It seems so simple, yet I'm not sure a lot of people get it. I know some do, and like me, they're terrified. I watch in horror, as those in charge of keeping our country alive are hastily slashing America's throat. "But they are trying to help", some will say. No, they're not, the only thing they care about helping is furthering their own agenda. We wouldn't need "focus groups" if this weren't the case. In Hollywood, focus groups are used to discover what will sell. They will change a shows story line to fit with what the focus group seems to want. That's all fine and dandy, because it's fiction. But a politician uses focus groups, even after they've "sold" themselves and been elected. Why? To find the fiction that will sell their programs. And yes, we're paying for the very focus groups that determine what fiction will be boxed up and sold to us. Enough about focus groups and selling.
Imagine if you will a hospital. We'll pretend it's one of those state of the art new ones, will all of the cutting edge medical technology, in every field. It's a well rated hospital, that has a reputation for being great. People know that if they have a heart attack or other medical emergency, they want to go to this hospital. Some even sell their homes and move just to be sure that they will go there if they need to. The staff is pretty well rated, though a few of them have been accused or convicted of some disgusting things, none of which related to patient care. But no one cares, because the supposed "bad seeds" were all fired and replaced with some really great promising new doctors and nurses. For the sake of irony, we will call our hospital Liberty General.
It's winter, and things start changing a bit at Liberty. Doctor's start pulling the plug on otherwise viable patients, just a few here and there, and they've even killed a few otherwise healthy patients, out of complete negligence. Now, Liberty has a great relationship with the local news stations. It just so happens that all of the hospital board are also the owners of those local stations, and the newspapers too! Wow, what luck! No one hears of the mysterious deaths in the news, but a few nurses have started talking to friends and family, voicing their concerns about the danger to the public. They are quickly hushed, a few of them disappear, and people are still going to Liberty for "great" care.
Things have started getting rather ridiculous at the hospital. Patients are dying left and right, and not of natural causes. Doctors have started brutally murdering them. They've pulled the plug of life saving equipment on the more fragile patients, the ones who needed they're help the most. They've turned to old fashioned stabbing and shooting for the healthier patients. The patients' families have witnessed these horrors, and they're talking, but the local news continues reporting on the greatness of the hospital, encouraging people to take their loved ones there.
So the families get together in their time of grief, they know they must do something, even though they're still dealing with the death of their children, husbands, wives, and other loved ones. They decide to call this guy who has a talk show that isn't on one of the local news channels, we'll call him "Blenn Geck". He's skeptical at first, as anyone in journalism must be, and sends a few of his people out to verify this information. Turns out, it's credible. So he airs a show immediately on Liberty, as he knows it's imperative to the people who aren't hearing anything on their local news to hear about what's going on.
We'll stop there, as I think it's pretty obvious where this analogy is going. The hard truth is, this analogy to what's going on in our country is not inaccurate. It's exactly what's going on. If a place like liberty existed, it wouldn't have made it to the point of killing all patients, not even with the lack of local news coverage. This is exactly what is happening in our country, with our leaders and our "news", with our loved ones, with our country itself. It isn't a slow death, but a fast one. Why hasn't it been stopped? Why aren't people outraged? The next time you hear a politician demanding more government involvement, more spending, and more redistribution of wealth, remember Liberty. It wouldn't happen if it were a hospital, but it has happened to just about every branch of government. They were hijacked long ago by the PC crowd pushing special rights under the guise of "equality". No one stood up, those who did were quickly dismissed or went missing. It's happening now at our highest level of government, the one in charge of making sure we remain free. They will decide whether or not liberty still exists for us, if we let them. They would love to take it away. Much like the families of the fictional patients, we must ring the alarm bells, and put it to an end.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Monday, June 22, 2009
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Let's See Those Zeros - No More M's, B's, or T's
My proposal seems pretty simple, and some may say it would make no difference, but I'd like the government to start using real numbers. In their budgets, in the congressional bills, in reports of actual spending. I'd like the newspapers to do the same. It would be quite the task for Washington, as the accountants would have to use 6,9, or 12 zeros instead of one letter, or instead of making the numbers look smaller by placing the phrase "all amounts are in millions" in the fine print. It would also require them to count those zeros, and double check for accuracy. That is fine with me. I'll foot the bill for the extra accounting hours, and I doubt too many taxpayers would fight that one. It's small in comparison to the other things they kindly sign us up to pay for.
Seriously though, we all know that if we have cash, as opposed to a credit card, it is a lot harder to justify buying things we'd have no problem purchasing on plastic. We see our money leave our hands, without having to wait for a statement, only requiring a small minimum payment. This is the oldest trick in the book for debt counselors. After requiring a person or couple to draft up a reasonable budget, they then give the person a set amount of cash, that's it, no more. People start spending less when this happens, because they realize there isn't a magic money fairy that will come replace their supply. Reality hits.
