The Wonder Springs Chronicle

The Barn is Missing

15 September 2010

Volume 12, Issue 36

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The original title for this article was “Missing the Mark.” But as I thought about our circumstances I realized that the old shooting saying, “They can’t hit the broadside of a barn,” was more appropriate. Then it became more obvious that I was just illustrating president Obama’s economic programs. To make this metaphor closer to the truth you would have to add in the Republicans continual bitching and moaning about letting the “Bush Tax Cuts expire,” which missed the other side of he barn.

Last Tuesday I delivered some rough-cut lumber to my cousin’s barn in Chewelah. The barn serves as storage for stuff that they don’t have space to store at their house in Spokane. The barn is an ideal place to cure the green lumber, because it is out of the weather, dry, without the temperature extremes that the sun’s heat might cause in a smaller building.

This barn used to be part of a small working dairy farm; very similar to those that once dotted the Colville Valley. My grandfather had worked the place, until he rented it to my uncle, when he retired from farming in the early 1950s. My uncle ran it as a dairy and worked in town until the milk processor required dairies to put in bulk tanks, a few years later. That was a significant investment that would never pay for itself, with the eight to twelve cows that the farm would support, so the dairy ceased to exist, and my uncle soon bought a larger place across the street that would allow for more profitable farming operations, while he still worked in his mechanic job in town.

I don’t know for sure, but I assume that much of the bulk tank emphasis was technology driven, but some it had to stem from making our milk safer. Just because nobody had got deathly sick from drinking pasteurized and homogenized milk products that came to market in old-fashioned cream cans, instead of a bulk milk tanker, probably saved all our lives. In any event I don’t know of any dairies in the Colville Valley any more. So that family farm monetary source is gone forever.

As I continued to think about missing the mark, I realized that the real problem with America is that there are a lot of similar old barns standing in America; the best of them serve as storage, essentially for junk. The unlucky ones stand completely unused, too proud and strong and well built to collapse, but without function, without purpose. In reality the barn still stands, but really the barn part of the barn is missing.

So when the president speaks about government Keynesian stimulus to get the old barn functioning again he is missing the barn, because he is aiming at something that hasn’t existed for at least a generation. Even if he is successful of hitting the side of an old barn with some money, the real barn of purpose and multiple use, is no longer there. The same is true for the Republicans and their messianic Reagan era tax cuts. America is attempting to live on past glories and no one in leadership has any proposals other than hoping for change that will make the old barn truly useful again.

Call it progress, yes call it progress, the progressive agenda, heavy on the Democrat Party side, and progressive lite on the Republican Party side, have failed the nation. Shoot, spun properly using different names and places, it has failed the world.

Where do we begin?

I have to be honest; I can’t bear to watch the president speak anymore. His, what his fans and even his detractors call eloquent words, ring so out of touch to me, I don’t know how to respond. The wordsmith part of me just doesn’t have the words. So I try to do what I used to do in high school English class, that is to piece together his remarks from the commentator’s questions and answers. From that I realized that the economic stimulus he was talking about in Friday’s news conference, which he was careful not to call a stimulus, was the same one he had proposed on Labor Day, with just three intervening days. To me it seemed as fresh as the same old, same old, we have heard for almost three years now, when you look at the whole of the Obama context.

Sadly the missing barn still exists with the Republicans, even if there is some element of truth in the reality that it makes no good sense to raise taxes in a recession-depression as severe as this one. Taxes are not the problem with the American economy. Furthermore this line of stuff you used to shovel out of a barn and pile out back, to spread on the fields with a manure spreader, has been proven just as stupidly untrue as Obama’s social justice, wealth redistribution, Keynesian economic central planning, fertilizer plans.

The lie that Republicans and Democrats don’t seem to understand, because they keep repeating it beyond ad nauseam, is that established businesses, large and small do not create jobs. Start up companies, within the first five years of existence create jobs, beyond that time period, in the net aggregate, established businesses lose jobs. Politicians don’t read the bills they enact or vote against; sometimes I wonder if they have become too stupid to read anything at all. What the new jobs data means to a non-evolved, stupid religious person, such as myself — “Tax cuts given to these established small businesses and corporate management will put the money in their pockets, they might spend it on themselves, but as far as creating jobs with the tax savings, that is really an evolutionary myth, a fairy tale.”

