• Retirement contributions lifted to $5k and $15.5k, then indexed to inflation
• Business taxes lowered and write-offs expanded
• Business depreciation accelerated
• Saver’s credit lifted to include slightly more income each year (possibly indexed)
• Indexed exemptions and credits
We already have three of the five listed above.
The proposed extension of the unemployment benefits, handouts to seniors and retirees, and those who paid payroll taxes but not federal taxes is worthless as an economic stimulator. Allowing us to keep more of our money is a worthwhile endeavor—we’re going to spend what we’re going to spend, and not much more. We just don’t need or have room for much else. We’ve already shopped ‘til we dropped, and that’s what caused the slowdown.
Handouts such as unemployment benefits, welfare and food stamps, and Medicare only serve to keep you out of certain markets—the government (whether state or federal) is paying you to stay home and out of the work force (or in the case of Medicare, payment to avoid taking control of your own health care matters). You’re being paid to stay home because you aren’t needed any more in any meaningful way. Soon, your kids will be paid to study if a certain Chicago pilot program is enacted nationwide—payment for keeping them off the streets and out of the menial labor market.
Isn’t that what education is for anyway? Why bring money into it? Because the federal minimum wage (the amount paid in this pilot program) is more than the average drug trafficker clears—most drug runners still live at home because they net so little.
Bet you didn’t know that about handouts, did you? This is when benefits are really deterrents. You have a set time limit to get the message: two years for welfare, and so many weeks for unemployment. Food stamps keep you from endeavoring to earn more, because they serve as a fallback to the income you could be making but aren’t. Thank God there’s an income limit for those, but it seems to be enough to deter lots of folks from working harder on their own. They don’t see the incentive to avoid handouts, and it’s freedom.
Instead of cushioning us from personal economic pain, the government should be increasing opportunity for us to work and profit more, hence opening up the spigot on the business side of things. More money (through more tax breaks) to businesses means more hiring, pay increases, more and/or better benefits, investment in newer and better equipment to get those jobs done, and room to lower prices on final goods and services. More money to them means more money or less work burden to you. It also means lower prices for the consumer—the reason why you have a job.
The better you get at your job the more potential you have for future raises—this all depends on how you handle your job. It’s not just the job description, but what’s not put in writing, that’s most important: your job is to help the boss make HIS or HER job easier. Your real job is to balance his/her priorities with your individual job duties—you learn to do that well enough, and it’s a sure ticket to job security and future raises. You’ve learned to make yourself indispensable, and now the boss absolutely cannot do without you (unless someone more skilled at this comes along)—he’ll pay more to keep you around.
This is why tax credits and deductions to BUSINESS are worth more to you than a check in the mail. What’s a mere $300, $500, or whatever number Congress eventually comes up with, when you alone have the potential to make that much and more without Uncle Sam’s handout? Besides, any check that comes as a result of this stimulus package is just a one-time rebate on your 2008 taxes—it’s not new money, but rather next year’s refund (or part of it) in advance.
If you work right, take the right amount of deductions and exemptions, live frugally, and save like there’s no tomorrow, you earn yourself more than that pittance of a check, because your monthly pay will reflect it.
Whatever check number comes out of Congress should be looked upon as an insult to you. Tell them to keep it—you can make that amount on your own without breaking a sweat! Tell them you’d rather have that handout through your employer instead. Besides, employer benefits are non-taxable. Cash direct to you is 100% taxable, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the IRS instructed us to claim rebate checks as unearned income.
So much of our lives is already subsidized, and we don’t even think about it: us as individuals, our marital status, the dependents exemption, the earned income credit, the child care credit, being blind or over 65, credit for the elderly and disabled, educator expenses, student loan interest, tuition and fees, even our retirement savings,—it’s all right there on your federal tax forms. Tell me what an additional $300, $500, or whatever the final number turns out to be, is going to do for you compared to what we already receive every year. Don’t we already receive adequate handouts from Uncle Sam? He already gives you $3,400 just for being alive and having an income, and that’s only the start. The more involved your 1040 form is, the more loopholes (credits and deductions) become available to you, and the more Uncle Sam supports you.
Pop quiz—which would you rather have?
A) the one-time offer of a final tax rebate number that may end up being taxable
B) the $3,400 deduction that’s available each and every year you file taxes as an individual, or even the $5,350 annual standard deduction for singles
I thought so. I bet you never thought of taxes this way until I brought it to your attention—they can be a real money-maker. Take this time to really scrutinize your tax forms, because there’s money in them. They pay you for just being alive, having an income, having a spouse and maybe some kids (er, I mean future workers), an elderly parent living with you, and so much more. Can you imagine where you’d be WITHOUT all these credits and deductions? None of us could afford to exist, and this would serve to show you what the REAL tax level would be in this country if Uncle Sam wasn’t so generous!
I just did some math, and found a SAHW with no kids to care for would have to earn $7.25/hour with a 15% total tax burden (state and federal), working 27.5 hours per week, and 51 weeks per year to net the same amount of money that the personal exemption and standard deduction would earn her as an individual. She earns (through Uncle Sam) $8750 just to be alive as long as her husband keeps working. Uncle Sam pays her (through tax deductions and credits) to stay married and out of the job market. She (and every other SAH individual) is worth this much to make room in the job market for someone else—then they get married, learn this trick, and stay home themselves (making room for another worker), and so on.
If they had kids, each qualifying kid would be worth $3400 just to be alive, and worth more for going to daycare. If Grandma moved in and qualified as a dependent, she too would be worth $3400 just to be alive.
Instead of cursing the tax man every April 15th, and clamoring for more handouts, think of these credits and deductions instead—your rich “uncle” is giving you money in ways you never knew before.
If you’re feeling more than slightly guilty over just how much subsidization you get from Dear Uncle, you can send money back to him via check or money order payable to the IRS. Just put the word “contribution” in the memo line. But I wouldn’t worry about it—nobody has done this for a number of years, not even our richest citizens (some of whom ballyhoo about the opportunity to avoid estate taxes).
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Why Your Vote Really Doesn’t Matter
Boy, I’m just a real shot in the arm, huh? First, I tell you why you aren’t part of “the economy” everyone’s worried over, then I tell you how you aren’t really a taxpayer unless you owe the IRS, and now I’m going to rip one more hole in your psyche: your vote doesn’t count for squat.
Sure, you can show up to as many voting places as you want, cast as many ballots as you want, but in the end, it’s only for LOCAL issues, not federal ones. All this presidential ballyhooing that’s going on all across the country, and this upcoming super-duper-pooper Tuesday hype is mostly all for naught. We’ve forgotten in a big way that our president is NOT chosen by THE people, but by a very small and select group of individuals called The Electoral College.
Yep—super-duper Tuesday is going to be a “duper” alright. It’s going to dupe many states at once into thinking their citizens’ votes count for something, when it’s really a giant exercise in mobility and futility. The whole electoral process has managed to dupe us all into thinking we actually matter, have a voice, and representation in government. The only thing that matters is that we continue to pay our taxes on time and in full, but the country goes through this huge charade every four years to keep us from revolting en masse.
In spite of what you may think about casting your vote, the Electoral College doesn’t refer to, or take into consideration, your individual vote—or the majority votes of the country. Instead, they do this: a select group of Presidential Electors (each state has its own number of Electors—see map)), go to their state capitols to cast a ballot for their presidential and vice-presidential choice. Your individual vote determines who the Presidential Electors are, not who the actual President is going to be.
The entry in Wikipedia goes on to say: “In each state, voters vote for a slate of pre-selected candidates for Presidential Elector, representing the various candidates for President. State ballots, however, are designed to suggest that the voters are voting for actual candidates for President. Most states use what is termed the short ballot, in which a vote for one party (such as Democratic or Republican) is interpreted as a vote for the entire slate of Presidential Electors. In these states, with rare exceptions, one party wins the entire electoral vote of the state (by either plurality or majority). Maine and Nebraska choose Presidential Electors using what is termed the District Method, which makes it possible for the voters to choose Electors of different political parties and split the electoral vote of these two states.
The Presidential Electors of each state (and DC) meet 41 days following the popular vote to cast the electoral votes. The Electors ballot first for President, then for Vice President. On rare occasions, an Elector does not cast the electoral vote for the party's national ticket, usually as a political statement; these people are called faithless Electors. Each Elector signs a document entitled the Certificate of Vote which sets forth the electoral vote of the state (or DC). One original Certificate of Vote is sent by certified mail to the Office of the Vice President.
One month following the casting of the electoral votes, the U.S. Congress meets in joint session to declare the winner of the election. If a candidate for President receives the vote of 270 or more Presidential Electors, the presiding officer (usually the sitting Vice President) declares that candidate to be the President-elect, and a candidate for vice president receiving 270 or more electoral votes is similarly declared to be the Vice President-elect.”
So you see, we really don’t count for much come election day. Some day someone will finally stand up and ask why we continue to go through this dog-and-pony show every four years, with more dog-and-pony acts of fundraising and campaigning in between. Also, that same someone will bring to our attention in a memorable way that these same politicians who campaign and fund-raise aren’t taking care of business up on Capitol Hill like they’re paid to do.
Then there’s the issue of vote-rigging by electronic means—time and time again the electronic voting machines have been shown to already be compromised, or can easily be compromised, rendering whatever vote we may cast to be erroneous and/or fictional at best. The vote can be rigged to favor one candidate over another, so why do we even bother? Because it makes us feel better and keeps us from considering mass revolt and huge tax protests. They want our money, not our opinion.
Doesn’t it make you wonder what Hillary, Obama, Romney, McCain, and the rest are missing back at work, while they’re out parading around the country, trying to persuade us to take part in a totally useless endeavor? How many bills might be passed or vetoed while they’re gone, and how many could’ve gone the other way with their votes? This probably accounts for the “do-nothing Congress” we have today—they do nothing but raise funds and campaign, while the others back on the Hill wait and watch. It’s got to be hard to reach a majority when so many members are out waging media war on the common citizen, so trying to get anything passed in Congress is put on hold while the chosen few go out and play.
It gets worse. Once people get elected (whether to Congress or a higher level), this past article explains why work still doesn’t get done by anybody, and never will.
What do you suppose would happen if nobody—not a single bloody soul—showed up to vote in November? Do you think chaos would erupt? Nope, it wouldn’t…well, only in the media. The process would continue on without our input, and go to show you exactly how insignificant we are in the scheme of things. If anyone who wasn’t a Presidential Elector suddenly died or left the country, we’d still have an elected President and Vice-President—that’s how insignificant we are on Election Day. Remember, they only want our money, not our opinion.
Welcome to Uncle Sam’s Plantation, Magic Show, and Prop Shop. We’re only supposed to work, be distracted by shiny things, and breed to make more workers—everything else is optional. Lou Dobbs can screech all he wants about having yourself designated as an independent voter, but it won’t do any good. It’s still taking part in a useless activity, so where’s the independence? You ask me, I say the REAL independent voters are the ones who stay home from the polls—they spend the time and energy doing something personally worthwhile instead. This is what Hubby and I plan to do—we’re getting a little tired of writing in Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on every ballot we get our hands on.
I have to admit it will be interesting to see how many people vote for Jon and Stephen this year. Last election, I believe they got something like 13% of the vote (I’d have to look this up to be sure). This is what happens when your choices come down to a giant douche and a turd sandwich, and it will happen again this election. I'm not going to tell you which is which, because it really doesn't matter.
*Last-minute note: How many of you out there think that last Wednesday's South Park episode about the "snuke in the snizz" had any effect on the outcome in South Carolina? That thought just occurred to me this morning.
Sure, you can show up to as many voting places as you want, cast as many ballots as you want, but in the end, it’s only for LOCAL issues, not federal ones. All this presidential ballyhooing that’s going on all across the country, and this upcoming super-duper-pooper Tuesday hype is mostly all for naught. We’ve forgotten in a big way that our president is NOT chosen by THE people, but by a very small and select group of individuals called The Electoral College.
Yep—super-duper Tuesday is going to be a “duper” alright. It’s going to dupe many states at once into thinking their citizens’ votes count for something, when it’s really a giant exercise in mobility and futility. The whole electoral process has managed to dupe us all into thinking we actually matter, have a voice, and representation in government. The only thing that matters is that we continue to pay our taxes on time and in full, but the country goes through this huge charade every four years to keep us from revolting en masse.
In spite of what you may think about casting your vote, the Electoral College doesn’t refer to, or take into consideration, your individual vote—or the majority votes of the country. Instead, they do this: a select group of Presidential Electors (each state has its own number of Electors—see map)), go to their state capitols to cast a ballot for their presidential and vice-presidential choice. Your individual vote determines who the Presidential Electors are, not who the actual President is going to be.
The entry in Wikipedia goes on to say: “In each state, voters vote for a slate of pre-selected candidates for Presidential Elector, representing the various candidates for President. State ballots, however, are designed to suggest that the voters are voting for actual candidates for President. Most states use what is termed the short ballot, in which a vote for one party (such as Democratic or Republican) is interpreted as a vote for the entire slate of Presidential Electors. In these states, with rare exceptions, one party wins the entire electoral vote of the state (by either plurality or majority). Maine and Nebraska choose Presidential Electors using what is termed the District Method, which makes it possible for the voters to choose Electors of different political parties and split the electoral vote of these two states.
The Presidential Electors of each state (and DC) meet 41 days following the popular vote to cast the electoral votes. The Electors ballot first for President, then for Vice President. On rare occasions, an Elector does not cast the electoral vote for the party's national ticket, usually as a political statement; these people are called faithless Electors. Each Elector signs a document entitled the Certificate of Vote which sets forth the electoral vote of the state (or DC). One original Certificate of Vote is sent by certified mail to the Office of the Vice President.