The proposed health bill is supposed to add between $1T and $1.6T in debt, there is no mention of the cost, only what will be added in debt. That's fine and dandy, aside from the fact that more than 25,000,000 people will still be without insurance AND those people will have to pay a fine to the government for not having insurance. To top it all off, it will be the very people the "universal healthcare bill" is supposed to help! Those who don't make at least 150% of the federal poverty level WON'T have health care, and they'll be fined for not having it. This fine of course will go to help fund the health care for the other people who do qualify. It's absolutely absurd! And the amount of debt that we will further drown ourselves and our children in? Well that's a mere $1,000,000,000,000 to $1,600,000,000,000. That's all, no worries. Yeah, look at those zeros, a bit different than the seemingly innocent "T", yes?
One more thing, house bills, how about a page limit? Say 25 pages, maybe 75? I think 75 would be more than generous. It irritates me beyond belief that the bills finding their way to congress these days are sometimes longer than the Bible. It takes me a day or two to read the Bible, but I wouldn't retain a whole lot of it. There is way too much room to sneak in unrelated "projects", or laws, which should be done away with. Simplicity is usually best, so is saving trees. It really gets me when people who claim to want to save the environment, because of course the earth will implode in 5 minutes if we don't do something NOW, waste thousands of pages of paper just to write up a bill and distribute copies throughout congress. Honestly, after the initial bill, revisions, and the final bill going through congress, how many trees are brutally murdered to get a bill through? I would like to know. It needs to stop, and it needs to stop NOW. I'm not an environmentalist, but I don't believe in wasting resources, including paper needlessly. That's the thing though, I don't proclaim to want to "save the earth" by radically changing the way we live, a lot of these politicians claim that is their goal, yet they would knock over a whole forest to supply the paper their precious self serving bills are wasting.
Seriously though, we all know that if we have cash, as opposed to a credit card, it is a lot harder to justify buying things we'd have no problem purchasing on plastic. We see our money leave our hands, without having to wait for a statement, only requiring a small minimum payment. This is the oldest trick in the book for debt counselors. After requiring a person or couple to draft up a reasonable budget, they then give the person a set amount of cash, that's it, no more. People start spending less when this happens, because they realize there isn't a magic money fairy that will come replace their supply. Reality hits.
The proposed health bill is supposed to add between $1T and $1.6T in debt, there is no mention of the cost, only what will be added in debt. That's fine and dandy, aside from the fact that more than 25,000,000 people will still be without insurance AND those people will have to pay a fine to the government for not having insurance. To top it all off, it will be the very people the "universal healthcare bill" is supposed to help! Those who don't make at least 150% of the federal poverty level WON'T have health care, and they'll be fined for not having it. This fine of course will go to help fund the health care for the other people who do qualify. It's absolutely absurd! And the amount of debt that we will further drown ourselves and our children in? Well that's a mere $1,000,000,000,000 to $1,600,000,000,000. That's all, no worries. Yeah, look at those zeros, a bit different than the seemingly innocent "T", yes?
One more thing, house bills, how about a page limit? Say 25 pages, maybe 75? I think 75 would be more than generous. It irritates me beyond belief that the bills finding their way to congress these days are sometimes longer than the Bible. It takes me a day or two to read the Bible, but I wouldn't retain a whole lot of it. There is way too much room to sneak in unrelated "projects", or laws, which should be done away with. Simplicity is usually best, so is saving trees. It really gets me when people who claim to want to save the environment, because of course the earth will implode in 5 minutes if we don't do something NOW, waste thousands of pages of paper just to write up a bill and distribute copies throughout congress. Honestly, after the initial bill, revisions, and the final bill going through congress, how many trees are brutally murdered to get a bill through? I would like to know. It needs to stop, and it needs to stop NOW. I'm not an environmentalist, but I don't believe in wasting resources, including paper needlessly. That's the thing though, I don't proclaim to want to "save the earth" by radically changing the way we live, a lot of these politicians claim that is their goal, yet they would knock over a whole forest to supply the paper their precious self serving bills are wasting.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Unemployment - What You'll Never See in the Headlines
We hear the unemployment rates quite frequently. While they are important, they aren't the whole story. What we don't ever hear about is the number of people who indeed have no job or source of income, but don't qualify for unemployment. I'm not talking about the people who don't qualify because they haven't worked, but the people who don't qualify despite the fact that they HAVE worked.
