New on the Nutrition Front for 2006

We have some new and exciting things to look forward to on the nutrition front, or rather, back of food labels. They include:

• Trans fat labeling
• Allergen identifiers and bold, dark warnings
• Whole grains to go mainstream in Sara Lee products

Trans fat labeling will be a helpful boon to those who are watching (or supposed to be watching) their cholesterol and fat levels, and for preventative measures against heart disease, hypertension, and excess calories from fat.

Allergen identifiers will help people leave potentially and personally hazardous food products on the shelf instead of in their stomachs in the E.R. The bolder, darker warnings will be easier to see when bunched up with ingredient lists as they are now. Even a trace amount of allergen essence can be enough to set off a huge reaction in super-sensitive people, stopping hearts, cutting off breathing, triggering seizures, etc., and food product companies don’t want the liability.

Sara Lee sees which way the nutrition tide’s turning, and has opted to go with the flow by adding whole grains to her lineup of baked and frozen products. They won’t be totally whole grain, though, but rather a whole grain and white flour mix.

As you can see, we’ve still got a long way to go for processed food to really become healthy and safe to consume.

The Home Business of Accounts Receivable Sales

That has a rather lofty sound, doesn’t it, for what actually takes place.

Say you go to a store to return an item, and receive store credit or a gift card instead of cash. This is the store telling you that they want to hang onto the money already spent previously, and this is a measure of exactly how desperate they are.

When you’ve gotten your much-unwanted store credit or gift card, you grumble loudly, then leave. What you may not realize is that you’ve been handed a ticket to your own little home business: buying and selling these credits and cards on E-bay.

When you actually submit the item on E-bay, you can forget making back the actual amount of money in the credit or gift card, because E-bay is all about getting something for next to nothing. However, you can get as much as 90% of the face value of your credit or gift card, or evenly exchange it for one that you’d rather have instead.

This action is called selling discounted notes, and it takes place in high finance all the time. Maybe you’ve heard the term “discounted notes” and didn’t think anything of it. Well now it has come home to roost in humanly-accessible dimensions.

The note you are selling is a promissory from the store for a certain dollar amount—an account receivable to them. You don’t owe them—they owe you. If you sell this obligation to someone else, the store now owes THEM instead, and they still owe the full face value of the original credit.

Banks do this sort of thing all the time. They want the money, not the time it will take to receive it in full, so they sell the note to the highest bidder. These notes include personal loans, mortgages, student loans, car loans, etc. When the bank feels that the risk of default is long past, they sell the note to obtain money that they would otherwise have had to await payment on from you. When the banks feel they can make better investments elsewhere, they sell your note and reinvest the proceeds.

Now John or Jane Q. Public can be the banker.

Before engaging in an actual home business of note transactions, do consult your tax professional to find out how to account for this income, because this is one area I’m not personally familiar with.

In the Realm of the Poor Part Three: A Contrast in Poverty

I thought I'd post this little ditty for you to read while you revel in whatever holiday largesse you got yesterday, and whatever largesse you plan on hunting down in the deep discount days ahead.
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Let me bring you up to speed with the “realm” saga—part one was witnessed accounts, part two was a comparison of poverty levels, and now we come to part three.

This episode will contrast two middle-aged gentlemen: a backwoods Appalachian man and a doctor in Kinshasa, Africa (the Congo). I’ll refer to them as Mr. Mountain and Dr. Congo for the sake of simplicity.

Mr. Mountain receives SSI (supplemental subsistence income for a previous disability—a heart attack on the job), and lives in a trailer surrounded by a working truck and about six non-working vehicles, along with assorted parts strewn around the yard. His ex-wife lives next door—they divorced so she could get welfare money for their three sons. Underneath Mr. Mountain’s front porch is a large and ever-growing pile of crushed Pepsi cans. His locale regularly fights back and forth with coal corporations, whose corrupt policies have put a stranglehold on the area’s jobs and economic viability—not to mention environmental viability.

Dr. Congo, by comparison, lives in a four-bedroom hut with 12 other family members. Since he is a prominent surgeon, he makes about $250 month from his hospital work and about another $400 from seeing private patients on the side. He’s rarely home with his family other than to sleep. He also suffers from twice-monthly shakedowns from the uniformed regime members of his so-called “government”, whose soldiers regularly fight back and forth with civilians over diamond and gold mines. Like Mr. Mountain, he too suffers from the effects of a political regime who struggles to keep control on the area’s economic viability—mostly through corruption, shakedowns, bribes, etc.

Mr. Mountain enjoys basic necessities as refrigeration, electricity, running water, and indoor plumbing. He also has good protection from the wind, rain, heat, and cold, and of course, has climate controls.

Dr. Congo, on the other hand, lives in a stick-built hut (albeit large), just like all his neighbors. He has seen how other doctors in the world live, and would very much like to have running water and access to reliable electricity for more than a few hours twice-weekly. Meat is a monthly rarity, and air conditioning is a wild fantasy for him.

Both men are roughly on the same scale monetarily, yet priority and will separate them for miles. TV (Dr. Congo sees it at work, while Mr. Mountain has cable) has made each acutely aware of his own and the other’s living conditions. Who do you think is happiest and why?

I’ll tell you my response: Mr. Mountain, of course! He doesn’t have to do anything for his money but show up to collect it each month. His trailer, coupled with our country’s definition of basic standard of living, has assured him a rather comfy life with all the amenities he could possibly take for granted. Even for an Appalachian backwoods trailer-dweller, he does a darn sight better than Dr. Congo, who had to go through years of schooling, make many sacrifices, and puts up with much day-to-day corruption to get where he is—and if he stops now, he loses what little he has. Mr. Mountain has no fear of losing anything except possessions due to a possible burglary if he slows down. Hell, he’s already stopped, in my opinion.

Even a prestigious surgeon in Kinshasa doesn’t rate in comparative wealth to our Appalachian man on the dole.

Avoidable Risk

Risk is everywhere. You can either learn to avoid it, fully embrace it, or find a happy medium.

The risk of cancer is mostly avoidable and about 1/3 of the cancer deaths in 2001 could’ve been avoided, according to a study in the Lancet medical journal. The nine most common risk factors are (in no particular order):

• Smoking
• Alcohol
• Poor diet
• Unsafe sex
• Lack of exercise
• Obesity
• Urban air pollution
• Dirty needle use
• Indoor air pollution

To a large extent, these nine items are totally within our control each and every day. By addressing them, we address the risk factors for a significant number of common cancers—then we can work to reduce or avoid them altogether.

None of these activities is hard to address, and none is particularly hard to reduce or eliminate completely, with the possible exception of smoking. It takes time and commitment, but smoking too can be conquered.

The cost of addressing these items is in time and money—but wouldn’t a little lost time and some money spent be a worthwhile trade-off against an expensive, avoidable, and early death?

Most importantly of all, don’t you want to be a good role model for your children? You DO want to be around when they get married and have kids of their own, right?

We’ll start now—put down that soda or beer you’re holding, and grab an apple instead. Your chances of meeting your own grandkids depend on it. So might your chances of ever collecting a Social Security check if you already have grandkids.

