Tough Times Ahead

I extracted the following quotes from this article. http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/bobbeauprez/2012/01/08/obama_fails_math_portion_of_presidency_test/page/full/ I believe that it is well worth your time to read but if you don’t feel like it then consider these words of wisdom.

"The history of taxation shows that taxes which are inherently excessive are not paid. The high rates inevitably put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw his capital from productive business and invest it in tax-exempt securities or to find other lawful methods of avoiding the realization of taxable income. The result is that the sources of taxation are drying up; wealth is failing to carry its share of the tax burden; and capital is being diverted into channels which yield neither revenue to the Government nor profit to the people." Andrew Mellon Secretary of Treasury for Warren Harding.

It seems to me that we would be very foolish not to look at history and see what has occurred at other times from the current era to the fall of the Roman Empire which can be traced back to policies that are very similar to those of the current president of the USA.

For wisdom let us look at someone from the party he says he represents though from another time: John Kennedy.

"Our true choice is not between tax reduction, on the one hand, and the avoidance of large Federal deficits on the other. It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits… In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now." John F. Kennedy

We are spending money we don’t have to make things better in the USA today. This is like a family maxing out all of its credit cards. The question remains this: What will happen when no other nation will lend us money? That I believe is a fearful day and fast approaching. Worse yet is the day when no one will accept our money, when it is viewed with the same disdain as the peso… indeed times are going to get tough.

© 2012 Vic Jones

2012 Writing Challenge

Well for 2011 I missed my goal of posting at least one item per week here. Part of the reason for that is that for most of the year I was still posting at Author Nation with the hope that that site would help build this site as it was a social networking site as well as a writer’s forum of sorts.

I’m now fairly certain that Author Nation is defunct so that should provide me with a greater incentive to post here more frequently. There has been one other thing that has held me up as well. That is the fact that The Hard Knocks School of Life is proving harder to do than I thought it would be. Not to write the items, as I have some 600 of them, but rather to expand upon them. This is due to the fact that a great many of the pieces of The Hard Knocks School of life are only a few words long. And while I feel that a lot of them are perfectly fine at that length I’ve felt that posting a 5 or 10 word bit once a week was a bit on the weak side when it came to writing.

© 2012 Vic Jones

Lesson 25 from The Hard Knocks School of Life

If someone says he wants to punish the rich because they are greedy you should ask what that person has to gain in the transaction they propose. You also should ask yourself if the person proposing to punish the rich is actually greedy…
People who are earning high incomes are called rich by our current government yet they may or may not have actually accumulated much wealth. Conversely many people who have much wealth (either inherited or accumulated) often have low incomes (or at least low earned incomes) because they have most of their assets stored in government preferred investments whether they be municipal bonds or T-bills or some project the government wants accomplished.

High income earners are the achievers of society and punishing (or taxing them) is like making fun of nerds in school.

© 2011 Vic Jones

Tomorrow

Tomorrow


Oh you say,

I’ll do it tomorrow,

Why do you think,

That you will have tomorrow,

Don’t you know,

That tomorrow never comes,

You only have today,

If you have something,

That should be done,

Don’t wait,

Do it as soon as you are able,

’Cause you never know,

When you’ll stop having today!

© 2010 Vic Jones

About the Future

One if the huge concerns I have had since the advent of the current war with Islam is that we will take our focus off from building a better future that includes a colonization of space. Consider the following scenario: Suppose that we were told tomorrow that the earth would be struck by an asteroid just ¼ mile in diameter. Would the governments (especially the ones that are the most paranoid) put aside their suspicions of one another long enough to do something constructive like make sure that the asteroid swung into orbit around the earth?


Consider the wealth that such an object would have V=4/3πr^3 which translates to 220 yards cubed times pi times 4/3 or more iron than the whole world uses in several decades if the asteroid were (as most of them are) mostly iron. And that doesn’t get into the possibility of rare earths like gold and platinum or that the whole thing could be hollowed out and reinforced to be used to transport a large quantity of supplies for a mission to Mars.

To be honest the continued fight over this ball of mud is frightening to the max and I sometimes want to simply crawl back in a cave and say please leave me alone. But I cannot and neither should you. If you value your children’s future then somehow we must win this war by making Islam come into the century where they can no longer be a closed and xenophobic society. They too must see that fighting over Israel is counterproductive to their children’s future.

Because the longer we fight over the earth or any part thereof, the longer it takes us to reach space where there is room enough for everyone to live the way they want to live…

© 2010 Vic Jones