Farm Aid

 Here it is; here I am. Much ado about nothing.
a simple gate after a ton of bickering and lot of lawyers!

Wow, they are trying to balance the budget and I am wondering where they will start?

  I used to think, not the poor farmers, those who toil from before sunrise to after sunset, those who rely on the fickle weather to eck out a living scratching their existence from the hard clay of this Earth!

   My "Hatfield and McCoy" feuding vintner's job is being resolved.  Yes, I still have their gate near the front of my shop!  You might remember this story.  Three "vintners", one road and the argument over who pays the bills and who can use the road.  It all went to court and now it is resolved.  Maybe...

   At any rate they called me to say they are ready for the installation of their gate.  After three months, "what gate?" I said, "Who are you?"  Too subtle for them they saw no humor in my quibs. 

   I will install this gate today but went out there yesterday to make sure there were no problems, at least no anticipated problems.

   Forty acres seems to be the minimum size to get significant "farm aid" around here and that is what they have.  Unkempt, poorly trimmed and looking abandoned.  Forty acres of grapes and weeds.  But I got to see "the House"!

   At least 4,000 square feet, at the top of the knol, brand new and just on "the tour of homes", it was a showcase for sure!

   I could go on and on about this, describing walk in closets bigger than my living room, but just so you get the idea I want to tell you about the kitchen appliances.  No, not the whole kitchen which could comfortably seat twenty onlookers as the cook (chef?) prepared the evening meals, just the stoves and refrigerators and stuff.  $58,000 worth!  That is way more than I paid for my house, fifty-eight thousand dollars just for the appliances!  I didn't even know there could be such a thing!

   This guy sells used cars for a living.  A used car salesman with a farmer's aid package that cuts his property taxes to less than mine!

   He might, on a good year, produce one bottle of wine, a vinegar based cooking wine.  Something to give you a sour taste in your mouth.

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Truth and Consequence!

   Now is the time in the United States where we will get a year and a half of Political BS from the politicians.
This is a tradition in America, it is a multi-billion dollar a year industry, an economic driver in itself.  They are all lying, of course, both sides and the "independents" and just everyone.  We are lied to and attach blame to
how we got into this mess and we are lied to any way out of it. We form opinions based on distortion, fired with emotion.  The easiest way is to obfuscate the issues with hatred.
   We don't teach literature anymore, or ethics or even logical thinking.  We know nothing about economics;
we don't even know our own history.  And we Vote!  Politics today is a bit like "American Idol" and this seems to be okay with us.
   Henry Ford had it right.  100 years ago he invented the assembly line, mass manufacturing and ushering in the era of modern industry.  One key to his success created the rise of the American Middle Class.  He paid his workers enough that they could afford to buy what they were making.  Pretty simple arithmetic.
   These were the days, and they lasted for almost one hundred years, where a CEO of a company made about six times the wages of their average worker.  Now that figure is thousands of times and in some cases
with stock options and bonuses, millions of times!
   I am not discussing what is fair here or whether these people really work that hard, this is only a discussion about math.  Money is not printed on demand, there is only so much available.  If one person is getting a LOT, someone else is getting less.  It would make no difference if the money were all taxed at the same rate and if the money stayed here and continued to circulate, eventually "trickling down" so everyone could have a chance at it.  But that is not how it works, not today anyway.  Money is shipped overseas, invested in foreign manufacturing, off shore bank accounts and otherwise hidden and taken out of circulation.
We STILL offer tax incentives to the oil companies as if Billions of dollars a month in profits weren't enough!
We STILL offer tax incentive to the mega-farmers, giant chemical corporations and others.  "Mega money"
before the loopholes are figured in is taxed at 15%.  General Motors paid NOTHING! There are a lot of loopholes!  This money is NOT taxed for social security, Not taxed for Medicare.
   Why is this kind of wealth so sacred?  ONE simple tax would solve our budget problems and offer a surplus.  Close the loopholes and have a 3% tax on money OVER 100,000 dollars, or $200,000 for a family of four.  What would be the down side to this?  Do you think they would quit working in protest?
   Congress will get the money somewhere but they won't cut their wages or their benefits.  One term in Congress and you have benefits forever!  That is a pretty good deal.  I should have gone into politics!

