MY OWN KNOWLEDGE BASIS FOR MINIMUM WAGE
Household 1 HH 2 HH 3 HH 4 HH
Health Care 6000 8000 10000 12000
Average Apart 7800 9900 13200 13200
Cost for Car 8250
Cost for 2 Cars 12375 12375 12375 12375
Cost for Food 3600 6000 8000 10000
Average Util 1800 2600 3200 3400
Retirement 4000 6000 6000 6000
Clothing 800 1600 2400 3200
Misc Household 500 750 1000 1250
32750 47225 56175 61425
$15.75 $22.70 $27.01 $29.53
Average not taxed Wage needed just to get by 23.74
20% Income Tax on $30 an hour 6
Minimum Wage needed for no frills lifestyle: $29.75
The Green Phoenix Poverty Salary $61,873.75
This is the Minimum Wage needed for there to be no social security and no government sponsored health care…..but still does not address the 20-40 million who cannot work.
Remember that the poor folks making over $250,000 were recently crying about getting taxed more, and that $250,000 was a difficult income to live on, but had enough extra influence to get that tax beat down to defeat. So %61,873 is merely a poverty wage by that standard.
Example to prove that there is more than enough money (GDP) sloshing around to accomplish this scheme:
$61,874 Annual Income for 150 Million persons in the US equals
$9,281,062,500,000 150 million $61,874 incomes is only 9.3 Trillion! (There were less than 150 Million tax returns)
US GDP was 15 Trillion last year so that would leave 5.7 Trillion for the Rich. And since most people spend most of their money it would really mean a whole lot more for the rich and local and state governments and all the related businesses providing health care and retirement and housing and the rest of the economy.
The Green Phoenix says: Minimum Wage $30.00 an Hour. And Minimum Welfare allotment to anyone unemployed for any reason equal to a $15.00 an hour salary.
Progressives wake up. Demand it. No Compromise. Throw them all out unitll the demands are granted. The Right Wing is going for all their Demands we should do no less.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Gotcha
First they broke up the industrial unions and sent all the jobs overseas, and I did not speak out as I was a professional.
Then they broke down the trades unions and brought wages down for all the trades workers and I did not speak out as I was a professional.
Then they took away health care and charged for it and I did not speak out as I was a professional.
Then they embezzled and took away the workers retirement benefits and I did not speak out as I was a professional.
Then they somehow lied about inflation for five decades and did not increase wages and I did not speak out as I was a professional.
Then they came for the public union employees and broke them down so there was no longer any standard for a good life and I did not speak out as I was a professional.
Then they came for all those who had benefits from before and cut those off, and I did not speak out as I was a professional.
Then they came and embezzled the wealth of the nation through stock market and real estate bubbles and made the super rich divinely rich, and I did not speak out as I was a professional.
Then one day I woke up and saw that my home was underwater, my retirement accounts on the plunge, the kids unemployed living in the basement, and what I thought was a live able income had become a pittance and they came for me, saying who are you? Why should you get a decent income and any benefits, no one else does? Who do you think you are anyway? And alas there was no one left to speak out for me.
Then they broke down the trades unions and brought wages down for all the trades workers and I did not speak out as I was a professional.
Then they took away health care and charged for it and I did not speak out as I was a professional.
Then they embezzled and took away the workers retirement benefits and I did not speak out as I was a professional.
Then they somehow lied about inflation for five decades and did not increase wages and I did not speak out as I was a professional.
Then they came for the public union employees and broke them down so there was no longer any standard for a good life and I did not speak out as I was a professional.
Then they came for all those who had benefits from before and cut those off, and I did not speak out as I was a professional.
Then they came and embezzled the wealth of the nation through stock market and real estate bubbles and made the super rich divinely rich, and I did not speak out as I was a professional.
Then one day I woke up and saw that my home was underwater, my retirement accounts on the plunge, the kids unemployed living in the basement, and what I thought was a live able income had become a pittance and they came for me, saying who are you? Why should you get a decent income and any benefits, no one else does? Who do you think you are anyway? And alas there was no one left to speak out for me.
Income Distribution Ruling a Bike Club
For the sheer amusement of it I made up a bike club that would work like the US economy.
The Freinds of Capitalism Forever Mountain Bike Club
This club has access to 1000 miles of Mt bike trails and has 1000 members.
Members are listed in order of income low to high from 1-1000. Members can only ride on the trail mileage equal to their share of the clubs income, just like freedom in the USA. The members income distribution matches the IRS 2009 Stats.
The first 266 club members only have 3.3 % of the clubs members income and they are only allowed to ride on 28 of the 1000 miles of trails. As in the real economy they get less than their statistical share. These 266 get the low muddy swamps and are not allowed on dry or improved trails at all In addition these members are required to work on all the trails, except the top 158 miles which are exclusively maintained by world class trail building contractors for the ultra club members only.
The next 208 members are allowed to ride on 75 miles of trail as they have 7.9% of the club members total income, they can also ride on the 33 miles of swamp if they wish, but they mostly ride on the 75 miles that the first 266 cannot ride on. their trail are merely poorly maintained jeep tracks and log roads. These members are also required to work on all the trails except the top ultra members trails but these members are allowed to work with better tools and use machinery.
The next 180 members get to ride on some average low grade trails with 117 miles reserved for them as they have 12.1 percent of the club membership income. These members are also required to work on the trails but they also have to make reports to the upper management.
The next 217 members get to ride on 262 miles of good quality trails as they have 22.3 % of the clubs income, and all the other trails under their status. These members don't work on trails but manage the work and are required to just go to meetings and make plans and set up work markers and file reports on what got done.
The next 97 members get to ride on 219 miles of trails exclcusive to them and their superiors and these trails are in great shape, with lots of fun features and always properly drained. These members exclusive job is to oversee the work of all the other members and attned board meetings when the board calls on them.
The next 24 members get to ride on the sweetest most buffed smooth flowy trails in the forest and they get 120 miles of these exclusively, and have to share them only with the top echelon 8 riders, and of course can ride on all the other trails under their status as well. These members just go to board meetings if they feel like it, usually bribing the lower members to vote for whatever they want.
The next 6 members get an exclusive penultimate 112 miles of groomed and raked daily trails with gondola service, an exclusive club house with international sharing with other world elite bike club members and a jet plane landing field in the valley. These members write all the rules behind the scenes and never venture on the other trails, though occasionally will ride on the next echelon down trails if they need to use them for something. If necessary they have private military and secret service clear the trails if they want to go ride on the rough and wild side.
The next One member has an exclusive 18 mile bike park with secret service detail.
And the Final Bike club member has 49 miles of private bike parks, in the sweetest most remote parts cordoned off with guards and behind tall brick walls. Only illegal immigrants and high clearance security personell rained in Mt bike trail building are allowed in these areas. And the other Billionaires from around the world can ride here as well coming in to this members private exclusive jet port and fully staffed private resort. This member has lawyers pass down the club law to the lower merely ultra rich members and usually has troublesome members die in unfortunate accidents on the trails.
And all was well with the Freinds of Capitalism Forever Bike Club with 2 members having about as much excellent trail as the bottom 500 members shit hole mud pits and of course having thousands and thousands of times the amenities and luxery and this was as it should be for ever and ever as is and forever ordained by the great Free Market Church of Chicago School Economics.
Especially as of 2010 when the Clubs supreme court of Biking Jurisdictions ruled that money equals free speech.
The Freinds of Capitalism Forever Mountain Bike Club
This club has access to 1000 miles of Mt bike trails and has 1000 members.
Members are listed in order of income low to high from 1-1000. Members can only ride on the trail mileage equal to their share of the clubs income, just like freedom in the USA. The members income distribution matches the IRS 2009 Stats.
The first 266 club members only have 3.3 % of the clubs members income and they are only allowed to ride on 28 of the 1000 miles of trails. As in the real economy they get less than their statistical share. These 266 get the low muddy swamps and are not allowed on dry or improved trails at all In addition these members are required to work on all the trails, except the top 158 miles which are exclusively maintained by world class trail building contractors for the ultra club members only.
The next 208 members are allowed to ride on 75 miles of trail as they have 7.9% of the club members total income, they can also ride on the 33 miles of swamp if they wish, but they mostly ride on the 75 miles that the first 266 cannot ride on. their trail are merely poorly maintained jeep tracks and log roads. These members are also required to work on all the trails except the top ultra members trails but these members are allowed to work with better tools and use machinery.
The next 180 members get to ride on some average low grade trails with 117 miles reserved for them as they have 12.1 percent of the club membership income. These members are also required to work on the trails but they also have to make reports to the upper management.
The next 217 members get to ride on 262 miles of good quality trails as they have 22.3 % of the clubs income, and all the other trails under their status. These members don't work on trails but manage the work and are required to just go to meetings and make plans and set up work markers and file reports on what got done.
