If you're Michael Dell, you contend you're doing shareholders of your company a favor. If you're an investor in Dell (DELL), you may well feel like you're getting low-balled.

Dell's largest outside investor, Memphis-based Southeastern Asset Management, agrees with the latter position, saying it won't support the $13.65-a-share management-led buyout of the computer seller. Dell responded to that announcement by arguing that the plan to take the company private "offers an attractive and immediate premium for stockholders and shifts the risks facing the business to the buyer group." Southeastern doesn't remotely believe that.

It's problem isn't with an acquisition. It's that the firm thinks the takeover price needs to be substantially higher, about $10 a share higher, in fact. By the money manager's calculations, Dell is worth $23.72 a share.

The last time Dell, of Round Rock, Texas, traded there was six years ago, in February 2007. It's not been above $20 since 2008, and in the last 52

By Terry Connelly

While we are on the subject of banning assault rifles and machine-gun ammo clips, it might be good to take a quick second look, not only at the doomsday machine heretofore known as the “Debt Ceiling,” but also at its close relative, the “Sequestration” legislation.

The “Sequester” was the deal concocted in Congress to back its way out of the summer 2011 Debt Ceiling fiasco: to get the Republican radicals to give up their threat to put America into default unless the budget was cut by an mount equal to any Debt Ceiling increase, Congress agreed to $1 trillion in across-the-board cuts to military and discretionary domestic spending (not including most “entitlement” programs) over 10 years, starting with 10 percent of that in the very first year (2013). Thus, there would be no Sequestration but for the manufactured Debt Ceiling crisis.

Self-Inflicted Economic Suicide

Virtually every reputable economist who has studied the U.S. debt situation, including the Federal