The Business of Business

Small business is the backbone of this country and I think that is defined as 200 employees or less.  For a while I had as many as fifteen but the average for my 35 years in construction was only five.  I also had steady, reliable sub-contractors, plumbers, masons, roofers, electricians and such.  It is a lot of responsibility.
   The cost of doing business does not begin here though.  In my town this type of business can't be run out of your home so first you need a place for business, somewhere the employees can gather to go to work and a place to store equipment and supplies.  I had a small shop I rented in one of those series of shops that every town has.  This costs me about $600 per month.
   Electrical rates for business are more expensive than residential rates so with only a small office heated this added about $200 to my monthly expense.  I had a lot of tools which I sometimes forget as an expense of doing business but you have to have them.  I would guess at one time this might have been $10,000 worth of tools, and then, a little truck, a big truck and a van.  I had to have insurance of these, of course, and commercial insurance is more expensive than personal insurance, and then you need liability insurance on everything you touch!  My "insurance package" came to over $500 a month.
    Without opening my doors and going to work, actually finding a job to pay for all this I figure my base cost of operations was close to $2,000 a month!  And I sometimes, except for around tax time, forget the yearly expenses that just seem to come up!  Accounting and bookkeeping was another grand a year!
    And, have I mentioned Taxes yet?  I am retired now and I have forgotten most of them but everyone wanted a piece of my action!  First, without making a dime, there were property taxes and inventory taxes and taxes on the equipment and vehicles!  And when you really get that first job the tax people are at your door.  It is like working for the Mafia!  In my county we have a bus system that is employer subsidized.  It makes no difference that we can't actually take our ladders and saws onto the bus, we pay for it anyway!
We have a great on the job injury insurance in our state but it is extremely expensive, averaging 17% of a paycheck in the construction trades, over 40% for roofers.  Social Security costs another 15%, the employer contributing 8% of this.  I have always been self employed so I paid the entire 15% on myself.
   I know there were more taxes but like any painful memory, as you get away from this you have a tendency to forget them.  Then, of course, there is the great bug a boo, the thing we hate to talk about and hope will just go away or solve itself:  Health Insurance!  When I began my company over 35 years ago I could get an adequate, although not perfect, policy for my employees for about $100 each per month.  When I retired this expense had grown to over $900 each per month.  It has become a burden that business can no longer bare.
The cost of health care adds about $1,700 to the price of an American automobile, almost nothing to the cost of an imported car!
    As an average, the last year I was in business, my employees made about $12 per hour, some more, some less.  I had to divide my expense of business by five, the number of employees I had.  Sometimes I am competing with a guy out of his car with a Black and Decker skill saw and a fifteen foot extension cord with no license, no insurance, no cost of doing business at all.
    I guess I am writing all this so you can appreciate how complicated all of this is.  I take my hat off to the small business person of this country.  They work hard with high risks and little appreciation for being the backbone of our American system.

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Monopoly Money

Monopoly is a great board game, fun for the whole family!  It was invented during the Great Depression, in the 1930's when the entire country ran out of money and no one had work. It might be time to go into the attic and dust it off and start playing the game again!  The game begins with each player having an equal amount of money and the bank has a lot.  You play until you run out of money or, in some cases, the bank runs out of money.  Then the game is over!  It is a game of skill and luck.
     This game can go on for hours, in fact I have played a single game over a three day period! It continues as long as money remains in circulation and each player has some property, some method of earning more money.  When one player has lost his property or when the property wealthy players lose their money then the game is over quickly.
     This is all related to art because I make my living as an artist, selling my wares to people who have money.  No, I don't sell to the "super-rich", I have never met them.  I sell mostly to the upper middle class, those with good jobs, good benefits and yes, even those with good pensions!  I admit it, I am worried about the economy because I need these people!  They are my customers!
    It is not "Boardwalk" and "Park Place" that is being removed from our economy.  I think you could probably still play "Monopoly" without these two positions.  It is the railroads and utilities that are being taken away.  For now, anyway, but they will be coming for the others!  We have changed the rules and it is now a bit more like "Domino's"!  or that children's song, what is it?  "Pansie, Pansie, all fall down"!
    Destroying the middle class, attempting some kind of equality by pulling down those just ahead of us in this rat race will not be good for me.  I doubt that it will be a good thing for anyone.  These are the people that continue the money in circulation, the people who buy new cars, keep the stores afloat, people that buy my art.
    Monopoly doesn't work when the Bank has all the money either.  When the player's have none the game is over.
This is what I do.