My husband and I own and run a small business. He started the business in his backyard long before we met. He started with a cement mixer that he made himself. He couldn't afford to buy one. He lived with his parents at the time, in an 800 square foot house, with his now ex-wife and 2 children. Two "bedrooms" and 1 bathroom, build in the early 1920's, and literally falling apart. He saw a need that he could fill. He started making precast concrete products to sell to other precasters, as they could hardly fill their increasing demands with the equipment, space, and people they had. The demand for our products continued to grow until summer of 2008.
We are a small corporation, and we are the only officers of the company. Most people don't know that corporate officers, until January 2009 did not have the option of paying into state unemployment in our state, and thus, were not eligible to receive benefits when their job no longer existed. We received a letter in December 2008 letting us know that we could now opt-in and have money taken from our checks, and from the company, and that we would be able to receive unemployment in the future should the need arise, if we met certain criteria. As with everything in life, there was a catch, to qualify for unemployment, you must have been employed for the previous 4 quarters, not only employed, but paying into unemployment. We knew in January when we elected to pay in, that we would not qualify until January 2010.
We also knew in January 2009, that we may well be out of business long before 2010. We don't hear about people like us in the news. There are no real statistics. We have worked more than 100 hours some weeks, on average we each work 70+ hours a week. We haven't been able to pay ourselves regularly since the beginning of this year. We opted to try to retain key employees instead, as well as their benefits. These are people we have had with us for many years, some more than 10 years. We didn't want to lay them off. We eventually had to, but a few still come in, knowing they won't see a paycheck, because they don't want to see our business go. It's an awful position to be in, on both sides. While my husband and I have been receiving some pay, it isn't nearly enough to get by. We don't have the luxury of receiving unemployment to help make ends meet.
We weren't irresponsible home buyers. When we purchased our home and took out a loan, the monthly payment was 1/8th of our monthly take home pay. We were hardly irresponsible, yet I worry every day about foreclosure. We are still working at our business, so we can't go get jobs elsewhere. If we decide to file bankruptcy for the business, we don't just wake up the next day able to go work for someone else, nor do we get to keep any of our personal assets. Many small businesses in this country are closing their doors, so I imagine we are not alone. But you don't hear about people like us in the news, we don't see any statistics or numbers that represent people like us. I wouldn't care about losing my home if it weren't for my children. I can't stand the thought of my children losing their home. So there you have it, just a brief introduction to who I am, what my situation is, and where I'm coming from. I would love to hear from other small business owners facing similar problems.
My husband and I own and run a small business. He started the business in his backyard long before we met. He started with a cement mixer that he made himself. He couldn't afford to buy one. He lived with his parents at the time, in an 800 square foot house, with his now ex-wife and 2 children. Two "bedrooms" and 1 bathroom, build in the early 1920's, and literally falling apart. He saw a need that he could fill. He started making precast concrete products to sell to other precasters, as they could hardly fill their increasing demands with the equipment, space, and people they had. The demand for our products continued to grow until summer of 2008.
We are a small corporation, and we are the only officers of the company. Most people don't know that corporate officers, until January 2009 did not have the option of paying into state unemployment in our state, and thus, were not eligible to receive benefits when their job no longer existed. We received a letter in December 2008 letting us know that we could now opt-in and have money taken from our checks, and from the company, and that we would be able to receive unemployment in the future should the need arise, if we met certain criteria. As with everything in life, there was a catch, to qualify for unemployment, you must have been employed for the previous 4 quarters, not only employed, but paying into unemployment. We knew in January when we elected to pay in, that we would not qualify until January 2010.
We also knew in January 2009, that we may well be out of business long before 2010. We don't hear about people like us in the news. There are no real statistics. We have worked more than 100 hours some weeks, on average we each work 70+ hours a week. We haven't been able to pay ourselves regularly since the beginning of this year. We opted to try to retain key employees instead, as well as their benefits. These are people we have had with us for many years, some more than 10 years. We didn't want to lay them off. We eventually had to, but a few still come in, knowing they won't see a paycheck, because they don't want to see our business go. It's an awful position to be in, on both sides. While my husband and I have been receiving some pay, it isn't nearly enough to get by. We don't have the luxury of receiving unemployment to help make ends meet.
We weren't irresponsible home buyers. When we purchased our home and took out a loan, the monthly payment was 1/8th of our monthly take home pay. We were hardly irresponsible, yet I worry every day about foreclosure. We are still working at our business, so we can't go get jobs elsewhere. If we decide to file bankruptcy for the business, we don't just wake up the next day able to go work for someone else, nor do we get to keep any of our personal assets. Many small businesses in this country are closing their doors, so I imagine we are not alone. But you don't hear about people like us in the news, we don't see any statistics or numbers that represent people like us. I wouldn't care about losing my home if it weren't for my children. I can't stand the thought of my children losing their home. So there you have it, just a brief introduction to who I am, what my situation is, and where I'm coming from. I would love to hear from other small business owners facing similar problems.
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