I stumbled across an oldie but goodie while reading a discussion of gay marriage. One of the people referred back to this Family Research Center writeup, citing numerous studies and statistics to call into doubt the notion that the typical homosexual relationship is basically just like the typical heterosexual one.
This leads me back to an old SSM argument which claims that being able to legally marry will stabilize gay relationships, and the main reason why gays are so promiscuous and so many of their relationships are so short-lived is because they don't receive the state benefits. Frankly, the early information on the length of gay marriages in countries and states that permit them are not promising.
Gay activists like to pull race into the mix, comparing any disapproval at all with homosexual sex with the kind of racism that once enslaved an entire people. I'd like to pull in the racist angle and give it a bit of a twist.
When blacks were enslaved, they had no rights. They had no legal standing. Nevertheless, they married each other all the time. On 'friendlier' plantations, the master would oversee a pretty little ceremony. On less friendly places, they would hold their ceremonies quietly, but they still married and were given in marriage.
Now when I say that blacks have no rights, I should remind my readers that this went far beyond simply lacking tax status. They had no inheritance, because they could not own property. Furthermore, a master was fully able to sell the wife away from the husband, or their children away from their parents. The environment was not simply unfriendly to marriage among the black slaves. It was downright hostile.
And yet despite this, the marriages prospered. When slavery first ended and the Civil Rights era began, the family values of the black culture put white culture to shame. Marriages lasted.
It is clear to me that the simple legal acknowledgement of a relationship as "marriage" is not what lends stability. Marriage is a term that is not so much defined as derived. It is the inherent qualities of marriage, the hormonal/chemical/physical/emotional/psychological workings of a sexually exclusive, opposite-sex couple that makes marriage what it is. Slapping the label on a group known for their promiscuity and short-term relationships will not transform them into upstanding pillars of family values.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
So much for resolutions...
Of course I haven't posted in a while now. It seems that "real life" continues to intervene! For today, I have a piece that I wrote in response to a forum thread. The conversation shifted to various economic responses to various tax cuts and government spending.
The first gem was the reminder that the "Clinton Surplus" was created by a Republican Congress and finally passed after Clinton stonewalled it so hard that the entire government shut down for several weeks. In this post, I went into the reasons behind the recent economic problems and their results.
This is what happened in 2006:
Shortly after the Democrats swept Congress, there was a bursting of a gas bubble. Not a physical bubble, but an economic one. Refinery problems plus Middle East concerns plus an increased integration of ethanol worked together to bring gas prices up. Food prices followed quickly. Whenever gas prices go up, food prices go up, because grocery stores work on a shoestring budget. They make almost no profit. So when it costs more to transport food to the store, the items cost more.
Now in 1977, the Community Reinvestment Act was passed by a Democrat majority Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter. The CRA had good intentions... to end the practice of redlining, or refusing to sell homes in certain areas to minorities. However, it basically involved sending the government into real estate to enact something very much like Affirmative Action. It didn't impact us much, though, for nearly 20 years, because it didn't have much teeth.
That changed under President Clinton, who empowered Reno to set things into motion that would punish banks that didn't make enough loans to minorities who wanted to buy homes. The only problem was that the reason why fewer minorities were buying homes was because fewer minorities had the financial means and acumen to hold down a mortgage. The banks were ordered to make it work somehow, and the bank response was the Subprime Mortgage.
The Subprime Mortgage, like the Saltbox and the SUV, was something created by private industry trying to keep what they wanted/needed while skirting Federal regulations. In all three cases, you ended up with something that didn't have all of the advantages of what the government wanted to force or what the private groups originally used. (The SUV is a replacement for the Station Wagon that not only fails to meet sedan fuel economy, but it fails to approach station wagon fuel economy as well. The Saltbox has a partial upper story with a roof that drops to the first story on one side, resulting in a loss of useable space.)
These subprime loans were snapped up by people for whom they were and were not originally intended, creating a heavy demand for new and expensive housing. People who would have been steered towards a starter home were using subprimes to afford twice the house they would have purchased otherwise. We had a housing bubble. W Bush sounded the alarm multiple times, but Frank and Dodd staunchly refused to look into it. All of these subprime home owners were barely managing to make their finances work, and the slightest rise in any of their other bills would lead to disaster.
Then, of course, as mentioned above, the oil price went up. That started a comprehensive collapse that ended in failing banks, foreclosures/abandonments, and rampant unemployment in the construction industry. Unfortunately, instead of isolating this disaster and allowing it to burn itself out, Obama decided to ramp up federal spending, and now it's affecting private sectors that had nothing to do whatsoever with construction or mortgages.