The next 97 members get to ride on 219 miles of trails exclcusive to them and their superiors and these trails are in great shape, with lots of fun features and always properly drained. These members exclusive job is to oversee the work of all the other members and attned board meetings when the board calls on them.
The next 24 members get to ride on the sweetest most buffed smooth flowy trails in the forest and they get 120 miles of these exclusively, and have to share them only with the top echelon 8 riders, and of course can ride on all the other trails under their status as well. These members just go to board meetings if they feel like it, usually bribing the lower members to vote for whatever they want.
The next 6 members get an exclusive penultimate 112 miles of groomed and raked daily trails with gondola service, an exclusive club house with international sharing with other world elite bike club members and a jet plane landing field in the valley. These members write all the rules behind the scenes and never venture on the other trails, though occasionally will ride on the next echelon down trails if they need to use them for something. If necessary they have private military and secret service clear the trails if they want to go ride on the rough and wild side.
The next One member has an exclusive 18 mile bike park with secret service detail.
And the Final Bike club member has 49 miles of private bike parks, in the sweetest most remote parts cordoned off with guards and behind tall brick walls. Only illegal immigrants and high clearance security personell rained in Mt bike trail building are allowed in these areas. And the other Billionaires from around the world can ride here as well coming in to this members private exclusive jet port and fully staffed private resort. This member has lawyers pass down the club law to the lower merely ultra rich members and usually has troublesome members die in unfortunate accidents on the trails.
And all was well with the Freinds of Capitalism Forever Bike Club with 2 members having about as much excellent trail as the bottom 500 members shit hole mud pits and of course having thousands and thousands of times the amenities and luxery and this was as it should be for ever and ever as is and forever ordained by the great Free Market Church of Chicago School Economics.
Especially as of 2010 when the Clubs supreme court of Biking Jurisdictions ruled that money equals free speech.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Prayer for the Great Planet
Prayer for the Earth --She needs it--
Yule
Gratitude to the Sun, Luminous energizing orb, whose warmth and energy calls forth all life from the earth and enables us to see.
In our minds so be it, in our actions so be it, in our relations so be it.
Imbolc
Gratitude to the great Sky who holds uncountable galaxies, who goes beyond all thoughts and all powers of the mind, and yet is within each one of us.
In our minds so be it, in our actions so be it, in our relations so be it.
Ostara
Gratitude to Green plants, the sun facing light changing leaf and fine root hairs
Standing though winds and rain, the dance of the flowing spiral grain.
In our minds so be it, in our actions so be it, in our relations so be it.
Beltane
Gratitude to Wild beings, our brothers and sisters who teach us freedoms secrets and ways, who are self complete aware and brave.
In our minds so be it, in our actions so be it, in our relations so be it.
Litha
Gratitude to Mother Earth sailing through night and day
And to her soil rich and rare and sweet.
In our minds so be it, in our actions so be it, in our relations so be it.
Lughnasadeth
Gratitude to water, Oceans, Clouds, Rain and Snow, Streams, Lakes and Rivers.
Holding or Releasing, streaming through all our bodies Salty Seas.
In our minds so be it, in our actions so be it, in our relations so be it.
Mabon
Gratitude to the Air, which bears the silent owl and the soaring swift at dawn,
Breath of our song, clear spirit breeze
In our minds so be it, in our actions so be it, in our relations so be it.
Samhain
Gratitude to our ancestors, in all their generations and billions who worked and played and loved to build the foundations of our world and our lives of ease and comfort.
In our minds so be it, in our actions so be it, in our relations so be it.
Gary Snyder-Mohawk Nation-Collective Consciousness.
Yule
Gratitude to the Sun, Luminous energizing orb, whose warmth and energy calls forth all life from the earth and enables us to see.
In our minds so be it, in our actions so be it, in our relations so be it.
Imbolc
Gratitude to the great Sky who holds uncountable galaxies, who goes beyond all thoughts and all powers of the mind, and yet is within each one of us.
In our minds so be it, in our actions so be it, in our relations so be it.
Ostara
Gratitude to Green plants, the sun facing light changing leaf and fine root hairs
Standing though winds and rain, the dance of the flowing spiral grain.
In our minds so be it, in our actions so be it, in our relations so be it.
Beltane
Gratitude to Wild beings, our brothers and sisters who teach us freedoms secrets and ways, who are self complete aware and brave.
In our minds so be it, in our actions so be it, in our relations so be it.
Litha
Gratitude to Mother Earth sailing through night and day
And to her soil rich and rare and sweet.
In our minds so be it, in our actions so be it, in our relations so be it.
Lughnasadeth
Gratitude to water, Oceans, Clouds, Rain and Snow, Streams, Lakes and Rivers.
Holding or Releasing, streaming through all our bodies Salty Seas.
In our minds so be it, in our actions so be it, in our relations so be it.
Mabon
Gratitude to the Air, which bears the silent owl and the soaring swift at dawn,
Breath of our song, clear spirit breeze
In our minds so be it, in our actions so be it, in our relations so be it.
Samhain
Gratitude to our ancestors, in all their generations and billions who worked and played and loved to build the foundations of our world and our lives of ease and comfort.
In our minds so be it, in our actions so be it, in our relations so be it.
Gary Snyder-Mohawk Nation-Collective Consciousness.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
12 Steps For US Exceptionalism
12 Steps For Political Recovery
We admitted we were powerless over the inhuman organizational forces of corporate and public bureaucracy, and its inherent inability to manage resources and people for the benefit of and continuation of life on planet earth, and that our social constructions have become machines unmanageable for the fulfillment of natural and human potential.
We came to believe that a power greater than any one religion, any economic system, our own nationalism, and separate from any one church, corporation, or nation(s), could restore us from the insanity of greed and arrogance, and lead us to sustainable long term peaceful relations with each other and the planet.
Made a decision to turn our wills and our fortunes over to a power greater than ourselves and to serving the interests of humanity and the planet.
Made a searching and fearless moral assessment of our political, social, economic, environmental, and historical wrongs.
Admitted to Our Higher Power, ourselves, and the whole world the exact nature of our collective corporate, institutional, governmental and national wrongs.
Were open to spiritual, social and economic re-assessment, and ready to have Our Higher Power remove our national, corporate, institutional, and personal defects of character.
Humbly asked Our Higher Power to remove all our blockages to being human beings and invited the world together to plan the way for all to reach their highest human potential in harmony with each other and the natural world.
Made a list of all the nations and peoples, ecosystems and species, we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
Made direct amends to such nations, peoples, and environments, in ways that are to be determined by those harmed.
Continued to take historical, social, economic, and political inventory in every situation affecting the environment other species and human beings and set wrongs right promptly.
Sought through true democracy and scientific discourse to improve our conscious and deliberate improvement of life on earth, seeking only the betterment of each generation and the improvement of ecosystems as the final outcome of all human endeavors. And we prayed to our various higher powers for the power to carry this mission out.
Having had a spiritual awakening and economic political renaissance as a result of these steps we tried to carry forward the good news of abundant peaceful life and prosperous sustainability to all future generations.
We admitted we were powerless over the inhuman organizational forces of corporate and public bureaucracy, and its inherent inability to manage resources and people for the benefit of and continuation of life on planet earth, and that our social constructions have become machines unmanageable for the fulfillment of natural and human potential.
We came to believe that a power greater than any one religion, any economic system, our own nationalism, and separate from any one church, corporation, or nation(s), could restore us from the insanity of greed and arrogance, and lead us to sustainable long term peaceful relations with each other and the planet.
Made a decision to turn our wills and our fortunes over to a power greater than ourselves and to serving the interests of humanity and the planet.
Made a searching and fearless moral assessment of our political, social, economic, environmental, and historical wrongs.
Admitted to Our Higher Power, ourselves, and the whole world the exact nature of our collective corporate, institutional, governmental and national wrongs.
Were open to spiritual, social and economic re-assessment, and ready to have Our Higher Power remove our national, corporate, institutional, and personal defects of character.
Humbly asked Our Higher Power to remove all our blockages to being human beings and invited the world together to plan the way for all to reach their highest human potential in harmony with each other and the natural world.
Made a list of all the nations and peoples, ecosystems and species, we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
Made direct amends to such nations, peoples, and environments, in ways that are to be determined by those harmed.
Continued to take historical, social, economic, and political inventory in every situation affecting the environment other species and human beings and set wrongs right promptly.
Sought through true democracy and scientific discourse to improve our conscious and deliberate improvement of life on earth, seeking only the betterment of each generation and the improvement of ecosystems as the final outcome of all human endeavors. And we prayed to our various higher powers for the power to carry this mission out.