To prove my point, companies that are truly trying to grow, are not organized as sole proprietorships, or other legal means to facilitate the same. The reason behind that is there is really no way in our tax code, probably from its inception a century ago, to retain earnings, including reinvestment cash flow, without being taxed on the proceeds in our antiquated income tax scheme, which is in reality a designed revenue taxing scheme. In simple unambiguous terms that the political class might understand, these sole owner enterprises are really a well paying job for the owner, nothing more and nothing less.

To use the proper example of the reinvestment of cash flow to grow the business, the prime popular recent example is Amazon.com. But in a world of eloquent speech, and sound bite pandemonium that is supposed to pass for journalism, why deal with reality, when spinning the fertilizer will produce growth without the fruit of substance and without the barn.

Come to think of it when I was 16, with my first real paying job, I learned there were tax deductions, that were called something like business expenses. The reason I didn’t have any business expenses back then, was I didn’t have enough revenue to hire anyone. Believe me, if I made enough to hire someone to buck hay bales and still have some left over for me, I would have done it. It seems to me, if that logic still applies, if I had enough revenue to qualify for the “biggest tax increase in American history,” I might hire someone and pay them just enough to have enough business expenses to knock me down to the top of that impoverished middle class.

The rich people who have the most to lose when the Bush Tax Cuts expire is not the small business owners, it is the people with corporate salaries above the $250 thousand, which is the threshold that Obama says he wants to create. This two percent just happens to include the television big mouths that don’t have the free time and maybe the smarts to shelter their revenue. They can sing, “Cry Me a River,” but they really are just loud, and besides they built that nest, either sleep in it, or move on. I heard some smart person (perhaps Art Laffer) on one of their shows state that no matter the marginal tax rate, the effective rate never goes much above twenty percent. So why don’t we just go to a flat tax of 20 percent, they would shut up, and for the first time in a century taxes really would be “fair and balanced.”

Back to the missing barn.

One thing I find quite interesting, from one stupid knuckle dragging primitive to another, is that all those elite people that tell us continually how smart they are, really don’t seem all that smarter than either you or me. Furthermore that stupidity is universal to all of mankind, regardless of race or creed. That puts us all into one race only; the human race. The Bible and natural law support that reality. Race only became an issue in the world when those who thought they were better than others sought to achieve advantage over others. That is historically known by the archaic word — sin.

If you believe that mistakes and poor choices are the essence of the problem, you will find the reason why the real barns have ceased to exist in America, are regulations, which pick winners and losers, punish success and foster failure. What really got me steamed about last week’s Obama “Economic Contraction Tour” was his professorial pontifications about the smarts of his regulatory boondoggles and desires of his “small beer economics” to create American jobs.

How can someone who has saddled Americans with almost ten thousand pages of new legislation, (honestly I have lost count and am too lazy to source it again) stand in front of the news media, reading his prepared remarks off flat screens, like the real pros do, and state with a straight face that he and his administration have done all they can do to get the American economy moving again? Is he incompetent, insane, too aloof, or just too much of a specialist, to understand what he is doing to the country? Personally I vote for the uber-specialist, with a tremendous skill set completely useless in the real world outside the Chicago intellectual-political elitist class.

When you take those thousands of pages of legislation, run them through the federal regulation mill, you are going to end up with hundreds of thousand, maybe a million, pages of regulations that say, “You can’t do that, but you can do this, if you do this and that. When you get right down to it both “this” and “that” are arbitrary and capricious rules that are so abstract from the real world, that all they do is create chaos, and random noise.

Of course I’m too stupid to understand the complex wisdom of it all. But I once worked with a guy who had a bachelors in business from Harvard and a masters from MIT and his sister was a prominent New York model. He didn’t think I was too dense to provide substantial input to some of the management decisions we were both facing.

Furthermore I did learn something while I was in the military, that considering it was the military, worked very well. That concept was KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid. Obama, to his benefit, has developed a corollary to this natural law, which is now being promulgated throughout the country. That concept is MICE: Make It Complex Einstein.