One month following the casting of the electoral votes, the U.S. Congress meets in joint session to declare the winner of the election. If a candidate for President receives the vote of 270 or more Presidential Electors, the presiding officer (usually the sitting Vice President) declares that candidate to be the President-elect, and a candidate for vice president receiving 270 or more electoral votes is similarly declared to be the Vice President-elect.”
So you see, we really don’t count for much come election day. Some day someone will finally stand up and ask why we continue to go through this dog-and-pony show every four years, with more dog-and-pony acts of fundraising and campaigning in between. Also, that same someone will bring to our attention in a memorable way that these same politicians who campaign and fund-raise aren’t taking care of business up on Capitol Hill like they’re paid to do.
Then there’s the issue of vote-rigging by electronic means—time and time again the electronic voting machines have been shown to already be compromised, or can easily be compromised, rendering whatever vote we may cast to be erroneous and/or fictional at best. The vote can be rigged to favor one candidate over another, so why do we even bother? Because it makes us feel better and keeps us from considering mass revolt and huge tax protests. They want our money, not our opinion.
Doesn’t it make you wonder what Hillary, Obama, Romney, McCain, and the rest are missing back at work, while they’re out parading around the country, trying to persuade us to take part in a totally useless endeavor? How many bills might be passed or vetoed while they’re gone, and how many could’ve gone the other way with their votes? This probably accounts for the “do-nothing Congress” we have today—they do nothing but raise funds and campaign, while the others back on the Hill wait and watch. It’s got to be hard to reach a majority when so many members are out waging media war on the common citizen, so trying to get anything passed in Congress is put on hold while the chosen few go out and play.
It gets worse. Once people get elected (whether to Congress or a higher level), this past article explains why work still doesn’t get done by anybody, and never will.
What do you suppose would happen if nobody—not a single bloody soul—showed up to vote in November? Do you think chaos would erupt? Nope, it wouldn’t…well, only in the media. The process would continue on without our input, and go to show you exactly how insignificant we are in the scheme of things. If anyone who wasn’t a Presidential Elector suddenly died or left the country, we’d still have an elected President and Vice-President—that’s how insignificant we are on Election Day. Remember, they only want our money, not our opinion.
Welcome to Uncle Sam’s Plantation, Magic Show, and Prop Shop. We’re only supposed to work, be distracted by shiny things, and breed to make more workers—everything else is optional. Lou Dobbs can screech all he wants about having yourself designated as an independent voter, but it won’t do any good. It’s still taking part in a useless activity, so where’s the independence? You ask me, I say the REAL independent voters are the ones who stay home from the polls—they spend the time and energy doing something personally worthwhile instead. This is what Hubby and I plan to do—we’re getting a little tired of writing in Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on every ballot we get our hands on.
I have to admit it will be interesting to see how many people vote for Jon and Stephen this year. Last election, I believe they got something like 13% of the vote (I’d have to look this up to be sure). This is what happens when your choices come down to a giant douche and a turd sandwich, and it will happen again this election. I'm not going to tell you which is which, because it really doesn't matter.
*Last-minute note: How many of you out there think that last Wednesday's South Park episode about the "snuke in the snizz" had any effect on the outcome in South Carolina? That thought just occurred to me this morning.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
An Update on OQNI Food Scoring
Form the SF Chronicle. If you've forgotten what OQNI is, I previously wrote about it here. Here's a sample of the food index scores.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Turning a $55,000 Salary into a Zero Tax Liability
This is all perfectly legal—just use the government’s own tax code against them, as you can learn to do for yourself.
Here’s what Joe Taxpayer did:
• Got married and stayed that way—this earns him $17,500.
• Contributed the max to a 401k plan—this earns him $15,500.
• Contributed the max to two IRAs (his & his wife’s)—this earns him $8,000.
• Because he contributed so much to savings, he got the saver’s credit—this covered what little he did owe after all deductions and other credits. This could’ve earned him up to $2,000, but only earned him $1,148.
• He contributes to his employer’s pension plan and opted for a PPO plan—this earns him $2,550 in pre-tax dollars.
• He used a commercial tax preparer for his return—they cost him $165 to use, but got him over ten times that amount for a refund. They do this consistently.
These are completely legal tax shelters, folks. These are also the most obvious ones.
He has a non-working spouse and no kids. If he had kids, he’d have even more deductions and credits. What he and his wife do have, and will always have, is the ability to live a frugal enough lifestyle to make it on half his salary. They could do even better if it weren't for recent large rent raises, food inflation, and high gas prices.
After his taxes were done, he visited the IRS’s W-4 withholding calculator (as he does every year) to re-balance his exemptions—he should owe zero taxes and should receive zero refund, so his 2007 refund told him that he wasn’t using enough exemptions. The IRS calculator told him he should double his exemptions to avoid that refund—this would get him his own money back during the year (when he needs it) instead of at the end. Now, he’ll owe a very small amount to the IRS, but the saver’s credit should wipe that out for him. If not, he can easily afford to pay whatever he owes.
In the meantime, re-balancing his federal withholding exemptions earns him a $175 monthly increase completely tax-free. He now has a raise and doesn’t have to work any more or harder for it. He didn’t even have to negotiate with his boss for it.
By the example shown above, Joe is technically not a “taxpayer”—this means if the economic stimulus package currently being bandied about ever came into existence, and followed the Bush plan for distribution, Joe and his wife could expect to receive nothing because of their careful and diligent tax planning. They didn’t owe taxes, so they didn’t “pay” taxes, regardless of what was taken out of his paychecks in the form of payroll deductions. Anybody who’s entitled to a refund also falls into this category of non-taxpayers, as well as people who didn’t earn an income and didn’t file, and those not making enough money to pay federal income taxes at all. What this “taxpayer” term actually refers to is EXCESS taxes owed beyond what you have deducted in the form of federal income and payroll taxes. You can think of AMT payers, and anybody who still owes each year after diligent tax planning, as the real taxpayers.
Joe wonders how high his annual salary can go before he runs out of government-given deductions and credits—it seems that every time he starts to get into owing-the-IRS territory, some new credit or deduction comes out, making him even more relieved he uses a paid tax preparer (just to keep track). He knows that if he gets involved with itemized deductions or business deductions, his rising salary could go on being tax-free for a very long time (until he hits the AMT threshold), but he thinks this is just too much hassle. He figures that when he starts to owe the same amount in taxes that his tax preparer charges each year, then he’ll begin working a little harder at creating deductions and qualifying for credits.
If you would like to re-balance your own W-4 withholding allowances, the IRS calculator is down--I recommend going here instead. The IRS's information and form 8880 for calculating the credit is here.
Here’s what Joe Taxpayer did:
• Got married and stayed that way—this earns him $17,500.
• Contributed the max to a 401k plan—this earns him $15,500.
• Contributed the max to two IRAs (his & his wife’s)—this earns him $8,000.
• Because he contributed so much to savings, he got the saver’s credit—this covered what little he did owe after all deductions and other credits. This could’ve earned him up to $2,000, but only earned him $1,148.
• He contributes to his employer’s pension plan and opted for a PPO plan—this earns him $2,550 in pre-tax dollars.
• He used a commercial tax preparer for his return—they cost him $165 to use, but got him over ten times that amount for a refund. They do this consistently.
These are completely legal tax shelters, folks. These are also the most obvious ones.
He has a non-working spouse and no kids. If he had kids, he’d have even more deductions and credits. What he and his wife do have, and will always have, is the ability to live a frugal enough lifestyle to make it on half his salary. They could do even better if it weren't for recent large rent raises, food inflation, and high gas prices.
After his taxes were done, he visited the IRS’s W-4 withholding calculator (as he does every year) to re-balance his exemptions—he should owe zero taxes and should receive zero refund, so his 2007 refund told him that he wasn’t using enough exemptions. The IRS calculator told him he should double his exemptions to avoid that refund—this would get him his own money back during the year (when he needs it) instead of at the end. Now, he’ll owe a very small amount to the IRS, but the saver’s credit should wipe that out for him. If not, he can easily afford to pay whatever he owes.
In the meantime, re-balancing his federal withholding exemptions earns him a $175 monthly increase completely tax-free. He now has a raise and doesn’t have to work any more or harder for it. He didn’t even have to negotiate with his boss for it.
By the example shown above, Joe is technically not a “taxpayer”—this means if the economic stimulus package currently being bandied about ever came into existence, and followed the Bush plan for distribution, Joe and his wife could expect to receive nothing because of their careful and diligent tax planning. They didn’t owe taxes, so they didn’t “pay” taxes, regardless of what was taken out of his paychecks in the form of payroll deductions. Anybody who’s entitled to a refund also falls into this category of non-taxpayers, as well as people who didn’t earn an income and didn’t file, and those not making enough money to pay federal income taxes at all. What this “taxpayer” term actually refers to is EXCESS taxes owed beyond what you have deducted in the form of federal income and payroll taxes. You can think of AMT payers, and anybody who still owes each year after diligent tax planning, as the real taxpayers.
Joe wonders how high his annual salary can go before he runs out of government-given deductions and credits—it seems that every time he starts to get into owing-the-IRS territory, some new credit or deduction comes out, making him even more relieved he uses a paid tax preparer (just to keep track). He knows that if he gets involved with itemized deductions or business deductions, his rising salary could go on being tax-free for a very long time (until he hits the AMT threshold), but he thinks this is just too much hassle. He figures that when he starts to owe the same amount in taxes that his tax preparer charges each year, then he’ll begin working a little harder at creating deductions and qualifying for credits.
If you would like to re-balance your own W-4 withholding allowances, the IRS calculator is down--I recommend going here instead. The IRS's information and form 8880 for calculating the credit is here.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Will the Real Economy Please Stand Up? (L-O-N-G)
No doubt you’ve heard everyone’s grand plan for rescuing our “economy”, but what is it they should be rescuing--the common man or business? Just what IS the economy, anyway?
Well, let me pull up a chair and get the tissues for you…it’s not at all what you think.
You probably think the economy is the reflection of ease in which you make your way through life, particularly financial life—can you afford to spend after the bills are paid, food procured, and gas tank topped off? This couldn’t be further from the truth, and in all honesty, the measure of the economy has nothing whatsoever to do with you or your spending habits personally. We don’t make up 2/3 of the economy with our spending—only about half.
In fact, what we spend the bulk of our money on—food and energy—isn’t even counted when gauging economic performance.
What the economy DOES measure, in reality, is the business cycle economy—how many jobs are created and lost, how much inventory/raw material is bought, stored, and used, how many sales were made, and how much profit margin there was in each product sold. John and Jane Q. Public don’t even show up until the very end, as the ultimate buyers of the finished product. The faster this cycle repeats itself, from the manufacture to the finished good sale, the better our economy does.
So please tell me: if a politician makes “economic stimulus package” promises to make money available to heat homes or extend unemployment benefits, how is this affecting the economy?
Also tell me: if we spend the bulk of our after-tax dollars on food and energy, which aren’t counted in tallying economic performance, how will putting tax rebate money into the hands of John and Jane Q. Public help the economy? Politicians are quick to agree that our mere spending will re-energize the economy by buying more end products from businesses, allowing them to buy more inventory to make more stuff, then continue to hope to make future sales—getting the raw materials-to-finished product cycle moving again. This is the theory behind the “keep America shopping” campaigns.
No matter how you get it, you’d most likely spend it on debt, food, energy, or savings/investments. Not very much of it would go into the actual economy, buying largely unnecessary goods and services.
Leftovers are leftovers, whether it’s food, houses, or machinery—when you make too much of something with no plan to use it or get rid of it, it’s waste. Businesses made too much, and now they’re sitting in their own resource waste. Nobody wants this stuff at any price, so it just sits there, causing recession in the business world as it depreciates into worthlessness and backs up the flow of goods.
Here’s the real economy: the bulk of personal spending is pretty much steady—we buy what we need, want, and not much else. Business spending, on the other hand, is as erratic as Britney Spears: huge cycles up, then down, then up again, depending on money availability, investment need, inventory replenishment needs, and labor needs. Currently, we are in a prolonged down-cycle with business spending grinding to a halt, and inventories rising higher and higher, causing a backlog all the way to the raw materials stage. The only perceived way to unclog this pipeline and get the process flowing again is to finance the end buyer (you)—either by discounting the final retail price, or offering you money to buy at any price. In some cases, both have happened at the same time—prices have been discounted to rock-bottom, and credit extended to even the riskiest borrowers, and look what happened! Now that credit has been tightened, business spending has come to a near-halt. The same can be said for consumers—tight credit, home foreclosures, and lack of savings pushed us into a near-halt.
When people talk about the economy and how bad it is, they’re talking about PERSONAL economy if they aren’t in business. Personal economy has nothing to do with business economy, and business economy is what the feds are all concerned over. Your buying a loaf of bread and some milk don’t really affect things like a construction company buying six brand-new Caterpillar bulldozers, or an airline company buying new Dreamliner jets, because those purchases run in the millions (even billions), while your bread and milk may run less than $10. The economy runs on millions and billions, not hundreds.
When a company that buys huge, costly pieces of equipment suddenly stops doing so, and is followed by other companies doing the same, it stalls the economy. Now, the huge, expensive equipment manufacturer has no reason to keep making huge equipment, and is stuck with inventory he can’t sell, and this leads to a write-down (or de-valuation), which leads to a tax loss—this directly affects the tax revenue stream our government relies on for spending.
When we all stop buying, the taxes stop racking up. The government (and business) is then forced to borrow money (from foreign investors, bond sales, etc.) to make up for the loss in revenue. When they can’t borrow any more, they’re forced to sell assets, as we saw in the Citibank stock sale to the Saudis, selling pieces of big-name Wall Street finance firms to other countries like China, India, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia, as well as Countrywide Mortgage going to Bank of America. When there are no buyers and no other alternatives, businesses go out of business, as witnessed by some big-name home builders filing for bankruptcy—there are too many homes and not enough buyers with access to adequate income or credit.
