John T. Reed’s news blog

When I was a student at West Point and since, I periodically heard about the Army or the military lamenting that too many junior officers were getting out rather than staying in long enough to become captains or majors. That, in turn, meant that the pool from which they could promote officers to colonels and generals was unhappily less numerous and less qualified. . The Army appoints committees to produce reports and recommendations about how to fix this. They created the Junior Officers Council. The officer students at Fort Monmouth Signal school, mostly captains, were about to unanimously elect second...

This is an email I got today from a U.S. Marine:.Dear Mr. Reed, At some point in the past I emailed you about me wanting to enlist. Despite your warnings I did it anyways. One of THE worst mistakes of my life. I can not even express the level of stupidity in the training, leadership, and daily life of the Marine Corps. Wish I had heeded your words. I count down the days till I am free of this misery. Hopefully I don’t pay the price on deployment. I don’t get why civilians worship the military. They don’t know the...

Below is a video by my son Dan and me discussing my new book Aggressive Tax Avoidance for Real Estate Investors, 20th edition.

On melting circulating U.S. coins with a high “face value to melt value” ratio.When I was researching my book How to Protect Your Life Savings From Hyperinflation & Depression, the light bulb went on in my head. It occurred to me that it would be really neat if somewhere in the world there was a circulating coin with a high melt-value-to-face-value ratio. So I googled that phrase. There are two Turned out there were two, and they were right here in the U.S.: the penny and the nickel. I learned about them at the coinflation.com web site. And it is great that...