Distribution of Wealth

     is really what government is all about.  The roads that are built, the bridges constructed are all about
economy and delivery of products and services.  Schools and education have replaced apprenticeship programs and are necessary for industry and modern technology.  Our military protects our wealth, our beliefs.  The local police protect our homes.  10,000 years ago, maybe if you wanted something, if you were big enough, you could just take it.  Someone discovered that six little guys had the power of one big guy and governments were formed.  You could no longer take what you wanted, there were laws and rules and regulations to acquisition of property.
    Nothing has ever been equal for everyone all the time.  There have always been poor people and the very rich.  These two extremes to our political system have always been with us and are probably not a bad thing
because they come with benefits.  The "right to be poor" is inextricably tied to the "right to be left alone" and individual rights, even the right to fail. On the other end of this spectrum, the wealthy, is our right to succeed and reap the rewards of working hard.  It offers us a goal and opportunity, something to "work hard for".
   This system of economics, our capitalist system has worked well for most people, most of the time.  It has always been open to improvement and there have been ways to alter it with the times.  For instance, we have abandoned slavery, we developed child labor laws and equal rights between the sexes.  More improvements can be made and we have a political system that slowly and steadily allow for these changes.
    But something has happened.  In the last twenty-five years something has happened that has horribly altered the math to our economic system and it is not working like it used to work.  Very simply put, if you reduced us to a village of only 100 people, it used to be like this:  there would be one person in this village who, for whatever reason just couldn't make it.  This person needed our assistance, maybe help with housing or food or unemployment or medical help. 80 people in this village had jobs and worked hard, paid taxes, bought cars and were at various points along this economic scale and they knew that working hard and carefully spending their money would offer them an even better future. Nine people worked for the government, doing what government people do, working to continue this system. and maybe ten people were "wealthy". Not wealthy beyond our dreams, in fact maybe our dreams could take us there.  We could work harder, save more, spend wisely, do what they did.  This was the "American Dream" and we were the only country in the world where this could really happen.  It still does, we are not entirely broken, but this might be only availabe to one in this village of a hundred.  About the same math as becoming a rock star.
   What it used to be, it seems, is there was a million dollars in this village.  The one poor person received
almost nothing.  The eighty people in the middle earned various proportions of $800,000 divided based on production and working hard, their educational and skill abilities. The people "at the top" split the remaining $200,000 and did whatever they did with it, invested it and loaned it out to create more!
    The math and distribution of money is all different now.  The "one" village poor guy has been joined by 20 others and for whatever reason just can't make it without a lot of help.  In fact, the help has been extended to the next 20 people and we now have in our little village of 100 forty people who are receiving help. Help with food, medicine, houseing, education, utilities, transportation, unemployment or something. There is no longer enough work in our village. What used to be a group of 80 people all working hard to sustain this system has dwindled to 60 and is getting smaller every day.  In 1965 General Motors was America's largest employer with an average wage of $25 per hour. Today it is Walmart with an average wage of just over nine dollars.
   The "top 10%" are still with us and always will be no matter the system.  The difference is now, instead of controlling that $200,000 in our mythical budget of a million, they control $400,000.  There is only the million to be had, you can't really just print more money.  So the very wealthy have acquired this by subtraction. It is all math in the end.  If someone gets more there will be someone who gets less.
    This might all be okay if these were even dreamable numbers, but they aren't.  We are talking riches here beyond our ability to count.  Five Billion Dollar Bonuses!!!! and almost none of it is returned to the village.
It is in off shore bank accounts. It is invested, not in our factories, nothing to support our village. It is out-sourced, sent to another villaged, not even in this country.  While we work hard and pay our 35% in taxes, these multi-billion dollar bonuses are taxed at 15%.  No transportation tax, nothing for our roads or bridges or to help our village in any way.  NO Social Security Tax, Nothing to help or offer assistance to our growing bottom, now 20%.
     The problem with this math, and math it is, is that it is getting worse.  We now have to offer incentives and bribery to keep the money here, to build our village instead of theirs.  Now the bottom is so much bigger and becoming larger every day.  The lowest Forty percent have nothing!!! and the top 10% control over 40% of the wealth.
    No, I am not a communist, I am not even a Socialist.  I live in this village.
This is what I do.

