Grinning Evilly He Started to Type

by Chris McGinty

Let’s see, Nathan started this blog on the 27th and it’s now the 31st, so it’s been civil for four days now. I think that’s a record, though admittedly, I didn’t sign in until yesterday.

You brought this on yourself, Nathan. I was just going to mention the new Tron movie, and then go back to sleep. Nope. You had to beat me to the punch, so I had to go look for something else to write about, and oh boy did I finded it.

I know finded isn’t a word, but sometimes I have to write what I hear in my heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee….

So I went over to Nathan’s Skipping Frog Blog, which you can finded here: http://skippingfrog.blogspot.com/

On July 13, 2009, Nathan asked, “Is it wrong to be afraid of the current administration?” and then went about the business of explaining how the government makes us pay more and more taxes a little bit at a time, until now with all the sales taxes and such, the average American pays something like 50% of their income in taxes.

You know what? Yes. That’s my answer.

If we understood what the government is, we shouldn’t be afraid of the government at all. Because the government is supposed to do what we say.

Grinning evilly he switched gears suddenly.

Nathan, how much do you pay each month in interest to credit cards, car payments, and your mortgage? What percentage of your income is that? Just curious. How much less are you living while having those kinds of payments drag you down?

But I don’t want to blame Nathan entirely here, or any number of us who are living just enough above our means that we’ll never have true financial freedom. I want to point a few fingers at big business, and how it is that we view jobs. Ignoring taxes for a moment. We go to work. From our labour we get a small share of the business, and the business gets a share, as well, called profits. The odd thing is that there probably isn’t a huge discrepancy between a business’s profit, and how much it paid out in labour. When a business shows no profit, there’s actually a huge discrepancy in favour of the workers.

So why is it that so many businesses thrive, and the workers don’t? Well we don’t profit do we? How long would you stick around at a job if you heard that they were never sure they were going to make their payroll each month, and you might not get paid next paycheck? Yet many of us live paycheck to paycheck. Why?

The government isn’t really doing this to us. We’re doing it to ourselves. We don’t make these companies behave. Visa hasn’t been affected by any of this economic downturn shit, because they’re set up to where the bank that issued the card is often responsible if the bill doesn’t get paid, because the bank wanted to use the Visa logo on their card. These are the same banks that don’t want to make unsecured personal loans, and that’s all a credit card is, an unsecured loan.

And we still keep shelling out our hard earned money to interest. A house I get because it maintains its value mostly, but that’s about it.

Further, there is a reasonable margin of profit for anything we ever buy. This profit margin pays workers, and profits the companies. Anytime we pay over that profit margin, we hurt ourselves, because the companies won’t drop their prices unless they feel they have to.

It’s estimated that a new car loses 20% of it’s value the moment it’s driven off a lot. So tell me, what percentage of your income is that 20% depreciation? A three year old car is typically just as reliable, and only depreciates at about 7-12% a year.

What I’m saying is that buying something when we want it, rather than when we can afford it, hurts us, and possibly worse than the government’s misguided appropriation and spending of taxes.