Einstein of course is the smartest person who has lived in our modern era. Through the wishful process of Social Darwinism, our new race of Einsteins have evolved quickly, simply because they have never done anything with their lives, consequently they have never made any mistakes. These MICE will rule the world, unless we learn something from the history of Europe, where they called it the Black Death or the Bubonic Plague. I know real mice and rats are different at least in economies of scale, but Make It Complex Rodent doesn’t ring true to even we guns and religion lovers. Beside MICR sounds way too complex for the simple folk, it would only work as a technology or a government acrostic.

KISS in the extreme would say that the Federal Government should be simplified to its constitutional mandate. That would essentially abolish the federal bureaucracy, except for national defense (not offense), the post office, some means to truly manage the public lands, and the offices of the do nothing legislative, executive, and judicial branches. Just think of the money that would save. You could fill out your income-revenue tax form on a single page, electronically, and all you would have to really deal with to do something constructive in this world, is deal with bloated state governments, who would now become the great protector of the public welfare of “You can’t do that.” But at least with state and local governments you would be able to be told what you can’t do by a real person!

The major problem with MICE is that it is a jobs bill for Einsteins. We now need Einsteins everywhere. In the government at all levels, to administer our schools and teach our children, to propose and implement ObamaCare regulations to make sure that doctors have all the tools they need so that they can no longer practice medicine they spent so much of their lives and their future fortunes to achieve.

When all is said and done, with MICE, the diversity of bankers that once served the barn builders, the cow milkers, and the real small business, now have become financial dinosaurs that transfer leveraged funds, from the commercial operations to the investment arm, to hedge funds, and then to derivatives, and then back to the commercial operations to keep the Ponzi scheme in play. Thankfully MICE has fixed the problem of 2 Big 2 Fail.

For a primitive small business person such as myself, instead of doing things I could have done myself a century ago, and what I could have assigned to others a generation ago, now demands a MICE compliance department, fully operational before I can hire any scientists, engineers, and marketing folks, to actually do anything other than devour cash flow that doesn’t exist. Even under George W. Bush you could have hired consultants at two to five times what you would pay your own staff, but at least that was a flexible option. Now you can’t even hire consultants to do what will take years to codify and years to learn how to comply; with a universe of totally unnecessary bureaucratic regulations that can serve no real purpose; not even fertilizer.

And the politicians all wonder why the American people want to change our MICE culture. All you have to do is go out and look at one of the abandoned barns and see that they can’t even support real mice anymore. If by chance a MICE entrepreneurial capitalist could evolve, they would probably leave the country, for the Federal government is currently so hostile to new job creating businesses, that even the states cannot overcome the evolving MICE environment.

But last week we located near Spokane, a facility that will work very well for The Creation Leadership Center and have begun the diligence necessary for the purchase. Currently our financing options are quite flexible and the existing infrastructure of the property will allow it to pay for itself, less our proposed improvements. The long-term goal is to provide the center with an endowment of PREFER Ltd, stock to fund the center, as well as Wonder Springs on a sustainable basis. This business plan is essentially a modification of the program we spent a couple of years trying to put together in Montana some years ago, that just didn’t work out. So presently grants, and donations, are being accepted, as well as the availability of common and preferred stock, to those who would seek to become part of this turbulent times opportunity.

PayPal is available for small donations on the Wonder Springs Chronicle Front Page, as well as specialized services for any heavy hitters that might be led to help us make this work. If you can only afford to pray, that is probably the most important donation. Pass your gift to others that might be able to help. When you forward this article please compose your individual message on why you think that this is a worthwhile adventure.

Your individuality is what will change the world, but you have to make that commitment to be part of the solution, instead of part of the problem. Pass that uniqueness on to others. Now is the time in which the future is being created. You were put on this earth for just such a time as this, become part of the exciting pilgrimage, wherever you may have been planted.

Shucky Darn, this was supposed to be an article about how we simple minded KISS people, who want to make a difference in the real world, might begin to make some changes within the MICE system we have, and is about to receive a steroid injection. I guess that will just have to wait till next week. But I will leave you with the proper visual essence of that barnyard perspective: