Who is rich?

Trump's new declared tax plan has sent out ripples of reaction throughout the media, mainstream and not. Some say that he goes too far. Many say he does not go far enough. Everyone seems to have a different opinion on the specifics of the plan. Memorably, several scattered sources have claimed that the mortgage interest deduction currently causes rich people who pay the AMT to buy larger homes (and people being able to afford larger homes is a problem, for some reason). Others have claimed that some lower-middle class families may pay as much as $100 per year in additional taxes as a result of this "horrible and regressive" plan. (They were notably silent when Obamacare premiums rose by an average of about 25% this year.)

I have seen a theme repeated, though, among rank-and-file commenters on various news sources, that troubles me, because it is linked to a problematic underlying philosophy. They say that this plan is all well and good, but this tweak or that tweak needs to be made to ensure that the rich pay their fair share. Usually in debunking this argument, conservatives and libertarians lean on words like "pay" (does the government have the right to take the money?), "fair" (a higher percentage of their income? A higher percentage of the taxes?), or "share" (What do people owe society as tribute for the shame of being wealthy?). I would like to focus, instead, on the word "Rich".

Terry Pratchett was an economic and political genius, and we are all sadder for his loss. In one of his early books, Guards Guards, he described the mindset of a group of laborers coming together under the leadership of a man who hoped to rule the city by terrorizing it with a dragon that he needed their help to summon.

The Supreme Grand Master listened to this with a slightly lightheaded feeling. It was as if he’d known that there were such things as avalanches, but had never dreamed when he dropped the little snowball on top of the mountain that it could lead to such astonishing results. He was hardly having to egg them on at all.

“I bet a king’d have something to say about landlords,” said Brother Plasterer.
“And he’d outlaw people with showy coaches,” said Brother Watchtower. “Probably bought with stolen money, too, I reckon.”
“I think,” said the Supreme Grand Master, tweaking things a little, “that a wise king would only, as it were, outlaw showy coaches for the undeserving.”
There was a thoughtful pause in the conversation as the assembled Brethren mentally divided the universe into the deserving and the undeserving, and put themselves on the appropriate side.

 This little mental exercise is undergone by each and every person who argues that "the rich" need to pay "their fair share". They celebrate tax cuts for "the middle class", of course, people making only [insert their own income here], but the "really rich people" need to continue to pay more. The definition of "really rich people" differs wildly by example, but it always represents a margin north of the commenter's own income.

If there's one takeaway I'd like my readers to get from this post, it is this, and I'll put it in boldface so that it sticks out despite being probably about halfway through my 'essay' by the time I'm done: You do not want someone else deciding what constitutes "wealth" for the purpose of government confiscation and redistribution of wealth.

This is actually a lesson that I first tried to give people when Obama was running for office in 2008, and many moderates took his speeches about how "the rich need to pay their share" and "we need to have a global mindset" in this exact same way: they mentally divided the universe into the deserving and the undeserving, and put themselves on the appropriate side. All the while, I was trying to pound away, to get people to listen and understand that, on a global perspective, even the poorest people who aren't even on welfare, even the homeless people on the street with no ID, no income, and no government social programs, are wealthy.

When the working-class started seeing their costs rise and their benefits decrease under Obama, I already knew it was coming. They fussed and fretted and felt betrayed, but I had already anticipated this move. The universe had been divided by the people with the power to make the changes, and these folks were not on the side where they expected to be.

The people now talking about the "rich paying their fair share" are mostly speaking against the total removal of the AMT. Don't remove it completely, they say. Just shift it up a bit. A bit further. You know, far enough so that I'm not "rich" anymore. What they miss is that this was the original intent and purpose of the AMT, which at first only targeted about 155 families, but which now reaches well into the middle class.

So let me remind 'my people'... 'ah, my people'... that the average American household in poverty has a large enough home that it would be considered 'wealthy' in most of Western Europe. You could halve the food stamp allotment to the poorest families and they'd still have more to eat than most people in the world. In fact, even in the country with the highest median income per household in the world (Norway, according to Gallup), that income is less than $52K/year... and some people claiming both that we need to keep the AMT and they shouldn't be paying it were claiming a household income in the $70-150K range.

