As you can see by looking at the date of my last post, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything. I’m not sure why, but I do know that I miss it. Tinkering around with WordPress and putting life down on “paper” is fun to me…
Regardless, the plan is to ramp it back up and start letting you into the mind of Steve Manatt again…enter if you dare…
I’ve been tinkering with Google SketchUp and have been really impressed with how easy it is to pick up and create some very cool and quite accurate drawings. So, I’m officially adding Google SketchUp design services as a marketable skill to be included in the Manatt Web suite of offerings.
Before you bombard me with requests and lots of money, I should warn you that it takes me an inordinate amount of time to do these things and I charge by the hour. So, if you’re OK with that, I’m too. Just head on over to www.manattweb.com and click the big GET STARTED button and we’ll be in business.
No big announcement would be complete without a few examples of my work. I’ll show two for now just to whet the ole appetite:
This will be some cabinets I build in our office. The top will eventually extend and become a desk and the entire unit will fill one of the walls. It is deep enough to add bookcases above and will also have doors added to the front to conceal the junk…I mean, valuable treasures we need to keep there.
This monster is a wheelchair ramp that we’ll be building in a house for CityFest. I will feature a gate and steps at the end of the first leg of the ramp (v. 2.0) to accommodate able-bodied people. The construction material will be pressure treated dimensional lumber. This project will also feature replacing the front steps and a wheelchair “boardwalk” from the carport to the mailbox as well as some basic landscaping and all around care.
If you’re in Central Arkansas on or after Oct. 2nd, come on by at the corner of Hwy 10 and Russ St. and be sure to bring your gloves and a hammer or two. You won’t be alone as literally thousands of people from the area churches will be out in force that day loving on our cities with the sweat of their brow and the work of their hands.
I’ve held my tongue for way too long on the issue of climate change. As a scientist and a default approach to life via a scientific viewpoint, this issue is so NOT about science that I can’t even believe it continues to be couched that way.
Do you know how I know? Money. If you would consider just for one second the motivational aspect behind the “debate” – you’ll soon conclude that stirring people up about climate change is just another ponzi scheme orchestrated by environmentalists that have long been frustrated about the lack of credibility they have been able to muster. That lack of credibility has resulted in very little capital investment, which has hampered their ability to advance their cause.
So, they got their heads together and got a spokesman who spent time in the White House, made a movie or two and created a script that everyone read verbatim ad nauseam everywhere from the nightly news to the cartoons on public television. I have my 4 yr. old son telling me about turning off lights to save the planet because Sid the Science kid’s Teacher Susie is preaching it every day from 7:30 – 8:00 am.
And it’s working – government subsidies for alternative energy sources have soared through the roof. We have windmill fields cropping up everywhere and driving people out of their homes due to the 80+ decibel noise each mill creates. We have electric cars that have a range suitable for a trip to the grocery store. We have solar panels that generate enough wattage to recharge your iPhone. All of which can’t make enough sense to consumers to get real funding and consequently have no real incentive to produce any tangible results.
Sorry – didn’t mean to get sidetracked by government spending and lofty goals with no accountability. Anywho – back to climate change.
Fact: the climate does change. The biggest influence on our weather is our sun and a star has a life cycle and goes through patterns of change, which are influence everything from temperature to magnetic pole strength. Do some research sometime on solar flares – fascinating stuff!
Fact: our planet has gone through both warmer and cooler seasons ever since we’ve had the capacity to keep track and, guess what, we’ve been in a warm one.
Fact: most high-profile environmental activists live very wasteful lives. Al Gore has several houses and flies on private jets all over the world. Why not sell some of those houses and give the money to solar panel or energy storage research? BECAUSE HE DOESN’T BELIEVE IT EITHER, but it sure pays well!
Fiction: mankind has the power to influence nature. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see us develop technology to control the weather like on Star Trek. Need rain for the corn crops in the midwest – no problem, I’ll just submit a request to the weather satellite. Wouldn’t that be sweet!
