Jarrett B. Topel's blog

As I worked towards my undergraduate degree in finance, then my Certified Financial Planner® designation, and finally my Masters in Financial Planning (MSFP), I was consistently taught about “Rational Choice Theory” and it its place in “Modern Portfolio Theory”.  I learned that a rational investor, would always make the right decisions based on facts and statistics, not on emotions or gut reactions, and that was why markets were so efficient over the long-term.  In the sterilized world of academia, it is easy to know the right thing to do: buy when prices are low, sell when prices are high,

I’ve never understood why there exists in most American’s minds, such a negative association with paying taxes (as in “death and…”). Doesn’t the fact that a person has to pay taxes mean that he or she has made money? I get that there are any number of specific objections people may have, depending on their own personal political or socio-economic position, to how much they are taxed, or to what the money is used for etc., but it has always struck me as an odd dichotomy that something relatively positive can carry such a negative connotation in most people’s minds.