Having had a spiritual awakening and economic political renaissance as a result of these steps we tried to carry forward the good news of abundant peaceful life and prosperous sustainability to all future generations.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Death Pledge or Green Pledge
Green Pledge Not Death Pledge
Why mortgages and interest kill the planet.
I will start with what may seem an absurd proposition at first but which will become clear if you are capable of breaking out of the pain and suffering of being stuck in the morass of conventional current financial cultural insanity.
Housing is cheap, dirt cheap, absolutely ridiculously cheap. All the materials that go into building a house are cheap, and the cost of the labor to produce all the materials and build the house is very low. At first this seems a total and complete idiocy to even state such a thing as we are told every day that housing is unaffordable and that the cost is high and that one must be prepared to make great sacrifice to get approved by the system and set up with a mortgage, a loan from a bank, and insurance to cover the possible loss of such an expensive and hard to come by asset such as a modern house. But we have been deceived and we have bought the deception in whole or part and are either in the game so deep that it would threaten all that we believe in to think otherwise, or we are out of the game and cannot get in but are stuck paying a heavy price to some one or some entity that is heavily in to the system of the deception to the point of playing the game with large numbers of housing units. Or you may be one of those completely out of the deception and cut out of economics all the way and be homeless money less, asset less and of course in this deception a person of zero value to the system.
But simply think of the real cost of your housing just in terms of the game of economics called capitalism and the purchase price is actually rather small. If you had the purchase price for an average house where I live it equates to about five years of an average households income which is in terms of 40-50 years of possible productive lifetime output not a whole lot. The main issue is that in this system no one is ever allowed to have access to the productive output of ones lifetime when it is needed and the majority of ones productive output is taken away in the form of taxes and interest and fees and charges and all the hidden costs of all the taxes in all the things anyone buys anywhere for anything. So very basically the house is cheap, for example a $200,000 house is cheap, the mortgage interest is usurious, in fact debilitating and destructive and a burden to both you and your local community, with a 6% loan on that house you end up paying an extra $150,000, and that is $150, 000 straight out of your community, and out of productive use and into the void of international finance. Next you will be required by the bank to insure the house, and if you do not have a large enough down payment, required to insure the mortgage itself! How absurd that if you do not have enough money as evaluated by a bank that you must then pay more, but still can have the loan at a higher rate, plus then pay an insurance penalty and a very large one to some other economic absurdity, so now you pay an additional fee for nothing, lets say $750 a year, which adds up to 22,500 over 30 years. Next you will get hit with a property tax, and where I live that would likely be about $2000 a year, so another $60,000 goes to property taxes.
In Summary:
House for $200,000
Mortgage Payments $350,000
Insurance 22,500
Property Tax 60,000
Now we are talking $432,500 for a $200,000 house. Great deal huh?
But you say I’ll never own one house for 30 years so I will never pay all that, and if I did the house would go up in value so much that 30 years from now it would be worth $675.000 due to inflation etc. This may be true, however if you inflate the insurance and property tax over the period and if you actually maintain the house you will end up having spent near to the inflated value of the house or more plus all costs for taxes and insurance and will have run head on in to a not mentioned economic reality that real estate prices escalate to equal what the real estate does in fact cost over time. So owning the house takes productive labor value out of you, for at least 30 years and gives it to the banks, the insurance companies and the government, you end up better off than if you lived under a bridge but you pay a heavy price. The price is that you do all the work and maintain the house and the finance and taxation folks get three times what you got. And when you sell that house in 30 years to move in to the old folks home , or pay off medical bills in old age, and move to a trailer park because they got such a large chunk of your money over your lifetime, the system will again extract a very large chunk of change out of your sale, for the real estate agent commissions, for the appraiser, and the closer and the excise tax, though at least for now you get a capital gains tax break on your own home sale.
I hope anyone gets the point here that the house is cheap, the system that disallows you from getting a few years of your productive labor converted to tradable exchange is very expensive.
A simple solution within bean counting shortage economics would be that the government could give all citizens a zero percent or 1% mortgage on any home up to the median price in each county or metropolitan area. This anyone in their right mind would prefer to our system giving money to banks at a very low rate who then loan it to you at a ruinous rate. It is simple to see that if everyone had this zero percent mortgage then all the money now sent to banks as interest would be freed up and circulate in the real productive economy and there would ensue a huge growth and flowering of all nonfinancial sectors. And happily for us, Banks and insurance companies would go down in size by a very large amount.
But we don’t want to just go there. We want to go much farther.
To carry the logic further, one should consider that every product that goes in to building your house is produced by businesses and companies and corporations and contractors all of whom themselves are constricted and over paying the banks and insurance companies and taxes to the government. One could easily conclude then that every thing in the house is over priced by at least 50% by the fact that all the producers have had to pay all the taxes and insurances and bank interest on loans, and many of the products in the building of a home have a multi path creation chain, for instance the lumber was cut down by one company which had to overcharge 50% to cover all the usurious excess, then it was processed in a mill that had to overcharge by 50 % and then it was transported and sold to the company that sold it to you which again had to cover all its usury and tax costs. I believe this has been called the rule of 10%, and if not yet then I am now, calling it that, the rule of 10%. Everything you purchase in this free market capitalist culture costs by bean counter standards 10% or less than what you pay for it. A pure capitalist actually profits best if it can acquire commodities for free and even better if not for free, then in addition get a subsidy to pay for the bean counters accrual of the fictionalized cost.
SO to add insult to injury you pay the price on paper of $200,000 for a house that cost $20,000 to build in reality and you will pay $675,000 to live in it. Now that is one sweet deal for you is it not?
But we don’t want to just to stop here we want to go much much farther.
And if you are a bean counter get out your beans and you can certainly prove that here in this document the numbers are not perfectly accurate, but if you do a thorough bean counting and really go down in to the details they are mechanically and systemically correct. Remember that taxes and interest and all this good stuff have reverse multipliers just like beans counted as income and spent around has positive multipliers called the velocity of money. For example you spend a dollar at the bakery, the baker spends it hiring a contractor, the contractor gives it to an electrician, who pays for stuff at the light store, who buys groceries with it, who takes the dollar back to the bakery who deposits in the local bank, which loans it to your neighbor to remodel her kitchen, who pays the contractor who then pays off his mortgage and poof that dollar goes to Wall street now. But when your dollar goes straight to the banker or the tax jurisdiction especially the Federal tax the negative velocity of your dollar now goes out of your community taking away all that activity mentioned , especially severe as noted when the money goes straight to wall street, and especially adding insult to injury then gets invested not back positively for you in the USA but is invested in the worst possible highest profit locations away from you, like to get low wage folks in foreign lands to manufacture stuff in factories built with subsidies, also out of your tax dollar, in some foreign economic zone.
But we can go further sadly :
Let us consider that all these cheap inputs are ravaging the environment and killing the planet. And they are. Because instead of all the resources being produced sustainably and each step of production getting proper compensation, all the primary and secondary producers and up the line are running around ripping off the planet and producing frantically not to produce good quality and leave the production site for the seventh generation or better than it was to start with, but to serve the banks and the taxation system which have no accounting for the real world in their operational function. Over generations the real costs of the production of your house is going to be more than the current value or any bean counting to determine such values today or tomorrow. So we can deduce and state certainly that we are really getting a negative acceleration on our home value. You yourself may be appearing to get some benefit but the planet and society as a whole are getting ripped off. Further the cheap inputs necessitated by the majority of the cost going not to production but to finance and taxes also means your home is not engineered and designed to be energy efficient and not designed to last for a as long as it could so you get an additional burden from the system that needs to extract your productive labor once again but now in the form of high utility bills and constant maintenance and replacement of consumer consumption grade building systems, channeling again huge percentages of all income upward and back to the financial centers for ever more of the same turning the death and destruction of the planet into money.
Your house is in effect really cheap in terms of the current market inputs that are counted, and creates huge wealth for those on top of the system while extracting huge sums from you and your local economy. This process is destroying the environment and diverting and then destroying your wealth making your community poorer and poorer. At the same time cheap housing is destroying the environment by not pricing in the effects of extracting all the resources in an unsustainable and exploitative manner. In effect the system is robbing us all and the planet and destroying our infinite life support base in order to produce illusionary monetary and paper wealth in Wall Street, London, Abu Dubai and Tokyo.
Think about an alternative. An alternative world where the products were produced in an environmentally sound way by persons receiving a living wage in all cases and your home was built with green products and all the contractors and contractors employees got a liveable wage and in the end you paid $200,000 for a $200,000 house because all the labor exchange value in the house was paid directly by you and all the products were produced without burden of taxes and usury and insurance and markups at every stage of the process.
Wow imagine that! That would be INSANE. Imagine you spent an hour doing whatever it is you do and you traded that value to someone else for one hour of what they do! Crazy.
