The Convenience of Credit

Lately I have heard several call-in radio shows where most of the callers complained about their problems getting credit. Many are incensed that they can't borrow money. They are indignant and want to string up all the bankers. It's as if they think credit is a civil right. Credit is not a right, it's a convenience. If you do not want to take the time to save money to buy an item, you can pay a bank for the convenience of getting the money in advance.

Banks are businesses. They exist to serve a need or desire in the marketplace and to profit from meeting those needs and desires. Banks make money primarily by collecting interest on the money they lend. Therefore, banks have to lend in order to make money. If they don't lend, they go out of business. They can also go out of business if they lend to people who don't pay the money back.

Banks have been damaged lately by the collapse of the housing market. Value has disappeared practically overnight. People have been defaulting on their loans and the capital that banks usually have available to lend has dried up. They are gun-shy. They got caught with their pants down and are extremely reticent to take risks. This is why they aren't lending like they used to. Once they get a handle on things, credit should loosen a bit. But it's not all the fault of the banks.

Just because a lender is willing to lend you money doesn't mean that you have to take the loan. If you have any doubts about your ability to pay it back, then you shouldn't take it. You don't have to borrow money at all. Really! It is quite possible to exist without borrowing money. This whole easy-credit thing is a relatively new development that got of control over the last 30 years. It used to be the norm that credit was hard to get.

During this anomalous rise of easy credit, savings rates in the U.S. have dropped to near zero while personal debt has risen to record levels. Instead of using savings in case of an emergency, people use credit cards. This is a crazy way to manage personal finance. It's expensive, too. If you saved up money for a rainy day, you could earn interest on it until you needed it. Instead, by using credit cards, you end up paying interest (at a much higher rate). In addition, using credit cards means that you need to continue to earn more money and have fewer emergencies in the future. There are no guarantees of either of those things happening.

We are way out on the limb of credit and the further out we go, the more likely the limb will break and we will fall hard. The slightest little glitch in the economy can crash the whole thing. That's what's happening now. The limb we are hanging on is cracking. The government and practically everyone are trying their best to get credit freed up so we can keep borrowing and consuming. This is not the solution. It's dangerous. We are trying to patch the crack in the limb so we can go further out on it. The fall will be even harder if we pursue this course.

What i am trying to say here is that the major problem with the economy is not the bankers, the government, the housing market, or other economic challenges we face. It's credit. The best thing that we can do is to live within our means, stop borrowing and start saving. Just ask your grandmother.

Tax Problems are Everywhere

So far, at least three nominees for President Obama’s cabinet have gotten negative attention due to tax problems. Why is this? Maybe it’s extra hard to find any American who doesn’t mess up on his/her taxes, either on purpose or by accident.

The IRS Tax Code is so long and convoluted that I can’t even find agreement online on how many pages it is. The official count is somewhere over 13,600 pages! With that kind of extreme complexity, it’s no wonder people screw up when doing their taxes. It would also not be a surprise to find that millions of people cheat on taxes either by not understanding the laws, or by purposefully misunderstanding parts of the law to their own financial advantage. I suspect that even the IRS agents don’t understand all of their own code, especially since parts of it change every month.

I’m about to do my annual tax return. My tax situation is a little complicated but nowhere near as complicated as Tom Daschle’s is. I would have never thought that having a friend provide limo service for free, would result in a $130,000 tax. This is why millions of dollars are spent each year to hire tax accountants to figure out our taxes for us. Interpreting the tax laws is a huge industry. I think it’s ridiculous. We need a much simpler tax code. It should be easy for any person to do their own taxes.

Unless the U.S. Senate, who approves cabinet nominees, can prove that candidates purposefully cheated, I don’t see why it should be a big issue if the candidate messed up by accident.

A Good Dream

Everyone around me has been so quiet today about the election, as if it might be a dream and if we talk about it we will wake up to find it not true.

Until last night I didn't realize how much I have been hunkered down, enduring the disappointment that continued to rain down on this country for the past eight years. I had already resigned myself to a continuation of this, thinking that there was no way Obama could be elected. I was prepared to keep my nose to the ground and not think too much about politics because I didn't want more discouragement to affect my health and happiness. As the results came in last night I felt a weight lifting off my psyche.

What a relief! The election of Barack Obama is one of the coolest things to happen in this country in a long time. Hope beat fear! That's so cool! I know there is more to it than that. One of the big factors is just how dismal the Bush administration was. Even some Republicans were disgusted.

Over the last eight years my expectations regarding the quality of U.S. leadership have been lowered to the point that I am thrilled just to have a president who can talk! I know Obama will be centrist and many of his policies and decisions will fall short of my idea of what should be done, but it WILL be an improvement over Bush and I am happy enough with that for the moment.

Maybe it is a dream. A waking dream. Martin Luther King's dream.

To all of you who voted for him, you so rock!

Ten Flaws in America's Election System

For a country that claims to be the world's greatest democracy, the election process of the United States of America has problems. Here are ten flaws that, if fixed, would improve our democracy.

1. Tuesday is an inconvenient day to vote.
This is a work day for most people and is not the most convenient day to try get to the polls. Why not hold elections on Saturday or Sunday or make election day a holiday. We'd probably get a better turnout.

2. All primary elections should be on the same day.
States compete to be the first to hold a primary. Some candidates drop out based on the primary results of only one of these early states. If all primaries were held on the same date, there would be a more level playing field for the candidates.