Ditch the AMT. What with the removal of all these tax breaks, Trump would be practically enacting it on everyone anyways. Let the rich have their break. You have your break. Don't be so eager to define whether someone else has "too much" money, "too big" house, "too many" vacations, "too fancy" clothing.

Rest assured that someone else is doing it to you.

Spinning the situation

My congressman sent me a "poll/survey" through the email.

Right now, Congress and the president are negotiating a solution to resolve our default crisis. If Congress does NOT vote to raise the debt ceiling, do you believe that this would be a real and serious problem?*


Yes
No
Not Sure




As a member of the Congressional Seniors Task Force, I cosigned a letter to the President this month objecting to proposed benefit changes to Social Security and Medicare as part of any deal. Do you believe that changes to benefits and cuts to Medicare and Social Security should NOT be part of a debt agreement?


Medicare and Social Security should not be cut or changed.
Cuts to Social Security and Medicare should be considered.
Not Sure




Republicans in Congress have said they are unwilling to raise any taxes, including on oil companies, corporations and the wealthy. Do you believe that closing tax loopholes or increasing revenues on corporations or millionaires should be part of a balanced approach to ending our default crisis?


Yes
No
Not Sure

This was my emailed response:

I tried to take your survey on the debt limit crisis, but I couldn't. The answers to the questions were all horribly skewed, and I couldn't pick one that came even close to my thoughts.

If Congress does not raise the debt limit, it may be a serious problem, but not nearly as serious as if we raise it with no plan to balance the budget and start paying off the debt. It's a no-brainer that you don't open a new credit card for someone who has ten of them maxed out and no plan to pay them off, but that's exactly what President Obama is asking us to do.

I do disagree with cutting Medicare and Social Security as part of this deal. That is why I supported Cap/Cut/Balance so strongly. I also strongly support a repeal of Obamacare, which will cut Medicare spending as part of its function. I have the feeling, from your record over the years, that this is not what you had in mind when you signed the agreement.... especially as Obama has already sworn to veto plans that do not include cuts to either. I sincerely hope that you are not engaging in scare tactics through an implication that Obama is trying to stop the Conservative Opposition from cutting things that they have explicitly excluded from cuts again and again.

I believe that closing tax loopholes must be accompanied by lowering taxes. I cannot agree with equating the words "tax" and "revenue", as lowering taxes in the past decades has resulted in increased revenues. In fact, I believe firmly that raising taxes at this point on our job creators will only reduce revenues. What we need now is to remove the loopholes that big business prompted legislatures to create along with new taxes and regulations, and reduce overall tax rates, so that everybody pays their fair share. It is not lost on me that the companies that contribute to Democrat politicians end up paying less at tax time. This is wrong.

Please consider this to be my response to your survey.

Becoming Rich Pt. 2

In my last post, I discussed the first of a couple of principles that will aid you in the process of becoming rich. The second is like it, and is best described in Heinlein's book, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. The principle is known as "TANSTAAFL", said as one oddly-pronounced word. It is an acronym that stands for "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch."

What does this mean for the person who is becoming rich? Simply this: Aside from a very few insanely lucky people, it will not happen quickly, and it will not happen without effort. Get-quick-rich schemes either depend on such vanishing statistical chance that they cannot in any way be depended upon, or require of you a price that you may not realize that you are about to pay.

I was tempted by offers of a $1,000 or even $2,000 shopping spree at a national electronics chain. All I had to do was to sign up for a certain number of free or almost-free offers. It was easy money, wasn't it? Not necessarily. I knew from the experiences of others that you would have to remember, personally, to cancel the various offers before you had anywhere from nine to fifteen companies charging you $10-20/month for their services. Actually getting these offers canceled is often a real pain, because many of these companies are less than scrupulous. They will take up your time trying to convince you to stay, and then mysteriously lose your cancellation paperwork to get everything out of you that they can. These offers also often involve you signing away the right for them to sell your information to other companies. One of these shopping sprees can result in a huge overflow of junk mail for years to come.