And now the fix, being basically the "You still have to provide mortgages for minorities whether they can afford them or not, but you can't do it this way", is making it nigh impossible for smaller businesses to operate through lack of liquidity. The government we-can't-allow-banks-to-fail mindset has brought to a full stop the natural process of stronger banks buying weaker ones and fixing the problems naturally. Did you know that, at the beginning of the recession, if you had been saving up a little money during the good times, you could have any home renovation done well on the cheap? Before Obama intervened in hopes of getting people to refinance their mortgages, refinancing was easy and very useful. We did it ourselves. Now it's all but impossible unless you fit the narrow and confusing government standards.
Gas prices also started to fall as demand fell, but now the weak dollar plus inflation (both the result of government spending) kept prices up and are now primarily responsible for the current spike. Of course, every part of this, from an end to free checking (next month, I believe, part of Obamacare) to the 50-100% rise in basic food prices, to the tightening of loans and resulting unemployment, is impacting primarily the poor and the middle class.
In short, the particular Democrats who swept Congress in 2006 (aside from Dodd/Frank and other members of the Old Guard) really were no more responsible for the beginning of the recession than W Bush was for the tech bubble burst and 9/11. It's what they've done with it since that has landed us in the Pit of Despair.
The first gem was the reminder that the "Clinton Surplus" was created by a Republican Congress and finally passed after Clinton stonewalled it so hard that the entire government shut down for several weeks. In this post, I went into the reasons behind the recent economic problems and their results.
This is what happened in 2006:
Shortly after the Democrats swept Congress, there was a bursting of a gas bubble. Not a physical bubble, but an economic one. Refinery problems plus Middle East concerns plus an increased integration of ethanol worked together to bring gas prices up. Food prices followed quickly. Whenever gas prices go up, food prices go up, because grocery stores work on a shoestring budget. They make almost no profit. So when it costs more to transport food to the store, the items cost more.
Now in 1977, the Community Reinvestment Act was passed by a Democrat majority Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter. The CRA had good intentions... to end the practice of redlining, or refusing to sell homes in certain areas to minorities. However, it basically involved sending the government into real estate to enact something very much like Affirmative Action. It didn't impact us much, though, for nearly 20 years, because it didn't have much teeth.
That changed under President Clinton, who empowered Reno to set things into motion that would punish banks that didn't make enough loans to minorities who wanted to buy homes. The only problem was that the reason why fewer minorities were buying homes was because fewer minorities had the financial means and acumen to hold down a mortgage. The banks were ordered to make it work somehow, and the bank response was the Subprime Mortgage.
The Subprime Mortgage, like the Saltbox and the SUV, was something created by private industry trying to keep what they wanted/needed while skirting Federal regulations. In all three cases, you ended up with something that didn't have all of the advantages of what the government wanted to force or what the private groups originally used. (The SUV is a replacement for the Station Wagon that not only fails to meet sedan fuel economy, but it fails to approach station wagon fuel economy as well. The Saltbox has a partial upper story with a roof that drops to the first story on one side, resulting in a loss of useable space.)
These subprime loans were snapped up by people for whom they were and were not originally intended, creating a heavy demand for new and expensive housing. People who would have been steered towards a starter home were using subprimes to afford twice the house they would have purchased otherwise. We had a housing bubble. W Bush sounded the alarm multiple times, but Frank and Dodd staunchly refused to look into it. All of these subprime home owners were barely managing to make their finances work, and the slightest rise in any of their other bills would lead to disaster.
Then, of course, as mentioned above, the oil price went up. That started a comprehensive collapse that ended in failing banks, foreclosures/abandonments, and rampant unemployment in the construction industry. Unfortunately, instead of isolating this disaster and allowing it to burn itself out, Obama decided to ramp up federal spending, and now it's affecting private sectors that had nothing to do whatsoever with construction or mortgages.
And now the fix, being basically the "You still have to provide mortgages for minorities whether they can afford them or not, but you can't do it this way", is making it nigh impossible for smaller businesses to operate through lack of liquidity. The government we-can't-allow-banks-to-fail mindset has brought to a full stop the natural process of stronger banks buying weaker ones and fixing the problems naturally. Did you know that, at the beginning of the recession, if you had been saving up a little money during the good times, you could have any home renovation done well on the cheap? Before Obama intervened in hopes of getting people to refinance their mortgages, refinancing was easy and very useful. We did it ourselves. Now it's all but impossible unless you fit the narrow and confusing government standards.