Simply put – human nature is fond of making itself out to be God and to think we can control the system (either destroying or fixing) He put in place is ludicrous and arrogant. It is the oldest lie we’ve ever bought and now, we’re being sold it again. Some of us are able to recognize it for what it is and deny it any place in our lives. Others…well, are buying it hook, line and sinker – even (and perhaps more poignantly) our kids.
Do we need to ramp up the development of energy alternatives to replace a finite resource like oil? Sure. That’s called being prepared. And there is a right way to do it – it’s called Capitalism and using the Free Market Economy to prove your idea has merit rather than work everyone up in a frenzy about how life on this planet is in peril unless we help those who refuse to contribute get a free ride putting up wind farms in our back yard.
I feel a point of clarification might be needed. I am and desire to be a good steward of the resources given to me. So, I turn off lights, use CF bulbs and turn the water off while I brush my teeth – but not because my heart breaks for a polar bear’s habitat melting. I do it because for every watt of electricity and gallon of water I’m punished financially each month when I get my bills.
Don’t be fooled and don’t drink the Kool-Aid. Remember, if you can find anyone benefiting financially from a crisis – resist the urge to call it a crisis. If it was, help would be free and clear and nothing about climate change is free and it is anything but clear…
Now that Heath Care Reform (HCR) has passed in this country, I’m wanting to hear what this historic piece of legislation means to you. I’ve seen many people on Twitter today range in emotion from excited to angry to passive – some even grateful that the process has come to conclusion.
Where are you? How do you feel about the government getting into the insurance game? Regardless of where you stand, I’m interested more in why you believe what you believe and will challenge your comment openly if you don’t add that in there.
In addition, does this change how you will vote in November based on how your representative voted on the issue? Here is a list of how the votes were cast by state: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?vote=h2010-165
As a continuation of the previous article, I’m compelled to help expose the hidden agenda of liberals – especially those in Washington these days. Whether it is job creation or universal health care or water allocations for the Central Valley of California – the truth isn’t readily apparent.
I’ve been told by a liberal friend that conservatives lack compassion and that is one of the reasons she votes for and supports Democrats. Is compassion bad? Surely not. But the distinction isn’t accurate or fair (and I’ll go into that in another post). On the surface, these federal programs do look to be meeting the needs to people that are hurting the most: the unemployed, the uninsured and the thirsty farmer.
In truth – they rarely accomplish anything that they are touted to do. When Obama and congress decided to pour over $1T into the economy to try to “stimulate” it rather than take a $1T hit on tax revenues by way of tax cuts, the result hasn’t been recovery, just more debt. Where has the stimulus been seen? GM is still in the tank, Wall Street is more unstable than ever and unemployment is still double-digits.
Ask any conservative what the biggest difference between liberals and conservatives is and you’ll hear a very common answer: conservatives desire less government and more personal responsibility. Why? Because there is a fundamental belief that the free-market, capitalist society in America will auto-correct anything that gets askew. Competition spurs innovation, which produces better products/services for less money.
Big government squelches competition because it takes away the accountability needed to keep the players honest and trades it for “stability” and broader access to privileges that have been turned into rights somewhere along the way.
Here’s the progression that liberals are working toward:
That’s not the way this country is supposed to work. Here’s how it should work:
Or
You see – in a pure free-market economy, the consumer dictates the rules of the game. For the most part, we don’t have a pure free-market in core services because liberals have seen fit to create crutch programs that looked good on the short, but never took into consideration the effect on the long. And intervention is on the rise and threatens to undo the very thing that makes this country great – reward for hard work, innovation and creativity.
“But Steve, nobody would want something so devastatingly bad – right?” Wrong. If you give a man a fish rather than incent him to learn to fish, you have control over the man because of his dependence. He eventually can’t imagine a world without his daily fish and that is called job security for the fish vendor.