In other words, the price for the offer was my privacy, along with a great deal of time and energy that in retrospect would be more burdensome than simply finding a job that paid $20/hr and working full-time for about a week and a half. TANSTAAFL.

I have a third principle, and liberals will not want to believe this one, because it undercuts their preferred form of aid to the poor. The principle is this: Spend the money that you earned. Earn the money that you spend. This will aid you greatly in becoming rich.

When people do manage to 'hit the jackpot' and become rich quick, it is almost always temporary. Give them a few weeks to a few years, depending on the dollar amount, and they will be just as poor as before. I have heard it said that if wealth was collected and distributed utterly equally, both property and money, within a generation all the wealth would be back where it was. Why is this?

Human beings value things based on the cost to acquire them. When your riches come to you by your own efforts, you are more likely to be careful with them. If you spent five hours digging ditches to get your check, you are less likely to toss it away on frivolities. Money in and of itself has no value. It's cotton and linen and dyes. The number stamped on it is more or less an arbitrary marking. The reason why it has value to you is because it represents those hours of sweat and aches, and it can be exchanged for a good meal and soft, safe place to sleep.

When people receive money through no effort of their own, through winning a huge prize or being handed it readily by faceless government officials, the money does not represent their hard work. It does not represent hours spent out in the sun, or days of frustrating problem-solving. It has little or no value, and the riches they purchase also mean little to them. What if your television breaks? Buy another! Break it out of pique and buy another! It cost you no effort. It cost you no pain, no determination, no struggle.

Now there are exceptions. Some people who win the lottery do manage their money wisely. Some people who receive aid do invest and use it wisely. By the great majority, however, you should not wish for instant riches if you want to become rich. You should wish instead for the slow and steady path, for the accumulation over years, for the knowledge that every time you are knocked down, you can get back up and start again on the path to becoming rich. Becoming rich, like aging fine wine, is more about the process than the result.

My own family is following this path.We have had downturns and upturns, but over all we are on a slow but steady path to the Middle Class. We take care of the things we own, because they cost us dearly in time and effort to accumulate. We save when we can, spend when we must, and reduce where we can. I used to think that it would be wonderful to win the lottery or suddenly have our mortgage debt randomly forgiven. Now I am beginning to see that such 'blessings' may turn out to be a curse. When we have won our way, we will do so by our own efforts, with our own skills, and our wealth will mean something to us.

May it be for everyone. Then everyone can become truly rich.

Becoming Rich

Thomas Sowell has an excellent article up today about rich people and how they got that way. This is not going to be the exact topic of my post today, but it's worth a read.

I learned a lot from my uncle, my mother's sister's husband. Though he is not related to me by blood, he might as well be. One of the few solidly INTJ people in the world, like me, he was able to help me understand how people like me can move through the world without breaking us... or it. One of the most important things he taught me was how to become rich.

Now, I chose my words very carefully. "Becoming" rich is not the same as "being" rich. The method doesn't guarantee any particular measure of wealth in any particular time. It merely ensures that you will remain on the road of improvement, and you will be better off than the way that you were.

These days, advice about life and work tends to be the kind of advice you'd expect from a very wealthy society. "Find out what makes you happy. Settle for nothing less." That is all very well and good when all businesses are booming and the world is full of friendly bosses just looking for the next CEO. Such environments, though, are historically very rare and unusual, existing only in small parts of the world for mere years or decades at a time. You can't rely on them, especially in this economy.

Of course it's a good thing to find out what makes you happy and strive towards it. Rush Limbaugh encourages his listeners to find what makes you happy and then find out how to make money doing it. He cites that as the secret to his success. It's not the only secret, though, and it is not the most important if what you want is to become rich.

Now let me explain my terms once again. People hear the phrase "become rich" and they think that you're automatically talking about turning from minimum-wage poverty to, well, Rush Limbaugh wealthy. Not everybody is going to do that. Not everybody actually wants it, no matter what they think. By the time I'm done explaining this, you'll understand why. However, if you are in dire straits, you do not have to become rich for your entire life. You only have to do it until you are closer to where you want to be.

The first principle to becoming richer is to do anything (within moral standing) that will get you paid. Nowadays there are too many young people who believe that a certain job is beneath them. They graduate with big-sounding degrees, and they've learned to believe that they should only have to work within their specialty. You can't have this mindset if you want to become richer. If you are searching for a job, you should be willing to take what comes your way. My father has worked as an electronics technician, a system designer, a laser builder... and a carpenter for a cabinet company.

My uncle has told me that he has trouble understanding why some people claim that they are just plain unable to get a job. He taught me that you can get a job as long as you're willing to do anything for pay and let enough people know about it. It may be dirty and unpleasant. You may be digging ditches, or working in a factory. Still, it will be work, and you will get paid. There will be times in your life when that will be the most important thing you can do just to keep yourself and your family going.

Now once you've got that job, you can work your way up. You can find out what you enjoy and try to make money doing it. But the first step is to simply get a job, any job that will feed you, or at least help you make ends meet. You may have to lower your expectations, especially in a poor economy. You may have to lower your standard of living for a time. If you want to survive, however, there will be times in your life when  you simply have to take what you can get. That dirty, tiring job should be viewed, not as a disgrace, but as the beginning of your rise.

Wealth

It's that time of year again. I watched the enormous truck back into the driveway. My son watched in fascination as a man with a thick, greying beard connected the pipe. Within minutes, our oil tank downstairs displayed its little floater at the top of the gauge, and I was writing out a check. We fill our oil tank twice a year, once around November and once around March. Of course, living in the northern hemisphere in a cold-winter area, we use significantly more oil in the winter months. But that's hardly my point today.

I always get a thrill from filling the oil tank. It's the same thrill I get after a good grocery shopping session, in which there have been a lot of good sales and I have filled my cart. It's the thrill I get when the church giveaway room has several outfits out for the taking, all the right sizes for my children. I simply love having Plenty.

This isn't just an odd quirk of mine, mind you. It's a pretty common human condition. In Western Society, we have the curious desire for sparser homes and thinner women. Throughout history, the cultures have trended in the exact opposite direction, probably because wealth was not nearly as common as it is in the present day. Consider the example of the needy taking pictures of soup kitchens on their cell phones. We hardly understand what poverty really is anymore. I can't claim to truly understand it either. Even when we haven't known if we could fill that oil tank again, we've still had a weathertight house and the expectation that nobody is likely to destroy it in war or for spite anytime soon.

I like to focus on and enjoy the simplest and truest types of wealth. Recently, my family and I sang for a Salvation Army coffeehouse. One of the workers there found out that I have a baby girl and offered me some free diapers. I hesitated, automatically saying what I usually say in similar situations. We'd love the help, and I'll definitely use anything we're given, but I'm sure there are others in more need than us and they should probably be aided first. My mother told me on the drive home that we are in fact 'salt of the earth humble' and probably not much less in need than the other families in that area.

This surprised me, to be sure. In my reckoning, we're doing pretty well. Sure, you can look at us as a family who can't yet afford to replace the carpet as it wears thin, we're basically one major car repair away from disaster, and it would be nice to have enough money in the bank to replace a major appliance should it suddenly die. However, I tend to look at the plenty. I look at the pantry piled high with consumables, the lovely big yard, the clothing so plentiful that we can afford to toss pilly t-shirts and holed socks...

...and the filled oil tank, ready to give us heat and hot water all winter long.

Last year, it was only the sudden dip in oil prices that allowed us to fill that tank at all. We're in better shape this year, thanks to the mortgage refinancing done before Obama's plans made the process nearly impossible for anyone who hasn't missed a payment. My baby's hospital bills are all paid off, and we're starting to put money back into savings.

Still, I'm never going to take a filled oil tank for granted again.

So simple, even a housewife can understand

This feels strange. These days, I read the news, and I immediately spot the flaws in the Democrats' plans. I do not own a business. I have had no formal education in business. My bachelor's degree is in Computer Science, for heaven's sake. Yet still, I can read these proposals, and the flaws show as clear as day for me. Is there something unusual about me, or about them?

Today's beauty comes from a Reuters article that I picked up from Newsmax:

Democrats are looking at the possibility of a windfall profits tax on insurance companies as part of healthcare reform, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday.

Pelosi said she had asked House Ways and Means Committee chairman Charles Rangel to examine the possibility and report back to her.

"This is very preliminary," she told reporters.

But she added that insurance companies would get some 50 million new consumers, many subsidized by taxpayers, under reforms Democrats are planning and "we think they can put more on the table."

Okay, it doesn't take a genius to put this plan together. We're talking about switching out the public option (at least in part) for taxpayer-subsidized private options, kind of like what Congress has... but not quite as posh. It seems they want to keep from raising taxes on the middle class by doing it to the insurance companies instead.

This sets up a neat bit of circular logic.

Only a fool would consider it a victory to let someone else take his profits and use them to buy his product.

Remember that profit is what's left after you have paid for your supplies and paid your workers. It's the part that you get to keep for yourself. It's a percentage, sometimes a small percentage, of what your actual product costs. In this plan, you are only going to recover a small percentage of what was taken away.

Now we've had some discussions about profit. Where does it actually go? It pays the salary of the business owner. So technically, if you earn $25,000 per year as a business owner, you have a profit margin of $25,000. In this society, however, it is also paid out in percentages to stockholders. Who owns stock in the company? Why, anybody can own stock, including the workers, who often are given stock as part of their pay.

If your salary is being decreased by the government and you need more money, the only way to do it is to lower your costs or raise the price of your product.

So where will this "windfall tax" money be coming from? Part of it will come from the CEO's salary, and I am sure that's what the Democratic Party is claiming as the source of the entire tax. In truth, only part, probably a small part, will come from there. The rest of the money will come from the middle and lower class in the form of raised premiums, lower stock returns, and fewer workers employed.

Yet again, the Democrat plan basically involves taking from us to spend on us... retaining a percentage for their own purposes, of course. It's a scam, and as scams go it may look good on the surface, but it is fundamentally flawed.

I'm just bewildered that it seems so obvious to me. After all, I am not one of the elite ruling class that the Democrats deem capable of making my own financial decisions. How can I be clever enough to understand the problems with the way they want to spend my money?

Clunkers for Cash: Subsidy for the Rich

I'd like to take a moment and complain heartily about the Clunkers for Cash program. In case you haven't heard, it allows you to get something like up to $4,500 from the government if your old car is sufficiently fuel-inefficient and it is replaced with a tidy little econobox... brand new, of course. And that is where my problem lies.

Just to clarify my wider stance, I disagree with the program itself on the simple basis that I do not believe the government should be using my taxpayer dollars to pay people for the cars that they drive. This is not a matter of national defense or the simple running of the government. It is not a matter of ensuring the uncoerced determination of value that runs a good free market economy. However, even were I to agree with the program and with the government's administering of it, I can still find a problem with what it does and for whom.

If you are going to buy a new car, you need one of two things: a bank account containing the money for a new car, or enough room in your budget for a monthly payment. My family has neither. I continue to wonder how we would be classified economically. My husband works a middle-class job, technically. Since I do not work full-time (I purposely took a job with lower earning power than I actually have, because it is family-friendly), our household income is less than half of what you might expect from a family with college-educated parents. Anyways, the relevancy to this topic is that we have neither sufficient savings to buy a new car nor the room in our monthly budget to make payments on a new car.

Therefore, Cars for Clunkers automatically does absolutely nothing for us.

Recently, my husband's car permanently died. It was a '90 Cutlass Ciera that we bought six years ago for $500, and though it technically still runs, its problems include brake line failure, a rusty gas tank beginning to leak, a transmission that downshifts as if it's going to drop out of the vehicle, and a myriad of mysterious oil leaks. It garnered, on average, 15-20mpg.

We took all of our savings and purchased an '01 Honda Civic. Despite having higher mileage than the car we are replacing, it looks as if it has at least five more years of life in it. My husband reports fuel economy in the neighborhood of 50mpg, but that is only an estimate, since he has not had to fill the gas tank yet.

My car is an '89 Chevy Cavalier station wagon. As of right now, it has no mechanical problems, just a few cosmetic 'quirks'. The body is finally rusting, and I hope it can hold together until we can afford its replacement. If it doesn't keep running for another three or four years at least, we may be stuck with one car, which is tougher than it sounds when you live at least 3 miles away from any non-residential building.