Your personal economy is how well you manage your money: spending, saving, and investing. If you have money available to do all three after taxes, you’re doing just fine. If you have to borrow (use credit) to get by day-to-day, you’re in trouble—that source of credit could dry up with higher rates and shorter payback times, causing you to do the same as businesses: sell off assets, make trade deals (renegotiating your debt), or default altogether.
So you see it isn’t really “our” economy that’s in trouble, but rather the business economy that has the problem. So rather than giving money to us as an economic bailout, the money should instead be going to businesses to shore up debt, liquidate overstock, buy more equipment and/or supplies, and create more jobs. But if nobody’s buying at even a deep discount, giving money to businesses won’t help, unless you happen to be a big business consumer—this means other big businesses and small business owners (wholesalers). Small businesses are the life blood of this economy, because they buy the most supplies and inventory (amount-wise, not dollar-wise) due to faster turnover, and they create the most jobs—but they are quick to cut jobs if the conditions are less than ideal. They have to because they want to avoid the traps of too much unsold inventory, and expensive hourly workers standing around with nothing to do. If there’s no demand for their goods or services, then nobody wins.
If we’re cutting back and only buying essentials, it means there’s a lot out there that we aren’t buying—we’ve deemed it unnecessary for whatever reason. Putting money into our hands to spend-spend-spend is not a remedy for the real problem—creating and carrying stuff we WILL buy under any financial conditions is. So far, the only two things we will continue to buy under any circumstance are food and energy (power for the home, and gas for the car). Anything beyond that is optional, and likely to be bought when we feel times are good, have excess discretionary income, or a surprise necessity arises.
The amount of “recession” in the business cycle should serve to show us just how much excess there is in our economy and business world—we’re chock full of things we don’t need or want right now, and it’s all dragging those businesses down in a big way. Even other businesses are sending this same signal by not buying from each other! A recession serves to wring out the excesses so we can get a clean start with a new economy and new business cycle based on things people and other businesses will likely buy. Competition will begin building up again, and the whole larger cycle will repeat itself over time. Tax revenues will also build up again over time, but the government can’t afford to wait until that happens—hence, the “stimulus package” to encourage SOMEBODY to buy, even if it’s us. This also is an indirect back-door way to buy votes.
Businesses have even had to go global looking for someone—anyone at all—to buy their goods and services, and even the government has helped this process by adopting pretty bizarre and seemingly desperate trade agreements (such as nuclear technology with India for mangoes, and high-tech weapons for oil in Saudi Arabia). I guess now even the globe is out of buyers—people with a need, a want, and adequate money or credit to do so.
Meanwhile, we consumers here at home chug merrily along buying what we need and deem necessary, our overall spending habits stable and contained. Non-food and non-energy companies would KILL for that kind of steady, stable demand, but how many of us buy bulldozers, jet airplanes, or cargo containers full of steel and wood? These companies went for the one-shot large profit, instead of opting for the small, cumulative, steady profit. Guess who won?
When WE quit buying anything because of exorbitantly high prices or no access to income, then we have collapse—depression. As long as we make money to satisfy our own needs and necessities, the economic recession isn’t our concern, and nobody should be trying to put (borrowed) money into our hands to divert our attention. As long as we still have jobs, we won’t run the risk of economic depression. If we lose those, we’ll just be unemployed. No matter if we exist on our own income, or are reduced to welfare and food stamps, we’re still going to buy food and energy—see the difference between a PERSONAL and BUSINESS economy? We can’t all lose our jobs at the same time, so there will continue to be steady spending on the part of the consumer, even if it’s a little less than usual—we have to eat, sleep, be warm, and transport ourselves somehow, and this is what keeps our PERSONAL economy afloat.
The same can be said for business: they can’t ALL go out of business at the same time, so only the strong and financially-prepared will survive, and new competition will spring up as time goes by. It just may be a rocky road to get through this die-off-and-start-anew point, and this is what our government (through stimulus package promises) is trying to stave off—the painful and ugly sorting-out process. Good luck with that.
Better spending control, tighter inventory controls, and a keen sense of demand is what avoids recessions, not more haphazard spending by John Q. Public (financed by his own future tax refunds—they call this a “rebate”). You’d think all this was a relic of the past with the invention of just-in-time inventory control, but no—there is just too much competition out there, and the field is too diluted with weak players offering the same things at the same price points.
Just when we’re salivating at the thought of getting checks in the mail, this caveat comes from the White House: “taxpayers” will get these checks. This means that if you didn’t work and file a return, didn’t make enough money to be charged a federal income tax, or your federal tax burden was wiped out by the saver’s credit, then you would get nothing. In other words, the bulk of this money would go to the rich, business owners, or just people who owed on their taxes—not what the presidential candidates had in mind (or you either, I’m guessing). This is precisely what should happen, because this will short-circuit the indirect vote-buying some candidates were hoping for, and most likely stimulate the spending that’s REALLY needed—business spending and large-ticket items.
What we need to spend like drunken sailors again is job creation, and higher-paying job creation at that (even this is no guarantee). No “stimulus package” direct to consumers is going to do that for us.
Well, let me pull up a chair and get the tissues for you…it’s not at all what you think.
You probably think the economy is the reflection of ease in which you make your way through life, particularly financial life—can you afford to spend after the bills are paid, food procured, and gas tank topped off? This couldn’t be further from the truth, and in all honesty, the measure of the economy has nothing whatsoever to do with you or your spending habits personally. We don’t make up 2/3 of the economy with our spending—only about half.
In fact, what we spend the bulk of our money on—food and energy—isn’t even counted when gauging economic performance.
What the economy DOES measure, in reality, is the business cycle economy—how many jobs are created and lost, how much inventory/raw material is bought, stored, and used, how many sales were made, and how much profit margin there was in each product sold. John and Jane Q. Public don’t even show up until the very end, as the ultimate buyers of the finished product. The faster this cycle repeats itself, from the manufacture to the finished good sale, the better our economy does.
So please tell me: if a politician makes “economic stimulus package” promises to make money available to heat homes or extend unemployment benefits, how is this affecting the economy?
Also tell me: if we spend the bulk of our after-tax dollars on food and energy, which aren’t counted in tallying economic performance, how will putting tax rebate money into the hands of John and Jane Q. Public help the economy? Politicians are quick to agree that our mere spending will re-energize the economy by buying more end products from businesses, allowing them to buy more inventory to make more stuff, then continue to hope to make future sales—getting the raw materials-to-finished product cycle moving again. This is the theory behind the “keep America shopping” campaigns.
No matter how you get it, you’d most likely spend it on debt, food, energy, or savings/investments. Not very much of it would go into the actual economy, buying largely unnecessary goods and services.
Leftovers are leftovers, whether it’s food, houses, or machinery—when you make too much of something with no plan to use it or get rid of it, it’s waste. Businesses made too much, and now they’re sitting in their own resource waste. Nobody wants this stuff at any price, so it just sits there, causing recession in the business world as it depreciates into worthlessness and backs up the flow of goods.
Here’s the real economy: the bulk of personal spending is pretty much steady—we buy what we need, want, and not much else. Business spending, on the other hand, is as erratic as Britney Spears: huge cycles up, then down, then up again, depending on money availability, investment need, inventory replenishment needs, and labor needs. Currently, we are in a prolonged down-cycle with business spending grinding to a halt, and inventories rising higher and higher, causing a backlog all the way to the raw materials stage. The only perceived way to unclog this pipeline and get the process flowing again is to finance the end buyer (you)—either by discounting the final retail price, or offering you money to buy at any price. In some cases, both have happened at the same time—prices have been discounted to rock-bottom, and credit extended to even the riskiest borrowers, and look what happened! Now that credit has been tightened, business spending has come to a near-halt. The same can be said for consumers—tight credit, home foreclosures, and lack of savings pushed us into a near-halt.
When people talk about the economy and how bad it is, they’re talking about PERSONAL economy if they aren’t in business. Personal economy has nothing to do with business economy, and business economy is what the feds are all concerned over. Your buying a loaf of bread and some milk don’t really affect things like a construction company buying six brand-new Caterpillar bulldozers, or an airline company buying new Dreamliner jets, because those purchases run in the millions (even billions), while your bread and milk may run less than $10. The economy runs on millions and billions, not hundreds.
When a company that buys huge, costly pieces of equipment suddenly stops doing so, and is followed by other companies doing the same, it stalls the economy. Now, the huge, expensive equipment manufacturer has no reason to keep making huge equipment, and is stuck with inventory he can’t sell, and this leads to a write-down (or de-valuation), which leads to a tax loss—this directly affects the tax revenue stream our government relies on for spending.
When we all stop buying, the taxes stop racking up. The government (and business) is then forced to borrow money (from foreign investors, bond sales, etc.) to make up for the loss in revenue. When they can’t borrow any more, they’re forced to sell assets, as we saw in the Citibank stock sale to the Saudis, selling pieces of big-name Wall Street finance firms to other countries like China, India, Singapore, and Saudi Arabia, as well as Countrywide Mortgage going to Bank of America. When there are no buyers and no other alternatives, businesses go out of business, as witnessed by some big-name home builders filing for bankruptcy—there are too many homes and not enough buyers with access to adequate income or credit.
Your personal economy is how well you manage your money: spending, saving, and investing. If you have money available to do all three after taxes, you’re doing just fine. If you have to borrow (use credit) to get by day-to-day, you’re in trouble—that source of credit could dry up with higher rates and shorter payback times, causing you to do the same as businesses: sell off assets, make trade deals (renegotiating your debt), or default altogether.
So you see it isn’t really “our” economy that’s in trouble, but rather the business economy that has the problem. So rather than giving money to us as an economic bailout, the money should instead be going to businesses to shore up debt, liquidate overstock, buy more equipment and/or supplies, and create more jobs. But if nobody’s buying at even a deep discount, giving money to businesses won’t help, unless you happen to be a big business consumer—this means other big businesses and small business owners (wholesalers). Small businesses are the life blood of this economy, because they buy the most supplies and inventory (amount-wise, not dollar-wise) due to faster turnover, and they create the most jobs—but they are quick to cut jobs if the conditions are less than ideal. They have to because they want to avoid the traps of too much unsold inventory, and expensive hourly workers standing around with nothing to do. If there’s no demand for their goods or services, then nobody wins.
If we’re cutting back and only buying essentials, it means there’s a lot out there that we aren’t buying—we’ve deemed it unnecessary for whatever reason. Putting money into our hands to spend-spend-spend is not a remedy for the real problem—creating and carrying stuff we WILL buy under any financial conditions is. So far, the only two things we will continue to buy under any circumstance are food and energy (power for the home, and gas for the car). Anything beyond that is optional, and likely to be bought when we feel times are good, have excess discretionary income, or a surprise necessity arises.
The amount of “recession” in the business cycle should serve to show us just how much excess there is in our economy and business world—we’re chock full of things we don’t need or want right now, and it’s all dragging those businesses down in a big way. Even other businesses are sending this same signal by not buying from each other! A recession serves to wring out the excesses so we can get a clean start with a new economy and new business cycle based on things people and other businesses will likely buy. Competition will begin building up again, and the whole larger cycle will repeat itself over time. Tax revenues will also build up again over time, but the government can’t afford to wait until that happens—hence, the “stimulus package” to encourage SOMEBODY to buy, even if it’s us. This also is an indirect back-door way to buy votes.
Businesses have even had to go global looking for someone—anyone at all—to buy their goods and services, and even the government has helped this process by adopting pretty bizarre and seemingly desperate trade agreements (such as nuclear technology with India for mangoes, and high-tech weapons for oil in Saudi Arabia). I guess now even the globe is out of buyers—people with a need, a want, and adequate money or credit to do so.
Meanwhile, we consumers here at home chug merrily along buying what we need and deem necessary, our overall spending habits stable and contained. Non-food and non-energy companies would KILL for that kind of steady, stable demand, but how many of us buy bulldozers, jet airplanes, or cargo containers full of steel and wood? These companies went for the one-shot large profit, instead of opting for the small, cumulative, steady profit. Guess who won?
When WE quit buying anything because of exorbitantly high prices or no access to income, then we have collapse—depression. As long as we make money to satisfy our own needs and necessities, the economic recession isn’t our concern, and nobody should be trying to put (borrowed) money into our hands to divert our attention. As long as we still have jobs, we won’t run the risk of economic depression. If we lose those, we’ll just be unemployed. No matter if we exist on our own income, or are reduced to welfare and food stamps, we’re still going to buy food and energy—see the difference between a PERSONAL and BUSINESS economy? We can’t all lose our jobs at the same time, so there will continue to be steady spending on the part of the consumer, even if it’s a little less than usual—we have to eat, sleep, be warm, and transport ourselves somehow, and this is what keeps our PERSONAL economy afloat.
The same can be said for business: they can’t ALL go out of business at the same time, so only the strong and financially-prepared will survive, and new competition will spring up as time goes by. It just may be a rocky road to get through this die-off-and-start-anew point, and this is what our government (through stimulus package promises) is trying to stave off—the painful and ugly sorting-out process. Good luck with that.
Better spending control, tighter inventory controls, and a keen sense of demand is what avoids recessions, not more haphazard spending by John Q. Public (financed by his own future tax refunds—they call this a “rebate”). You’d think all this was a relic of the past with the invention of just-in-time inventory control, but no—there is just too much competition out there, and the field is too diluted with weak players offering the same things at the same price points.