Imagine that you did not trade 10 hours of what you do to get one hour of what others do. Imagine that the huge number of persons who don’t do anything at all productive but seem to need 100’s or 1000’s or Millions of times more beans than you need, no longer got those beans.
Imagine that we all spent most of our productive income in our local area and everyone else did, creating a huge renaissance of small local businesses and services and farming and art and culture instead of most of everyones income and productivity getting channeled ever upward and into more and more arcane and bizarre investment schemes where fewer and fewer people work or do anything and more and more people do weird meaningless tasks related to the manipulation of imaginary things and to satisfy ever deeper layers of bureaucratic rules and regulations designed to insure that nothing ever gets done at all without approval of some legislative rule written somewhere by someone interested in getting some profit out of nothing.
Depressed Yet?? Pissed? Well there is still more. Or hell yeah, screw this crap, lets go flip some houses and get rich before the shit hits the fan!
If you live in an apartment in a city with good development and you can get around on foot or public transportation hooray for you. Most of our houses in slumburbia however have been built in a car centric crazed planning and development paradigm and your house very probably is not being served very well by public transportation, and it is probably not surrounded by nice bike and walk ways to the local stores and health services, probably you have to have a car to survive as all the places you need to go to have been zoned exclusively to areas far and scattered from your house. So if and when Oil either runs out or gets really expensive your suburban dream home may become a real economic trap as the cost of driving to and from it escalates to an unsustainable portion of your income (in fact why many folks got foreclosed on in this recent cycle, the cost of driving to and from work can reach 10-30% of a persons income if they drive a lot). And we can thank ourselves for this last one as much as the auto industry and the planning department and the banks and developers who got all these nice big neighborhoods approved and built.
Why mortgages and interest kill the planet.
I will start with what may seem an absurd proposition at first but which will become clear if you are capable of breaking out of the pain and suffering of being stuck in the morass of conventional current financial cultural insanity.
Housing is cheap, dirt cheap, absolutely ridiculously cheap. All the materials that go into building a house are cheap, and the cost of the labor to produce all the materials and build the house is very low. At first this seems a total and complete idiocy to even state such a thing as we are told every day that housing is unaffordable and that the cost is high and that one must be prepared to make great sacrifice to get approved by the system and set up with a mortgage, a loan from a bank, and insurance to cover the possible loss of such an expensive and hard to come by asset such as a modern house. But we have been deceived and we have bought the deception in whole or part and are either in the game so deep that it would threaten all that we believe in to think otherwise, or we are out of the game and cannot get in but are stuck paying a heavy price to some one or some entity that is heavily in to the system of the deception to the point of playing the game with large numbers of housing units. Or you may be one of those completely out of the deception and cut out of economics all the way and be homeless money less, asset less and of course in this deception a person of zero value to the system.
But simply think of the real cost of your housing just in terms of the game of economics called capitalism and the purchase price is actually rather small. If you had the purchase price for an average house where I live it equates to about five years of an average households income which is in terms of 40-50 years of possible productive lifetime output not a whole lot. The main issue is that in this system no one is ever allowed to have access to the productive output of ones lifetime when it is needed and the majority of ones productive output is taken away in the form of taxes and interest and fees and charges and all the hidden costs of all the taxes in all the things anyone buys anywhere for anything. So very basically the house is cheap, for example a $200,000 house is cheap, the mortgage interest is usurious, in fact debilitating and destructive and a burden to both you and your local community, with a 6% loan on that house you end up paying an extra $150,000, and that is $150, 000 straight out of your community, and out of productive use and into the void of international finance. Next you will be required by the bank to insure the house, and if you do not have a large enough down payment, required to insure the mortgage itself! How absurd that if you do not have enough money as evaluated by a bank that you must then pay more, but still can have the loan at a higher rate, plus then pay an insurance penalty and a very large one to some other economic absurdity, so now you pay an additional fee for nothing, lets say $750 a year, which adds up to 22,500 over 30 years. Next you will get hit with a property tax, and where I live that would likely be about $2000 a year, so another $60,000 goes to property taxes.
In Summary:
House for $200,000
Mortgage Payments $350,000
Insurance 22,500
Property Tax 60,000
Now we are talking $432,500 for a $200,000 house. Great deal huh?
But you say I’ll never own one house for 30 years so I will never pay all that, and if I did the house would go up in value so much that 30 years from now it would be worth $675.000 due to inflation etc. This may be true, however if you inflate the insurance and property tax over the period and if you actually maintain the house you will end up having spent near to the inflated value of the house or more plus all costs for taxes and insurance and will have run head on in to a not mentioned economic reality that real estate prices escalate to equal what the real estate does in fact cost over time. So owning the house takes productive labor value out of you, for at least 30 years and gives it to the banks, the insurance companies and the government, you end up better off than if you lived under a bridge but you pay a heavy price. The price is that you do all the work and maintain the house and the finance and taxation folks get three times what you got. And when you sell that house in 30 years to move in to the old folks home , or pay off medical bills in old age, and move to a trailer park because they got such a large chunk of your money over your lifetime, the system will again extract a very large chunk of change out of your sale, for the real estate agent commissions, for the appraiser, and the closer and the excise tax, though at least for now you get a capital gains tax break on your own home sale.
I hope anyone gets the point here that the house is cheap, the system that disallows you from getting a few years of your productive labor converted to tradable exchange is very expensive.
A simple solution within bean counting shortage economics would be that the government could give all citizens a zero percent or 1% mortgage on any home up to the median price in each county or metropolitan area. This anyone in their right mind would prefer to our system giving money to banks at a very low rate who then loan it to you at a ruinous rate. It is simple to see that if everyone had this zero percent mortgage then all the money now sent to banks as interest would be freed up and circulate in the real productive economy and there would ensue a huge growth and flowering of all nonfinancial sectors. And happily for us, Banks and insurance companies would go down in size by a very large amount.
But we don’t want to just go there. We want to go much farther.
To carry the logic further, one should consider that every product that goes in to building your house is produced by businesses and companies and corporations and contractors all of whom themselves are constricted and over paying the banks and insurance companies and taxes to the government. One could easily conclude then that every thing in the house is over priced by at least 50% by the fact that all the producers have had to pay all the taxes and insurances and bank interest on loans, and many of the products in the building of a home have a multi path creation chain, for instance the lumber was cut down by one company which had to overcharge 50% to cover all the usurious excess, then it was processed in a mill that had to overcharge by 50 % and then it was transported and sold to the company that sold it to you which again had to cover all its usury and tax costs. I believe this has been called the rule of 10%, and if not yet then I am now, calling it that, the rule of 10%. Everything you purchase in this free market capitalist culture costs by bean counter standards 10% or less than what you pay for it. A pure capitalist actually profits best if it can acquire commodities for free and even better if not for free, then in addition get a subsidy to pay for the bean counters accrual of the fictionalized cost.
SO to add insult to injury you pay the price on paper of $200,000 for a house that cost $20,000 to build in reality and you will pay $675,000 to live in it. Now that is one sweet deal for you is it not?
But we don’t want to just to stop here we want to go much much farther.
And if you are a bean counter get out your beans and you can certainly prove that here in this document the numbers are not perfectly accurate, but if you do a thorough bean counting and really go down in to the details they are mechanically and systemically correct. Remember that taxes and interest and all this good stuff have reverse multipliers just like beans counted as income and spent around has positive multipliers called the velocity of money. For example you spend a dollar at the bakery, the baker spends it hiring a contractor, the contractor gives it to an electrician, who pays for stuff at the light store, who buys groceries with it, who takes the dollar back to the bakery who deposits in the local bank, which loans it to your neighbor to remodel her kitchen, who pays the contractor who then pays off his mortgage and poof that dollar goes to Wall street now. But when your dollar goes straight to the banker or the tax jurisdiction especially the Federal tax the negative velocity of your dollar now goes out of your community taking away all that activity mentioned , especially severe as noted when the money goes straight to wall street, and especially adding insult to injury then gets invested not back positively for you in the USA but is invested in the worst possible highest profit locations away from you, like to get low wage folks in foreign lands to manufacture stuff in factories built with subsidies, also out of your tax dollar, in some foreign economic zone.
But we can go further sadly :
Let us consider that all these cheap inputs are ravaging the environment and killing the planet. And they are. Because instead of all the resources being produced sustainably and each step of production getting proper compensation, all the primary and secondary producers and up the line are running around ripping off the planet and producing frantically not to produce good quality and leave the production site for the seventh generation or better than it was to start with, but to serve the banks and the taxation system which have no accounting for the real world in their operational function. Over generations the real costs of the production of your house is going to be more than the current value or any bean counting to determine such values today or tomorrow. So we can deduce and state certainly that we are really getting a negative acceleration on our home value. You yourself may be appearing to get some benefit but the planet and society as a whole are getting ripped off. Further the cheap inputs necessitated by the majority of the cost going not to production but to finance and taxes also means your home is not engineered and designed to be energy efficient and not designed to last for a as long as it could so you get an additional burden from the system that needs to extract your productive labor once again but now in the form of high utility bills and constant maintenance and replacement of consumer consumption grade building systems, channeling again huge percentages of all income upward and back to the financial centers for ever more of the same turning the death and destruction of the planet into money.