If the Honda Civic was a new vehicle, we would surely qualify for Cash for Clunkers. Unfortunately, we don't have the money to buy a new vehicle. Even the least expensive new vehicle, after the government rebate, would be at least twice what we paid for the Honda. If the program worked for used cars, we could have just about paid for the Honda with the rebate and still had our little nest egg to use when my car gives up its ghost.

But I've learned a long time ago that the government, when run by Liberals, doesn't care about people like us.

The kicker is this: Since we are not too poor to pay taxes, the government will be taking money that we could have used to save for our car fund and using it to pay people who earn more than we do so that they can buy their brand-new cars for less.

Liberals often wonder how anybody below the upper-middle-class could possibly disagree with their social programs. I'm here to explain that this is just one of many examples that formed my anti-socialist bent.

If the government trying to help troubled Americans save the economy results in lower-class Americans paying for upper-class Americans to drive brand new cars, what will the government trying to help troubled Americans afford health care do to us?

Loving our healthcare system

So I called the hospital in trepidation to discuss payment options for what my private insurance didn't cover in my daughter's birth. I gave the woman the account numbers, and she quoted me a very reasonable monthly payment and told me that if I needed it lower, they had another company they could outsource me to. I asked her if I could start next month, as everything beyond food/electricity/etc. for this month had gone to a car repair, and she said I could. I told her I could make these payments and thanked her for her help.

My hospital stay was excellent. Due to complications during the birth, the staff had to act quickly, professionally, and competently. They did. As a result, in a situation where babies have died or been brain-damaged, mine came out perfectly healthy. (They accelerated delivery under the correct suspicion that the cord was around her neck. She came out blue, but did not need resuscitation and shows no sign of oxygen deprivation.)

Thanks to our current healthcare system, and I admit it could use some work, I was able to afford the best of care. That's right, this working-class/lower-middle-class (how do I figure out which one I'm in?) was given access to the best medical care. There was no tier system, like they have in Holland, in which lower-wage workers have lesser levels of coverage. There was no government decision on whether my baby was viable enough to deserve care, as there is in England. There was no lack of diagnostic machinery, as there is in Canada.

Why on earth would I be interested in Obama patterning our healthcare after any of these countries? The way things are now, the lower class (as long as they aren't unfortunate enough to fall under the government care that liberals want to expand for all of us) can afford and receive medical care. The trick is that you have to be willing to do as I have done, to call, to explain what you can pay, and to set up a plan. You have to be willing to talk to them and let them know of your situation. The help is readily there, if you care to... 'Look' may be too strong a word. If you care to even speak.

I said before that it could use some help. I can think of two models that would be an improvement over the current setup.

Auto insurance is mandatory (in my state), but you can choose whichever company you like. Since it isn't linked to your employer, you aren't placed in the position where employer-subsidized coverage is the only type you can afford. You can also choose the extent of insurance once you've gone above the state minimum. There are factors in your lifestyle that can lower your payments, because they lower your risk. As a result, our auto insurance payment is one-fifth of our health insurance payment, and that's after the company has paid its part.

Though pet health insurance is available, it isn't mandatory or common. Veterinary medicine simply cost what it cost, and you pay at time of service. You can choose your veterinarian. As a result, most families that own a pet are capable of affording that pet. Veterinarians do not charge $100 for a band-aid. They know that the families involved will be paying the entire bill, and if their care is too expensive, their customers will go elsewhere. What about people who really can't pay for their pet's care? Organizations abound to help them. I had my cats spayed when I was a college student with a part-time job, and I had it done at a mobile unit for less than half the price of an office visit. The care was just as good.

You may notice that neither of my examples involve increased government regulation, intervention, or spending.

Responsibility versus Entitlement

I submit for your consideration the following from a Moneynews article today:

“One very troubling point is that, whether measured using 30-day or 60-day delinquencies, re-default rates increased each month and showed no signs of leveling off after six months and even eight months,” said Comptroller of the Currency John C. Dugan.

