My heart is saying to move out of here to a far nicer place and a better neighborhood, but my brain is saying stick right here until I can afford the best and while waiting out what is a precarious economy that seems doomed to get worse. One thing certain is I am in no danger of winding up in the streets; the situation here is stable.Can’t say that about the US though. It doesn’t matter who wins this time, the middle class is going down. And the major difference between us and the rest of the world was that we once had a middle class. Then, they borrowed themselves out of existence. It’s evident the stimulus packages didn’t work, mainly because they didn’t use the money to retrain all those “workers” for harder but lower paying jobs. What was that they gave the auto makers, something like $110,000 per worker?
It is hard to sympathize with the middle class when the new taxes arrive. But it was them and their parents who borrowed all that money. I think that idiotic program of giving $2,000 to those who default on their mortgage is still around. The worst possible thing you can do is shield people from the consequences of their own bad decisions. That last stimulus package was more money wasted than all the US wars of the 1900s, plus the moon landing and the New Deal combined. It made no difference. The same people are still in the same kind of trouble. You see them complaining in the supermarket lineup while buying their groceries with a credit card. Hey, Forrest, whaddaya say ‘bout that?
Remember the “Freedom Ship”? This is the floating city for 30,000 of the wealthiest. It sails around the globe and governments hate it because of the problems with income tax. Um, you g-people, the problem IS income tax. I still subscribe to the general idea of the Laffer Curve, at least to the extent that tax rates have a definite effect on people’s behavior. Remember the Nigerian Whisky Tax (funny, it isn’t found in Google)? When they lost tax as people turned to smuggling, they kept raising the tax rate until they got nothing.
Some twenty-year British archives have been released from the 1982 Falklands War. The strangest thing about warfare is how everyone involved resorts to “soldier think”. If the enemy is on your flank, you turn sideways and you are on his. In this case, the British talked about how hard-pressed they were to provide tents and food for the captured Argentineans. Um, Farnsworth III, how do you suppose these men were living before you captured them? Guess I’ll just never make a soldier.
Then I watched a BBC documentary on Bang Kwang. This is the notorious prison in Bangkok largely populated by drug dealers and smugglers. The minimum sentence, if I recall, is 25 years, but the usual penalty is life. Sorry, I don’t sympathize with drug people. I was in Thailand a total of around seven months without ever touching any illegal substances, but I saw plenty of idiots who thought they were immune because we were so far from Bangkok.
Like the Thai monks say, drug dealers are mass murderers. Just the small fry get caught, but it’s a start. The prison had been totally cleaned up for the film crew, and did not show the “yard”. I do not know if it is true, but I had a Thai explain to me they put the worst of the worst in a concrete culvert buried in the ground and seal them in concrete with a tiny food hole. They know the prisoner is dead when he stops throwing his waste back out the hole. Even if it was just a scare tactic, you don’t want to go to jail in Thailand. Like the US, they don’t segregate the violent rapists and murderers from the general prison population, so everybody turns worse.
The splattering rain lasted until well after dark, so I measured out the new music room. Three people at most, and even that will be close quarters. The room is under 8 feet wide. If I’m staying put, I’m falling back to my old pattern of making my place better for what I do, like music. I threw out the kitchen table today since I was using it mostly for storage. Give me a flat spot, I’ll find something to put on it. Tomorrow I wire up the area for a work bench, freeing up half the ground floor. Out goes the entertainment center with 24” color TV. Haven’t watched it two hours in six years and I should have a flat screen anyway. An American living room with no TV. Be nice and I’ll take an actual picture to show you.