Just when we’re salivating at the thought of getting checks in the mail, this caveat comes from the White House: “taxpayers” will get these checks. This means that if you didn’t work and file a return, didn’t make enough money to be charged a federal income tax, or your federal tax burden was wiped out by the saver’s credit, then you would get nothing. In other words, the bulk of this money would go to the rich, business owners, or just people who owed on their taxes—not what the presidential candidates had in mind (or you either, I’m guessing). This is precisely what should happen, because this will short-circuit the indirect vote-buying some candidates were hoping for, and most likely stimulate the spending that’s REALLY needed—business spending and large-ticket items.
What we need to spend like drunken sailors again is job creation, and higher-paying job creation at that (even this is no guarantee). No “stimulus package” direct to consumers is going to do that for us.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Word of the Day: "Gro-cession"
A last-ditch effort on the part of CNBC to slather lipstick on this stinking, mud-covered pig of an economy. It's only going to get worse form here, folks, so take whatever evasive action you can--move into bonds, become even more frugal, get debt-free, etc.
I can hardly wait to see what NEW term they come up with for the next leg down--maybe "gro-flation"? Whatever it is, it'll still be some version of #792 False-Hearted Harlot lipstick.
I can hardly wait to see what NEW term they come up with for the next leg down--maybe "gro-flation"? Whatever it is, it'll still be some version of #792 False-Hearted Harlot lipstick.
Another Reason to Be Leery of Health Care
Unfavorable drug studies don't make it into print--from Yahoo Health.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Where’s the “Care” in Health Care?
This is what Glenn Beck wants to know, and so do I. So do a lot of us.
He recently underwent some surgery while on the holiday tour and writer’s strike break, and was treated shabbily by just about everyone at the hospital who had an M.D. after his name. After recounting his horrific tale twice (once on his own show, and again on Good Morning America with wife Tanya), he asks this question of our medical community.
The sad truth is this: doctors are trained and paid to treat our ILLNESSES and AILMENTS, not us as human beings. The medical establishment, such that it is, won’t let them do anything else. We have insurance companies, various bureaucracies, and Big Pharma to blame for this. People who went into this profession with the best of intentions came out as an army of pill and procedure salesmen who have annual implied quotas—treat as many people as they can to create the most billable hours (sound familiar, lawyers?), sell the most expensive pills, and use the most expensive procedures the patient’s insurance will cover. Hospitals always need money, and fundraising and subsidies aren’t enough. Padding your bill always helps too.
Medicine in general has taken a fast-food approach: get ‘em in, get on ‘em, and get ‘em out again for the most profit margin—it’s worse in low-income areas, where the operating motto is “treat ‘em and street ‘em.” Like fast food, you’re left wanting (or needing) more in about an hour, or the next day, so the ambulance rolls you in again. Quality went out the window a long time ago—besides, who’s watching? Who do we really have to compare our level of care to, seeing as how we supposedly have the best health care around? Britain? Cuba? Canada? I don’t think so.
McMedicine is only going to get worse when Democrats get into office or control Congress, and Hillary-care is enacted as the health care policy of this nation—then we WILL be comparable to Britain, Canada, and Cuba. Only the young and those with a good prognosis will be worked on, and the rest will be shoved aside for being non-cost-effective because they aren’t likely to be viable contributors to the tax base—the tax base must be fed. The government will get the power to decide who lives and who dies, and everyone will probably come with automatic, iron-clad, Supreme Court-issued DNRs. Do you want that? Hell, we’d be only a few short steps away from Soylent Green at that point!
I wrote Glenn and told him to count his blessings—at least he wasn’t worked on at Walter Reed army hospital. I’ve been to both Walter Reed and Bethesda, and both had their problems—Bethesda had more “people problems” than structural ones, though. Walter Reed has been a derelict hospital for decades, and has been on the BRAC base closure list for about that long, but high-ranking people at the Pentagon and elsewhere always stepped in to prevent “the army’s source of pride” from being torn down and rebuilt (probably because of the Presidential Wing there). All those horror stories about Walter Reed were true, even 12 years ago, when I had the honor of receiving a phone call from my husband (in a waiting room) with a roach tally. Staff at Bethesda just ignored me when I told them my husband had an egg allergy, and almost killed him with anaphylaxis after repeatedly ordering him bacon, eggs, and toast for breakfast while he was zorked out of his mind on pain meds. This told me right away that I had to be his advocate. I went medieval on some poor nurse, and she got me the meal order form so I could order something appropriate for him to eat. He chef-saladed his way out of there in 5 days (I requested no eggs be put on his salads)—not bad for a heart surgery patient. They predicted 7 days at least. I’m just glad I was smart enough to know that healing nutrients are found in fresh fruits and veggies, and ordered the closest approximation to them from the hospital’s menu, plus brought in outside foods and a daily multivitamin. If I hadn’t ordered something from the hospital menu at least once every day, they probably would’ve tube-fed him, thinking he wasn’t eating at all.
Medicine around here has gone corporate, and I’m expecting doctors to start wearing sponsor logos on their white coats (like race car drivers do on their fire suits) any day now. The human is now nothing more than a talking machine, and doctors are now mechanics—they don’t want to hear from you, they just want to fix your plumbing, your hard drive (head), your electrical system (nerves), your HVAC system (lungs/nose), change your oil (blood), or look at your engine (heart). Occasionally, they have to drag out the rivet gun to fix our frames (bones). Do you see the resemblance? The corporate-ness of this whole field has driven everything down to the bare minimums in the race for the last dollar. Quality became non-existent with the invention of the HMO and Medicare.
Welcome to McMedicine. You DON’T want fries with that, trust me—it’ll only get you sold a bottle of statins and hypertension drugs for your trouble.
I’ve taken to visiting a D.O. (doctor of osteopathy) for my health care needs. They’re trained to treat the whole person, not just his ailments and illnesses. D.O.’s want to know what you’ve been eating, what supplements you take, how you exercise, and offer corrective advice to solve your health issue without trying to sell you expensive Big Pharma pills. Most diagnoses can be made with simple, inexpensive tests, and this is what a D.O. primarily uses. If he/she cannot solve the problem, then a referral to a diagnostician (a nice Dr. House-type guy) is made, who then uses whatever means necessary to solve the problem. This method of medical practice just about completely bypasses the McMedicine factories, and there’s a bonus: D.O.’s are covered by most insurance carriers (check your policy), where more human-based practitioners like homeopaths or holistic practitioners generally aren’t, unless maybe a flexible spending plan allows for them.
He recently underwent some surgery while on the holiday tour and writer’s strike break, and was treated shabbily by just about everyone at the hospital who had an M.D. after his name. After recounting his horrific tale twice (once on his own show, and again on Good Morning America with wife Tanya), he asks this question of our medical community.
The sad truth is this: doctors are trained and paid to treat our ILLNESSES and AILMENTS, not us as human beings. The medical establishment, such that it is, won’t let them do anything else. We have insurance companies, various bureaucracies, and Big Pharma to blame for this. People who went into this profession with the best of intentions came out as an army of pill and procedure salesmen who have annual implied quotas—treat as many people as they can to create the most billable hours (sound familiar, lawyers?), sell the most expensive pills, and use the most expensive procedures the patient’s insurance will cover. Hospitals always need money, and fundraising and subsidies aren’t enough. Padding your bill always helps too.
Medicine in general has taken a fast-food approach: get ‘em in, get on ‘em, and get ‘em out again for the most profit margin—it’s worse in low-income areas, where the operating motto is “treat ‘em and street ‘em.” Like fast food, you’re left wanting (or needing) more in about an hour, or the next day, so the ambulance rolls you in again. Quality went out the window a long time ago—besides, who’s watching? Who do we really have to compare our level of care to, seeing as how we supposedly have the best health care around? Britain? Cuba? Canada? I don’t think so.
McMedicine is only going to get worse when Democrats get into office or control Congress, and Hillary-care is enacted as the health care policy of this nation—then we WILL be comparable to Britain, Canada, and Cuba. Only the young and those with a good prognosis will be worked on, and the rest will be shoved aside for being non-cost-effective because they aren’t likely to be viable contributors to the tax base—the tax base must be fed. The government will get the power to decide who lives and who dies, and everyone will probably come with automatic, iron-clad, Supreme Court-issued DNRs. Do you want that? Hell, we’d be only a few short steps away from Soylent Green at that point!
I wrote Glenn and told him to count his blessings—at least he wasn’t worked on at Walter Reed army hospital. I’ve been to both Walter Reed and Bethesda, and both had their problems—Bethesda had more “people problems” than structural ones, though. Walter Reed has been a derelict hospital for decades, and has been on the BRAC base closure list for about that long, but high-ranking people at the Pentagon and elsewhere always stepped in to prevent “the army’s source of pride” from being torn down and rebuilt (probably because of the Presidential Wing there). All those horror stories about Walter Reed were true, even 12 years ago, when I had the honor of receiving a phone call from my husband (in a waiting room) with a roach tally. Staff at Bethesda just ignored me when I told them my husband had an egg allergy, and almost killed him with anaphylaxis after repeatedly ordering him bacon, eggs, and toast for breakfast while he was zorked out of his mind on pain meds. This told me right away that I had to be his advocate. I went medieval on some poor nurse, and she got me the meal order form so I could order something appropriate for him to eat. He chef-saladed his way out of there in 5 days (I requested no eggs be put on his salads)—not bad for a heart surgery patient. They predicted 7 days at least. I’m just glad I was smart enough to know that healing nutrients are found in fresh fruits and veggies, and ordered the closest approximation to them from the hospital’s menu, plus brought in outside foods and a daily multivitamin. If I hadn’t ordered something from the hospital menu at least once every day, they probably would’ve tube-fed him, thinking he wasn’t eating at all.
Medicine around here has gone corporate, and I’m expecting doctors to start wearing sponsor logos on their white coats (like race car drivers do on their fire suits) any day now. The human is now nothing more than a talking machine, and doctors are now mechanics—they don’t want to hear from you, they just want to fix your plumbing, your hard drive (head), your electrical system (nerves), your HVAC system (lungs/nose), change your oil (blood), or look at your engine (heart). Occasionally, they have to drag out the rivet gun to fix our frames (bones). Do you see the resemblance? The corporate-ness of this whole field has driven everything down to the bare minimums in the race for the last dollar. Quality became non-existent with the invention of the HMO and Medicare.
Welcome to McMedicine. You DON’T want fries with that, trust me—it’ll only get you sold a bottle of statins and hypertension drugs for your trouble.
I’ve taken to visiting a D.O. (doctor of osteopathy) for my health care needs. They’re trained to treat the whole person, not just his ailments and illnesses. D.O.’s want to know what you’ve been eating, what supplements you take, how you exercise, and offer corrective advice to solve your health issue without trying to sell you expensive Big Pharma pills. Most diagnoses can be made with simple, inexpensive tests, and this is what a D.O. primarily uses. If he/she cannot solve the problem, then a referral to a diagnostician (a nice Dr. House-type guy) is made, who then uses whatever means necessary to solve the problem. This method of medical practice just about completely bypasses the McMedicine factories, and there’s a bonus: D.O.’s are covered by most insurance carriers (check your policy), where more human-based practitioners like homeopaths or holistic practitioners generally aren’t, unless maybe a flexible spending plan allows for them.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Income or Outlay
I've written about this type of financial fight before. This one's different.
I recently visited a frugal forum discussion regarding money—a woman was wondering where she and her husband could move to so he could make more money. Naturally, all sorts of answers and the usual conventional advice was given, but nothing was said about outlay. Everyone presumed she was already frugal, as did I, seeing as how she was posting in a frugal forum.
“Where do they pay more for this type of job?”
(………….record screech……………)
We always seek to do the easiest thing first, and the knee-jerk reaction is always to assume one has to make more money to satisfy a deficit. Let’s look at the flip-side of earning, which is spending—income versus outlay.
This woman automatically reached for the gun of “more income” when the equally viable weapon of “lowering expenses” would’ve done the same job, only with additional benefits. The additional benefits I’m speaking of are lower taxes, and this is how I got there: when you make more money, you get taxed for it. Sometimes, you throw yourself into a higher tax bracket, or even the dreaded AMT, just by making a few more dollars a month after taxes.
By lowering your expenses (outlay) instead of going for more pay, you save tax money—if normal, conventional frugal measures aren’t enough to do the job (and even some UNconventional ones too), perhaps it’s time to look for a cheaper place to live, not a better-paying job locale. By moving to a lower cost-per-living place than the one you live in now, while able to preserve your current job or transfer to a lateral position, you actually make more money without incurring taxes. In some cases, even taking a lower-paying job can yield the same savings, because the cost of living will be considerably lower, and will make up the difference.
Example: a GS-11 civil service worker grossing $52k/year in a mid-Atlantic state can find a cheaper cost of living by moving (transferring) to Alabama, reducing his gross pay to $48k/year for the exact same job. The difference in pay was because the mid-Atlantic state tacked a cost-of-living adjustment to the original job salary, meaning this is how much MORE the area cost to live in compared to the U.S. average. Moving to Alabama would yield $4000 less annually, but the difference in cost of living would more than make up for it (by 31%). Also, the tax savings would add to it—after the move, there would be $4000 less to be taxed (by state AND federal), and the food, medical, gas, housing, utilities, and taxes would all be cheaper to boot! Frugal living would only enhance the cost-of-living discount, so by transferring to Alabama, this worker could potentially cut his living costs by almost half!
Next time you need to “make more money”, instead investigate whether or not you’re really doing all you can in the expenses or outlay realm first. Making more money means paying more taxes on it, and there is another way to come out ahead, and tax-free—it may be a more uncomfortable way, but it’s a way nonetheless. Besides, in some circumstances, a job-related move can be written off on your taxes (see a tax advisor first).
If you live anywhere in the west coast states, Colorado, or the New England states, a move just about anywhere else will certainly be cheaper than where you live now—your cost of living is THAT high. For the rest of us, look to states that border the Mississippi River, the Gulf Coast, and the Ohio and Tennessee valleys. To use a political term, blue states are usually the most expensive ones, but they get paid more and taxed more.