Hedge Funds for the Common Man

As I previously ranted in my “lazy woman’s investing” saga, I look to hedge fund activity to see where the bulk of the big money is headed. Now you can go one step better and actually BELONG to one.

From a CNN Money article, here is a list of “hedge funds” for the common man—mutual funds that shucked the shackles of ordinary investment criteria restrictions:

Fund: Gateway
Manager: Gateway Investment Advisers

The Gateway Fund invests in stocks and sells index call options. It's designed to give investors higher returns than fixed income investments while reducing the volatility of stock funds.

While the fund mainly invests in equities, according to its prospectus, its volatility has historically been closer to things like bonds. Its expense ratio is 0.97 percent of the fund's assets. The fund's minimum investment is $1,000.
The fund has netted returns of 4.7 percent through Dec. 9. Over a 10-year period ending Dec. 1, 2004, the fund produced returns after taxes of 4.52 percent.

Fund: Diamond Hill Focus Long/Short
Manager: Diamond Hill Investments

As its name implies, the Diamond Hill Focus Long/Short fund bets on stocks its managers like and against those seen as overvalued.

According to a Morningstar profile, the fund has generated average returns of 8 percent a year, a performance Morningstar's analysts called "better than most of its rivals, and it easily trumps its benchmark Russell 3000 Index's 1.9 percent average annual loss."

But the fund's performance has been more volatile than that of similar funds and it takes risks most mutual funds avoid, according to Morningstar. It's also pretty expensive: the fund levies a 5 percent sales charge and its expense ratio is about 1.75 percent of funds assets.

Hmm... high fees, higher than average risk, but higher than average returns? Sounds like this mutual fund is more of a hedge fund than many hedge funds these days. The fund has returned 19.12 percent this year through Dec. 9.

Fund: Hussman Strategic Growth
Manager: Hussman Funds

Portfolio manager John Hussman describes the fund as a "risk-managed growth fund." The fund invests in common stocks but uses options and futures to boost returns.
"What I try to do is always be fully invested in stocks," he said, while hedging against fluctuations in the broader market.

Hussman doesn't short stocks, nor does he borrow money to enhance returns, but in a strong market may use "leverage"-type techniques such as buying call options on individual stocks or market indices. In falling markets, he'll sell short.
The fund's expense ratio comes out to 1.15 percent of the fund's assets; the minimum investment is about $1,000.

The fund has netted returns of 4.95 percent through Dec. 9. If you'd invested since the fund's inception in July 2000, you'd have doubled your investment.

Fund: Pimco Commodity RealReturn Strategy
Manager: Pimco

While not billed as a hedge-like mutual fund, the fund gives retail investors exposure to commodity markets by investing in a basket of futures. It benefited this year in particular from the energy market.

While commodity funds are more volatile that more traditional investments, they can produce stellar returns. Some investment advisers recommend using such funds as a small part of a balanced portfolio.

Returns? 21.25 percent through Dec. 9. The fund has doubled since opening in June 2002.

Now everyone who can afford the minimums can belong to a hedge fund, but you may not want to. The expenses are high, the criteria are loose, and your money is flown by the seat of its pants. Volatility is the middle name of these sorts of funds, and they eat risk for breakfast. This is why I instead observe what they’re investing in, and follow along with index funds—this is what most other mutual fund companies do anyway, yet they charge commission. This is called “closet indexing,” and it can get quite expensive over the years. I chose to come out of the index closet with my investments long ago, and you can too.

As you can see by the performance numbers of the above hedge funds, most of them either didn’t beat the S&P, or barely beat out the 10-yr. bond yield or even a bank CD. Such cost and risk for such mediocre performance—but when you have millions invested, even a lousy 4% return yields more than most people make in a year. For this crowd, tax avoidance is the name of the game, because they have clearly exceeded the limits of any sort of tax-advantaged account. Hedge funds are really just a place to preserve capital against inflation erosion, not to make any real sort of gains. These people don’t really want to make a killing on their money—they just want their money back!

Another way to look at them: rich people loan their money out to hedge funds for market gambling purposes, so they just want their own money back plus a little something for its use. Hedge fund managers make commissions on their market gambles, and those commissions add up to one pretty penny for a years’ play. So the managers must make sure every bet they place makes a profit to cover their commissions and a little something for the kind rich people who lent them money to gamble with. When gambling with billions in other people’s money, lots of pressure exists to make sure bets however they can—speed and luck are the talismans here. If a bet is placed and fails, a larger bet or multiple small bets must be placed to try to win back some of this lost money—this is where the pressure comes from. More losses lead to more and more reckless behavior just trying to stay even.

My advice: don’t get involved with them, but rather watch and make notes of who the winners are and where they parked, then prepare to follow them home. They’ve done the research, they’ve taken the risk, and the payoff must be good or they wouldn’t still be there. When the payoff has ceased, they will move on, and so will you.

This Lazy Woman’s Investment Method Part 2: A Whole New Index

I had to get this out of my head before cephalic explosion occurred.

This past Sunday was a day in Book TV infamy for me—three book author sessions in a row that I was interested in. Boy, I wished I had popcorn for that, but I was too lazy to get up and make some. I took notes instead. It was Sunday, after all—my day off.

Anyway, one of the authors included was Richard Florida, a man I had not previously heard of until that fateful day. He talked about the arrival and the flight of “the creative class” and I was thoroughly intrigued—enough to go look him up on Amazon and Google, and spend an entire evening immersing myself in all that was Richard Florida, publicly accessible.

The creative class doesn’t include just artists and hippies, but rather those who possess the soul and lifestyle of idea, free thought, and independence. In fact, the creative class, according to Richard, encompasses about 40% of our labor force—it includes the idea people from all industries and occupational fields.

In Richard’s mind, the labor force of this country is divided this way: white-collar idea people, and blue-collar production people.

He even went so far as to research, with the Carnegie-Mellon Institute, just where the “creative class” lived and worked, and from there, made an “creativity index” of places in this country that are anywhere from amenable to hostile toward this class. This creative class index encompasses more than just idea havens—it also includes the things that allow for and detract from creative acceptance. He calls them the Three T’s: technology, talent, and tolerance. All three T’s must be in place for a locale to become a creative and economic mecca.

Now for the investment part—seeing that all three T’s are necessary for an economic mecca to emerge in this country and elsewhere, I went to his website and consulted a map containing the creativity index, and each metropolitan locale’s ranking. I then started thinking seriously about how this information could be put to investment use, i.e., real estate, utilities, corporations, etc. Then I considered market price for those areas at the top of his charts.

Seeing that the top 10 creative meccas had already priced me out (as well as much of the public—think “market peak” here), I went for the second group of 10, and the third, and so on. Richard’s site even included a regional breakdown of the creative index, so I could hone in much better on up-and-coming areas with an eye toward market price. When I find an area that fits my criteria of affordability and future economic draw, I’ll then begin to put chips down and wait. The crowd isn’t here yet, but they will be in about 10 years or so.

At this rate, who needs Wall Street? Just reading the right books and synthesizing data for hidden clues can lead you to riches that ordinary people would just read on by.

