Category Archives: Business

Business, Culture, Finance, Government

For Which People?

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Today, the Democrats secretly unveiled their new election slogan, “For the People“. The Dims are supposedly going to focus on healthcare, infrastructure spending, and Republican corruption.

Yes, they should fix the healthcare debacle that they created. Remember Nancy and her famous justification for passing the bill, “We have to pass it to find out what’s in it!“? We found out that it benefits the few at the expense of the many. Great deal.  What the Dims want to do is double down on Obamacare as their fix.

What gets ignored in the debate about the current fiasco of healthcare is that it hurts the MIDDLE CLASS THE MOST. For those that work for a large employer, they may not have seen much of an effect, but long term the employer couldn’t give out raises because of these increases in healthcare costs.  Someone ends up paying for the increased cost and it’s the worker in the long run.  Why do you think that wages have stagnated?  More on this below.

Small business owners are hit hard if not the hardest. Some business owners have made the decision to limit the growth of the companies to stay below the 50 EMPLOYEE healthcare mandated ceiling. Above 50 employees the rules for an employer paying healthcare dramatically changes. More people could have been employed but it doesn’t make financial sense to take the step over 50 to many business owners.

What you end up creating is TWO CLASSES. Wealthy and poor. Those in the middle are burdened by the yoke of healthcare. How big of a burden is it? In real dollars I can tell you that for an individual healthcare is about $10,000.00 per YEAR. A family of 4 must spend about $25,000.00 per YEAR. And remember that’s for INSURANCE ONLY, NOT COVERAGE. They don’t tell you that you need to spend those dollar figures before your coverage starts. And in most cases, the coverage is only 80%. Another great deal.

A recent study shows that the percentage of businesses comprised of startups and small businesses is declining. Why is this? I suspect it has to do with economies of scale. Large businesses have a distinct advantage over the small company because they can negotiate for lower healthcare insurance costs as well as paying for staff to navigate the morass of regulations and taxation mandated by state and federal governments.

Why are healthcare costs HIGH and INCREASING?  With the passing of Obamacare we found out that inside of the legislation, those in the MIDDLE CLASS must PAY for those who are “UNINSURED”.  Legislation “For the uninsured people“.  Socialist wealth re-distribution.  Feels good to force working people to give their hard earned dollars to others.  Social justice from above.  Obamacare is a TAX that is buried inside of healthcare premiums.  If the Dims were honest (which is an unlikely scenario for any politician) they should have proposed HIGHER INCOME TAXES to pay for FREE healthcare “For the uninsured people“.  It would have only been a 5% to 10% increase in income tax.  Those forcibly obtained dollars would have easily provided insurance “For the uninsured people“.  Do you think a 10% income tax increase would have been popular?

Here’s that sad part.  Many in the working class have, on top of their increased healthcare costs, also LOST the equivalent of that 10% TAX.  If you didn’t get a raise or you received a smaller than usual raise since the beginning of Obamacare, you’ve fallen behind at least 10% in your yearly income.  If the business owner could have given you a 1.25% raise per year for the past 8 years of Obamacare’s existence, your pay rate would be more than 10% higher than it was before Obamacare.  Even if you get cost of living raises from now until you retire, remember you’re still losing that 10% of earnings for the rest of your working career.

Democracy (ahem SOCIALISM) at its best.

Feel better now?

Business, Government

Another Financial Comparison

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The White House Administration is putting together a plan to combine the Department of Labor and the Department of Education. The move is to remove wasteful spending of money between overlapping programs and goals in the separate departments.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the annual budget of the Department of Labor (DoL). A quick web search yields a plethora of ‘news’ headlines stating DoL requested $9.7 BILLION as their budget for 2018. Some of the articles report that the DoL has over 15,000 employees.

What the ‘news’ reports FAIL to mention is that the almost $10 BILLION in requested budget dollars is a “discretionary” budget number. After some digging the TOTAL BUDGET for 2017 was $46 BILLION of your tax dollars of which more than $12 BILLION was moved about in a “discretionary” manner.  If you want to revue the budget you can read it here,  FY2018BIB.

Let’s look at a comparison between a publicly traded corporation and the Department of Labor. Truth in lending, I hold stock in the company we are going to use to compare numbers. Raytheon Company is a publicly traded defense company listed as RTN on the New York Stock Exchange. From their 2017 financial report the company had $25.358 BILLION in REVENUE. The COST of revenue was $19 BILLION which means they had a gross profit of over $6 BILLION. During the year the company employed 64,000 people worldwide.

Hmmm, They have over FOUR TIMES THE NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES when compared to the DoL and they are run on a total expenditure of about 40%, well less than half, of the budget of the Department of Labor. On top of that, they MADE OVER $6 BILLION IN PROFIT!

If it wasn’t for the generosity of YOU the American Taxpayer, the Department of Labor would FAIL miserably as a company.

How much of your money do you think is wasted in “The Swamp”?

Business, Technology

Why Does This Sound Familiar?

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Recently, a well known “celebrity” in the automotive field who is making a high mileage, revolutionary product declared, “… a long list of organizations,” including OIL COMPANIES and Wall Street short-sellers, that “want [us] to die.”

In the 1930s a Canadian inventor named Pogue declared that he had created a high mileage revolutionary product.  Mr. Pogue’s revolutionary invention was a gas vaporizing carburetor that would allow a car to travel 200 miles on 1 gallon of gasoline. All that was required was a simple swap of the standard carburetor with the Pogue device and any car would achieve 200 Miles Per Gallon.

Why don’t we see 200 MPG cars today? It’s been almost 90 years since this miraculous discovery.

The answer over the years is that one of the big American automobile manufacturers and BIG OIL COMPANIES bought Mr. Pogues miracle design and have suppressed it’s use so they could sell more oil. Even today, people still believe this conspiracy theory.  Break out the tin foil hats, folks.

Science time. Fuel vaporization is only a small part of an engines efficiency. The bigger factors of efficiency according to thermodynamics is Th versus Tc or “T-hot versus T-cold”. There’s a fancy equation to figure out thermal efficiency but in simple terms you want the combustion process as hot as possible and the expanding burning gas to become as cold as possible. An engine manufacturer needs to balance these two opposite requirements and make a product that actually works and doesn’t melt down. Again in simple terms the biggest factors of INEFFICIENCY is the heat loss through a car’s engine block and cooling system which are necessary to prevent the engine from destroying itself.  Try running your engine with out water in the radiator and see how well that turns out.  But SCIENCE and FACTS ruin a good conspiracy theory.  Bah humbug to science.  We can have 68 genders according to the wacky social justice warrior crowd even though SCIENCE doesn’t back that up.  So let’s just keep blaming BIG OIL for all the ills in the world.

So who was the automotive celebrity that stated recently that BIG OIL COMPANIES want his company to fail?

Elon Musk the CEO of Tesla Inc.