Category Archives: Business

Business, Culture, Government

Biden Needs Illegals Or Grandma Is Going To Die

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What do illegal immigrants have to do with your grandma getting shoved off the cliff?

One of the big pushes by the Leftists such as President Biden, Komrade Sanders, and the Idiot-In-Charge Cortez is to get a federal minimum wage of $15 per hour. Everyone should be paid a living wage, they scream.

Here’s the problem.

Not everyone who employs a person can afford to pay them $15 per hour.

Let’s look at a worker earns $80,000 per year and supports a family. That income is almost one and a half times MORE than the median income in the US. After taxes the NET income is less than $60,000 per year. That is $30 per hour in remaining dollars.

What happens if the family needs to take care of an aging parent or the spouse, or a child needs at home care. Under the Biden plan, the family will need to pay out HALF of their income to hire someone to help. Now if you’re a 20 something congressman from New York making $174,000 per year, or a multimillionaire senator from Vermont, or an ex-vice president who made millions of dollars making speeches, paying out $30,000 per year is no big deal.

This is where the illegals come in. There is and will continue to be a “shadow” economy that has and will continue to pay illegal workers less than minimum wage. Most of the illegals are employed by businesses that required “touch labor” such as cleaning, manufacturing, construction, and agriculture.

I believe in the future we will see a booming “shadow” economy fueled not by businesses, but by individuals, such as the family who needs to hire a care worker, and  cannot afford to pay the mandated “minimum wage”.

Why would anyone work for less than minimum wage? If the worker is paid in “shadow” dollars, no taxes are paid. That’s a 10 to 20 percent increase in real dollars. $12 of “shadow” CASH is worth more than $15 of taxed income.

And there will be another effect that the Leftist won’t see coming. With the “shadow” economy, government never gets their hands on THE CASH, which means they will eventually raise taxes on the working folks, making the “shadow” economy even MORE LUCRATIVE, and the spiral downwards accelerates.  More taxes, more cash transactions.  At some point you may see the government try to crack down on cash transaction.  When this happens you will see a switch to crypto currency to keep one step ahead of “the man”.

What a system!

Business, Finance, Government, International, Politics

Throwing Your Money Away

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I don’t hear any outrage about this FACT that I’ve noticed since President Biden was elected. GAS PRICES have been going UP UP UP. In my neck of the woods fuel prices are approaching 60 cents per gallon HIGHER since the election. Seems people should be upset by this, but I haven’t heard much outcry in the news.

What does a measly 60 cents mean? Just a few pennies, right?

If a WORKER uses 10 gallons of gasoline per week to commute to a job, to take the kids to school, to buy groceries, that’s $6.00 per week flushed down the toilet, since President Biden, the most popular president in US history, was elected.

What’s $6.00 per week mean? That may seem like a small amount of money.

Let’s look at a 20 year old worker who took that 60 cents per gallon ($6.00 per week, $312 per year) and put it into a Individual Retirement Account (IRA). Let’s assume the worker’s IRA has an annual interest rate of 7% which is how the markets perform over the long term. What does that measly 60 cents mean when the worker reaches the retirement age of 65?

60 cents per gallon would turn into $95,706.55 !!!  Just shy of $100 Grand.

If there was a 1% upward variance in the return the 60 cent would become $130,548.93 !!!

President Biden’s pick for Transportation Secretary, Petey Buttigieg, has said that he wants to raise the Federal gasoline tax to take more of your money, to give to gender studies programs in Pakistan I suppose.

I guess we can all flush down the crapper $100,000.00 of OUR MONEY for Pakistanis, or to bail out mismanaged public sector retirement funds, or to give to all the new ‘CITIZENS’ once President Biden gives amnesty to people who have entered into this country illegally.

As the saying goes, “It’s only (your) money“.

Business, Culture, Environment, Technology

Going Green

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I own an electric vehicle. Call me Mr. Environmental Sucker. Here’s the issue.

The battery in my Nissan Leaf is going “Tango Uniform” as the folks in the military say. The car was originally touted as having a 100 mile range. Right now I’m limping around with about 50 miles of range and it’s still decreasing as time goes on. The simple solution should be, replace the battery. Here’s the problem.

Car companies would rather sell you a new vehicle instead of extending the life of an older model. What Nissan has been doing is raising the price of a replacement battery to make fixing the car unaffordable. According to kbb.com the car has a private party value of $5000. The trade-in value is half of that, around $2,700. How much is a new identical replacement battery from Nissan? About $10,000!

There are some shops that will replace the battery with a used battery from a wrecked newer car and prices vary from $5000 to $9,500 depending on the capacity of the used battery. The upper end batteries are almost double the capacity of the original battery, increasing the range to 160 miles, which is an improvement.

At this point, I’m not sure if spending more money on the electric car is worth it. On top of the repair costs, here in the People’s Republik of Kalifornia, the electric company has raised the rate of electricity. At peak times the charge is about $0.58 per kilowatt-hour. Compare that to the national average of about $0.12 per kilowatt-hour. If the battery were 100% efficient in charging (which it isn’t) and I was able to get the full 100 miles per charge (which I can’t) it would cost $14 to drive the 100 miles, best case. With gas at about $3.00 per gallon, the equivalent “gas mileage” is 21 miles per gallon. An equivalent sized gas car gets 30 or more miles per gallon, which means the gasser is 50% more cost effective to drive.  My bigazz, four-wheel drive, diesel pickup averages better than 25 miles per gallon beating the electric car on cost effectiveness.

Given all that, I have no idea what I’m going to to with my electric car.  Anyone want an electric vehicle?  I have a “Green New Deal” for you.

As an owner of an electric vehicle, “Going Green” means that “Green is Going out of my wallet“.