Richard’s newest book, The Flight of the Creative Class, deals with how the creative are fleeing to meccas outside the U.S. because the three T’s existing together are in short supply here, and those places have priced people out of their own markets as well (not to mention the glut of idea people that already exists in those places). New Zealand, Canada, and other places are becoming the “new” creative meccas, because the three necessary T’s are in abundant supply, and the areas are sparsely populated with idea people, so these countries are eager to import the creative juice they need.

In my mind, the three T’s will also serve as the backbone of the global economy in as far as telling people where their best job opportunities lie. If there isn’t technology, or talent, or tolerance (lifestyle, ethnic, and religious) co-existing, there will be no economic engine. Think of it as a footstool: all three legs must be there and in perfect order, or the whole thing will collapse.

If this man’s books serve to tell one person about the future employment picture, it serves to tell me about where to invest my money to profit from the future employment picture while minimizing my risk—as the index adjusts, I can adjust my holdings. That’s following creative demand on a global scale. Richard Florida puts a whole new spin on index investing, doesn’t he?

Not-So-Sweet Sugar Story

No, this one’s not about nutrition, but rather about home economics. Hurricane Katrina has brought inflation to our sugar canisters, but we haven’t felt it yet.

When Hurricane Katrina blew into our lives this past season, it took out much of the sugar cane crop, closed a sugar processing and refining plant, destroyed delivery trucks, and raised the price of fuel.

Now, what remains of our home-grown Gulf Coast sugar industry is going to have to raise prices in ’06 to quell demand. Manufacturers and vendors had already set their prices for products containing the sugar for ’05, and had to eat the higher costs brought on by Katrina and shortages. Next year, the gloves come off.

What was once sold for .28/pound is now going for .72/pound.

The good news: commodity analysts are predicting sugar to slowly drop by half as the sugar beet markets of the Midwest come back into season, helping to pick up the slack.

The primary victim is the Domino sugar company. Cane fields were knocked down by waves and wind, then flooded with storm surge. They may take years to return to “normal”.

Next year will be a rocky one for sugar price-wise, so I suggest you use honey or artificial sweeteners in your baking until this situation resolves itself. The price spike will be temporary until the sugar beet crops come in next summer.

Honey conversion notes from Vickilynn Haycraft’s web page:

“Substituting honey for sugar seems to be a matter of taste. Some people use it cup for cup, others prefer 1/2 cup - 2/3 cup of honey per cup of white sugar. Reduce the amount of other liquids by 1/4 cup for every cup of honey used. Lower the oven temp about 25 degrees F to prevent over-browning and add 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda for each cup of honey to your batter. (Honey is naturally acidic and the baking soda tempers it.)”

Vivkilynn’s web page with sweetener FAQs: http://www.realfoodliving.com/sugars.htm

“All I’ll Ever Know I Learned Way Back in Medical School” Part Three: Throwing Drugs at the Problem

Let me bring you up to speed on the “way back in medical school” saga: part one was the lack of modern knowledge and awareness of recent research, part two was the lack of control over controlled substances, and now we come to part three.

Picture an IBM-type commercial where medieval fur-and-weapon-clad horde members sit around a large wooden boardroom table with the “king” at the head. The king-slash-doctor asks what they should do about a certain person’s health issues, and one member of the horde says they should build a huge catapult suitable for lobbing a large load at the enemy-slash-patient.

The king looks at the horde member-slash-health care specialist, and asks, “Are you suggesting we throw DRUGS at the problem?”

This is what health care is like for my husband right now, and most assuredly for countless others.

He was born with an extremely narrow left ventricular aorta, once repaired by surgery when he was 7. Now in his 40’s, he needed it repaired again—this time, the surgeon added Gore-Tex to the area to widen it even more. Surgery-wise, all was well, except for the fact that hubby now has hypertension as a result of the extra widening.

While in post-operative care, his nurses managed to get his blood pressure down to an acceptable level by current medical standards. I was told to “halt the salt”, and I replied that salt hadn’t been in our house for the past 10 years since I began having high blood pressure problems myself from work stress.

Five days and five prescriptions later, we were home again.

Since we had already changed our diet to include more fruits and veggies, and less meats, his post-op recovery time was actually shorter than was previously predicted. I credit the diet. Eventually, five prescriptions got whittled down to three.

Fast-forward to today: his VA cardiologist called us from his office, and said that he’ll be sending us a drug through the mail for hubby’s suddenly-recurring hypertension—NO VISITATION, NO CONSULT WITH US OR ANY OF HIS DOCTORS, NOTHING.

Now I don’t know about you, but I get extremely leery when a doctor who hasn’t seen or heard from you starts arbitrarily sending drugs through the mail. All this man did was consult a computer record containing the last EKG taken by the primary care physician, and it was 5-week-old data at that.

What I did about it: since I live with this man day in and day out, I’m acutely aware of changes in his condition caused by diet, circumstances, and nutritional supplements. We monitor his blood pressure at home each day, so I know when something’s setting hubby off. I’m usually able to deduce what it is, then remove it.

When this horde-lobbed drug arrived in the mail, I immediately went to WebMD to look it up—boy oh boy am I glad we haven’t take it yet! The medication supposedly is a patch for all things contributing to a cardio event: epilepsy, high blood sugar, high cholesterol, kidney issues, and other assorted things, none of which have to do with hubby’s condition. The side effects of this drug would’ve laid him out cold.

What gave the cardiologist alarm was the fact that hubby’s last EKG (from 5 weeks ago) seemed a little off, and that was because we were experimenting with a new supplement at home. We found by accident that a certain kind of ale relieved hubby’s knee pain, so I began supplementing his drug regimen with the main ingredient to the beverage: hops. I did this because I didn’t want hubby to become alcoholic trying to make his knee feel better.

The hops effect on his heart was showing on our blood pressure monitor at home, so I stopped giving it to him. The blood pressure returned to normal, but this wasn’t until AFTER we’d gone to a primary care visit, setting this whole episode off.

I had hubby schedule an appointment with this mail-order cardiologist for two reasons: to get CURRENT data on his heart, and to give him a piece of my mind on how it feels to get drugs thrown at a problem. I also asked for and got an appointment with a nutritionist to find out what else we could do in the diet arena to alleviate whatever fears his other doctors seemed to have about his condition.

I’m also going to ask if there’s an integrated medicine specialist on staff who understands the importance of what food and supplements together can do without having to resort to big-name pills. Since this is the VA (the government) we’re dealing with, I believe I may have trouble finding an integrated medicine doctor on staff—remember, if it isn’t FDA-approved, it doesn’t get anyone’s blessing, or get spoken of around the water cooler.

No matter. I can just go find one out in town somewhere.

I bet the problem is either a deficiency or excess of some nutrient, but have no way of knowing until I can get his blood tested. As you can tell by now, I’m always at war with hubby’s doctors over serious diagnosis vs. palliative drug-lobbing. Just who are they looking to make feel better, hubby or themselves? I know—Big Pharma.

At this point, I’m wondering just how many other people are in this same situation, and don’t have the option of going out in town to find alternatives. I’m also wondering how many of these people don’t even know there are alternatives to the big-name pills that keep getting thrown at them.