Your house is in effect really cheap in terms of the current market inputs that are counted, and creates huge wealth for those on top of the system while extracting huge sums from you and your local economy. This process is destroying the environment and diverting and then destroying your wealth making your community poorer and poorer. At the same time cheap housing is destroying the environment by not pricing in the effects of extracting all the resources in an unsustainable and exploitative manner. In effect the system is robbing us all and the planet and destroying our infinite life support base in order to produce illusionary monetary and paper wealth in Wall Street, London, Abu Dubai and Tokyo.
Think about an alternative. An alternative world where the products were produced in an environmentally sound way by persons receiving a living wage in all cases and your home was built with green products and all the contractors and contractors employees got a liveable wage and in the end you paid $200,000 for a $200,000 house because all the labor exchange value in the house was paid directly by you and all the products were produced without burden of taxes and usury and insurance and markups at every stage of the process.
Wow imagine that! That would be INSANE. Imagine you spent an hour doing whatever it is you do and you traded that value to someone else for one hour of what they do! Crazy.
Imagine that you did not trade 10 hours of what you do to get one hour of what others do. Imagine that the huge number of persons who don’t do anything at all productive but seem to need 100’s or 1000’s or Millions of times more beans than you need, no longer got those beans.
Imagine that we all spent most of our productive income in our local area and everyone else did, creating a huge renaissance of small local businesses and services and farming and art and culture instead of most of everyones income and productivity getting channeled ever upward and into more and more arcane and bizarre investment schemes where fewer and fewer people work or do anything and more and more people do weird meaningless tasks related to the manipulation of imaginary things and to satisfy ever deeper layers of bureaucratic rules and regulations designed to insure that nothing ever gets done at all without approval of some legislative rule written somewhere by someone interested in getting some profit out of nothing.
Depressed Yet?? Pissed? Well there is still more. Or hell yeah, screw this crap, lets go flip some houses and get rich before the shit hits the fan!
If you live in an apartment in a city with good development and you can get around on foot or public transportation hooray for you. Most of our houses in slumburbia however have been built in a car centric crazed planning and development paradigm and your house very probably is not being served very well by public transportation, and it is probably not surrounded by nice bike and walk ways to the local stores and health services, probably you have to have a car to survive as all the places you need to go to have been zoned exclusively to areas far and scattered from your house. So if and when Oil either runs out or gets really expensive your suburban dream home may become a real economic trap as the cost of driving to and from it escalates to an unsustainable portion of your income (in fact why many folks got foreclosed on in this recent cycle, the cost of driving to and from work can reach 10-30% of a persons income if they drive a lot). And we can thank ourselves for this last one as much as the auto industry and the planning department and the banks and developers who got all these nice big neighborhoods approved and built.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Quote for Today
To think deeply in our culture is to grow angry and to anger others; and if you cannot tolerate this anger, you are wasting the time you spend thinking deeply. One of the rewards of deep thought is the hot glow anger at discovering wrong, but if anger is taboo, thought will starve to death.
- Jules Henry- from " Walking on Water" by Derick Jensen
As I see all the news about the social upheaval happening in Egypt I wonder on the one hand about how the average American has no conception of the decades of US behind the scenes maneuvering and how the billions in US military over the decades has been not to the people but to the military and secret services to prop up our puppet. On the other hand I look at this country and see immense wealth and gaping chasms of poverty and ignorance growing at an exponential rate while the powers that be just keep on lying to the people with no consequence and no accountability what so ever.
When are the American people gong to get Angry and say this is enough, we are walking out of our jobs and hitting the streets, and everything is stopping until the BS ends.
And the capitalist and the banker and the government shills get really really upset when the gears come to a halt as contrary to all the lies about how money and highly super rich smart dandys make the world go around what really make the whole thing possible is that 100 million americans get out of bed every morning and go to work.
- Jules Henry- from " Walking on Water" by Derick Jensen
As I see all the news about the social upheaval happening in Egypt I wonder on the one hand about how the average American has no conception of the decades of US behind the scenes maneuvering and how the billions in US military over the decades has been not to the people but to the military and secret services to prop up our puppet. On the other hand I look at this country and see immense wealth and gaping chasms of poverty and ignorance growing at an exponential rate while the powers that be just keep on lying to the people with no consequence and no accountability what so ever.
When are the American people gong to get Angry and say this is enough, we are walking out of our jobs and hitting the streets, and everything is stopping until the BS ends.
And the capitalist and the banker and the government shills get really really upset when the gears come to a halt as contrary to all the lies about how money and highly super rich smart dandys make the world go around what really make the whole thing possible is that 100 million americans get out of bed every morning and go to work.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Colonize Space and the American Colonies
This is a thought Experiment.
Imagine that we sent to the Moon a 1000 people with the goal to set up a self sufficient colony, and one to Mars, and set one up also on a very large asteroid for mining rare earth elements.
According to the bankers and the government all that would need to be done is to drop the people off with large piles on money and then instantly a perfect free market would form and all would be a great success. Of course the space colonists would all die instantly as money is nothing. What they need is real capital. And that is all the things they need to build the living space, the mines, the plants to refine water and air and the green houses to grow food.
If we extrapolate this situation and compare it to the colonization of America we might conclude that these space colonies would probably grow infinitely faster than economies on earth and in a few centuries these colonies would do much as the American colonies did in the late 1700's, they would break free from planet earth. And the reason would be the same, to break free from the limitations of the encrusted banking and power systems of earth in the space colonists case, as it was for the American colonies to break free from the banking of the English and
Europeans.
The original USA prospered greatly for about 150 years and then the bankers got back in on the act and since that time the US has become a global empire of war and set on a track the track of worship of money as the representation for all things that it is not.
Space is a harsh mistress and there will be no denying that every single aspect of life and continuance are based upon the capital of human ingenuity and use of real materials and not on bankers whims to grant monetary allowance.
This gets me back to the idea that money is a tool for efficient trade of goods of services, it is not a good or service in itself. Money is not a good or service in itself. It is a tool.
If you were a carpenter would you accumulate millions of hammers and saws?
If you were a baker would you warehouse stock piles of cook ware and ovens?
Would a writer be richer if they hoarded millions of cubic feet of paper and pens.
It is not the tool or how many tools you have, it is the human use of the tool and the resultant creation of real things and real services that are the capital. The symbolic cultural transaction medium, the cash or digital credit or the promissory note these are imaginary representations of the real things in the real world, and hence should be treated as such.
Unfortunately we now have things turned around the other way and are rapidly building a world that can not be sustained.
We have the tool and we have the knowledge and many can see the way out but do we have the collective awareness to unshackle ourselves?
As an aside: support space colonization. It will get mining off the earth and help the environment eventually. And hopefully one day if we fail in getting free here on earth the space colonies will surpass us and go freely off into infinite space unhindered by what a bank, an insurance company and a government official say is so.
Imagine that we sent to the Moon a 1000 people with the goal to set up a self sufficient colony, and one to Mars, and set one up also on a very large asteroid for mining rare earth elements.
According to the bankers and the government all that would need to be done is to drop the people off with large piles on money and then instantly a perfect free market would form and all would be a great success. Of course the space colonists would all die instantly as money is nothing. What they need is real capital. And that is all the things they need to build the living space, the mines, the plants to refine water and air and the green houses to grow food.
If we extrapolate this situation and compare it to the colonization of America we might conclude that these space colonies would probably grow infinitely faster than economies on earth and in a few centuries these colonies would do much as the American colonies did in the late 1700's, they would break free from planet earth. And the reason would be the same, to break free from the limitations of the encrusted banking and power systems of earth in the space colonists case, as it was for the American colonies to break free from the banking of the English and
Europeans.
The original USA prospered greatly for about 150 years and then the bankers got back in on the act and since that time the US has become a global empire of war and set on a track the track of worship of money as the representation for all things that it is not.
Space is a harsh mistress and there will be no denying that every single aspect of life and continuance are based upon the capital of human ingenuity and use of real materials and not on bankers whims to grant monetary allowance.
This gets me back to the idea that money is a tool for efficient trade of goods of services, it is not a good or service in itself. Money is not a good or service in itself. It is a tool.
If you were a carpenter would you accumulate millions of hammers and saws?
If you were a baker would you warehouse stock piles of cook ware and ovens?
Would a writer be richer if they hoarded millions of cubic feet of paper and pens.