Billions and the National Debt!

     Yesterday I was talking (off the top of my head) about personal economics and was referring to hundreds and thousands of dollars.  That is "chump change" (what you pay a boxer to lose a fight on purpose); the real issue is in Millions and Billions of Dollars.  Can you count that high?  Personally I think it is pretty exciting when someone can earn this kind of money and I would like to think they worked really, really hard for it.  If I just weren't so lazy, then maybe I could get into this part of the American Dream too!  Maybe if I slept less and got another job?  Or went back to school and learned something useful?  I realize that a million bucks isn't what it used to be.  It is, after all, only $500 per hour!  Some CEO of Google just received $100,Million dollar bonus for this past year.  It was a good year for him and I am sure he worked extra hard.
That would be $50,000 dollars per hour!  Doesn't sound like a lot when put that way.  I saw on the news last night that a Wall Street Banker made FIVE BILLION DOLLARS last year, a huge improvement from last year when he only made $4,000,000,000 Dollars.  Five billion would be about $125,000 PER HOUR, maybe anyway, I get lost in the zero's.
     It takes 100 thousand people, each earning $50,000 a year to make Five Billion, that is a whole city full of people each making pretty good money.
     The difference in Tax Revenue is pretty big.  This "city worker" would be taxed at about 35% and to that you would have to include his Social Security Tax, his share and his employers shared being about 15%.That would be about (this math is killing me!) 650 MILLION DOLLARS!!! for the City Workers.  The guy who made five billion paid NOTHING!!! and he didn't pay 35% either, only 15%
     I think making Millions and Billions, maybe even a Gazillion Dollars would be pretty cool. This is America, right?  and if you can figure out how to do this without going to jail, well then more power to you!
But I am in favor of the same tax rate for everyone for everything.  This is no kind of punishment or a tax on the wealthy.  I am sure they have expenses, legitimate reasons for their deductions.  I am only saying that if they were taxed at the same rate as everyone else then we wouldn't have a National Debt and the Social Security Fund would have a surplus.
    In order to reduce the National Debt you only have two choices: Reduce Spending or Increase Taxes.
The Wars are our biggest expenditures and if you add to that the cost of taking care of our men and women in uniform who return broken and in pain, you are talking trillions of dollars there.  Taxes are simple and you can get this money from wherever you want to.  We could tax bread so even the poorest of the poor would have to pay. Or, we could make taxes more equal, say, after the first $30,000 everyone would pay the same percentage on everything. Or, we could admit that it is only in our society where we have a certain reverence for greed and wealth, that it is even possible to make FIVE BILLION in ONE YEAR, and just bump these people a little tiny bit, say a 2% extra for wealth tax.  Then the country would have a surplus.
    We live in a Democracy and these issues are up for voting all the time. The Social Security Tax applies to the fist $116,000 of earned income, that means wages.  The guy who made $5,000,000,000 paid NOTHING because his money came from "Capital Gains".  The google guy who only made $100,000,000
paid NOTHING for the same reason.  Their tax rate is 15% and our tax rate is 35%.
    The National Debt has to be paid down or China will own us, it is that simple.  All of this is simple math.
The guy at the corner store buying his dinner with food stamps or who is on public assistance is the "chump change" to all of this.  He is irritating because we work so hard and maybe he doesn't, but he is a diversion and represents pennies to this problem.  We see him every day and it is a thorn in our side but he is not the issue.  On a pie chart he is not even a slice.  The biggest piece of this pie is the servicing of our National Debt, like making minimum payments on a Visa card, it just gets bigger and bigger.
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The Socialist Approach