Gas prices also started to fall as demand fell, but now the weak dollar plus inflation (both the result of government spending) kept prices up and are now primarily responsible for the current spike. Of course, every part of this, from an end to free checking (next month, I believe, part of Obamacare) to the 50-100% rise in basic food prices, to the tightening of loans and resulting unemployment, is impacting primarily the poor and the middle class.
In short, the particular Democrats who swept Congress in 2006 (aside from Dodd/Frank and other members of the Old Guard) really were no more responsible for the beginning of the recession than W Bush was for the tech bubble burst and 9/11. It's what they've done with it since that has landed us in the Pit of Despair.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Responsibility for education
In Florida, a State Representative has proposed increasing parental involvement in childhood education by having public school teachers grade the parents. Of course, there are many angles in describing the problems with this proposal. A friend of mine who is a Florida-certified to teach and knows the local public schools told me that the parents should be the ones grading the teachers.
On the plus side, the proposal does address a problem that is very real in today's society. Too many parents don't have enough involvement in their children's education. The question in my mind is, will this proposal solve or worsen the problem? I believe that it is a treatment of a symptom rather than the ending of a societal disease.
In Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, young Scout does not take easily to school. Her teacher is appalled when she discovers that Scout knows not only how to read, but how to write cursive. Her father has spent so much time reading with her in the evenings, and her housekeeper copied out words for her to practice when she wanted something to do. The teacher is adamant that this is wrong.
Combine these two together and you have, nurtured for about 50 years by the Liberal Left, the belief that it is the job of parents to work outside the home while leaving the matter of their children's education in the hands of government officials and "properly-trained" instructors. I note that one of the biggest questions I hear as a homeschooling mother is, "How do you know that you're qualified to teach your child?" Before the '60's and its various revolutions, such a question would have been downright laughable. Who is better qualified to teach a child than the people whose genetics created him or her?
Of course, as with many such reforms, we are now discovering that parental involvement does in fact have a strongly positive effect on a child's education. What is the solution? Although Representative Stargel is listed as a Republican, she offers the very liberal proposal that the Government, having discouraged parents from involvement, must now mandate parental involvement for the exact same reason... the good of the children. This is worse than the purported ambulance-in-the-valley solution for the lack of fence on the dangerous cliff. This is tantamount to removing an already-present fence on the cliff before instituting the ambulance in the valley.
On the plus side, the proposal does address a problem that is very real in today's society. Too many parents don't have enough involvement in their children's education. The question in my mind is, will this proposal solve or worsen the problem? I believe that it is a treatment of a symptom rather than the ending of a societal disease.
In Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, young Scout does not take easily to school. Her teacher is appalled when she discovers that Scout knows not only how to read, but how to write cursive. Her father has spent so much time reading with her in the evenings, and her housekeeper copied out words for her to practice when she wanted something to do. The teacher is adamant that this is wrong.
"Now you tell your father not to teach you any more. It's best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I'll take over from here and try to undo the damage-"This book was published in 1960 and referred to the rise of new teaching methods including the much-lampooned "New Math" in public school systems. The adjoining message, naturally, was that these methods would be compromised if all these parents kept thinking that they could do the job of teaching their children how to learn. The movement coincided with the Feminist Movement, which championed pushing mothers, against their will if necessary, to leave their child-rearing and climb the career ladder.
"Ma'am?"
"Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now."
Combine these two together and you have, nurtured for about 50 years by the Liberal Left, the belief that it is the job of parents to work outside the home while leaving the matter of their children's education in the hands of government officials and "properly-trained" instructors. I note that one of the biggest questions I hear as a homeschooling mother is, "How do you know that you're qualified to teach your child?" Before the '60's and its various revolutions, such a question would have been downright laughable. Who is better qualified to teach a child than the people whose genetics created him or her?
Of course, as with many such reforms, we are now discovering that parental involvement does in fact have a strongly positive effect on a child's education. What is the solution? Although Representative Stargel is listed as a Republican, she offers the very liberal proposal that the Government, having discouraged parents from involvement, must now mandate parental involvement for the exact same reason... the good of the children. This is worse than the purported ambulance-in-the-valley solution for the lack of fence on the dangerous cliff. This is tantamount to removing an already-present fence on the cliff before instituting the ambulance in the valley.
Friday, January 28, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Taxing Riches
What tipped the scales for me when I voted for John McCain in the 2008 election? Certainly his appointment of Sarah Palin, a mother of five who bought diapers at Walmart and wasn’t afraid to hunt for food, helped his case. I am a conservative mother, and I identify with her. However, the real decision was made during the debate hosted by Rick Warren in which McCain refused to set an arbitrary dollar amount as the dividing line between rich and poor.