I recently visited a frugal forum discussion regarding money—a woman was wondering where she and her husband could move to so he could make more money. Naturally, all sorts of answers and the usual conventional advice was given, but nothing was said about outlay. Everyone presumed she was already frugal, as did I, seeing as how she was posting in a frugal forum.
“Where do they pay more for this type of job?”
(………….record screech……………)
We always seek to do the easiest thing first, and the knee-jerk reaction is always to assume one has to make more money to satisfy a deficit. Let’s look at the flip-side of earning, which is spending—income versus outlay.
This woman automatically reached for the gun of “more income” when the equally viable weapon of “lowering expenses” would’ve done the same job, only with additional benefits. The additional benefits I’m speaking of are lower taxes, and this is how I got there: when you make more money, you get taxed for it. Sometimes, you throw yourself into a higher tax bracket, or even the dreaded AMT, just by making a few more dollars a month after taxes.
By lowering your expenses (outlay) instead of going for more pay, you save tax money—if normal, conventional frugal measures aren’t enough to do the job (and even some UNconventional ones too), perhaps it’s time to look for a cheaper place to live, not a better-paying job locale. By moving to a lower cost-per-living place than the one you live in now, while able to preserve your current job or transfer to a lateral position, you actually make more money without incurring taxes. In some cases, even taking a lower-paying job can yield the same savings, because the cost of living will be considerably lower, and will make up the difference.
Example: a GS-11 civil service worker grossing $52k/year in a mid-Atlantic state can find a cheaper cost of living by moving (transferring) to Alabama, reducing his gross pay to $48k/year for the exact same job. The difference in pay was because the mid-Atlantic state tacked a cost-of-living adjustment to the original job salary, meaning this is how much MORE the area cost to live in compared to the U.S. average. Moving to Alabama would yield $4000 less annually, but the difference in cost of living would more than make up for it (by 31%). Also, the tax savings would add to it—after the move, there would be $4000 less to be taxed (by state AND federal), and the food, medical, gas, housing, utilities, and taxes would all be cheaper to boot! Frugal living would only enhance the cost-of-living discount, so by transferring to Alabama, this worker could potentially cut his living costs by almost half!
Next time you need to “make more money”, instead investigate whether or not you’re really doing all you can in the expenses or outlay realm first. Making more money means paying more taxes on it, and there is another way to come out ahead, and tax-free—it may be a more uncomfortable way, but it’s a way nonetheless. Besides, in some circumstances, a job-related move can be written off on your taxes (see a tax advisor first).
If you live anywhere in the west coast states, Colorado, or the New England states, a move just about anywhere else will certainly be cheaper than where you live now—your cost of living is THAT high. For the rest of us, look to states that border the Mississippi River, the Gulf Coast, and the Ohio and Tennessee valleys. To use a political term, blue states are usually the most expensive ones, but they get paid more and taxed more.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
More False Economies
This week there is a wonderful Dollar Stretcher contribution about false economies. I’d like to add some more, one of which I have mentioned before in my own repertoire of frugal lore.
The original article above mentioned things like stocking up to the point of overstock, shopping at warehouse stores when you only have an average-sized or smaller family, not getting enough out of a warehouse membership for the cost, being forced to repeat purchase something because the item in question was so cheap (cheaply made) to begin with, and waste in general. Oh, the waste!
I’d like to share one of my most controversial favorites—the one that gets me the most hate-mail: carcass meats like whole chickens and whole turkeys. I’ve been preaching about the inefficiencies of whole-carcass meats for some time, such as the cost per pound when the carcass is frozen and filled with ice (which adds weight), and the amount of actual usable meat compared to the amount of bone, fat, and other waste.
Bone-and-broth devotees will write me and say how wrong I am about avoiding buying bone-filled meats, because you supposedly can’t make gelatin for soups and stews without boiling bones, and they state how much healthier those soups and stews are with the gelatin. I’m here to inform you that I, too, make gelatin without a bone in sight—you don’t need bones at all to do it. Meat drippings from browning, broiling, or roasting are all you need—drain the drippings into a bowl and refrigerate overnight, so the fat can rise to the top and harden, leaving pristine gelatin underneath it. The fat layer can be easily removed intact or mostly so, leaving the same gelatin you so fondly crave.
I do this with regularity—I make my own cat food, and the drippings from the meat I brown get strained into a bowl for overnight refrigeration. The next batch of cat food I make after that automatically has a bowl of fat-topped gelatin waiting for it in the fridge—I just remove the top fat layer, and add the underlying gelatin to my food processor, along with the rest of the recipe ingredients. I’ve never used any kind of bone for this, and have all the gelatin I could ever use just by saving my meat drippings and refrigerating them overnight. If you need gelatin sooner than the next day, cook your meat early in the day and refrigerate those drippings NOW—the earlier you can get them into the fridge, the sooner you’ll have evening gelatin. Placing the bowl in the back of the fridge helps cool it down faster.
Rubber chicken devotees will also e-assault me with their stories of how many ways they were able to stretch a carcass after most of the usable meat was already eaten, and again, this points to the waste issue: after you’ve made casseroles, soups, stews, gravies, and gelatins out of your poor bird, what’s left besides WASTE? You paid for those bones, that fat, and that cartilage, and at a per-pound price too. Waste is waste, and if you’re throwing anything at all away when you’re done, it’s waste. If you aren’t grinding those bones up into calcium for the garden, then it’s waste—I can’t think of another way to use bones, other than possibly for a kid’s science or art project.
I leave that particular waste at the grocery store, letting them deal with it instead. I buy (and continue to buy) boneless and 100% usable cuts of meat, and get my gelatin too—no bones about it.
If you find boneless cuts too expensive for daily feeding (and many of my hate-mail writers do), then learn the fine art of price-per-serving and portion control. The Food Guide Pyramid says we only need 3 oz. of meat twice a day, so multiply the number of people you’re feeding times 3 oz., and you get the amount of meat you actually need for your dish—too many people think a whole “family size” package is the norm for a family meal, and it’s meat overkill for many of us. Too many people are guilty of eating more than their fair 3 oz. share of meat at a meal, too, and this is the ultimate waste—right into your toilet! A 1-lb. package of hamburger, before cooking, yields 16 oz., or 5 1/3 raw servings. When cooked, it yields somewhat less, due to the meat/fat percentage. However, this can be remedied by adding reconstituted TVP to the meat, using beans to add protein and fiber, or a handful of nuts, a cup of cheese, a scrambled egg or two, or tofu. The point is we consume way too much meat in one sitting, and our cholesterol profiles are proof of that. Getting a tighter rein on our meat expenditures and portions will go a long way toward minimizing waste, possibly eliminating it altogether.
Avoid the false economies of rubber chicken and bones for gelatin. Instead of buying a whole bird to ultimately make your soups, try using only a portion of that boneless meat family pack, subdividing and freezing the rest. I find a cut-up single boneless chicken breast, boneless beef rib, or boneless pork chop more than adequate for a pot of soup.
Some more thoughts: unplanned leftovers are also a waste—it means you cooked too much to begin with. If you’re packing lunches, then serving the meal, and STILL have leftovers with absolutely no plan for their use, you’ve wasted time, energy, and money—especially when those leftovers get lost in the fridge, and you end up throwing them out a couple of weeks later. Amish people have no refrigeration for their leftovers, and use them to feed the family pig instead--at least SOMEBODY'S getting the benefit of that food!
Those “green bags” that are heavily marketed all over TV currently are another waste, and I’ll tell you how: the lady says that her carrots look like this (wilted and dried out) after 18 days in the fridge, and her other various produce looks even worse for wear after so many days in the fridge—what is her food doing in the fridge for so long? Buy your food to EAT, not to store! In other words, if you have to resort to green bags to keep your produce fresh, you’re buying too much. If her family couldn’t consume that little bit of carrots in 18 days, or the strawberries in 10 days, she just plain bought too much produce, didn’t have a plan to use it, and it became waste. How can this happen when we’re all supposed to be eating 8-10 servings of fruits and vegetables a day? Spending good money on her bags (in my opinion) is creating more waste. Learn to buy what you need, or can use in a week, and have a plan for it all. The best food storage plan I know of is "on the vine" (so to speak)--it doesn't rely on anything but sun, good soil, and some water.
That ethylene gas she talks about is occurring because the nutrients inside are slowly decomposing—the object here is to eat the food before it loses all those vital nutrients. Make soups, salads, and chop or dice sturdy vegetables for the freezer, like peppers, celery, and carrots. Emphasize nutrients rather than using another petroleum-based product that will eventually stop working and become waste itself. Besides, what if you lose power due to a weather emergency? Not only have you lost 2 ½ weeks’ worth of produce, but the bag is now useless too, because it’s lined with rotten produce. Had you purchased correctly, you’d have lost less than a week’s worth if you had a chest freezer— that would become a refrigerator after a couple of days, and last a couple more days.
Just remember you buy food to EAT, not to store, and certainly not to throw away.
The original article above mentioned things like stocking up to the point of overstock, shopping at warehouse stores when you only have an average-sized or smaller family, not getting enough out of a warehouse membership for the cost, being forced to repeat purchase something because the item in question was so cheap (cheaply made) to begin with, and waste in general. Oh, the waste!
I’d like to share one of my most controversial favorites—the one that gets me the most hate-mail: carcass meats like whole chickens and whole turkeys. I’ve been preaching about the inefficiencies of whole-carcass meats for some time, such as the cost per pound when the carcass is frozen and filled with ice (which adds weight), and the amount of actual usable meat compared to the amount of bone, fat, and other waste.
Bone-and-broth devotees will write me and say how wrong I am about avoiding buying bone-filled meats, because you supposedly can’t make gelatin for soups and stews without boiling bones, and they state how much healthier those soups and stews are with the gelatin. I’m here to inform you that I, too, make gelatin without a bone in sight—you don’t need bones at all to do it. Meat drippings from browning, broiling, or roasting are all you need—drain the drippings into a bowl and refrigerate overnight, so the fat can rise to the top and harden, leaving pristine gelatin underneath it. The fat layer can be easily removed intact or mostly so, leaving the same gelatin you so fondly crave.
I do this with regularity—I make my own cat food, and the drippings from the meat I brown get strained into a bowl for overnight refrigeration. The next batch of cat food I make after that automatically has a bowl of fat-topped gelatin waiting for it in the fridge—I just remove the top fat layer, and add the underlying gelatin to my food processor, along with the rest of the recipe ingredients. I’ve never used any kind of bone for this, and have all the gelatin I could ever use just by saving my meat drippings and refrigerating them overnight. If you need gelatin sooner than the next day, cook your meat early in the day and refrigerate those drippings NOW—the earlier you can get them into the fridge, the sooner you’ll have evening gelatin. Placing the bowl in the back of the fridge helps cool it down faster.
Rubber chicken devotees will also e-assault me with their stories of how many ways they were able to stretch a carcass after most of the usable meat was already eaten, and again, this points to the waste issue: after you’ve made casseroles, soups, stews, gravies, and gelatins out of your poor bird, what’s left besides WASTE? You paid for those bones, that fat, and that cartilage, and at a per-pound price too. Waste is waste, and if you’re throwing anything at all away when you’re done, it’s waste. If you aren’t grinding those bones up into calcium for the garden, then it’s waste—I can’t think of another way to use bones, other than possibly for a kid’s science or art project.
I leave that particular waste at the grocery store, letting them deal with it instead. I buy (and continue to buy) boneless and 100% usable cuts of meat, and get my gelatin too—no bones about it.
If you find boneless cuts too expensive for daily feeding (and many of my hate-mail writers do), then learn the fine art of price-per-serving and portion control. The Food Guide Pyramid says we only need 3 oz. of meat twice a day, so multiply the number of people you’re feeding times 3 oz., and you get the amount of meat you actually need for your dish—too many people think a whole “family size” package is the norm for a family meal, and it’s meat overkill for many of us. Too many people are guilty of eating more than their fair 3 oz. share of meat at a meal, too, and this is the ultimate waste—right into your toilet! A 1-lb. package of hamburger, before cooking, yields 16 oz., or 5 1/3 raw servings. When cooked, it yields somewhat less, due to the meat/fat percentage. However, this can be remedied by adding reconstituted TVP to the meat, using beans to add protein and fiber, or a handful of nuts, a cup of cheese, a scrambled egg or two, or tofu. The point is we consume way too much meat in one sitting, and our cholesterol profiles are proof of that. Getting a tighter rein on our meat expenditures and portions will go a long way toward minimizing waste, possibly eliminating it altogether.
Avoid the false economies of rubber chicken and bones for gelatin. Instead of buying a whole bird to ultimately make your soups, try using only a portion of that boneless meat family pack, subdividing and freezing the rest. I find a cut-up single boneless chicken breast, boneless beef rib, or boneless pork chop more than adequate for a pot of soup.
Some more thoughts: unplanned leftovers are also a waste—it means you cooked too much to begin with. If you’re packing lunches, then serving the meal, and STILL have leftovers with absolutely no plan for their use, you’ve wasted time, energy, and money—especially when those leftovers get lost in the fridge, and you end up throwing them out a couple of weeks later. Amish people have no refrigeration for their leftovers, and use them to feed the family pig instead--at least SOMEBODY'S getting the benefit of that food!
Those “green bags” that are heavily marketed all over TV currently are another waste, and I’ll tell you how: the lady says that her carrots look like this (wilted and dried out) after 18 days in the fridge, and her other various produce looks even worse for wear after so many days in the fridge—what is her food doing in the fridge for so long? Buy your food to EAT, not to store! In other words, if you have to resort to green bags to keep your produce fresh, you’re buying too much. If her family couldn’t consume that little bit of carrots in 18 days, or the strawberries in 10 days, she just plain bought too much produce, didn’t have a plan to use it, and it became waste. How can this happen when we’re all supposed to be eating 8-10 servings of fruits and vegetables a day? Spending good money on her bags (in my opinion) is creating more waste. Learn to buy what you need, or can use in a week, and have a plan for it all. The best food storage plan I know of is "on the vine" (so to speak)--it doesn't rely on anything but sun, good soil, and some water.