Yes, it comes down to simple security. Liberals want it through making people dependent on their programs, while conservatives want it based on the merit of their ideas and hard work. So, whether you are talking about health care reform or stimulus money, the goal of the current administration and democratic congress is to make us more dependent on the federal government and they will not let anyone or anything – including the Constitution of these United States – stand in their way.
Have you ever heard that if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, he’ll immediately jump out, but if you put him in the water and then turn the heat on, he’ll stay and literally be cooked alive? It’s time we realize we are the frog and the liberals have been turning up the heat for decades now – it is up to us to change the menu to something other than frog soup. Get involved and call your elected officials and the next time we get a chance to vote, may we look deeper than a catchy campaign slogan and feel-good promises.
Remember, it is more compassionate to teach a man to fish than to make him dependent on anyone or anything.
Our president and elected officials have stated their number one job is to bring this country’s recession to an end as soon as possible.
I DON’T BELIEVE THEM!
I know…shocker, right? What you may not understand are all the reasons. Some probably assume that it is simply because the majority are Democrats and I’m a conservative and the two shall not mix…ever. That assumption, while true, isn’t why I’m writing – I think I can prove it without focusing on politics. It is simple logic and a slight understanding of how business works.
What do we need for more jobs to be created? A simple examination of why jobs are being eliminated should provide us the answers. A company, especially a publicly-traded company, is not owned by the business leadership, but rather by shareholders. People buy stock because they want to see a return (more money) from the money they use to buy the stock.
That return is realized when the company is able to make more money (net revenue) than they expected, which is one component of what drives stock prices up. There are two components to net revenue – profit and loss (income and costs). If a company says that they think they can produce a net revenue of $100K and are able to actually do $105K for a given time period, then people would buy the stock because the current price reflects the anticipated $100K and therefore undervalued and should go up. Make sense? If not, just know that doing what you say you are going to do in the stock market is good, and exceeding it is better.
All that to say is that the owners (shareholders) expect to be making money and therefore expect profits to be at least what you projected. To achieve this, in a recession, the focus gets put on the costs a company incurs. The most expensive line item on a company’s balance sheet is payroll and consequently the place where the biggest impact to the bottom line can be made. Eliminate jobs and you cut costs and directly affect net revenue.
So, if jobs are cut to help companies maintain net revenue and shareholder expectations and we want to stop that trend, what can be done help net revenue. The second largest cost on a company’s ledger is taxes and this is where we get to the meat of the issue. If you receive a paycheck and ever ventured to look at the amount of taxes that are taken out – you’d immediately get red in the face. What you need to know is that is nothing compared to what the business must pay.
There is a tie to payroll taxes and the overall picture for a company – if you have an employee that you hire at $50K, their take-home pay is affected by the taxes that are required to be taken out. A lower tax rate means that an employer might be able to hire the same person for $48K if the tax rates were lower. If you add that up over 1,000 employees, all of a sudden you’ve just found $200K of income that you can put into something else – like new jobs.
So, if you want to create jobs in America, the first place the government should be looking is to lower the federal taxes levied against employers. Decreasing the tax rate means more money stays with the company and can be reinvested immediately to stabilize and grow the business.
But this wasn’t even considered for more than a second in Washington. Reagan implemented this very tactic to successfully bring inflation under control and it has been successfully used time and time again to help stimulate the economy. There’s a proven track record and tons of evidence…so why haven’t we seen this as a proposed solution?
If you really want to know the full reason, read the next post. It is political…so be warned.
The short answer is that job creation, at least where most of us live (private sector), hasn’t been the goal at all. If it was, we would be seeing more money in our pockets each paycheck, which would allow us to go spend it on goods and services and really “stimulate” the economy.
All this to say, any talk about job creation coming out of Washington these days should be interpreted as creating federal jobs to support new programs intended to “fix” our country. Don’t be fooled for another second because now you know.