“Some of the richest people I've ever known in my life are the most unhappy,” he said, following Obama’s description of ‘rich’ as making $250K/year. “I think that rich should be defined by a home, a good job, an education and the ability to hand to our children a more prosperous and safer world than the one that we inherited.” The important part, however, the part that I wish all conservatives would memorize, is his next sentence:
“I don't want to take any money from the rich — I want everybody to get rich.”
I have realized that this was one of the greatest reasons why I staunchly oppose the liberal mindset. The liberals have set up “the rich” in order to bear the burden of their great society, built by directing cash flow from the producers to the non-producers in defiance of all the laws of nature. In setting up “the rich” for this burden, they must first define “the rich”, and every attempt to do so has led to disaster.
In this Great Recession, I have been lucky. My husband has not been laid off. However, we were notified last week that all employees in the company were going to undergo a temporary salary reduction. For whatever reason, they cannot bear the costs during this quarter. Their clients, however, cannot bear the drop in productivity. What was first going to be recompense as paid vacation is now going to be delivered to us as a bonus at the beginning of the next quarter.
As soon as I heard this, I groaned. I also used to work full-time, and the very first thing I learned regarding my salary was to never take accumulated vacation time as a monetary bonus. As soon as I heard the word ‘bonus’, I immediately knew that nearly half of the temporarily-docked pay would be lost to us for the rest of the year. Why?
Somewhere along the line, someone decided that the rich get bonuses. Therefore, bonus tax withholding should be calculated differently. Bonuses are taxed at a flat percentage, regardless of your financial situation. Once Social Security and other taxes are added on, you invariably find yourself with only about half of the original amount. Of course, the rich can weather a blow like this. A lower-middle-class family has very little stretch in the monthly budget, and paying back only half of a salary reduction puts a very real strain on the finances.
State luxury taxes provide a similar problem. By defining certain activities and property as ‘rich’, luxury taxes become a self-fulfilling prophecy, lifting these activities and property out of the reach of the middle class who may be willing to sacrifice in other areas of their lives in order to enjoy just one of these ‘luxuries’. The idea is the same; the liberals have decided that use of a certain good or service defines you as ‘rich’, and they who claim to bring opportunity to the poor end up forbidding it.
Property tax is yet another method by which those who define ‘rich’ end up snaring the poor and middle class. I live in a rural area, in which you will hear the phrase “Land-rich, money-poor”. This is not by any means a new problem. Property tax was a very early method of funding the government. It too, however, defines someone as ‘rich’, this time by looking at the size of their house or land. The New England Saltbox is an architectural design created in order to reduce taxes in a time when your house value was calculated by how many floors were in your home. By extending the roofline to the top of the first floor on one side of the house (usually the back), builders created the look and usefulness of a two-story house that was taxed as one. Measures like this were necessary for some families. Wealth is not the only reason to own a large house. The families with many children, typically poorer than the average, are hit hardest by large house taxes. Farmers are hit hardest by property tax determined by acreage.
As time goes on, I realize more and more the folly of a tax system that targets the "rich", due to the problems that arise from defining the line between "rich" and "poor". I am beginning to believe that perhaps the only method of taxation that can encourage growth and wealth is a flat income or sales tax percentage across the board.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Setting the record straight
One of the plagues of the Internet is that anyone can be an expert on anything. Some sites are better at vetting their content than others. Unfortunately, "about.com" is not one of them. Oh, there are good articles on the site. If you trawl through enough trash, you will almost always find something valuable. As my readers have probably guessed, it is part of that 'trash' that irks me today.
I'm here to set the record straight.
The article purported to be a review of the computer game Sims 3, written by someone who seems to have played the game for all of ten minutes and may not have even had a legal copy. That's a serious charge to make, I am aware. Why would I make it? The review was dated in December of 2010 and gave the game a low score for world customization. The reviewer claimed that the game did not even give you the object placement options of Sims 2. He (or she, as the case may be) did acknowledge that there is a tool on the Sims 3 website called "Create-A-World", but he had never touched it, so he was not including it in his review.
Something that sets Sims 3 apart from previous Sims games is its updating feature. Other Sims games did deliver patches and updates, but none of the updates ever included any new content. They largely addressed bugs and issues. In Sims 3, however, if all you purchase and own is the vanilla game, the updates will give you a few of the new abilities included in the expansion packs. The update that came out with Sims 3 World Adventures allowed you to build basements, even if you did not purchase adventures. The update for Ambitions gave your sim a few extra personality traits, such as "Vehicle Enthusiast", which gives your sim extra happiness if his car is a particularly nice one. Now here is the important part when dealing with the faulty review: Sims 3 Late Night was released in late October, and its corresponding update allowed us to add and delete lots and objects. In other words, it gave us the exact same functionality as we had in Sims 2, and anyone who had installed and registered/updated a genuine copy of the vanilla game in December of 2010 would have seen it.