That ethylene gas she talks about is occurring because the nutrients inside are slowly decomposing—the object here is to eat the food before it loses all those vital nutrients. Make soups, salads, and chop or dice sturdy vegetables for the freezer, like peppers, celery, and carrots. Emphasize nutrients rather than using another petroleum-based product that will eventually stop working and become waste itself. Besides, what if you lose power due to a weather emergency? Not only have you lost 2 ½ weeks’ worth of produce, but the bag is now useless too, because it’s lined with rotten produce. Had you purchased correctly, you’d have lost less than a week’s worth if you had a chest freezer— that would become a refrigerator after a couple of days, and last a couple more days.
Just remember you buy food to EAT, not to store, and certainly not to throw away.
Friday, January 04, 2008
Dispatch from Seat #29 of the Paranoia Express (Super L-O-N-G)
The education/employment picture: White collar jobs will continue to go to India, China, or robots/software, high-paying (and dependable) jobs in the service sector will go to illegal immigrants (who will have been made legal by politics), and the only so-called high-paying white-collar jobs left to us will be in politics, lobbying, and the military upper ranks—illegals-made-legal will fill the military rank and file (we always need more cannon fodder)so we may continue going to war for resources (oil, people, food, you name it). Even Wall St. is getting gutted from the inside out: brokers are being replaced by technology, and firms are bankrupting themselves trying to reach for more profits despite the risk level. Paying for college will become futile at best until a Democratic/Socialist congress finishes the playing field-leveling job, creating a whole new CETA jobs generation (this is what got the hippies out of the woods and off the streets back in the 70's). Big molly-coddling government will be back with a vengeance!
U.S. News and World Report is telling us the some pretty astonishing things about education and future employment: college grads should look toward blue-collar work that’s dependable and steady, and can’t be farmed out to outsourcing, off-shoring, or technology. I said this very same thing back in 2005, only I carried it a bit further: I questioned the need for a degree at all when the steady jobs won’t need that level of education. I also threw in one more little ditty: since we seek high-paying jobs, then work our patooteys off just to afford a mortgage, what if we were to get the house FIRST? Assuming we all could inherit our abodes, we wouldn’t have to make so much money just to pay expenses—eliminating the need for high education levels, high income levels, and the high job loss risk inherent at those levels.
Amish living, here we come! Good thing they’re still around to show us how to survive in the coming downturn.
We will be China-izing again, thanks to the desperation of business: radically lowering standards of designing, manufacturing, and employee/consumer/environmental safety. Stafford Shirts will be the new Triangle Shirtwaist Company disaster of our time. Ralph Nader and unions may once again have careers ahead of them, if only Ralph could live long enough to see it—maybe he could train his grandchildren how to fight and mop up after bad political and business decisions the way he did for us back in the 60's and 70's.
Our prisons and jails are the new U.S. sweatshops. What’s cheaper than a .30/hour worker that lives on the premises, needs no benefits, and is part of an ever-increasing population? People will be committing crimes just to get fed, housed, clothed, and employed in the years ahead out of sheer desperation, because social programs will no longer pick up their slack.
On the political front: Democrats will either take the presidency or fill both sides of Congress—we won’t be able to escape them. Too many “losers” (job, house, health care, etc.) will use their voting power to reinstate the safety net they so desire. All our taxes will be raised 2-4 times what they are right now—there is behind-the-scenes talk of doubling our income taxes as we speak, and the minimum wage will have to rise again (whispers of $10+/hour) to offset it. As a result, more and more of us will become landlords (PASSIVE income, subject to lower taxes) to both take advantage of plummeting home prices/mortgage rates, and escape the ACTIVE income taxes of a job.
More people will be running to the shelter of public subsidy programs, only to find them more restrictive than today, and even phasing out altogether—government wants to spend your money, but not on you. They only want to do enough to keep the slaves, I mean workers, in the fields (so to speak)—this means bare minimums in food, medical care, and possible transportation subsidies (bus passes), but nothing else. You will be expected to work at something for the rest, even if it’s a $10/hour job at Mickey D’s with an 80% total tax rate. You heard the term “Uncle Sam’s plantation”? This is it.
Congress-critters may come to realize what an egregious error they made in creating this corn-for-fuel scheme, and begin undoing it (when they themselves have trouble affording meat). Somewhere down the road someone will have exposed the REAL agenda behind this whole ethanol thing, and it isn’t about oil: the eco-weenie liberals want to create a vegetarian world. They’re convinced that cow flatulence and humans are the major causes of greenhouse gases, the leading cause of global warming—never mind the fact that there’s global warming on Mars and Neptune, where cow and man doesn’t exist. Also, never mind the fact that meat is the only meaningful protein source that isn’t allergenic—soy, nuts, and dairy are all problematic for much of the population. But then, it plays right into their “no human allowed” game…no humans except themselves, of course.
Hypocrisy will continue to play a huge role for time immemorial. Yet another conservative uprising will occur in a few years—this time, getting back to the FISCAL roots of conservancy, not so much the SOCIAL ones we have now. Much of our religiously-fervent will die off, leaving moderates, a small handful of fundy-loonies, and a whole lot of Atheists. The older we get, the more we will turn to church—the OTHER safety net, and the only one anybody can afford. A collection plate contribution will seem a bargain for the services rendered—compare that to the taxes/social services scenario. Communal living will fit the bill for non-believers.
Our northern and southern borders will continue to be politically-obstructed from fence-building, because Uncle Sam WANTS those illegals here--for Social Security salvation, military numbers salvation, and economic consumer/spender salvation for the entire North American continent, not to mention filling pews and collection plates for the churches (the new safety nets). Our capitalist bubble, which has been building since the depression of the 30's, is now collapsing—everything old will be new again. We will be reliving our grandparents' and great-grandparents' lives through new eyes and with modern trappings (think Dust Bowl and Depression, only with granite countertops).
Everything old will HAVE TO BE new again, because we ran out of ideas about 10 years ago—we even wore out the term “retro.” If you want a better look at what this future life will entail, look to Europe--what they make now is for EXPORT. Those Euro-style things we keep falling for here in kitchen, bath, and general home items only exist for sale, not in their own homes (I lived in Italy, and know this personally). A trashcan is a trashcan, right, so why bother with fanciful aesthetics? Because that’s what sells.
We were the only country left with a middle class, and now even that's being exported to China, India, and Russia. What's worse than that, however, is the fact that China is still a Communist country (and Russia may as well still be one) operating with a capitalist economy--how long will it take us to try THAT one? In my mind, it's already starting: FISA laws, excess political secrecy, shadow governments, one-man think tanks like Robert Pastor, and the inept-appearing congress stalling on the border fences. If you want to read more on Robert Pastor, please see the last chapter of Glenn Beck's new book.
When you add up the FEMA fiascos of New Orleans, Texas, and Florida, and combine them with illegal immigration and drug trafficking, you get what appears to be a large-scale version of Amsterdam back in the 80's—the drug use freedom center of the world. Drugs were legal, drug USE was legal, and they eventually had to restrict it to one city park. All those druggies crammed into one park, free to use to their hearts' content until they overdosed and died--they weren't allowed to leave the park once they entered. Each day, ambulances would go to the park and carry out the dead. After a few years, Amsterdam was cleaned out, and new laws were enacted to curb drug use, effectively shutting the doors to drug rats. Now, substitute our long-time welfare-dependent citizens for the druggies of Amsterdam…we're replacing our crop of generational welfare rats (that didn’t swept away with Bill Clinton’s welfare reform) with new imported versions--models with a work ethic. Meanwhile, we will keep tightening eligibility restrictions and restricting enrollment on the welfare programs to curb dependency.
Ever wonder why New Orleans and all the recent U.S disaster areas haven't been rebuilt in a speedy manner like Mississippi? Someone's trying to clean out the non-economically-viable rats from the ship. Think of FEMA as an exterminator, not a disaster agency. The more you contribute to the tax coffers, the faster and better the FEMA response will be—witness the responses to the Hollywood (celebrity homes) wildfires, the south Florida (celebrity vacation homes) hurricanes and floods, and anywhere there isn’t a large demographic of welfare-dependent residents. Mississippi didn’t have a large welfare population, and was largely supported by casino profits. Casino profits = tax revenues.
We all can be replaced—especially the least productive of us, from the welfare queens to striking writers. Speaking of which, the writers will either be forced back to work (with no new contract, out of desperation), or be replaced by non-union staff—while picketing, they’ve already lost more in wages than they would ever hope to receive from future internet royalties. A futile effort at union effectiveness, don’t you think? I guess they didn’t count on the power of reruns and the internet as diversions.
This is where the impending and burgeoning Socialism of the Democratic Party plays a role in our future, even if we grudgingly accept it. If you want to get started on indentured servitude now, go ahead and vote for Hillary and her ilk. Otherwise, if you still have spine, testicles, and fight left in you to do things yourself on your own dime, bite the bullet in the voting booth. Every election, it comes down to voting for either a turd sandwich or a giant douche (just like South Park says)--pick your poison and be willing to live with the consequences. These things will probably happen no matter who gets voted into office.
FWIW, I don't think the impending Socialist bent will last--remember, we managed to wrestle our way out of the Democrat's political power grip before, and we'll do it again just as soon as our great-grandchildren and very young immigrants learn the value of a dollar (or rather Amero) and desire to hang onto more of them. In the meantime, we will have abdicated all we have left to abdicate: our free will and our rights. Socialism has never lasted anywhere it took hold, and it won’t here either. Too many of us will know better by then.
Our borders shall remain open so those being expelled from our society have somewhere else to go, and both options (Canada and Mexico) are states with abundant safety nets. As soon as the illegals are made legal, and our generational welfare rats have scurried off to new homes north or south of the border, many doors will shut behind them: welfare, Social Security, food stamps, and all other forms of human subsidies. The New Deal will become No Deal—at least for the “new” rats. Our new set of welfare queens will come from the grandchildren of Boomers—those who’d rather picket, protest, and panhandle rather than do an honest day’s work. What else can we expect from children and grandchildren of protesters, except to hand down that family tradition of making waves, no matter how absurd?
Moving on: Castro has supposedly “retired”, and mentions replacement by a younger party member—and it ain’t his slightly younger brother Raoul. Most likely, it’s going to be Chavez, who’s used his own country for OJT. Since his fellow countrymen voted him down as Dictator-for-Life, he has to leave office when his term expires, and I’m sure he wants to go somewhere friendlier to his ideas and methods—where else but Cuba? Once he’s gone, the rest of the SPP plan will go forward, because he was the only major sticking point stopping it—we already have trade agreements with nearly all the other countries in South America, and are working on the drug exporter countries in Central America.
China already has port access in Mexico, so shipments can avoid the scrutiny we fight so hard to get in place at the border, in spite of Homeland Security’s foot-dragging—this is all part of that open borders thing. Now China can ship to Mexico, and trucks can take cargo all the way up the proposed NAFTA/I-35 (Mexico to Canada) with very little interference. Yippee—more lead and mercury for everyone, not to mention the possibility of terrorist activities! And to think we can’t board a plane without x-ray scrutiny…(sigh).
Our own elites are witnessing and yearning for a China-style eco-political system: an iron hand over the people, but a free hand over commerce. That’s what gives power to all—the leader and the people, but not the people over the leader. We’ve already been rendered too stupid to vote our way out of a wet paper bag, so the elites have engineered a whole new system to rule us over our heads and behind closed doors. China has it, as does Russia, and both leaders have one thing in common: a craving for power. Cheney and Rumsfeld have it too, but couldn’t remake the successes they accomplished back in Nixon’s realm—to create so much fear and loathing that we sheep just turn over our keys (along with our privacy rights) and let them drive. The comparisons of Vietnam and Iraq are more accurate than you know in terms of the politics and goings-on behind the scenes. Look at what they created over Saddam Hussein, Iran, and nukes when our own intelligence says the whole thing was ceased three years ago.
How many troops died so Cheney and Rumsfeld could peek at our phone records unannounced and apprehend us without cause? We’re still feeling the effects every time we go to the airport—we practically have to file a flight plan with Darth Vader himself before showing up for our public frisking! They want to know about OUR goings-on in x-ray detail, but care nothing about imported goods or illegals flowing into this country by the boat-load. FISA was their political wet dream, and it will die from exposure to UV rays.
Meanwhile, we’re left with the residue of 9/11: color-coded threat levels, plastic sheets, and duct tape. Al-Qaeda is a weak sister and will never make it over here in meaningful numbers. They’re too busy blowing up their own people over their own power grab—they didn’t count on the rest of us being so vigilant. We took their power away by not being afraid, on both a military and personal level. We will do the same here at home over FISA and Homeland Security.
On the environmental front: we will have been gagging on the global warming thing for years now, and it’s always going to be nothing more than a clever marketing ploy. One solution to the we-buy-oil, we-go-to-war, we-finance-our-own-enemies circle is alcohol-based fuels—they aren’t any more efficient than ethanol, but methanol in particular can be made from the fermentation of just about anything: trash, yard waste, crop waste, coal, refinery waste and by-products, you name it. Our own city dumps have the potential to become our next gas stations, and states could own the fuel sales just like they now (in large part) own booze and tobacco sales. The dumps already sort and recycle, so what’s another (profitable) way to dispose of the indisposable besides burning and burying? It’s another source of revenue for the city, state or region, and it gets us off the OPEC treadmill. Once we get our energy stuff together, the price of oil may once again plummet to below $70/barrel or lower. All we need is about $150 worth of flex-fuel conversion work done to our existing cars to handle the new fuel OR the old gasoline—flex-fuel cars run both. All that needs to be changed is the gas line and the ignition, and these things can be done today in preparation. For optimal conversion, a larger gas tank will have to be installed, because more alcohol-based fuel will be needed to obtain the same MPG that you get now, but the air will be cleaner, and oil spills will be a thing of the past (alcohol evaporates into the air).
Funny how nobody has put the hole in our ozone together with global cooling, isn’t it? The hole has closed, and now we’re warming up again—it’s like putting a hat on to preserve body heat. You think maybe the earth put on its own hat by closing the ozone hole? Maybe we need to re-open that hole so polar ice won’t melt. God save the polar bears!
On the energy front: Several Saudi princes have been making large bets on hotels in Central Africa for years now, and I think I know why: a place to escape to when their own people rise up and overthrow the monarchy. The Saudi population is largely young, restless, and in desperate need of opportunity—uneducated and nowhere to go. Also, the oil dependence thing will have been solved, so oil-related jobs will no longer be available. The Middle East will be hip-deep in its own revolt, oil fields will no doubt be damaged, and supply will be severely cut just as our demand has entered its twilight. China, Russia, and the Middle East may join forces and create the world’s first central manufacturing center, combining Chinese steel with Arab and Russian oil. Sand-dwellers will climb down from their camels (so to speak) and take up blue-collar jobs—something they’ve never had before. This working center may spread all the way into Africa, or Africans and Palestinians may migrate over to the Middle East for work. Peace will break out in the region because people will be too busy working to blow anybody up. Prosperity will finally occur in the Muslim world.
Our merger with Canada for their oil sands, and Mexico and Venezuela for their heavy sour crude will pretty much wrap up our oil needs so we won’t have to disturb the deer in Anwar with drilling or intrude on the Utopian splendor in Colorado for coal mining. Mexico and Central America may become our new China for cheap labor-fueled light manufacturing and assembly as China gets regulated and legislated out of our business realm of possibilities. Prisons and jails here at home will make up our remaining cheap-labor needs.
Oil will reach $100-$120/barrel and stay there before falling in the second half of ’08, and the economic talking heads (Bernanke, Kudlow, etc.) will continue to pull wool over viewer’s eyes with the “no such recession” talk—by the time they acknowledge a recession, we will have reached depression status. These economic commentators are paid to be cheerful and positive, just as others get paid for doom-and-gloom forecasts—it’s what brings ratings. DON’T FORGET THAT!
I’m on nobody’s payroll—getting paid would ruin my tax strategy.
After the Beijing Olympics come and go, ethanol will become a passing fancy, as will the whole global warming thing. Hopefully, nuke plants will finally be making a comeback, in spite of the shrill cry of NIMBYs. We will be pretty much rerunning the same energy moves we made since the last oil crisis of the 70’s (higher CAFÉ standards, even more efficient appliances, realistic-sized LED bulbs, etc.), with the possible emergence of an escape from those bloody catalytic converters! Did you know they rob us of a whopping 10 mpg? Get rid of those, and we wouldn’t have to raise CAFÉ standards!
On the defense front: because China may merge with Russia and the Middle East to create this giant centralized steel manufacturing area, China and Russia may get the navy they’ve been sorely lacking. Meanwhile, our navy will be filled with undereducated incompetents (like it is now), be led by idiots who aren’t fit to pour coffee, and we will have gone from command of the high seas to largely rendered deaf-mute and harmless by our own government’s actions. While all three “oil/steel” countries will have command of the skies with life-sized planes and armament, we will have long since turned ourselves over to the Nintendo generation with toy planes, ships, and tanks on radio control. Good thing we’re leaving those borders open so we have somewhere to run and hide!
On the economic front: At the rate in which jobs are moving away from here, secondary education costs are skyrocketing, both we and Uncle Sam are defaulting on loans and accumulating debt, and foreign countries are buying up and loaning money to our businesses these days, we Americans as a culture may turn into the world’s next generational welfare rats. The U.S. may become just another leisure continent to the rest of the world.
The current housing bubble burst will level off in the second half of 2008 through 2009 (possibly making tiny gains), then dive again in 2010—today’s ARMs are due to reset then. Meanwhile, it’s going to be the used car-buying bonanza people have fantasized about, as more and more people default on their car loans right along with their mortgages. Used hybrids may finally come into reach for many (thanks to those who fell for the whole global warming thing), and ethanol increases in the gas-ethanol mix may be coming to your town soon—along with higher car repair bills for corroded fuel lines. Today’s cars cannot run E-85 without anti-corrosive fuel lines found in today’s flex-fuel cars, but that can be remedied for about $150.
As soon as the Beijing Winter Olympics is over, things should return to a 2004 normal—China’s demand for just about everything should dwindle, freeing up lots of resources for everyone else at much lower prices.
Down the road, more and more married working women will find that the new tax picture is just not feasible, and leave the work force in droves—they too will find out that staying home to raise kids and keep the home will pay more in tax benefits than that job ever did, and society will thank them for producing intelligent, respectful kids in return. We will slowly make the descent back into 50’s-style living with modern trappings. Kids will stay home until their mid-20’s or early-30’s due to wages, taxes, and the unaffordability of just about everything. People will be buying duplexes (or apartments) and renting out the extra unit(s) until the kids can handle rent (to get rid of the kids earlier). This will be the new family housing scheme (and the new ownership society), because nobody will be able to afford their own single-family homes after about 2015 unless they’re rich. The housing market may never return to the heady days of 2005-2006, because nobody will qualify for a mortgage due to the new tax burden.
I will leave you now, as I see we’ve reached my destination.
U.S. News and World Report is telling us the some pretty astonishing things about education and future employment: college grads should look toward blue-collar work that’s dependable and steady, and can’t be farmed out to outsourcing, off-shoring, or technology. I said this very same thing back in 2005, only I carried it a bit further: I questioned the need for a degree at all when the steady jobs won’t need that level of education. I also threw in one more little ditty: since we seek high-paying jobs, then work our patooteys off just to afford a mortgage, what if we were to get the house FIRST? Assuming we all could inherit our abodes, we wouldn’t have to make so much money just to pay expenses—eliminating the need for high education levels, high income levels, and the high job loss risk inherent at those levels.
Amish living, here we come! Good thing they’re still around to show us how to survive in the coming downturn.
We will be China-izing again, thanks to the desperation of business: radically lowering standards of designing, manufacturing, and employee/consumer/environmental safety. Stafford Shirts will be the new Triangle Shirtwaist Company disaster of our time. Ralph Nader and unions may once again have careers ahead of them, if only Ralph could live long enough to see it—maybe he could train his grandchildren how to fight and mop up after bad political and business decisions the way he did for us back in the 60's and 70's.
Our prisons and jails are the new U.S. sweatshops. What’s cheaper than a .30/hour worker that lives on the premises, needs no benefits, and is part of an ever-increasing population? People will be committing crimes just to get fed, housed, clothed, and employed in the years ahead out of sheer desperation, because social programs will no longer pick up their slack.
On the political front: Democrats will either take the presidency or fill both sides of Congress—we won’t be able to escape them. Too many “losers” (job, house, health care, etc.) will use their voting power to reinstate the safety net they so desire. All our taxes will be raised 2-4 times what they are right now—there is behind-the-scenes talk of doubling our income taxes as we speak, and the minimum wage will have to rise again (whispers of $10+/hour) to offset it. As a result, more and more of us will become landlords (PASSIVE income, subject to lower taxes) to both take advantage of plummeting home prices/mortgage rates, and escape the ACTIVE income taxes of a job.
More people will be running to the shelter of public subsidy programs, only to find them more restrictive than today, and even phasing out altogether—government wants to spend your money, but not on you. They only want to do enough to keep the slaves, I mean workers, in the fields (so to speak)—this means bare minimums in food, medical care, and possible transportation subsidies (bus passes), but nothing else. You will be expected to work at something for the rest, even if it’s a $10/hour job at Mickey D’s with an 80% total tax rate. You heard the term “Uncle Sam’s plantation”? This is it.
Congress-critters may come to realize what an egregious error they made in creating this corn-for-fuel scheme, and begin undoing it (when they themselves have trouble affording meat). Somewhere down the road someone will have exposed the REAL agenda behind this whole ethanol thing, and it isn’t about oil: the eco-weenie liberals want to create a vegetarian world. They’re convinced that cow flatulence and humans are the major causes of greenhouse gases, the leading cause of global warming—never mind the fact that there’s global warming on Mars and Neptune, where cow and man doesn’t exist. Also, never mind the fact that meat is the only meaningful protein source that isn’t allergenic—soy, nuts, and dairy are all problematic for much of the population. But then, it plays right into their “no human allowed” game…no humans except themselves, of course.
Hypocrisy will continue to play a huge role for time immemorial. Yet another conservative uprising will occur in a few years—this time, getting back to the FISCAL roots of conservancy, not so much the SOCIAL ones we have now. Much of our religiously-fervent will die off, leaving moderates, a small handful of fundy-loonies, and a whole lot of Atheists. The older we get, the more we will turn to church—the OTHER safety net, and the only one anybody can afford. A collection plate contribution will seem a bargain for the services rendered—compare that to the taxes/social services scenario. Communal living will fit the bill for non-believers.
Our northern and southern borders will continue to be politically-obstructed from fence-building, because Uncle Sam WANTS those illegals here--for Social Security salvation, military numbers salvation, and economic consumer/spender salvation for the entire North American continent, not to mention filling pews and collection plates for the churches (the new safety nets). Our capitalist bubble, which has been building since the depression of the 30's, is now collapsing—everything old will be new again. We will be reliving our grandparents' and great-grandparents' lives through new eyes and with modern trappings (think Dust Bowl and Depression, only with granite countertops).
Everything old will HAVE TO BE new again, because we ran out of ideas about 10 years ago—we even wore out the term “retro.” If you want a better look at what this future life will entail, look to Europe--what they make now is for EXPORT. Those Euro-style things we keep falling for here in kitchen, bath, and general home items only exist for sale, not in their own homes (I lived in Italy, and know this personally). A trashcan is a trashcan, right, so why bother with fanciful aesthetics? Because that’s what sells.
We were the only country left with a middle class, and now even that's being exported to China, India, and Russia. What's worse than that, however, is the fact that China is still a Communist country (and Russia may as well still be one) operating with a capitalist economy--how long will it take us to try THAT one? In my mind, it's already starting: FISA laws, excess political secrecy, shadow governments, one-man think tanks like Robert Pastor, and the inept-appearing congress stalling on the border fences. If you want to read more on Robert Pastor, please see the last chapter of Glenn Beck's new book.
When you add up the FEMA fiascos of New Orleans, Texas, and Florida, and combine them with illegal immigration and drug trafficking, you get what appears to be a large-scale version of Amsterdam back in the 80's—the drug use freedom center of the world. Drugs were legal, drug USE was legal, and they eventually had to restrict it to one city park. All those druggies crammed into one park, free to use to their hearts' content until they overdosed and died--they weren't allowed to leave the park once they entered. Each day, ambulances would go to the park and carry out the dead. After a few years, Amsterdam was cleaned out, and new laws were enacted to curb drug use, effectively shutting the doors to drug rats. Now, substitute our long-time welfare-dependent citizens for the druggies of Amsterdam…we're replacing our crop of generational welfare rats (that didn’t swept away with Bill Clinton’s welfare reform) with new imported versions--models with a work ethic. Meanwhile, we will keep tightening eligibility restrictions and restricting enrollment on the welfare programs to curb dependency.
Ever wonder why New Orleans and all the recent U.S disaster areas haven't been rebuilt in a speedy manner like Mississippi? Someone's trying to clean out the non-economically-viable rats from the ship. Think of FEMA as an exterminator, not a disaster agency. The more you contribute to the tax coffers, the faster and better the FEMA response will be—witness the responses to the Hollywood (celebrity homes) wildfires, the south Florida (celebrity vacation homes) hurricanes and floods, and anywhere there isn’t a large demographic of welfare-dependent residents. Mississippi didn’t have a large welfare population, and was largely supported by casino profits. Casino profits = tax revenues.
We all can be replaced—especially the least productive of us, from the welfare queens to striking writers. Speaking of which, the writers will either be forced back to work (with no new contract, out of desperation), or be replaced by non-union staff—while picketing, they’ve already lost more in wages than they would ever hope to receive from future internet royalties. A futile effort at union effectiveness, don’t you think? I guess they didn’t count on the power of reruns and the internet as diversions.
This is where the impending and burgeoning Socialism of the Democratic Party plays a role in our future, even if we grudgingly accept it. If you want to get started on indentured servitude now, go ahead and vote for Hillary and her ilk. Otherwise, if you still have spine, testicles, and fight left in you to do things yourself on your own dime, bite the bullet in the voting booth. Every election, it comes down to voting for either a turd sandwich or a giant douche (just like South Park says)--pick your poison and be willing to live with the consequences. These things will probably happen no matter who gets voted into office.
FWIW, I don't think the impending Socialist bent will last--remember, we managed to wrestle our way out of the Democrat's political power grip before, and we'll do it again just as soon as our great-grandchildren and very young immigrants learn the value of a dollar (or rather Amero) and desire to hang onto more of them. In the meantime, we will have abdicated all we have left to abdicate: our free will and our rights. Socialism has never lasted anywhere it took hold, and it won’t here either. Too many of us will know better by then.