3. In the primaries, why not have the voters directly elect a particular party's candidate for President?
Under our current system the voters are not electing candidates, they are electing delegates to the political parties' national conventions who then vote for the candidate. And what about "superdelegates?" This is way too complicated. Eliminate the middle man and vote directly for your party's candidate.

4. What state you live in should be irrelevant to a Presidential election.
The President and Vice President's job is to work for all the people of the country regardless of which states they live in. States get to pick two senators and a number of congressmen. These elected officials' job is to represent a state's interests in Washington. The states create their own voting laws and decide independently when their primaries will be held. For a national office, there should be national standardization for the primaries and the general election. The voting process in national elections should be standardized. State governments should stay out of it.

5. If the candidate with the most votes does not win the election, it's not democracy, is it?
Abolish the Electoral College. The President should be directly elected by voters. A few times in our history the person who got to be president did not get the most votes. This is wrong.

6. Voting is difficult for people who happen to be out-of-state at election time.
Because voter registration is done state by state, people who are out of state at the time of elections have trouble voting because the rules differ from state to state,and sometimes change. For example, an out-of-state student going to school in Arizona can't use his or her out-of-state ID to register to vote in AZ. They have to go to extra trouble to get aballot from their home state. This is fine for state issues and for electing a state's senators and congresspeople but, for a presidential election, it's unfair.

7. The media pick the president.
Early on, the media start focusing on who they consider to be front-runners. The other candidates don't stand a chance with all the attention focused on just a few people. The media also destroy candidates. Everyone makes mistakes but one misplaced word can knock a good person out of the running if the media decide to focus on their goof. Meanwhile, other candidates' mistakes might go unnoticed. I think this is a problem we might just have to live with.

8. Whoever has the most money wins.
This is not always the case but it is too often. The candidates who raise the most money get the most access to potential voters via the media and other means. One could say that the one who raises the most money is obviously the most popular and, therefore, should be elected. I wonder where the money comes from, though. Does it come from a broad spectrum of voters or mostly from corporations and the wealthy? If the latter is the case, raising the most money does not necessarily mean that a candidate best represents the people. This problem is difficult to solve. Every attempt to reform campaign finance laws creates new loopholes and opportunities to game the system.

9. The United States has a "winner-take-all" system of voting.
This makes it possible to elect someone to office without a majority of the vote. The winner only has to have more votes than anyone else, not a majority. It creates a situation where voting for the candidate you really like best could have the same effect as voting for the candidate you don't want. People end up voting against the person they don't want instead of for the person they want. Instant run-off voting would solve this problem. Vote for who you want and pick a second and third choice, too. If your first choice candidate doesn't make it, your second choice gets counted. If that one doesn't make it either, your third choice gets counted. The final result would be a candidate that actually has a majority of the votes, and the candidates of all parties would get a more realistic idea of their standing among the voters.

10. The two-party system sucks.
We have Democrats and Republicans and that's about it. No other real choice exists. If there was proportional representation in Congress, we would have elected officials who better represent the different constituencies. Proportional representation means that the percentage of different political parties represented in Congress would reflect the public's percentage of interest in those parties. A political party with 9 percent of the vote would result in 9 percent of Congress being members of that party.

I am sure there are other issues that, if resolved, would result in a better democracy. Voting is important. The system is worth fixing. I believe the United States would be a better and stronger country if it can remedy these flaws, and if all eligible voters actually voted.

- Royce Carlson
Reprint (and re-write) of a Zenzibar article I posted in January, 2008.

Homo Sapiens Clemens - Conscious Evolution

Besides homo sapiens, are there any un-domesticated species of plant or animal on earth that have a growing population? I'll bet not. Humanity has won the game of proliferation. We have been able to successfully compete with all other species for territory. We have practically eliminated predation on humans. We have made many other species subservient to us, and we have spread our species all over the globe and, occasionally, into space. Our biological instincts combined with our intellect and opposable thumbs have made us practically invincible. The only remaining enemies to the survival of humanity are the very instincts that brought us to the top in the first place.

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LowTech / High Science - The Future of Sustainable Technology

Western culture, as it has developed so far, has taken scientific discoveries and engineered the results into products and systems that are highly energy intensive and uneconomical to repair. We have all kinds of tools that are fun to use, until they break. Few people know how to fix them. The only option is to buy another one and use it until it breaks. I have a couple of stereo receivers, one at home and one at my shop. They were both built in the 1970’s and still work and sound great. The stereos that you can buy now are inexpensive but they only seem to last a few years. The same thing is true with my 35mm film camera. I bought it new in 1977. It still works great thirty years later. Unfortunately film is becoming obsolete. So I bought a digital camera. It lasted two years before it broke. Repair? It was cheaper to throw it away and buy another camera. What a waste. The technology that science and engineering is producing today is throwaway technology – obsolete after only a few years.

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Guru Trouble

I was recently researching what happened to a guy whose books I read back in the 70’s. Sort of a “where is he now?” kind of thing. Back then he went by Bubba Free John. He was a spiritual teacher that had many quite brilliant insights, in my opinion. Still, there was something not right. I couldn’t put my finger on it. As I said, the teachings were brilliant and useful. I never met him or joined an ashram or anything like that, probably because of that slight uneasiness, and because I wasn’t much of an ashram joiner anyway.
He is still alive and living on an ashram that covers an entire island in Fiji. He now goes by the name, Adi Da, and his “religion” is called Adidam.
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