It is not the tool or how many tools you have, it is the human use of the tool and the resultant creation of real things and real services that are the capital. The symbolic cultural transaction medium, the cash or digital credit or the promissory note these are imaginary representations of the real things in the real world, and hence should be treated as such.
Unfortunately we now have things turned around the other way and are rapidly building a world that can not be sustained.
We have the tool and we have the knowledge and many can see the way out but do we have the collective awareness to unshackle ourselves?
As an aside: support space colonization. It will get mining off the earth and help the environment eventually. And hopefully one day if we fail in getting free here on earth the space colonies will surpass us and go freely off into infinite space unhindered by what a bank, an insurance company and a government official say is so.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Are government employees efficient?
This is a straight forward bean counting trip.
I keep hearing from the right that government functions would be better turned over to private for profit enterprise. I have my doubts,and think the real motive is that a big corporation wants to get a huge pile of money and not provide any services to anyone.
So bean counter that I am I looked up the list of the largest corporations in the World and eliminated those that are not headquartered in the USA. I simply added up the corporations revenues until that revenue equaled the Federal Government Budget for the year.
Simple: Federal Government 3.767 Trillion. Including the Post Office, which by the way is just .067 Trillion and pays its own way on stamp revenue.
It took the top 33 corporations on the list to equal 3.765 Trillion in Revenue, a scary thing in and of itself.
Those 33 corporations employ 7,509,540 people. That means for each $484,300 of revenue the big efficient corporations employ one person.
On the other hand the highly wastful Federal Government which employs:
2,230,000 people to run a nation of 300,000,000 people
584,000 people to keep the mail moving
1,600,000 in the armed service fighting multiple wars and protecting all the corporations
800,000 reservists also now spending a lot of time fighting wars.
The federal government then has 5,213,900 employees for an much more efficient use of its revenues, that works out to $722,500 per employee.
So 33 corporations, do a shit load of retailing, move a lot of oil around, conglomerate a bunch of companies and hoard wealth, overcharge us for banking, and make our phones and computers work, make a bunch of crappy cars.
The government merely keeps the whole system going and fights wars mostly to benefit the corporations and does it 33% more efficiently dollar for dollar.
So using the right corporate logic more corporate functions should be taken over by the government as it would be more rationally efficient in the free market system.
The private corporation wants to take over the government function precisely in that they see that they could take that 33%
This bean counting revealed an interesting fact. Four of the largest corporations on the list are Health insurance companies. These health insurance companies have the highest revenue per employee of any except a few oil companies. How in a fair economic system could a health insurance company employing 18,000 people have a revenue per employee of 7.5 Million dollars???
The companies:
Retail:
Wal Mart
CVS
Kroger
Costco
Wallgreen
Home Depot
Target
Oil
Exxon MObil
CHevron
Conoco Phillips
Valero
Conglomerate
GE
Berkshire Hathaway
Koch Industries
Proctor and Gamble
Telecom and Tech
Hewlett Packard
AT &T
Verizon
IBM
Banks
Bank of America
AIG
Wells Fargo
Citigroup
State Farm
JP Morgan
Manufacture
GM
Ford
Boeing
Health Insurance
McKesson
Cardinal
United Health
Amerisource
Agriculture
Cargill
I keep hearing from the right that government functions would be better turned over to private for profit enterprise. I have my doubts,and think the real motive is that a big corporation wants to get a huge pile of money and not provide any services to anyone.
So bean counter that I am I looked up the list of the largest corporations in the World and eliminated those that are not headquartered in the USA. I simply added up the corporations revenues until that revenue equaled the Federal Government Budget for the year.
Simple: Federal Government 3.767 Trillion. Including the Post Office, which by the way is just .067 Trillion and pays its own way on stamp revenue.
It took the top 33 corporations on the list to equal 3.765 Trillion in Revenue, a scary thing in and of itself.
Those 33 corporations employ 7,509,540 people. That means for each $484,300 of revenue the big efficient corporations employ one person.
On the other hand the highly wastful Federal Government which employs:
2,230,000 people to run a nation of 300,000,000 people
584,000 people to keep the mail moving
1,600,000 in the armed service fighting multiple wars and protecting all the corporations
800,000 reservists also now spending a lot of time fighting wars.
The federal government then has 5,213,900 employees for an much more efficient use of its revenues, that works out to $722,500 per employee.
So 33 corporations, do a shit load of retailing, move a lot of oil around, conglomerate a bunch of companies and hoard wealth, overcharge us for banking, and make our phones and computers work, make a bunch of crappy cars.
The government merely keeps the whole system going and fights wars mostly to benefit the corporations and does it 33% more efficiently dollar for dollar.
So using the right corporate logic more corporate functions should be taken over by the government as it would be more rationally efficient in the free market system.
The private corporation wants to take over the government function precisely in that they see that they could take that 33%
This bean counting revealed an interesting fact. Four of the largest corporations on the list are Health insurance companies. These health insurance companies have the highest revenue per employee of any except a few oil companies. How in a fair economic system could a health insurance company employing 18,000 people have a revenue per employee of 7.5 Million dollars???
The companies:
Retail:
Wal Mart
CVS
Kroger
Costco
Wallgreen
Home Depot
Target
Oil
Exxon MObil
CHevron
Conoco Phillips
Valero
Conglomerate
GE
Berkshire Hathaway
Koch Industries
Proctor and Gamble
Telecom and Tech
Hewlett Packard
AT &T
Verizon
IBM
Banks
Bank of America
AIG
Wells Fargo
Citigroup
State Farm
JP Morgan
Manufacture
GM
Ford
Boeing
Health Insurance
McKesson
Cardinal
United Health
Amerisource
Agriculture
Cargill
Quote For Chewing on
Most of us will never have to be put in the internment camp because we are already there.
If they give you lined paper write the other way.
If the poll giver asks questions and then gives you the choice of answers choose your own answer.
If they give you lined paper write the other way.
If the poll giver asks questions and then gives you the choice of answers choose your own answer.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Green and Money Reform
I think Money reform is the key to human survival and break away from being merely another animal species destined to a short chapter in the natural history of the planet.
We must have the sure notion that each and every human being is born with an endowment which is his or her fair share of the planet earth and the entire universe. No king, no government, no banker, no land owner, no god anywhere or ever may lay claim to your endowment nor make any charge upon it. Any who make such false constructions are not aware, and live in a world of false representations of reality and want only to build up power and gains due to their being unable to see their own error.
Imagine a world in which each time a child is born the human server system automatically put up an endowment equal to the determined needs of an average person and increased the global money supply by that amount. That probably sounds absurd to you.
But how is it any more absurd than a goldsmith having gotten 100 dollars of gold deposited in his safe, deciding he can loan out 100 dollars a thousand times so long as no one comes in to take their gold out, directly profiting hugely off of peoples ignorance, and ironically causing a gigantic leap in economic activity between all the persons in the community thus duped into believing that there was not only 100 dollars of gold in the bank, but many hundreds of thousand of dollars worth. This scheme has multiplied a million fold to now and the powerful have decided that really there is no need for anything at all to back up the tool of economic transactions but the people need not know this. The few in the know are left to concentrate all the symbolic wealth and control all activity on the planet to a large degree and since they are all educated in mathematics and science they fall back on assumptions that money = real things = a need for money to be controlled and that control system is called accounting.
The big big problem is that things are not money. And we have transposed the real world and substituted for it an illusion world. A world in which things that are not rational, things that cannot be divided and multiplied or grown or made into manageable percentages are starting to work against us.
Real capital is not a bag of gold, or a digital financial statement, or a factory that makes cars, or a mono crop field of corn, or a factory beef shed. These things can be for some time chopped and diced numerically and symbolic profits and growth can be believed to have come out of the activities associated with these things. But the real capital underlying these human antics and primitive superstitions are is not going to provide anything if it becomes despoiled and drained.
The fractional reserve system and the whole capitalist system of accounting for all things with double entry book keeping and bizarre tax rules all set up to keep track of all things in some rationalization of economics as the have all and all of all activity on the planet is killing the planet, killing the human spirit, and quickly accelerating the emergent global culture which emulates this insanity towards a very hard fall.
We have been educated into a powerful belief that money is a real necessity of life, that money itself contains the energy of oil, the power of electricity,the nourishment of food, the kernel of knowledge and is the source of power and wisdom. The deep ecologists err severely in the analysis of how the coming end of civilization must come about due to the monetary problems associated with energy and commerce because energy is the embodyment of money and hence the end of easy sources of energy means the end of the current money and commerce system. The current money and banking scheme will very easily survive even the worst case scenarios of the most pessimistic end of civilization doom sayer and it will thrive in and make such collapse worse. Imagine a post technological world dominated by the current crop of ultra rich and a despotic feudal global possible theocratic nightmare where the rulers live in low tech splendor and the rest work the land for them and they continue the old school economic paradigms. The world can be run on low teck, wood sailing ships, messenger pigeons, human runners even, and the methods of control go way back to the Romans and the Greeks and Egyptians and are still much the same today as then. We are still not an intelligent species, really we are a few billion apes, running around beating the crap out of each other and the planet, most of us at least, and importantly those in control, trying to be the ape with the biggest number on the bottom line.
The key is changing the way of accounting for the goods and services we all use and at every level. We need to get away from the 100's of generations of conditioning that have beat into us that human beings are worthless useless sinful and have no right to anything on the planet, that your only salvation lies beyond this world.
We must have the sure notion that each and every human being is born with an endowment which is his or her fair share of the planet earth and the entire universe.
It is your endowment and yet you will not believe it. Will you not see. Instead of going to the banker and getting a loan and paying more in charges and fees than whatever is already yours, why not instead have the banker serving you? You are the cause of all that the banker and the tax jurisdiction and all the trades and business live for, without you they are nothing. why do you pay them? why do they blindly all and every one of them fumble and flail about in constant war of all against all, and no one knows why no one owns anything, or who does own anything. After all it is you and I who own it all and always have. So why not an accounting system where when I come to you and i have need of a grocery cart of food stufs or a load of material to remodel my house why not you pay me for coming and getting these things of which I have now enabled you to provide service of? And why not we pay each other? Equally? After all if I had no need you would have nothing to provide, nothing to do, nothing to trade. Why not in the covenant of believing in our own value, we exchange the value and have it digitally recorded? Without a bank or governments control!!! Could this be possible? Why can't we believe that there does not need to be a bank and a tax and some mystery system that tells us no, no, no, you that have created all the value and have toiled long and hard and have gotten all these goods from the good earth you, you cannot have any of it it all belongs to some one else, always someone else somewhere else, someone who had lots and lots of money and has had the grace to allow you to access some of this power and light of life this money thing, this all encompassing force of which none actually has any and all must promise to owe, but somewhere somehow all of us are always unable to get enough of it ever as it always must be paid forward and upwards away from the real world of the everyday human.
And why don't we see that this thing this symbol this illusion which can bind us all in slavery for ever if we do not awaken and see, this thing this overpowering force, even if we take it for our own severing it from the bonds of illusion and control, and win we the world, this currency must be allowed to die, to expire to go away every year so that never again will we be fooled back in to slavery and destruction.
It must be ensured that those who are clever and scheme in ways beyond our average imaginations and accumulations manipulate symbolism and ignorance into imaginary accounts and then make grandiose claim that such things as numbers in ledgers and letters in law books and accounting manuals give them power and privilige over others. A nonsense and absurdity we will not permit to happen, we say nay, for privilige and power one must create real things in the real world and show that one has the generosity and humility of giving away of things that bring joy and happiness and prosperity to others. Someone who believes accumulation of more than is necessary to accomplish the task at hand is an ill person and need counseling and rehabilitation. Building a great and useful enterprise in the service of providing things of benefit is a fine thing and to be encouraged.
So check out the monetary reform act.
Check out the theory of Digital money.
Read the Federal Reserve booklet: Modern Money Mechanics.
Burn a dollar bill and give someone a fiver and then forget about it.
We must have the sure notion that each and every human being is born with an endowment which is his or her fair share of the planet earth and the entire universe. No king, no government, no banker, no land owner, no god anywhere or ever may lay claim to your endowment nor make any charge upon it. Any who make such false constructions are not aware, and live in a world of false representations of reality and want only to build up power and gains due to their being unable to see their own error.
Imagine a world in which each time a child is born the human server system automatically put up an endowment equal to the determined needs of an average person and increased the global money supply by that amount. That probably sounds absurd to you.
But how is it any more absurd than a goldsmith having gotten 100 dollars of gold deposited in his safe, deciding he can loan out 100 dollars a thousand times so long as no one comes in to take their gold out, directly profiting hugely off of peoples ignorance, and ironically causing a gigantic leap in economic activity between all the persons in the community thus duped into believing that there was not only 100 dollars of gold in the bank, but many hundreds of thousand of dollars worth. This scheme has multiplied a million fold to now and the powerful have decided that really there is no need for anything at all to back up the tool of economic transactions but the people need not know this. The few in the know are left to concentrate all the symbolic wealth and control all activity on the planet to a large degree and since they are all educated in mathematics and science they fall back on assumptions that money = real things = a need for money to be controlled and that control system is called accounting.
The big big problem is that things are not money. And we have transposed the real world and substituted for it an illusion world. A world in which things that are not rational, things that cannot be divided and multiplied or grown or made into manageable percentages are starting to work against us.
Real capital is not a bag of gold, or a digital financial statement, or a factory that makes cars, or a mono crop field of corn, or a factory beef shed. These things can be for some time chopped and diced numerically and symbolic profits and growth can be believed to have come out of the activities associated with these things. But the real capital underlying these human antics and primitive superstitions are is not going to provide anything if it becomes despoiled and drained.
The fractional reserve system and the whole capitalist system of accounting for all things with double entry book keeping and bizarre tax rules all set up to keep track of all things in some rationalization of economics as the have all and all of all activity on the planet is killing the planet, killing the human spirit, and quickly accelerating the emergent global culture which emulates this insanity towards a very hard fall.
We have been educated into a powerful belief that money is a real necessity of life, that money itself contains the energy of oil, the power of electricity,the nourishment of food, the kernel of knowledge and is the source of power and wisdom. The deep ecologists err severely in the analysis of how the coming end of civilization must come about due to the monetary problems associated with energy and commerce because energy is the embodyment of money and hence the end of easy sources of energy means the end of the current money and commerce system. The current money and banking scheme will very easily survive even the worst case scenarios of the most pessimistic end of civilization doom sayer and it will thrive in and make such collapse worse. Imagine a post technological world dominated by the current crop of ultra rich and a despotic feudal global possible theocratic nightmare where the rulers live in low tech splendor and the rest work the land for them and they continue the old school economic paradigms. The world can be run on low teck, wood sailing ships, messenger pigeons, human runners even, and the methods of control go way back to the Romans and the Greeks and Egyptians and are still much the same today as then. We are still not an intelligent species, really we are a few billion apes, running around beating the crap out of each other and the planet, most of us at least, and importantly those in control, trying to be the ape with the biggest number on the bottom line.
The key is changing the way of accounting for the goods and services we all use and at every level. We need to get away from the 100's of generations of conditioning that have beat into us that human beings are worthless useless sinful and have no right to anything on the planet, that your only salvation lies beyond this world.
We must have the sure notion that each and every human being is born with an endowment which is his or her fair share of the planet earth and the entire universe.
It is your endowment and yet you will not believe it. Will you not see. Instead of going to the banker and getting a loan and paying more in charges and fees than whatever is already yours, why not instead have the banker serving you? You are the cause of all that the banker and the tax jurisdiction and all the trades and business live for, without you they are nothing. why do you pay them? why do they blindly all and every one of them fumble and flail about in constant war of all against all, and no one knows why no one owns anything, or who does own anything. After all it is you and I who own it all and always have. So why not an accounting system where when I come to you and i have need of a grocery cart of food stufs or a load of material to remodel my house why not you pay me for coming and getting these things of which I have now enabled you to provide service of? And why not we pay each other? Equally? After all if I had no need you would have nothing to provide, nothing to do, nothing to trade. Why not in the covenant of believing in our own value, we exchange the value and have it digitally recorded? Without a bank or governments control!!! Could this be possible? Why can't we believe that there does not need to be a bank and a tax and some mystery system that tells us no, no, no, you that have created all the value and have toiled long and hard and have gotten all these goods from the good earth you, you cannot have any of it it all belongs to some one else, always someone else somewhere else, someone who had lots and lots of money and has had the grace to allow you to access some of this power and light of life this money thing, this all encompassing force of which none actually has any and all must promise to owe, but somewhere somehow all of us are always unable to get enough of it ever as it always must be paid forward and upwards away from the real world of the everyday human.
And why don't we see that this thing this symbol this illusion which can bind us all in slavery for ever if we do not awaken and see, this thing this overpowering force, even if we take it for our own severing it from the bonds of illusion and control, and win we the world, this currency must be allowed to die, to expire to go away every year so that never again will we be fooled back in to slavery and destruction.
It must be ensured that those who are clever and scheme in ways beyond our average imaginations and accumulations manipulate symbolism and ignorance into imaginary accounts and then make grandiose claim that such things as numbers in ledgers and letters in law books and accounting manuals give them power and privilige over others. A nonsense and absurdity we will not permit to happen, we say nay, for privilige and power one must create real things in the real world and show that one has the generosity and humility of giving away of things that bring joy and happiness and prosperity to others. Someone who believes accumulation of more than is necessary to accomplish the task at hand is an ill person and need counseling and rehabilitation. Building a great and useful enterprise in the service of providing things of benefit is a fine thing and to be encouraged.