When we finally meet with Mr. Cardiologist, I want so badly to ask him if he knows what optimum nutrition’s about. I plan on asking Mrs. Nutritionist if she knows. I WILL find a practitioner of optimum nutrition and integrated medicine if it kills me!

Gifts Worth Giving—More Bang for Your Charity Buck

Let’s face it—the mall just isn’t the shopping thrill it used to be. Neither is all this “seasonal” giving with all the corresponding trash that it produces—the wrapping paper and bows, the box(es), and all the internal packing material. It seems like an awful lot to go through just to give someone an object that ends up being the size of a bread box when it finally gets freed from its trappings.

This alone makes me think that maybe we should start tipping our garbage men!

What do you give when most of us already have enough of whatever our hearts desire, and can get it 24/7 when we don’t?

You give to those who don’t have even the basic necessities of life—decent food, clean water, adequate protection from the elements, no gainful employment prospects, and no hope of ever gaining any of this in the near future. I’m speaking of charities to third world countries and disaster zones.

There are plenty of places that harbor people who suffer greatly from a lack of food, clean drinking water, warm places to sleep, and a shelter over their heads from the sun and rain. The suffering in these places can be alleviated with relatively small sums when compared to what we shell out for things here at home during the holidays for far fewer people.

Just to give you an example of what kind of small amounts help greatly, I’m including an excerpt from a CNN Money article by Jeanne Sahadi:

“At Church World Service, for instance, $20 can buy four blankets for those in disaster relief areas. (A full $172 can buy a shelter kit, including a family-sized tent, ground cover and blankets.)

At Alternative Gifts International (AGI), $20 can buy a month's worth of nutritional supplements for 75 Sudanese children living in the Darfur camps.

Or $44 can provide two to three month's of basic medical supplies for 100 people in a developing country. (A full $440 buys enough for 1,000 people.)

A mere $14 buys one share of an oxen ($143 the whole animal) for a poor farmer in Bolivia. Owning the animal can boost the farmer's harvest by 80 percent.

Another $15 buys one solar cooker that can be used to purify water in Kenya and Tanzania.

In the United States, for $44, a woman living in poverty who is the sole support for her family can receive a week's worth of job training, career counseling and temporary paid work. Another $15 will provide a family with food for one day, and $30 will buy them two bags of groceries.

And this barely skims the surface of possibilities.”

I have to agree. Also, none of these things produces waste from excess wrapping and packaging, and they are completely useful gifts—no worries about returns.

At these prices, this has got to be bargain gifting at its finest! Nowhere else can you do so much for so many with so little.

The best part: your giving doesn’t have to be restricted to the holiday season. These folks have real needs all year round. If you’d like to do some meaningful giving, here are a couple of previously-mentioned places you can go to donate:

Church World Service (www.churchworldservice.org)

Alternative Gifts International (www.alternativegifts.org)

If you want to check out a charity before sending money:

Charity Navigator (www.charitynavigator.org)

Charity Watch (www.charitywatch.org)

If these organizations fit your giving criteria, and aren’t on your charity campaign at work, either write them in or seek to have them added. An auto-payment directly from your bank is another way of giving year-round in monthly installments.

For us, it’s just another way of doing good and possibly receiving a tax deduction. For us, it’s a few missed Starbuck’s visits—for them, it’s the gift of life. Without life, there is no hope and no possibility of world peace. What could possibly have more meaning?

Come shop at the “new” mall and experience the thrill of being part of a much bigger picture.

Inflation Comes to the Cat Box (and Elsewhere)

While leisurely strolling through Sam’s Club yesterday, I was visually assaulted and insulted by what I found in the pet aisle: their already-overpriced (in my opinion) 40-pound rectangular bucket of litter had been re-vamped into a 35-pound designer oval bucket FOR THE SAME PRICE!

(gasp) The horror! The absolute horror. (gasp-choke-wheeze)

That’s a .15 price increase—only .15, yet a 5-pound decrease in size. That’s 5 pounds of litter I need. Why not just jack up the price of the OLD bucket, instead of pouring money into creating a new, smaller bucket?

I guess I can file this incident right next to the disappearing bleach quart. In fact, I’m thinking of taking a milk carton ad out on that missing bleach quart! If I was a coffee drinker, I’d be reminiscing about the good old days when a can of coffee was one full pound. Nowadays, not even sugar is above suspicion—some bags are only four pounds instead of the standard five.

Now it looks like I’m going to have to find an alternative for the cat litter, or teach my babies how to go outside in the snow. Perhaps it’s a good thing I picked up an idea or two from the Dollar Stretcher site about what my alternatives are—ground corn from a feed store was one of them.

For now, I’m set—I purchased two full-size buckets on my last visit, and the cats are going less because of their homemade diet generating less waste. I’m more concerned about the bleach issue.

What makes retailers and manufacturers think we’re so stupid as to just lie down and accept this “ultra” bleach thing anyway? “We took away the water, and now it’s ultra bleach—it’s more effective.” Yeah right! As we’re pouring it into a washer full of water, we’re supposed to believe them. I refuse to pay $1.50 and up for ¾ of a gallon of bleach! I want my old bleach back—the generic full gallon for $1.00, and screw the water.

After scouring store after store in search of my old bleach, the closest I could come to was generic full-size water-in bleach for $1.17 at one of the hoity-toity upper-class grocery stores (the last place I expected to find it). I grabbed a cart and cleaned off their shelf, anticipating that this was as good as I was going to get.

So is .17 all they wanted for that missing ¼ gallon of bleach? Why not just mark up the old jugs, instead of spending money on creating these smaller ones?

Let’s see--.17 more for bleach, .15 more for cat litter—and the inflation fun just keeps on coming.

I thought I was going to have to resort to an idea I had back in my Motley Fool days: checking out pool supply departments of home improvement stores. After all, bleach is bleach, is it not? My own mother used to use pool bleach in the laundry eons ago.

Now, I guess I need to head out to a local feed store (not many of THOSE around here in urban Norfolk/Virginia Beach) or find some other alternative for clumping cat litter before my stash runs out.

Hmmm…I wonder what that hoity-toity store has to offer. I’ll check next time I’m over that way. It’s pretty sad when you get priced out of the dollar store and Sam’s Club market, isn’t it? It’s even sadder when you find better deals in the high-end grocery stores.

Bugler…taps, please. I sense the death of true bargains, in spite of the blusterous PR about the “robust” economy.

Bait and Switch: A Book I Won’t Be Getting Anytime Soon

I just left Amazon.com, and I won’t be adding to my Barbara Ehrenreich collection—her newest tome Bait And Switch isn’t fit for my bookshelves.

The writing quality is still there, and Barbara’s undercover expose’ style is still there, but I don’t like the tone of her book—victimization. Her books have been referred to as “poverty writing” by other authors, and I have to agree.

Yes, it’s a shame what’s happening to white-collar workers these days, and any other colored collar as well. Yes, it’s also a shame that low-paid workers are having to share a hotel room or sleep in their own vehicle just to have a “place.” But she irritates me by taking the victimization angle of all these plights. Instead of trying to help the situation, she instead spotlights it and it’s hapless victims.