What the heck is this anyway?  I mean in America, land of the free.  I am not a socialist, let me be clear about that.  I am way too much in favor of descent, have often mentioned here that I wouldn't join a group that had such low standards as to accept me in their membership.  I like a thousand ideas on the table and after sifting through them I make up my own mind.  I think all ideas need to be expressed without labels which only raise the hairs and befuddle the issues at hand.
     Historically a government has two main jobs and in our country it has further tasks that we give it. These jobs are to protect us and to redistribute the wealth.  That's right.  That is why we have commerce laws and taxes and certain rules and regulations.  You can't rob a bank; you have to actually get a job and earn your money.  That's the law. In a real socialist society the "people" might actually rob this bank.  It has happened and it just never seems to work.  We are really robbing this bank right now, stealing from future depositors, our very children.  Our National Debt has grown to over $40,000 for each man, woman and child living in the United States.   If you want true freedom and responsibility this debt could be transferred to each of us personally, just added to our Visa cards!
   I fear the word, socialism, we all do and that is why it is used.  We imagine it with a police state and Stalinist tactics of oppression.  But let me tell you things we have now and see how you feel about them.
Economic Socialism is nothing but shared responsibility.  We share the benefits and we share the risks.
Have you been in a store recently where the employees are wearing badges that say something to the effect:
"I am an owner of this employee owned store"?  We have grocery stores, hardware stores and even variety stores in my town where they wear these badges.  That is socialism.
    If you don't use that emotional word and just think about the shared responsibility around you, you will see we have socialism everywhere.  Unemployment, Food cards, and any public assistance is a method of redistributing the wealth.  It is nice to think we do this from the kindness of our hearts, that it is the right thing to do when someone is down on their luck.  Historically that is garbage.  We do it to prevent riots,  as an alternative to robbing banks. Go back to the Great Depression in the twenties when we didn't have these "safety nets" and read what happened, or in the 1890's when cities were burnt to the ground.  Desperate people do desperate things.
    We have National Health Care, and a lot of it, just not everyone.  Our military has it with the Veteran's
Administration.  It is not self supporting, it is funded by taxes.  We pay for it.  Personally I think we do it out of guilt for what we have asked our servicemen and women to do in our name.  And, if you can make it to 65 in one piece we have Medicare and once there, probably the best system of Health Care in the World.
That is Socialism.
     Libraries are socialist.  We can't even imagine a time when if you wanted to read a book you had to buy it, but it used to be that way, before, as a society, we valued reading.  Our system of medical care has very little to do with capitalism and free enterprise. I think, however this idea should be included for discussion!
You can't just build a hospital or set up an MRI in a corner store and go into business for yourself.  We have laws to prevent that.  We have a lot of laws to prevent free competition in the medical business.  Pharmacies are heavily subsidized.  Most of the research money is generated from taxes, the government, us. We pay for it.
     I am not saying any of this is good or bad.  I am only saying it should be discussed, put on the table without emotional labels, no one wearing any political hats, and see what the ideas are, see if we can come to a kind of agreement.  Besides a particular vocabulary, what makes this very difficult is it is all expensive.
Nothing is free.  I don't need any kind of National Health at all, in any form.  I had (past tense, thank you!)
Cancer and it cost $130,000 to cure me and all but $1,000 was covered by insurance.  I have a "Cadillac"
policy, which means, basically, someone else paid for it.
    Some of these issues should be really easy to discuss.  Would National Health be less expensive? That is just math and someone should be able to explain this to us.  Why are we paying, as an average, $7,000 per year for medical costs and other countries pay half of this and live longer? and there are a lot of other real questions and concerns we have that, maybe, without emotional catch phrases we could get to the bottom.
In California some insurance companies raised their premiums by 50% just last month!  Businesses can't afford this; we can't afford this.  How much worse does it have to get before we are willing to make changes?
     One other issue makes this complicated.  Do we vote for ourselves or do we vote for our children?
I wouldn't mind a true Capitalist System.  Pay for it or die.  I would live.  I have been a businessman all my life and I have and pay for good insurance.  What happens more often than you would like to think is a guy has a good job with good insurance and he gets cancer.  Halfway through his treatment he is too sick to work and loses his job...And his insurance.  Happens all the time.  Maybe this is an opportunity to discuss  what kind of society do we want to live in?  Could we dare to not just think about our personal selves?
     I refuse to believe that this is not a discussable issue. There is an Art to discussion, we just have to find it.
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