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Let’s Hear It – HCR

March 22, 2010 in Info, Politics with 0 Comments

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

Hidden Agenda – Hoax Part II

March 19, 2010 in Info, Politics with 0 Comments

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:

  • Big government produces services at no or little cost to the consumer
  • This entitlement removes the incentive to be creative and work hard
  • Private sector cannot compete with a government that doesn’t have to play by the same rules
  • The lack of competition has a direct impact on the price of goods/services from the private sector
  • People turn to government for intervention
  • Government obliges and offers a federal option
  • Taxes are increased to pay for it
  • Private sector is forced to cut jobs to meet shareholder expectations due to expanded taxes
  • Dependence on the government increases for more and more unemployed
  • Government programs grow to meet the need
  • Personal freedom is removed for the sake of the greater need
  • Taxes are raised
  • and so on…

That’s not the way this country is supposed to work. Here’s how it should work:

  • Private sector produces services at a fair market price
  • Innovation allows company A to offer same services at a lower price
  • Rest of market responds either with better services or still lower price
  • Consumer reaps the benefit of the battle for market share

Or

  • Private sector produces services at a fair market price
  • Company A decides to try to make more money by raising their price
  • Consumers respond by taking business to Company B
  • Company B is allowed to use additional revenue to offer better and better services – either by increased features or by lower price
  • Company A has to respond by adjusting price or adding features
  • Consumers decide who has the best value

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.

Job Creation Hoax

March 19, 2010 in Info, Politics with 0 Comments

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.

Immoral Profits – huh?

July 31, 2009 in Business, Leadership, Politics with 1 Comment

I heard the term “immoral profits” today from Nancy Pelosi in reference to the insurance companies’ financials and it floored me. I have never heard two words put side by side that don’t deserve it more in my life. In fact, I’m not even sure I know exactly what that means when you look at the words individually. I do; however, know what she is attempting to convey and it is something that is at the crux of the liberal mindset.

We’ve heard this type of talk for months now – it’s always been around, but Obama has made it mainstream. In terms like “spread the wealth” and new taxes for only those that make over $200k. The message is that people (and organizations) that make a lot of money should feel guilty because there are a ton of people that don’t and the rich should give all of their money away to help elevate the financial status of the poor and we should all have basically the same.

Any capitalists out there? Hello! You should be IRATE at this because you know that the reason people (and most organizations) amass wealth is because somewhere, somebody found the goods/services they offered to be valuable and are willing to part with some of their hard-earned money to acquire it. In a capitalistic society – innovation (doing it better, cheaper, faster than your competition) drives profits and if left alone, you either challenge the big dog in your market or you go out of business. Since the beginning, more chose to challenge than go home and the result of this effort is the greatest nation on the planet. Competition, not government intervention is the key to making sure the markets stay (and remain) reasonable.

Take Apple for example. Did they create the first portable music player – no, but the iPod has blown all others away and is now synonymous with portable music. How did that happen? Innovation. Apple developed better hardware (sleek, sexy) and a better interface (simple, functional) and then made it affordable. That’s innovation and it has made Apple a literal TON OF CASH. Are their profits immoral? Of course not.

So what makes insurance companies profits immoral? Nancy would say it’s because they deny claims to sick people to protect those profits. Profiting while people suffer when something can be done about it. I guess that is the immoral part of the term.

The problem with demonizing profits in this way is that there isn’t a clear-cut delineation of where profits could be considered moral. Would any profit be OK? Who gets to decide? Turn on the TV and you’ll find the answer. Obama, Pelosi, Reid – they get to decide, or they are trying. They want to use these terms to make you think that the redistribution of wealth from those that have it to those that don’t is the moral high ground and anyone that doesn’t agree needs to be shut down or taken over.

Just watch out for the references – “big oil”, “big banks”, “big medical”, “big insurance”, etc. Most of us don’t make enough money to be personally affected, but our employers do. Most of us don’t need to be concerned about being in the top tax bracket and having our wealth stolen to support more and more programs that don’t work. But I think we all want to know  that the possibility for financial independence is obtainable. Allow the liberal politicians to have their way and you can kiss that dream goodbye.

Your voice and your vote are the only tools you have to affect change in this country. Write, talk, send smoke signals – whatever it takes to send a clear message to Washington that you want profits to be encouraged, not demonized; less, not more taxes; less, not more government intervention; and to SLOW DOWN the amount of change being introduced. How can they tell what works when they are changing hundreds of variables at the same time? They can’t,so perhaps…just perhaps, they aren’t interested in actually fixing anything…chew on that one for a bit…

Health Care – Who is Scaring Who?

July 29, 2009 in Business, Leadership, Politics with 9 Comments

I’ve been stewing over the constant dribble over health care reform coming out of Washington and I’ve had enough. It is time for us all to snap out of the trance, put the Kool-Aid down and get our heads into the game. What set it off for me is this excerpt from an e-mail sent by the Whitehouse.

“Over the next month there is going to be an avalanche of misinformation and scare tactics from those seeking to perpetuate the status quo. But we know the cost of doing nothing is too high. Health care costs will double over the next decade, millions more will become uninsured, and state and local governments will go bankrupt.”

There are several things to take now of here, so let’s dive right in (hang with me – it’s a bit wordy).

  1. I don’t think anyone – no matter what political party or affiliation – is asking for the status quo to be perpetuated. Health insurance costs too much and is, consequently, harder and harder to get (and keep in some cases). This should alarm us, but the source of that alarm is what is in question. The Whitehouse and Congress want you to believe that nothing can be done about the “cost” of  medical treatment and the trouble lies in the insurance companies. I’m here to tell you that is a bold-faced lie. Insurance companies are like any other for-profit company. They have a fiduciary responsibility to their stakeholders to stay solvent – i.e. make a profit. As such, they hold to the same supply/demand macro-economic principles everyone else in a capitalistic society does, which is to say that if their costs go up, their retail prices go up.
  2. “Health care costs will double over the next decade.” – I’m sure someone has looked at trending from the past several decades and can project the doubling of health care costs over the next 10 years, but in no way should we believe it to be gospel. Nobody can tell the future and to word this in this way only serves one purpose – to scare you into thinking that this has to be dealt with sooner rather than later.
  3. If that weren’t enough, to say with certainty that millions more will be uninsured and the eventual consequence is bankrupt state and local governments is OUT OF LINE. In the last 233 years, there has NEVER been a bankrupt government. Do you know why? Because they all have the ability to raise taxes or adjust budgets. Don’t buy this – it isn’t true and the sky isn’t falling.

Back to the real reason you are still reading – the real story. Creating a government-run, tax-funded insurance option doesn’t address the costs, but it does do something else that should make you take notice – it adds competition to the market that is not only unfair, it is un-American. Capitalism demands that competition be part of the mix for fairness and equality TO PROTECT THE CONSUMER. Without competition, we have monopolies, and monopolies are bad for us – remember the telecom breakup of the ’80s?

If the Federal Government can “set” the cost of coverage without regard to natural market pressures (profit & loss largely), they in essence become a monopoly and the rest of the market has no way to compete and therefore no way to survive. The President knows this. Congress knows this. It is what they are counting on. They don’t want private insurance companies to survive because they desire more control over our lives – in part, to justify their own position and to further the agenda of big government, higher taxes and more control.

Taking this to the logical conclusion – without alternatives to the government-run option, we end up like Canada and the UK…there simply isn’t a way to avoid it because the real problem isn’t being addressed, which is the high costs associated with medical services. If the President and Congress wanted to fix the health care problem in America, they would have started there – as it is the most logical place to start. If health care costs are PROJECTED to double over the next decade, are we helpless to prevent that? I think not.