I’d rather read books by Daniel Pink, the duo of Stephen Pollan and Mark Levine, and Richard Koch on how to handle unemployment in a positive light rather than wallow in what could have been. All Barbara managed to do for her readers is march them down the path of misery. Did she bother to explore what can be done to secure a white-collar job, or what NEEDS to be done by the job-seeker to bend and hone skills to meet the current need, rather than trying to sugar-coat and sell outmoded skills? No.

By sugar-coating, I mean the useless efforts of hiring a career coach, going to network seminars and meetings, using a stylist, and going to mood-enhancing and inspiration sessions at workshops—things to distract you from feeling bad about not being in current demand. When you wind up in this situation, you have to replace your skills with skills in demand now—a simple solution with no extra crap. It may require more college, a blue-collar specialist academy (HVAC repair, auto mechanic, truck driving, and the like), or even a relocation.

The authors I mention in the last paragraph talk about nothing else but how to deal with an employment world that has since left the “information age” station.

Barbara would’ve best served her audience by showing in the end how her borrowed $50k/year party-planner persona would’ve found a job by bending and tweaking her skills to fit open slots in other companies, rather than beating her tattered resume’ drum of obviously unneeded skills—but then she wouldn’t have achieved her “dream” of making $50k through book sales, now would she? In my mind, party planners would make excellent travel secretaries, or organizational arrangement people, or even concert planners. The “party” definition could’ve been expanded to include anything, really, or even left off altogether. City planners, community planners, security planners, and contingency planners come to mind. She could’ve even looked into teaching event planning, or considered job-seeking nationwide, as opposed to restricting herself to one locale. Going online would've helped, too--I don't believe she mentioned ever using Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, or any of the other online job bulletin boards.

Had Barbara or her anonymous cadre of the represented thought about these, there probably would’ve been a whole different book written, instead of one that chooses to wallow in the misery of those who lack imagination to gain meaningful employment.

Instead of trying to fit a square peg of know-how into a round hole, she should've found out how to round her edges to better fit the round hole of employer needs. This alone should prevent her from having to take a “survival” job (as Barbara puts it) as a retail clerk in a 7-11 or Circle K store.

Marketing a brick wall to people who need a wrought iron fence is a tough job in itself--just like selling refrigerators to Eskimos. This is where market research comes in handy, even for employment.

This book goes to show you that there’s plenty of money to be made at the bottom of the food chain. Pandering to the plight of “poor” people (re: victims) and the sympathies of liberals is a very lucrative business in itself—it makes them feel like they’re not alone. In the end, nothing gets cured, only exploited.

Bird Flu “Cures” Laid Bare

Undoubtedly, you’ve heard by now that various medicines and foods will either cure you or prevent you from contracting the Bird Flu. It doesn’t help that CNN sent their resident medical person-slash-unemployed neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta* straight into Bird Flu territory to get the real scoop on how they’re handling things at ground zero. Hype and more hype for TV ratings.

Folk remedies in the form of sauerkraut and kimchee are circulating the airwaves. They may have an inkling of a shred of truth to them, and I bet you’re dying to know why.

Remember that sci-fi thriller The Andromeda Strain? If so, do you remember what ultimately protected an old alcoholic and a tiny baby from catching the disease, and the way the virus was ultimately put out of humans’ misery? It was the pH balance of our blood—the Andromeda strain could only live in a certain pH. Too much acid or alkaline wouldn’t let the virus multiply and spread. Alcohol made blood too alkaline, and the baby crying made his blood too acidic.

What do you suppose sauerkraut and kimchee would do to our pH levels? Well, both have cabbage as their base vegetable, and both subject it to fermentation. Cabbage by itself in its natural state would alkalinize our blood, but subjecting it to fermentation would change the dishes into a highly acidic state. If our blood is too alkaline or too acidic, nothing will grow, spread, and take over the body.

Washing our hands with soap makes them temporarily alkaline, but it doesn’t last.

Carrying this “Andromeda Strain” philosophy one step further, it can be applied to all sorts of chronic diseases—cancer being the top dog. If you were to alkalinize yourself by eating less meat and more vegetation, you’d greatly cut down your chances of getting cancer or other such blood-carried consumptive diseases. Vegetation is alkaline, meat is acidic. Unfortunately, loading up on meat will NOT benefit you in the fight against cancer, or heart disease, or any other illness.

If your mind is leading you to ask if vegetarians are healthier than the rest of us, I tell you yes they are. Not because of who they are, but because of what they eat. Vegetables just so happen to be the nutritional powerhouses of the food family, and meat serves to provide mostly protein and a very few other things—most of which are dangerous to your health (cholesterol, unneeded hormones, and artery-clogging fodder). A lot of what’s in meat breaks down into carcinogens, so you’re feeding cancer, not yourself.

There are vegetables that provide adequate protein without the carcinogen, cholesterol, and hormone fears, and we all certainly get enough protein a day if we get enough calories. A serving of protein = 3 ounces, and we only need 2 servings a day for adequate protein intake. A 3-ounce serving is about the size of a deck of cards, and that’s all. Two pre-formed frozen hamburger patties would equal a day’s protein needs. Shocking, isn’t it?

For 6 ounces of meat, you can eat tons of vegetables to equal the same amount of protein, yet we Americans insist on gorging at the meat trough of life—the BBQ pit, the steakhouse, the meat department of our local supermarket, and the Gargantuan Burger drive-thru window. It’s the smell that sells.

We should be flocking to our supermarket’s produce section instead, alkalinizing ourselves for this coming flu season—whether it‘s Bird Flu or not. Then, we should be cruising over to the sauerkraut and kimchee, just so we know where it is if Bird Flu should come to our shores. I’m thinking that maybe regular cabbage should work just as well on the opposite side of blood pH levels—in alkalinizing rather than acidifying. Perhaps some coleslaw or Brussels sprouts would suffice instead of kimchee in the fight against Bird Flu? It’s all cabbage anyway.

I don’t know about you, but I’m eating salad—Bird Flu or no. I’ve got a horrific family history of cancer, and Mother Nature will be my savior in this fight. Ever since I began my private produce campaign, I haven’t been sick nearly as much as before I started. Simple colds and skin conditions no longer bother me, my hair is in the best shape of my life, and I’ve managed to lose some weight without exercise.

Alkalinizing your blood will help prevent a lot of things from growing in it—cancer, fungus, bacteria, viruses, and more. It’s kind of funny that a sci-fi flick would hit the medicinal nail on the head decades before anyone was listening for a clue.
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*The Gupta family has got to be pissed—I bet they sacrificed so much for him to become a neurosurgeon, and look what happened! Sanjay’s making more money as a TV talking head than an expensive medicine man. Such a terrible waste of college tuition..

Component Cooking: Boiling It All Down to a Science

When it comes to preparing dinner or any other meal, having things pre-prepared without the extra expense or waste packaging helps. Here’s how I handle it:

Meats—I buy large cuts (London broil, roasts, etc.) and cut them into serving-size portions before freezing. I freeze individual portions in their own zippy bags for easy removal and thawing.

