn't go into that.
9. Conclusion: If one desires or needs life insurance at any
age and can qualify for it by answering health questions, it will be far less
costly than a ‘no health questions’ policy, in which the underlying one-year
term premium as explained above is increased because the insurance company is
unaware of the insured’s health, and the full death benefit is not usually
available for the first two years. But
before purchasing any life insurance policy, at any age, a need for it must be
first determined.
JL
* * *
Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri
Strange “Hits’! The large number of those accessing Jackspotpouri from Singapore has suddenly ceased. In their place, however, there have appeared large numbers of ‘hits’ on each posting in the hundreds, and as was the case with those from Singapore, but this time from Hong Kong! I suspect that the Chinese are playing around with internet transmissions, possibly to try to identify who is reading them.
Email Alerts: If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do. And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com.
Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it. Friends, relatives, enemies, etc.
If you want to send someone the
blog, you can just tell them to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or
you can provide a link to that address in your email to them.
There’s another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it though! Google Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible. If you click on the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which that blog posting will be forwarded, along with a brief comment from you. Each will receive a link to click on that will directly connect them to the blog.
Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting.
Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it, particularly if they are a registered voter. This is an election year. Spread the word.
JL
* * *
No comments:
Post a Comment