Our borders shall remain open so those being expelled from our society have somewhere else to go, and both options (Canada and Mexico) are states with abundant safety nets. As soon as the illegals are made legal, and our generational welfare rats have scurried off to new homes north or south of the border, many doors will shut behind them: welfare, Social Security, food stamps, and all other forms of human subsidies. The New Deal will become No Deal—at least for the “new” rats. Our new set of welfare queens will come from the grandchildren of Boomers—those who’d rather picket, protest, and panhandle rather than do an honest day’s work. What else can we expect from children and grandchildren of protesters, except to hand down that family tradition of making waves, no matter how absurd?
Moving on: Castro has supposedly “retired”, and mentions replacement by a younger party member—and it ain’t his slightly younger brother Raoul. Most likely, it’s going to be Chavez, who’s used his own country for OJT. Since his fellow countrymen voted him down as Dictator-for-Life, he has to leave office when his term expires, and I’m sure he wants to go somewhere friendlier to his ideas and methods—where else but Cuba? Once he’s gone, the rest of the SPP plan will go forward, because he was the only major sticking point stopping it—we already have trade agreements with nearly all the other countries in South America, and are working on the drug exporter countries in Central America.
China already has port access in Mexico, so shipments can avoid the scrutiny we fight so hard to get in place at the border, in spite of Homeland Security’s foot-dragging—this is all part of that open borders thing. Now China can ship to Mexico, and trucks can take cargo all the way up the proposed NAFTA/I-35 (Mexico to Canada) with very little interference. Yippee—more lead and mercury for everyone, not to mention the possibility of terrorist activities! And to think we can’t board a plane without x-ray scrutiny…(sigh).
Our own elites are witnessing and yearning for a China-style eco-political system: an iron hand over the people, but a free hand over commerce. That’s what gives power to all—the leader and the people, but not the people over the leader. We’ve already been rendered too stupid to vote our way out of a wet paper bag, so the elites have engineered a whole new system to rule us over our heads and behind closed doors. China has it, as does Russia, and both leaders have one thing in common: a craving for power. Cheney and Rumsfeld have it too, but couldn’t remake the successes they accomplished back in Nixon’s realm—to create so much fear and loathing that we sheep just turn over our keys (along with our privacy rights) and let them drive. The comparisons of Vietnam and Iraq are more accurate than you know in terms of the politics and goings-on behind the scenes. Look at what they created over Saddam Hussein, Iran, and nukes when our own intelligence says the whole thing was ceased three years ago.
How many troops died so Cheney and Rumsfeld could peek at our phone records unannounced and apprehend us without cause? We’re still feeling the effects every time we go to the airport—we practically have to file a flight plan with Darth Vader himself before showing up for our public frisking! They want to know about OUR goings-on in x-ray detail, but care nothing about imported goods or illegals flowing into this country by the boat-load. FISA was their political wet dream, and it will die from exposure to UV rays.
Meanwhile, we’re left with the residue of 9/11: color-coded threat levels, plastic sheets, and duct tape. Al-Qaeda is a weak sister and will never make it over here in meaningful numbers. They’re too busy blowing up their own people over their own power grab—they didn’t count on the rest of us being so vigilant. We took their power away by not being afraid, on both a military and personal level. We will do the same here at home over FISA and Homeland Security.
On the environmental front: we will have been gagging on the global warming thing for years now, and it’s always going to be nothing more than a clever marketing ploy. One solution to the we-buy-oil, we-go-to-war, we-finance-our-own-enemies circle is alcohol-based fuels—they aren’t any more efficient than ethanol, but methanol in particular can be made from the fermentation of just about anything: trash, yard waste, crop waste, coal, refinery waste and by-products, you name it. Our own city dumps have the potential to become our next gas stations, and states could own the fuel sales just like they now (in large part) own booze and tobacco sales. The dumps already sort and recycle, so what’s another (profitable) way to dispose of the indisposable besides burning and burying? It’s another source of revenue for the city, state or region, and it gets us off the OPEC treadmill. Once we get our energy stuff together, the price of oil may once again plummet to below $70/barrel or lower. All we need is about $150 worth of flex-fuel conversion work done to our existing cars to handle the new fuel OR the old gasoline—flex-fuel cars run both. All that needs to be changed is the gas line and the ignition, and these things can be done today in preparation. For optimal conversion, a larger gas tank will have to be installed, because more alcohol-based fuel will be needed to obtain the same MPG that you get now, but the air will be cleaner, and oil spills will be a thing of the past (alcohol evaporates into the air).
Funny how nobody has put the hole in our ozone together with global cooling, isn’t it? The hole has closed, and now we’re warming up again—it’s like putting a hat on to preserve body heat. You think maybe the earth put on its own hat by closing the ozone hole? Maybe we need to re-open that hole so polar ice won’t melt. God save the polar bears!
On the energy front: Several Saudi princes have been making large bets on hotels in Central Africa for years now, and I think I know why: a place to escape to when their own people rise up and overthrow the monarchy. The Saudi population is largely young, restless, and in desperate need of opportunity—uneducated and nowhere to go. Also, the oil dependence thing will have been solved, so oil-related jobs will no longer be available. The Middle East will be hip-deep in its own revolt, oil fields will no doubt be damaged, and supply will be severely cut just as our demand has entered its twilight. China, Russia, and the Middle East may join forces and create the world’s first central manufacturing center, combining Chinese steel with Arab and Russian oil. Sand-dwellers will climb down from their camels (so to speak) and take up blue-collar jobs—something they’ve never had before. This working center may spread all the way into Africa, or Africans and Palestinians may migrate over to the Middle East for work. Peace will break out in the region because people will be too busy working to blow anybody up. Prosperity will finally occur in the Muslim world.
Our merger with Canada for their oil sands, and Mexico and Venezuela for their heavy sour crude will pretty much wrap up our oil needs so we won’t have to disturb the deer in Anwar with drilling or intrude on the Utopian splendor in Colorado for coal mining. Mexico and Central America may become our new China for cheap labor-fueled light manufacturing and assembly as China gets regulated and legislated out of our business realm of possibilities. Prisons and jails here at home will make up our remaining cheap-labor needs.
Oil will reach $100-$120/barrel and stay there before falling in the second half of ’08, and the economic talking heads (Bernanke, Kudlow, etc.) will continue to pull wool over viewer’s eyes with the “no such recession” talk—by the time they acknowledge a recession, we will have reached depression status. These economic commentators are paid to be cheerful and positive, just as others get paid for doom-and-gloom forecasts—it’s what brings ratings. DON’T FORGET THAT!
I’m on nobody’s payroll—getting paid would ruin my tax strategy.
After the Beijing Olympics come and go, ethanol will become a passing fancy, as will the whole global warming thing. Hopefully, nuke plants will finally be making a comeback, in spite of the shrill cry of NIMBYs. We will be pretty much rerunning the same energy moves we made since the last oil crisis of the 70’s (higher CAFÉ standards, even more efficient appliances, realistic-sized LED bulbs, etc.), with the possible emergence of an escape from those bloody catalytic converters! Did you know they rob us of a whopping 10 mpg? Get rid of those, and we wouldn’t have to raise CAFÉ standards!
On the defense front: because China may merge with Russia and the Middle East to create this giant centralized steel manufacturing area, China and Russia may get the navy they’ve been sorely lacking. Meanwhile, our navy will be filled with undereducated incompetents (like it is now), be led by idiots who aren’t fit to pour coffee, and we will have gone from command of the high seas to largely rendered deaf-mute and harmless by our own government’s actions. While all three “oil/steel” countries will have command of the skies with life-sized planes and armament, we will have long since turned ourselves over to the Nintendo generation with toy planes, ships, and tanks on radio control. Good thing we’re leaving those borders open so we have somewhere to run and hide!
On the economic front: At the rate in which jobs are moving away from here, secondary education costs are skyrocketing, both we and Uncle Sam are defaulting on loans and accumulating debt, and foreign countries are buying up and loaning money to our businesses these days, we Americans as a culture may turn into the world’s next generational welfare rats. The U.S. may become just another leisure continent to the rest of the world.
The current housing bubble burst will level off in the second half of 2008 through 2009 (possibly making tiny gains), then dive again in 2010—today’s ARMs are due to reset then. Meanwhile, it’s going to be the used car-buying bonanza people have fantasized about, as more and more people default on their car loans right along with their mortgages. Used hybrids may finally come into reach for many (thanks to those who fell for the whole global warming thing), and ethanol increases in the gas-ethanol mix may be coming to your town soon—along with higher car repair bills for corroded fuel lines. Today’s cars cannot run E-85 without anti-corrosive fuel lines found in today’s flex-fuel cars, but that can be remedied for about $150.
As soon as the Beijing Winter Olympics is over, things should return to a 2004 normal—China’s demand for just about everything should dwindle, freeing up lots of resources for everyone else at much lower prices.
Down the road, more and more married working women will find that the new tax picture is just not feasible, and leave the work force in droves—they too will find out that staying home to raise kids and keep the home will pay more in tax benefits than that job ever did, and society will thank them for producing intelligent, respectful kids in return. We will slowly make the descent back into 50’s-style living with modern trappings. Kids will stay home until their mid-20’s or early-30’s due to wages, taxes, and the unaffordability of just about everything. People will be buying duplexes (or apartments) and renting out the extra unit(s) until the kids can handle rent (to get rid of the kids earlier). This will be the new family housing scheme (and the new ownership society), because nobody will be able to afford their own single-family homes after about 2015 unless they’re rich. The housing market may never return to the heady days of 2005-2006, because nobody will qualify for a mortgage due to the new tax burden.
I will leave you now, as I see we’ve reached my destination.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Planning Ahead for Next Christmas
When is a good time to shop for NEXT Christmas? Right now--actually, any time between Black Friday and April 15th.
Why? Because retail inventories need to be sold off as much as humanly possible in time to be excluded from their taxes. Inventory carried over is inventory unsold, and technically becomes property of the store, tax-wise.
Now April 15th isn’t necessarily tax time for all retail stores, but most of them have a fiscal calendar that doesn’t match up to the regular calendar, and their particular tax doomsday may be extended past January 1, depending on when they started doing business. A few have tax deadlines AFTER April 15th, but not many—mostly the ones who don’t regularly do a lot of discount selling.
Regular retailers (not wholesalers) like to have their floors cleared out of old inventory no later than April 15th, because the summer selling season merchandise usually arrives by that time, and summer being a “high” season means fewer discounts until the back-to-school season arrives, which leads us into pre-Christmas blowouts.
With our economy not performing as well as it did in years past, due to job losses, home foreclosures, gas prices, and extreme weather, you can expect year-round sales to be fewer and farther between as well.
The time to start saving for next Christmas is when you get your tax refund back—or if no refund, start a savings account (non-Christmas club, if you please). Designated Christmas club accounts will expect you to withdraw your money by a certain date to count as Christmas savings—usually by December 31. Since they pay exactly the same rate of interest as regular accounts, why not open a regular account with no withdrawal timetables built in? That way, you can use the Black Friday-to-Tax Day shopping method and get the most bang for your gift buck or gift card over 5 months and a week of prime discount shopping time.
Sure, your gifts will seem so “last year,” but you will have saved enough money not to care one way or the other. Besides, that’s what return desks are for—so the recipient can either exchange it for something “today,” or for whatever cash the item’s worth now (and it usually has left the system some time ago, so no return value can be assessed to it). As an alternative, they can re-gift the item elsewhere, or donate it to charity. It really doesn’t matter, because you will have spent so little for the item in the first place.
Try thinking ahead on holiday shopping by planning NEXT year’s gifts THIS year during the heavy-discount period. This should work all the way up until the retailers finally figure out what we’re up to, and delay discounts to later in the year, or worse—lump them all together in June. Then we really WILL have Christmas in June! Whatever they end up doing, they will always have to mark down to avoid taxes on unsold merchandise—we can wait ‘em out, can’t we? We have a plan.
Why? Because retail inventories need to be sold off as much as humanly possible in time to be excluded from their taxes. Inventory carried over is inventory unsold, and technically becomes property of the store, tax-wise.
Now April 15th isn’t necessarily tax time for all retail stores, but most of them have a fiscal calendar that doesn’t match up to the regular calendar, and their particular tax doomsday may be extended past January 1, depending on when they started doing business. A few have tax deadlines AFTER April 15th, but not many—mostly the ones who don’t regularly do a lot of discount selling.
Regular retailers (not wholesalers) like to have their floors cleared out of old inventory no later than April 15th, because the summer selling season merchandise usually arrives by that time, and summer being a “high” season means fewer discounts until the back-to-school season arrives, which leads us into pre-Christmas blowouts.
With our economy not performing as well as it did in years past, due to job losses, home foreclosures, gas prices, and extreme weather, you can expect year-round sales to be fewer and farther between as well.
The time to start saving for next Christmas is when you get your tax refund back—or if no refund, start a savings account (non-Christmas club, if you please). Designated Christmas club accounts will expect you to withdraw your money by a certain date to count as Christmas savings—usually by December 31. Since they pay exactly the same rate of interest as regular accounts, why not open a regular account with no withdrawal timetables built in? That way, you can use the Black Friday-to-Tax Day shopping method and get the most bang for your gift buck or gift card over 5 months and a week of prime discount shopping time.
Sure, your gifts will seem so “last year,” but you will have saved enough money not to care one way or the other. Besides, that’s what return desks are for—so the recipient can either exchange it for something “today,” or for whatever cash the item’s worth now (and it usually has left the system some time ago, so no return value can be assessed to it). As an alternative, they can re-gift the item elsewhere, or donate it to charity. It really doesn’t matter, because you will have spent so little for the item in the first place.
Try thinking ahead on holiday shopping by planning NEXT year’s gifts THIS year during the heavy-discount period. This should work all the way up until the retailers finally figure out what we’re up to, and delay discounts to later in the year, or worse—lump them all together in June. Then we really WILL have Christmas in June! Whatever they end up doing, they will always have to mark down to avoid taxes on unsold merchandise—we can wait ‘em out, can’t we? We have a plan.
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