Vegetables—I used to use frozen vegetables and portion them into 1-cup freezer containers for easy removal and thawing. Now I just assemble a salad with raw veggies every night. A mandolin and pre-prepared salad greens helps.

Starches—When we ate starches, I would cook up a large pot of rice and subdivide it into 1-cup portions for freezing and thawing. I would also freeze raw potatoes in liquid, but we no longer eat starches that can freeze.

Animal food—This may seem a little weird, but I make my own cat food. Here’s why: have you looked into what commercial pet food is made of? I did, and it’s disgusting. AAFCO, like our own USRDA, only provides the bare minimum of nutrition to our animals, meaning the bare minimum to keep them alive. This is not optimal nutrition that will fight off and prevent diseases. I got a prescription homemade cat food recipe from a vet, and make my own. I make large batches and freeze it in portion-sizes in ice cube trays. One cube = one serving, and my babies have never been healthier. Three cubes get thawed three hours before the next meal time, and my garbage has never been emptier for the loss of all those cans! Also--less by-product in the food means less waste in the litterbox, meaning Mom spends a whole lot less time at PetSmart these days (especially when she buys her litter at Sam's club).

Ground meats—I buy large cuts and grind my own with my food processor. I see no need to spend up to $1.00/lb. extra for meat that’s pre-ground for me, rather than the large cuts that can be ground up at home. Pre-ground meat is expensive when compared to large cuts on a per-pound basis—check it out for yourself. I subdivide this meat according to our portion sizes and the recipe needs of my cats—the cat baggies get contained separately, so I don’t mix them up. I also grind my own organ meats for their foods (liver, heart, kidney, and so forth), pre-measure according to the recipe needs, bag up, and store separately. If you opened my freezer, you’d find a pile of big zippy bags (with notes in them for identification) containing smaller meat-filled zippy bags ready to cook and use for the recipe.

Salads—I buy large uncut heads of organic greens (lettuces, collards, spinach, kale, etc.) and cut them up into bite-size portions. I then store them in a large rectangular Tupperware container with a folded paper towel on top, upside-down. That way, the water can flow to the towel for absorption. The towel gets changed everyday, because moisture is the bane of all veggies. I also do the same for hard veggies (cucumbers, summer squash, zucchini, etc.) and fruits—cut them up with a labor- and fingertip-saving mandolin, then store them in a refrigerator container (with paper towel) face down. All salad components stay fresh for at least a week, maybe more.

Leftovers make a dandy breakfast or lunch the next day, and nobody cares what you eat for breakfast! There is no hard-and-fast rule about what you eat at what time of day. You should actually be eating the foods that are most nutritious at ALL times of day, not just at night. Cereal for breakfast and sandwiches for lunch are the biggest misnomers in existence. Eat what’s good for you when you’re hungry for it, and screw the lessons about appropriate foods for certain meals!

I thaw meat, I grab a clean handful of each container of salad makings, and I thaw some cat food cubes…that is the extent of my involvement with meal preparation at dinnertime. The “hard” work has already been done during the day, or on the weekends. I also focus on the most nutritious foods available, leaving the unnecessary starches at the store for others. Cutting down the shopping list also cuts down my time and expense at the grocery store. Less food in the house means less food I have to worry about storing.

With all these time- and labor-savers, you’d think I had a job to go to or something. Alas, I have no job other than to read, stay informed, and report to you—my favorite kind of wintertime employment. Come spring, I wil be adding real estate shopping to the list--the top of the market is near, and prime price-negotiating time is upon us.

This Lazy Woman’s Investment Method (L-O-N-G)

I will start off by saying that I do no research—absolutely none. Others have already done it for me, and I just check in with them. Specifically, I use Morningstar and Vanguard fund year-to-date performance ratings.

I also avoid individual stocks and bonds—since I’m no clairvoyant, I have no way of knowing what tomorrow brings for stocks, bonds, or anything else. Nor do I intend to learn how by driving myself crazy studying charts and dissecting annual reports.

What I do pay attention to is demand, overall trends, scarcity, and insider activity—particularly the CFO of a corporation.

Demand tells me what the consumerati will use willy-nilly without regard to cost or season. Overall trend tell me (in an offhand way) what the hedge funds are doing. Scarcity follows the same lines as demand, only the demand comes from a different source. Insider activity tells me that something’s up at a company that the public doesn’t know about yet (for better or worse).

Some examples of what constitutes my four pillars of interest:

Willy-nilly consumerati use: gas, utilities, credit, and food.

Hedge fund activity: fast-moving and quickly-rising bubbles (or conversely, any fast-moving and quickly-imploding black holes) in any given market sector, such as real estate, gold, oil, etc. Since hedge funds must do a heck of a lot of research to best invest the monies of rich people, I just play follow-the-leader. They take the risk, I reap the rewards by playing along at home.

Scarcity: resources that are drying up, or hard to come by, despite our vast exploration, technology, and demand. Oil, water for processing semiconductor chips, natural gas, land, and gold fit this category well. Nobody’s making any more of these things, in spite of huge business demand.

Insider activity: a CFO (chief financial officer who makes investment decisions for himself and his company) suddenly and without warning buys or sells huge blocks of his own company’s stock, signaling that he knows something I (or the rest of the public) doesn’t know about…yet. By the time it becomes public, the big money has been made.

All this activity can be participated in through the use of indexes and mutual funds. If you can find a mutual fund company that satisfies most of your needs, then go with it—otherwise, stick with indexes. Actively-managed funds don’t normally do any better than the indexes anyway, and most managers merely strive to match index contents. Why pay commissions for something that has no manager middleman?

Once you have made your own list of industry interests, keep an eye on Morningstar to see where the funds are performing YTD. The top performers in each category will also tell you where the largest returns are, and that’s where you should be putting your money—not those same specific funds, but in those categories. How you participate in the categories is up to you—indexes, funds, or individual stocks.

The financial news itself will blare a horn when activity is brisk one way or the other, and that will usually signal large buying or selling activity by hedge funds. Keep an eye on the news and an ear on CNBC (for the activity reports and industry interviews, not the idle staff chitchat).

The regular news will alert you to scarcity issues.

Insider activity can be monitored through this website: http://www.secform4.com/

For the most part, this is a set-it-and-let-it-run method of investing…not a set-it-and-FORGET-it one. There is no such thing now, as the markets have far outgrown their own britches. The best time for setting and forgetting was in the early 20th century, when markets and industries were in their infancy. Back then you could have picked a stock at random, held on for decades, and come out a gazillionaire. Not so today.

The nineties taught us investors that we can’t rely on research done by a Wall Street firm, and we can’t rely on information put out by a company—both can and will say exactly what they want you to hear to elicit an investment purchase. This is why individual stock investment is so dangerous. When left alone to our own investment devices, we become vulnerable to emotional swings of fear and greed, with a healthy dose of persuasion (good or bad) thrown in. This, to me, equals too much risk for my money—I got tired of lipstick-covered pigs, and too much “distraction” has been built into this Wall Street world of ours. Why is it only money managers that can understand and navigate this world? If we’re all meant to invest, shouldn’t the unnecessary crap be removed?