Secondly, it was a really bad move to give Sims 3 a low score for world customization without even looking at the Create-A-World tool, especially if the writer is going to complain about the worlds being less customizable than in Sims 2. He should have either included the tool in his review or not commented on the world creation features. In Sims 2, there was no Create-A-World tool. Instead, you were able to work with the terrain and road placement only if you owned a copy of Simcity 4, and your custom neighborhood only imported properly if you followed exactly a rather capricious set of rules. The "city" had to be of a certain size, and anything in it had to follow certain rules of placement. Of course, Simcity 4 was not free, meaning that any neighborhood customization aside from placing trees and lots required you to spend an extra $30-50.
Sims 3 Create-A-World, on the other hand, is a free tool downloaded from the website. It is designed to work with Sims 3, so it is very good at vetting its worlds and ensuring that they will import easily and accurately. It also is a true world-builder, in which you can start with either a height map or a plain stretch of land and add every single thing included in any proper Sims 3 world. It provides you with terrain sculpting, painting, routing information, object placement, road placement, lot placement, and even collectible object spawners. It runs a streamlined version of Sims 3 in which you can do lot-building that remains in the world, allowing you to release something just as complete and sophisticated as the worlds that come with the game, minus the actual Sim families residing in the actual houses.
Basically, with Sims 3 Create-A-World, Sims 3 worlds become far more customizable than Sims 2 ever had, and with the late October update, even the vanilla Sims 3 game provides you with the customizing capability of Sims 2.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to make my own world... let's have a mountain here and a beachfront over here...
I'm here to set the record straight.
The article purported to be a review of the computer game Sims 3, written by someone who seems to have played the game for all of ten minutes and may not have even had a legal copy. That's a serious charge to make, I am aware. Why would I make it? The review was dated in December of 2010 and gave the game a low score for world customization. The reviewer claimed that the game did not even give you the object placement options of Sims 2. He (or she, as the case may be) did acknowledge that there is a tool on the Sims 3 website called "Create-A-World", but he had never touched it, so he was not including it in his review.
Something that sets Sims 3 apart from previous Sims games is its updating feature. Other Sims games did deliver patches and updates, but none of the updates ever included any new content. They largely addressed bugs and issues. In Sims 3, however, if all you purchase and own is the vanilla game, the updates will give you a few of the new abilities included in the expansion packs. The update that came out with Sims 3 World Adventures allowed you to build basements, even if you did not purchase adventures. The update for Ambitions gave your sim a few extra personality traits, such as "Vehicle Enthusiast", which gives your sim extra happiness if his car is a particularly nice one. Now here is the important part when dealing with the faulty review: Sims 3 Late Night was released in late October, and its corresponding update allowed us to add and delete lots and objects. In other words, it gave us the exact same functionality as we had in Sims 2, and anyone who had installed and registered/updated a genuine copy of the vanilla game in December of 2010 would have seen it.
Secondly, it was a really bad move to give Sims 3 a low score for world customization without even looking at the Create-A-World tool, especially if the writer is going to complain about the worlds being less customizable than in Sims 2. He should have either included the tool in his review or not commented on the world creation features. In Sims 2, there was no Create-A-World tool. Instead, you were able to work with the terrain and road placement only if you owned a copy of Simcity 4, and your custom neighborhood only imported properly if you followed exactly a rather capricious set of rules. The "city" had to be of a certain size, and anything in it had to follow certain rules of placement. Of course, Simcity 4 was not free, meaning that any neighborhood customization aside from placing trees and lots required you to spend an extra $30-50.
Sims 3 Create-A-World, on the other hand, is a free tool downloaded from the website. It is designed to work with Sims 3, so it is very good at vetting its worlds and ensuring that they will import easily and accurately. It also is a true world-builder, in which you can start with either a height map or a plain stretch of land and add every single thing included in any proper Sims 3 world. It provides you with terrain sculpting, painting, routing information, object placement, road placement, lot placement, and even collectible object spawners. It runs a streamlined version of Sims 3 in which you can do lot-building that remains in the world, allowing you to release something just as complete and sophisticated as the worlds that come with the game, minus the actual Sim families residing in the actual houses.
Basically, with Sims 3 Create-A-World, Sims 3 worlds become far more customizable than Sims 2 ever had, and with the late October update, even the vanilla Sims 3 game provides you with the customizing capability of Sims 2.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to make my own world... let's have a mountain here and a beachfront over here...
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