What are the contributing factors to the rise in the COSTS of medical services?

  • Advancement in technology | This is a natural (and good) progression. Better technology should eventually lower health care costs as it helps to diagnose faster and more accurately as well as speed the treatment/healing process. We want this to continue and I think we all are willing to pay for it, but what if research hospitals can’t fund research because the government is controlling their profits? You know the answer…
  • Malpractice insurance | The courts have done this country a huge disservice in providing a place to attract medical lawsuits. The millions upon millions awarded to those cases are paid via malpractice insurance. And because insurance companies are subject to profit/loss pressures, they must consequently raise the rate for said insurance. The doctor has no choice but to pay the increased premiums and consequently passes that along to you and me in his/her rate.Limit the amounts awarded in medical malpractice suits and the premiums come back down and so will the rates – all a natural consequence of competition in the marketplace. This is known as tort reform.
  • Uninsured care | Nobody is denied emergency care in America. Again, something we can almost all agree that is good WHEN RESERVED FOR AMERICAN CITIZENS. A large portion of the costs for uninsured care comes from illegal aliens (I use the term on purpose) as they can’t get insurance BECAUSE THEY ARE ILLEGALLY IN THE COUNTRY. So, this cost is linked to another failure of our government – border security and immigration law enforcement. The hospitals therefore are forced to pass those costs on to those that actually pay the bills, which hits the insurance companies first and so on and so on…

I’m sure there are others as I’m not an expert in the field – my degree is in Physics and I design websites for a living, but even I see bad things ahead.

So what are we to do? First, tell your representatives and senators to slow down. Health care reform is a HUGE issue and should not be taken lightly and needs much debate and investigation. We didn’t get into this mess in a week, and we won’t get out of in a week. In fact, how about we focus on the economy and then tackle this issue? We must not let present-day circumstances force us into thinking that we can’t wait. We can – we have – we must.

Hypocrisy = O'Bama

March 17, 2009 in Business, Politics with 0 Comments

It has gone on long enough and like Popeye, “I’s can’ts takes it no more!” So, here we are in the midst of the most dire economic downturn since the Great Depression (or so “they” say) and our government deems it necessary to give OUR money to various companies because they can’t make ends meet – affectionately called a “bailout.”

First – what a HORRIBLE idea! Why can’t these organizations suffer the consequences of their poor decisions? That one we’ll save for another early morning rant…

Second, they give this money WITHOUT RESTRICTION on what it can be used for. Take AIG for example. They were under contract with their employees to pay bonuses, so when they got the money from O’Bama’s boys, they did what they were bound BY LAW to do and they paid those bonuses. Most of us hear the term “bonus” and think of a $25 gift card to the local grocery store at Christmas – something extra that we weren’t expecting for a job well done. A way for all to feel the fruit of their labor.

That isn’t what goes on in big business. Most sales guys and upper level executives have small salaries compared to the amount of the responsibility they carry. They carry that responsibility because they are financially incented with bonuses to perform – whether it be a lucrative deal or innovation that saves the company money or hitting 125% of a sales quota. The point is that they go above and beyond what it takes to “get by” because the rules state that you will reap a reward when you do. The company is trying to set up a “win/win” for everyone involved – and it WORKS…been working for decades!

So, we have O’Bama vilifying AIG (US government owns 80% now) CEO (government-appointed BTW) for paying these bonuses with bailout money and spending more tax money for his thugs to investigate. All the while being OK with $5B – $7B of earmarks (our money) in the latest spending bill for Democratic pet projects. One is $500K to help Marquette figure out a way to turn human waste into energy – aptly named “Poop to Power”.

When do we get to say, “I’m outraged that you are taking my tax money and wasting it on meaningless pet projects under the guise that it will stimulate the economy.” Frankly – this is the kind of stuff I’d expect from my three year old trying to justify not sharing his Hot Wheels…not my government, except that I do from such a liberal world view…

This has to stop NOW!

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