If it was, then ALL of us would be millionaires, and they can’t have that! Brokers and money managers would be a dime a dozen, and find their jobs off-shored and outsourced. Heaven forbid we preserve an industry that serves no real purpose other than obfuscation.

I look and see what’s moving, where the big money is, and join the fun as best I can with the limited offerings of my mutual funds, 401(k) choices, and index funds. I also have a play portfolio set up at Morningstar to track the offerings of the mutual funds and 401(k), and can make choices based on YTD performance of those specific offerings—that way, I know I’m doing the best I can with what I have to work with. I often have to shift money around, and have done so plenty of times this year—fortunately, I pay little to no commissions for doing so. Also, the mutual funds themselves will adjust their holdings for maximum performance, so I don’t have to worry about industry specifics, like oil drillers vs. oil services—just holding an oil mutual find is enough. I let them sort it out.

I have yet to sit down and figure out if staying where I am and paying occasional small fees for exchanges more or less beneficial than just moving the whole kit and caboodle over to I-shares—I suppose I should do that soon with January fast approaching. But I am lazy, as I said in the beginning…and oil is still paying me handsomely for now.

Gold and Japan are two places where hedge funds seem to be parked these days, so I got into a Pacific Stocks fund and a metals fund—notice they aren’t precisely Japan and gold, but allow enough wiggle room to capture gains from related places within those sectors. I expect these trends to continue into next year, and am leaving some money there. Set it, but don’t forget it.

My lazy method usually does three times better (or more) than the S&P, and many times better than the Dow. Not stellar, I know, but better than the average bear for the work I put into it. No losses yet, I must say.

Keeping Tabs on Food Values

We have a new tool for tracking food: the Natural Nutrient-Rich score.

As if we didn’t already have enough to worry about with calories, fat content, water content, sodium and cholesterol. Hopefully, this will come to replace nearly all of them.

The NNR score is fairly easy to use—the higher the NNR score, the better the food is for you. The highest NNR values will be found in fruits and vegetables, naturally. This new concept of food valuing turns the Food Guide pyramid on its head, as well as other national nutritional guidelines, and would lead to implications for food labeling, nutrition policymaking, and consumer nutrition education.

My bet would be food politics as well—advertisers, manufacturers, and lobbyists could no longer collude to purposely mislabel or mislead us, given the raw nutrient data in quick-to-interpret form. What’s there is there, as far as nutrient content goes—no opportunity for hype and spin.

In the past, food scientists have tried to measure nutrient value by roundabout methods such as calorie-to-nutrient scores, and nutrient indexes, but the NNR value gets right to the heart of the matter without requiring a calculator when shopping.

Don’t look for this number any time soon—it would have to pass the congressional gauntlet of members, lobbyists, and the various governmental agencies before it ever saw the light of day. Assuming this thing gets a tailwind on Capitol Hill, don’t look for it to appear on food labels before 2008 (my bet is 2010, because you have a presidential election in there, and presidential candidates usually go into full campaign mode a couple of years before the actual election—and “W” will be right in there with endorsements and fundraiser appearances).

If you are truly interested in obtaining NNR values sooner, I suggest visiting a nutritionist instead. Software writing and distribution among an industry is usually faster than trying to traverse the Hill. Software will probably be out in 2007 (my guess).

The Era of Abundance

When a society spends more on the trash bags for waste disposal than most societies spend in total for everything, finds its highest-paying job skills on the global commodity auction block, and provides lengthy financing for all manner of things to anyone who can spell his own name successfully on paper, it has entered the Era of Abundance.

What does one do in this era? How does one get along in a world where everyone is "the man who has everything"? Where does one go from here? More importantly, how did we get here in the first place?

It all started with scarcity—few people chasing fewer goods. Then, as manufacturing and production improved, there were more goods. With more goods came more people. More people improved the manufacturing and production some more, and there were more goods yet again. And on and on until we have so many goods and so many people, there are excessive backlogs of both sitting idle and waiting for demand.

But the world has changed.

All these goods have blurred into a sea of ubiquity, and nobody’s attracted to ubiquity any more. Mundane is out, and arcane is in. Logic and analysis are also out, replaced by magic and synthesis. Every picture MUST tell a story.

Once upon a time, anything and everything relating to computers held our attention, and thus held a rank of importance, especially the translators—the programmers, technological champions of our day. They were heralded with much fanfare and high pay, because they were a special breed among us—Those Who Understood. Then they would be joined by Those Who Understood Creativity—the software engineers and game designers. Now they have all gone the way of Those Who Understand and Create for Lower Pay, leaving our translators in the dust of times past and floundering in the sea of economic and employment change. This is all considered white-collar scutwork now.

Enter the new important skills in the Era of Abundance—those skills that don’t generally get replicated by machines, software programs, or other cultures who cannot assimilate the ideas behind them: independent thought, concept creation, storytelling, design, detecting patterns and opportunities, and combining seemingly unrelated ideas into novel invention. The ability to empathize, understand the subtleties of human interaction, find and elicit joy, and the pursuit of purpose and meaning also fit this category.

Things that come from the heart and human emotion—things that cannot be done with a software program, a machine (no matter how sophisticated), or a static culture—these are what will drive the innovation of, and survival in, this Era of Abundance.

The MFA (Master of Fine Arts) is the new MBA.

Are you equipped to survive in this new age, for however long it lasts? It’s called Right-Brain Directed Thinking, and it will drive this new age right alongside the old left-brained skills of logic, analysis, and utility. One won’t replace the other, but instead be coupled with it to usher us into a new level of innovation, production, and fulfillment.

What will come AFTER this whole-mind phase, incorporating left- and right-brain thinking? I don’t know. All I set out to do was explain what’s happening in the global economy, especially from the U.S. standpoint, and how we can regain some dignity and pull ahead once again. I just hope it takes awhile for IBM to come up with a right-brained thinking computer—it already came up with a left-brained one that beat the chess champion Gary Kasparov, and it won’t be long before Asian white-collar scutworkers themselves are replaced by a machine that works for kilowatts rather than pay. We already have a small British firm called Appligenics to thank for the invention of software that can write software, leaving us all to rely more than ever on creativity rather than competence for our economic survival.

Technology will forever be nipping at our heels, it seems. We have to stay ahead of it, or we risk getting flattened by it.

The Mighty Egg

The lowly, humble white or brown ovals we know as eggs pack a powerful nutritional punch—and even more so when we choose organic over conventional.

Besides hype and price, you may be wondering what the difference is between the two. Well, I’m going to explain it.

The visual
• The yolks are brighter yellow and sometimes larger.

• The whites are clear, not cloudy.

• The shells are also edible after washing, and are used as calcium in the making of homemade pet foods (in well-ground form).

The ideological
• The chickens are fed better, treated better, and aren’t exposed to pesticides, antibiotics, hormones, or chemicals of any kind other than organic cleaning products.

• Their feed crops are also not exposed to pesticides, antibiotics, hormones, or chemicals before it becomes food for the chickens.