So check out the monetary reform act.
Check out the theory of Digital money.
Read the Federal Reserve booklet: Modern Money Mechanics.
Burn a dollar bill and give someone a fiver and then forget about it.
Monday, February 7, 2011
Whining about Poor folks Making $250,000
I recently reviewed a whole slew of articles that made it look like those with adjusted gross incomes of only $250,000 were just average struggling Americans.
First if the higher tax rate kicked in at an adjusted gross income of $250,000 then really in the real world your income would probably be more like $300,000 or more, and in many cases very wealthy people get so much complicated tax benefits and ability to defer income that again, someone might really be worth tens or hundreds of millions but there adjusted gross income could be nothing at all.
I pulled the IRS own statistics for 2008 and find that:
Of 142 Million returns:
93 Million make less than $50,000
124 Million make less than $100,000 and these get one half of the nations income!
138 Million make less than $200,000
That is 96.8% of taxpayers make less than $200,000
And 96.8% of us get about 70% of the income.
The next 3.2 % of taxpayers earn over $200,000 and get about 30% of the income.
So each of us gets 3/4 piece of pie.
Each of them those earning 200,000-500,000 gets 10 pieces of pie.
Of course.... the top top 40,000 get 20,000 pieces of pie EACH, but they would much rather you talk about the poor folks earning a measely $250,000.
Enjoy your pie!
First if the higher tax rate kicked in at an adjusted gross income of $250,000 then really in the real world your income would probably be more like $300,000 or more, and in many cases very wealthy people get so much complicated tax benefits and ability to defer income that again, someone might really be worth tens or hundreds of millions but there adjusted gross income could be nothing at all.
I pulled the IRS own statistics for 2008 and find that:
Of 142 Million returns:
93 Million make less than $50,000
124 Million make less than $100,000 and these get one half of the nations income!
138 Million make less than $200,000
That is 96.8% of taxpayers make less than $200,000
And 96.8% of us get about 70% of the income.
The next 3.2 % of taxpayers earn over $200,000 and get about 30% of the income.
So each of us gets 3/4 piece of pie.
Each of them those earning 200,000-500,000 gets 10 pieces of pie.
Of course.... the top top 40,000 get 20,000 pieces of pie EACH, but they would much rather you talk about the poor folks earning a measely $250,000.
Enjoy your pie!
Supply and Demand
Basic Bean Counting. Or that is School of Chicago Economic Assumptions.
The new thing now is cheering on the newest Global Nation. That is the nation of the nationless, the richest top 1% who can go wherever they want in person or with the click of a mouse move their assets across borders. With 7 billion people on the planet one could make the assumption that Globally now there are about 70 Million people who are in the category "Ultra Rich". The Ultra rich are not like you and me, they have a whole lot more money. Enough that if they looses 90% of everything they become merely sort of rich, dropping from 30 million in assetts to only 3 Million. Where if you or I loose 90% of our assets and loose our job we are living in the street and eating at the soup kitchen.
Why should I care?
If those 70 million folks take their wealth and decide to build a very nice and large house, for instance a 5000 square foot home, which they frequently do, and then decide they can get several of these nice homes, maybe one in a nice spot in Colorado and one one in Hawaii and one in New England and one maybe in the Bahamas or something. Well so what???
Well traditional supply and demand kicks in here. If 70 million are buying up 4 and 5 big 5000 square foot homes then those 70 million are buying up housing building materials at the rate as compared to the average person is 10 times as much stuff. So the 70 million actually consume as much building materials as 700 million people creating a 9% excess demand on the markets. And the bean counters tell us if demand goes up then the price of the items under demand must go up.
So now you should care because this is a demand on building materials equal to the entire normal income demand of Europe and the United States Combined and a demand that skews the market even more because in addition the very wealthy do not have to pinch pennies and squeeze costs on materials or an hiring contractors and can thus cause even more price inflation. This also causes the markets to shift away from providing modest and low cost solutions to building and towards luxery and superflous things. So you get piece of crap junk house for $250,000. The new nation of ultra rich nomads get multiple mansions appointed in high luxery and superior quality.
How is this a green issue?
Simply in that the ultra wealthy consume a huge percentage of the natural resources put in to their homes. This denies resources to the other 6.93 Billion people on earth and causes misuse and over use of resources by those left out.
A solution for the problem:
A real consumption tax that would tax those who over consume.
An Initial build green consumption tax:
For example: Any home under 1500 sq ft gets no consumption tax.
Any second home gets a consumption tax.
From 1500-3000 sq ft the tax goes up lets say from 0-10% of the value
Form 3000-10,000 feet the tax goes up from 10% to 50%
If over 10,000 feet it rises to 100%
Then annually such large homes would get an additional percent of value consumption tax as such homes consume more energy, take more materials to repair and maintain, take up more space and are really unnecessary in any real way for anyone to have other than for egocentric and selfish narcisstic reasons. It could easily be demonstrated that just renting a nice place for ski or summer vacations is more economical than owning, and for business renting a banquet hall or other is more economical than having to have a huge house in order to do whatever it is that rich folk claim they must do in such huge empty halls of luxery.
Zoning laws would need to be changed such that the existing huge monstrosities all over the place could be converted to multifamily housing.
In the US at least we actually have a surplus of housing, not a shortage, what we have is a total absurd mis-allocation of housing resources with millions of units of unoccupied luxery homes and millions of over sized homes while millions languish in homeless destitution and the cost of housing is inflated by super over consumption of the resource.
$@
The new thing now is cheering on the newest Global Nation. That is the nation of the nationless, the richest top 1% who can go wherever they want in person or with the click of a mouse move their assets across borders. With 7 billion people on the planet one could make the assumption that Globally now there are about 70 Million people who are in the category "Ultra Rich". The Ultra rich are not like you and me, they have a whole lot more money. Enough that if they looses 90% of everything they become merely sort of rich, dropping from 30 million in assetts to only 3 Million. Where if you or I loose 90% of our assets and loose our job we are living in the street and eating at the soup kitchen.
Why should I care?
If those 70 million folks take their wealth and decide to build a very nice and large house, for instance a 5000 square foot home, which they frequently do, and then decide they can get several of these nice homes, maybe one in a nice spot in Colorado and one one in Hawaii and one in New England and one maybe in the Bahamas or something. Well so what???
Well traditional supply and demand kicks in here. If 70 million are buying up 4 and 5 big 5000 square foot homes then those 70 million are buying up housing building materials at the rate as compared to the average person is 10 times as much stuff. So the 70 million actually consume as much building materials as 700 million people creating a 9% excess demand on the markets. And the bean counters tell us if demand goes up then the price of the items under demand must go up.
So now you should care because this is a demand on building materials equal to the entire normal income demand of Europe and the United States Combined and a demand that skews the market even more because in addition the very wealthy do not have to pinch pennies and squeeze costs on materials or an hiring contractors and can thus cause even more price inflation. This also causes the markets to shift away from providing modest and low cost solutions to building and towards luxery and superflous things. So you get piece of crap junk house for $250,000. The new nation of ultra rich nomads get multiple mansions appointed in high luxery and superior quality.
How is this a green issue?
Simply in that the ultra wealthy consume a huge percentage of the natural resources put in to their homes. This denies resources to the other 6.93 Billion people on earth and causes misuse and over use of resources by those left out.
A solution for the problem:
A real consumption tax that would tax those who over consume.
An Initial build green consumption tax:
For example: Any home under 1500 sq ft gets no consumption tax.
Any second home gets a consumption tax.
From 1500-3000 sq ft the tax goes up lets say from 0-10% of the value
Form 3000-10,000 feet the tax goes up from 10% to 50%
If over 10,000 feet it rises to 100%
Then annually such large homes would get an additional percent of value consumption tax as such homes consume more energy, take more materials to repair and maintain, take up more space and are really unnecessary in any real way for anyone to have other than for egocentric and selfish narcisstic reasons. It could easily be demonstrated that just renting a nice place for ski or summer vacations is more economical than owning, and for business renting a banquet hall or other is more economical than having to have a huge house in order to do whatever it is that rich folk claim they must do in such huge empty halls of luxery.
Zoning laws would need to be changed such that the existing huge monstrosities all over the place could be converted to multifamily housing.
In the US at least we actually have a surplus of housing, not a shortage, what we have is a total absurd mis-allocation of housing resources with millions of units of unoccupied luxery homes and millions of over sized homes while millions languish in homeless destitution and the cost of housing is inflated by super over consumption of the resource.
$@
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