Happens Every Time
As Linda Ronstadt sultrily crooned, "I've been cheated, been mistreated when will I be loved?"
When Linda Ronstadt sultrily crooned, "I've been cheated, been mistreated when will I be loved?", she was assessing the return on investment of her relationships.
From the lyrics, it appears her ROI, her return on investment, wasn't looking too good.
Primarily thought of as a business, investment or accounting term, ROI is something that happens every time we look at the pros and cons of events in our lives or the choices we plan to make or have made.
Primarily thought of as a business, investment or accounting term, it is something that happens every time we look at the pros and cons of events in our lives or the choices we plan to make or have made.
It’s why we shop around for cheaper gas in an age where gas isn’t cheap.
We are in the process of renovating out kitchen – I gutted it down to the bare walls. ROI came in at every step – flooring, cabinets, countertops, tile, appliances, add more outlets, lighting, etc. We could have bought a Delta faucet at mass market Big Box store for $150 or a Moen at a kitchen specialty shop for $400. For the first year, both would be fine – but the Big Box Delta had a ton of made-in-China plastic parts in it where the Moen guts were all precision machined brass from America.
I know from experience, that Delta is going to start dripping after a year or so, the Moen will outlive me and never drip. We went Moen.
To me, there is a difference when you purchase something, you are either buying it or investing in it. Buying is sort of an instant or short-term gratification activity and investment is a return of value for a much longer term. We were willing to pay more to get more, so we invested in the Moen.
Then there is the case of the return on investment we make in government. We do have a choice in the government we buy – and we do buy government through our taxes, which, as noted in analysis by several different entities, now amount to more than we spend on food, clothing and shelter…combined.
That’s a significant amount of out-of-pocket cash any way you look at it – and it is largely a zero-sum game – every dollar extracted from you for government is a dollar that can’t be used for things you want, need or desire.
Wouldn’t it make sense to understand whether we are buying or investing and what returns we are (or are not) receiving?
We do not have to look far into the past to understand the difference.
A couple of things “triggered” my thinking on this subject.
The first was the idiotic idea the White House was allegedly kicking around to send out taxpayer funded gas cards while at the same time crafting a proposal for a new “minimum tax” to gouge taxpayers even more. In both cases, the programs amount to government forcing taxpayers to pay for the incompetence and idiocy of government policies that created the very situations for which they are demanding the people pay.
This is equivalent to paying a Moen price for the performance of a Big Box, all-plastic Delta faucet.
Not a good ROI.
But this is generally what we got with the elections of Obama and Biden – we paid more for less each time.
So where did the money go?
What must be understood about government is that it is always going to take its cut for handling the money. It is always the middleman. The taxpayers never see more than pennies on every dollar, the bulk of the money goes to favored groups to buy loyalty and votes. The main beneficiary under Democrat administrations is the government itself, and because it has the power to tax, unlike a business that makes bad decisions, it never has to pay – it just raises the tax rates or invents money by creating debt obligations. The main beneficiary under Democrat administrations is the government itself.
It can be successfully argued that government by Democrats is of the government, by the government and for the government.
Now think about life under two Republican presidents – Reagan and Trump. Many who read this won’t remember what it was like under the Democrat administration of Jimmy Carter, but it looked a lot like life under Biden. Reagan took the hard decisions, got inflation under control, cut taxes, stopped the nuclear threat from the USSR and made life livable again, and guess what?
Even with reduced taxation, revenues to government went up!
But that’s not unique – it has happened anywhere it has been tried. The UK saw the opposite situation when they raised taxes a few years ago and government revenues went down.
Look at what happened under Trump.
America became a net-exporter of oil and gas. Unemployment fell to record lows. Median household incomes went up substantially. Taxes went down. Russia and North Korea sat down and shut up. China was calmer, knowing Trump supported repatriating manufacturing to the US. Even Mexico got on board with stopping illegal immigration.
Both Trump and Reagan put citizens first – of the people, by the people and for the people.
And yet, because half of America thinks Twitter is the real world, they voted for an incompetent socialist corpse because they didn’t like Trump’s mean tweets – and there is only one thing in this world worse than a socialist and that is an incompetent socialist.
It is simply inarguable that life was not better for people in every economic stratum under Reagan and Trump that it was and is under Obama and Biden.
Reagan and Trump were a much better investment with a far higher ROI.
Where Reagan and Trump delivered on their promises, none of what Obama or Biden promised was delivered. The media covers them to this day, but objective reviews prove they never delivered on a single promise (even though they said they did) and they made things worse.
Your vote is like currency. It can be invested in a kitchen faucet that looks good and won’t ever drip, or it can just be spent on a cheap faucet that looks good in the beginning but will need to be replaced in a couple of years.
We can be made blue and lied to, put down and pushed ‘round.
Or we can stop it.
It is our choice.
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