“This trend of increasing delinquencies underscores the need to understand why these modifications have not been more sustainable.”

I can explain precisely why these modifications have not helped. Many of these mortgages were initially given to people who should not have qualified for the loans. In many cases, they were also used not to allow a working-class worker to move into a small suburban starter home, but to let people who have spent their entire lives expecting the government to provide for them stretch their budget to the limit to build or buy a "McMansion" on abandoned farmland. These are not people who are genuinely struggling to put proper clothing on their children and milk in the fridge. These are people who are "struggling" to keep up with their brand new car payments, their cell phone bills, and still have enough money left over to get their manicures.

I did not watch a lot of the Obama commercial that focused in on "poor families who need help" (from the Democrats, naturally), but I saw enough to remember the woman who said that her kids drank soda because she could not afford milk. I had two immediate thoughts. One was that if her kids drank water like water instead of drinking soda like water, no doubt she could afford a little milk for them. Maybe not a lot, but a little milk and a lot of water is healthier than a lot of soda. The other thing I noticed was her finely manicured nail job, which I asked around about and discovered that $40/month was a very low estimate for upkeep on that kind of beauty product. $40/month will buy a lot of milk... easily two gallons a week. That would give four children a little over a cup of milk each day right there.

My point? These are people who are used to expecting things. They likely got given what they wanted by their parents. They grew up watching commercials that told them what they needed to want. From allowances given for doing nothing to college credit cards gone sky-high, when have they ever learned that they can't have what they "must have"? What kind of standard of living do you have, anyways, if you can't have your hair the color you want it? And if they can't afford it, that's someone else's problem.

So why should they start paying now that they have a more reasonable loan? They've just learned that if they cry enough, banks will do everything possible to accomodate them, to ensure that they aren't (horrors) turned out of their five-bedroom lake-view domiciles. If they continue to cry and don't bother to pay, no doubt in the end they can get what they want for free, especially with a political party in place who doesn't seem to understand that the government does not create wealth... it just takes wealth away from other people.

In the midst of all this nonsense, one family acquired a modest raised ranch on a fixed-rate FHA and have held onto it with all they've got, forgoing cell phones for electricity, forgoing car loans for student loans, forgoing nail jobs and hair jobs for milk and potatoes. They have never missed a payment. It's that kind of attitude, responsibility rather than entitlement, that will bring down foreclosures of modified loans.

Starting again

The nice thing about being a homemaker is that if you've been slipping on the job lately, you can always declare a start point and renew your efforts.

The cold is beginning to recede. I'm out of the nasal-congestion stage and into the coughing stage. My energy has perked up a little, and I'll be able to get some real cleaning done. It's the benefit of an increasingly organized house that the 'damage' isn't too bad. I'll be able to make actual progress in cleaning pretty quickly. I also have a lot of organizational things to do.

Our favorite of the local agricultural fairs is happening this coming weekend. I need to budget the money we can spend there. It's a rare 'splurge time' for us, in which we bring a certain amount of carefully-budgeted money and then just spend like maniacs until it's gone. Well, my way of spending like a maniac is to find the things I like best, figure out how I can afford as many of my favorites of them as possible, and then buying. I buy things like jewelry, scarves, india dresses, sheepskin slippers, specially-colored wax candles, and similar with my allowed money. I'll also get ride tickets and 'german fries' and perhaps a bag of tiny fresh donuts. My husband is not overly enthused about all these little fair things and has the habit of spending his share of the money on me. I think that's really sweet and he's an awesome guy!

The woman exalted in Proverbs 31 is known for some of her work in the marketplace, and I will not be much different this fall. I've been offered an adjunct teaching position at the community college, a single three-credit course. I've taken it, and I start this Saturday. Attitudes differ about homemakers working part-time. I think each family will have it's own profile that will change as the family changes. My mother did not work at all when she had four children all in school age (except when she had to that one time, but that's a whole story in itself!). But now, with one in highschool and one in elementary school, she works part-time at the local post office. With one child starting homeschooling this fall, I've decided that a part-time job that requires me to be gone Saturday mornings, with the rest of the work done at home, is by no means overly intrusive.