The governmental
• Organic eggs are the ONLY eggs regulated by the USDA for cleanliness, nutrient content, advertising content, and safe rearing, production, processing, and handling practices.

These are some things to think about when considering the purchase of eggs—they do pack a mean nutritional punch for the money, but can also pack a mean punch when it comes to hidden additives and chemicals that disrupt your body over time and encourage disease. You can pay the farmer NOW or you can pay the emergency room later.

Book Review: The FairTax Book

Neal Boortz, syndicated radio talk show host, has solved all our tax and social spending program dilemmas with this one simple sweeping plan.

This plan is the book known as The FairTax Book: Saying Goodbye to the Income Tax and the IRS. It proposes a plan to eliminate the FICA, Medicare, corporate income, estate, self-employment, AMT, gift, and capital gains taxes. The IRS itself would also be abolished.

FairTax is so simple, it’s absurd. You’d think the government would be falling all over itself to get on board with this plan, but sadly no—there are re-elections to think about.

The book starts with a brief and concise history of Social Security, the IRS, and how some of our currently crazy taxes came to be, then launches into a precise layout of how FairTax would eliminate these problems. No single income level or economic status would be treated any different from the rest—it’s fair, just like the name implies.

The plan involves re-engineering how our tax structure is laid out from the ground up, and there are numerous layers of embedded taxes we don’t even know about, yet we pay blindly—just like Uncle Sam wants us to. For instance, when an item is manufactured for an American company, taxes are levied every step of the way from obtaining the raw materials to selling the finished product, and the final sale price reflects all of them plus overhead. Then, the final product is taxed again at the register (this is where we come in). All the embedded and previously unknown taxes, plus the final sales tax, make up much of the actual item’s costs, and these can be eliminated with the plan. This would reduce the retail price by about 23%.

Now for income and payroll taxes: the FairTax plan will do away with these taxes entirely, giving us all about a 20% pay raise right off the top—meaning more money to spend. These funds would come from the national sales tax that would be tacked onto our newly-gotten 23% discounts, meaning the 23% discount would become our 23% sales tax, making the item cost exactly the same in the end (minus the old sales tax at the register).

What you saw on the price tag is what you’d pay, and not a penny more at the register. You’d also have more income from which to do the purchasing.

The plan is aimed at the purchase of NEW goods and all services only—thrift stores, garage sales, and used car lots would be exempt from this tax. If you grow/raise your own food, sew your own clothes, buy from second hand sources, and refurbish other things as needed, this tax plan would largely bypass you.

The good part: we would actually see a monthly rebate check from Uncle Sam. That’s right, a monthly rebate check! Uncle Sam would make calculations based on the poverty level of income, the number of members in your family, and the estimated expense for annual necessities (food, clothing, shelter, etc.). These items would not be subject to the tax—instead, Uncle Sam wants to PAY YOU for them. The estimated annual necessity allowance would be calculated, along with the 23% taxes levied, and the tax levy would be sent to you each month to subsidize the costs of these necessities.

Imagine a world where there are absolutely no taxes levied against you for anything except what you buy brand new or hire as a service. With the FairTax plan, this could become a reality, Congress willing. Who knows? After the 2006 elections, they may actually get around to taking it up—H.R. 21 is already on the calendar and just needs debate.

If you’d like to know more specific details and answers to your potential questions, do get this book. Frugalites everywhere are flocking to support this plan.

Another Cheap Source for Meat

To go along with my previous posts about cheap meat sources—making friends with a hunter or fisherman, going hunting or fishing for yourself, or employing the art of “complementary proteins” to replace meat altogether—I have just stumbled upon another great source for cheap meat: colleges with an agricultural program that actually raise livestock.

The source for this inspired and surprising search find: my cats. You see, I recently lost a cat to cancer. He was 21, so his passing wasn’t entirely unexpected—but he didn’t die from the most expected cause, which was his renal failure. At his last (and final) vet visit, his blood and urine all registered normal, and his renal failure wasn’t even detectable. We took him in because he was suddenly incredibly weak and in pain, and it turned out to be a tumor encasing 2” of his intestine. At his advanced age, it was highly unreasonable to expect him to endure rounds of chemo—surgery would remove the mass, but it would’ve grown back in about 6 months. Meanwhile, his weakness would’ve remained the entire time. We made the decision to let him go.

The rest of the herd remains, and has been transitioning to homemade food. They all eat the same low-carb, species-appropriate diet, have finally been weaned off canned food, and are about to finish off the last of their dry food forever (I hope!). My biggest problem with the production end is finding heart meat to supply their much-needed taurine. While searching Google for heart meat retailers, I came across a University of Iowa website with meat prices. I wrote them to ask if they did mail order, and no, they do not.

Their prices were ASTOUNDINGLY cheap!!

This made me think of all the other colleges out there that have agricultural programs that actually raise farm animals for slaughter—I bet they sell their meat cheaply too.

If you happen to live in an area that does this, do call and find out about their sales program.

As for the heart meat, the U of Iowa program director wrote me back and sent two very useful links for purchasing heart meat--organic at that! My kitties will be happy and well-nourished this winter.

Making Pay Cuts Work for You

Yep, you read that right—making pay cuts work FOR you—and no, I haven’t gone off my rocker or smoked something funny!

A story in CNN Money says that a pay cut can work for you IF:

• There is something better to take the place of the missing pay, such as more and/or better benefits, reduced workload or responsibilities, flexible hours, etc.

• Better opportunities lie elsewhere, such as a new place of employment, a new division of your current company, or more time at home.

• You’re young, not too talented, and/or not very experienced in your job field. Most young bucks get out of college and try to make mad grabs for big bucks long before their talents and experience warrant it.

• You live in (or are planning on moving to) a location with lower cost of living expenses, or are already frugal enough to weather a pay cut with your savings and spending abilities.

• You’re older, wiser, and stuck in a rut. A change of ANY sort may be just the thing you need to recharge your batteries and kick start your creativity once again.

• You need a break, or have a long list of unmet desires.

These apply to a pay cut from your current workplace or a new workplace. Sometimes a jumpstart involves a step backward, but only temporarily. If the step is made in a workplace that has plenty of room to grow forward and upward, then it is a right move to make the pay cut work for you.

My only suggestion is this: if you receive a pay cut from your current company, and have no prospects for getting out or away from it, try using it as a negotiation chip to get something better for yourself as compensation for the pay cut—benefits, paid time off, flexible hours or a change in work hours, telecommuting, fewer responsibilities, subsidized transportation or other things, you name it. Employers want to keep you, but can’t or don’t want to pay you for staying—at least in the PAYROLL sense. Use your imagination to figure out a way your company can make it up to you, and negotiate for it. Otherwise, your best bet may be to look elsewhere for employment.

Don’t use short-sightedness to guide yourself into a deadly job that pays big bucks—try to get some fulfillment out of the deal. Think long-term instead. Besides, the more you make in raw dollars, the more you get taxed! Benefits and other tangibles aren’t taxable to you. A job with saner hours, less commute time, less duties and responsibility, and a happier environment may be worth the reduction in pay—maybe more.