I don't claim to be an expert at prognostication, nor would I expect my pontifications to be gospel truth, but I've recently become one of those people who is actually worried about the future stability of our country. It doesn't feel to me that we've gone off the deep end, or there's going to be complete anarchy, but I am concerned enough to consider that it's worthwhile knowing how to reduce dependency on the market for the most basic of life's accoutrements.
I'll be considering where this impacts the standard lifestyle of Americans, so I'll attempt to consider topics as they arrive. At the moment, I've considered a few hypothetical ways to reduce economic impact at the same time as reducing environmental impacts...
1- Sharing. This, of course, is one of the primary virtues of pre-institutional education for most families, I know this was the case with mine. The idea is that certain appliances simply do not necessitate being one-per-house. Vacuums, mops, washing machines, and lawnmowers, amongst other things, are all items that are not regularly used on a daily basis. By coordinating with a few neighbors, four households can own between them one of each appliance, reducing the need for each to have one. Material benefit: less waste. Perceived negative: less purchasing in the market. That is, however, a false negative; if goods are not needed, the lack of their purchase is the market functioning properly. This enables more resources to be spent on other goods and developments that will open new markets by the preferred method: improved technology and increased productivity. It is, of course, not as simple as that, but this is one method to reduce your individual budgets and make sure you're more financially soluble overall.
Why is this unlikely to happen? People are shy; fewer people know their neighbors than in the past, and the connections are diminishing. We feel apart and detached from others, and we're less likely to ask for help the less we feel that we can depend on others. The solution to this is to have grassroots organizations begin to connect people for non-political aims, or to have popular leaders attempt to alter the behavior of their flocks.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Friday, February 13, 2009
Have You Written Your Representatives This Year?
Everyone living in America is being represented on the national level by three individuals, and three individuals alone. While you may identify with the President, his appointees, or the leaders of your party in Congress, you are ultimately unrepresented by those people in the meaningful sense; if you send a letter, it will not be likely to influence their policy decisions.
Three individuals, however, will receive your letter and, at the very least, log your view and consider it as one to address publicly. Those three people are the two Senators that your state sends to the Senate, and the Representative that your district sends to the House. Do you know who your representatives are? Most people don't, despite the fact that they're the people that should be on your Christmas card list every year. Curious how to find them? Here's how:
1. Find your full zipcode via the Postal Service.
2. Input your address here to find your representatives' names and contact info
Once you've done that, you could call regularly, or compose a letter once a year to let them know what's on your mind. As a general rule of thumb, Congresspeople are able to tally up the letters received, multiply that number by 20, and then have a general number of the people who care enough about that issue and agree with those letters, to base their votes on it. This means that if you live in the state of Pennsylvania, for example, and you wanted to send a letter to Arlen Specter relating to the economy, your opinion would be magnified greatly. Specter's most recent re-election campaign won by a margin of just under 600,000 votes out of a total of 5 and a quarter million. That's a fairly safe margin, but consider if he started receiving a few thousand letters; he'd really need to pay attention to those.
Pennsylvania has around 11 million inhabitants, of whom 5 million will regularly vote on any given Presidential election season. On non-Presidential election cycles, however, perhaps 3 to 4 million will take part, tops. In those cycles in particular, Senators need to listen to the views of the politically active; the party-aligned civically unaware will usually refrain from voting, so it's all about winning over the people who care enough to vote every time they get the opportunity. Those are exactly the same people who would send letters regularly to their congresspeople, and it's those people whose views are magnified by the assessment of the worth of letters. A few thousand of those letters might not seem like a lot of votes, but consider if he were to receive 10,000 letters prior to the 2010 election cycle; he'll want a comfortable margin, and those 10,000 letters would point to a possible bloc of 200,000 votes in a cycle when that's getting close to 10% of the total. Any election analyst will tell you that if you can secure 10% of the voters by championing a single issue that doesn't interfere with the general public sensibilities, you are almost guaranteed the victory.
When you look at House Representatives, the numbers are even better. People are less aware of the House than of the Senate, so letters that are received are treated with even greater respect, and this is compounded by the fact that there are far fewer voters in those districts (by definition, they're organized around centers of 500,000+ inhabitants, of whom 300,000 regularly vote in Presidential cycles and 100,000-200,000 will vote regularly). As such, tighter margins mean that smaller blocs are courted more regularly, so as few as 1,000 letters will be enough to secure attention to the cause.
Most people have some issue that they care about greatly. What's your issue? Have you written your three representatives about your view in order to convince them to represent you more fully? It is never a waste of time, and you might very well be surprised at what can happen if you get your friends and family, too, to send a letter at least once a year.
Just sayin'.
Three individuals, however, will receive your letter and, at the very least, log your view and consider it as one to address publicly. Those three people are the two Senators that your state sends to the Senate, and the Representative that your district sends to the House. Do you know who your representatives are? Most people don't, despite the fact that they're the people that should be on your Christmas card list every year. Curious how to find them? Here's how:
1. Find your full zipcode via the Postal Service.
2. Input your address here to find your representatives' names and contact info
Once you've done that, you could call regularly, or compose a letter once a year to let them know what's on your mind. As a general rule of thumb, Congresspeople are able to tally up the letters received, multiply that number by 20, and then have a general number of the people who care enough about that issue and agree with those letters, to base their votes on it. This means that if you live in the state of Pennsylvania, for example, and you wanted to send a letter to Arlen Specter relating to the economy, your opinion would be magnified greatly. Specter's most recent re-election campaign won by a margin of just under 600,000 votes out of a total of 5 and a quarter million. That's a fairly safe margin, but consider if he started receiving a few thousand letters; he'd really need to pay attention to those.
Pennsylvania has around 11 million inhabitants, of whom 5 million will regularly vote on any given Presidential election season. On non-Presidential election cycles, however, perhaps 3 to 4 million will take part, tops. In those cycles in particular, Senators need to listen to the views of the politically active; the party-aligned civically unaware will usually refrain from voting, so it's all about winning over the people who care enough to vote every time they get the opportunity. Those are exactly the same people who would send letters regularly to their congresspeople, and it's those people whose views are magnified by the assessment of the worth of letters. A few thousand of those letters might not seem like a lot of votes, but consider if he were to receive 10,000 letters prior to the 2010 election cycle; he'll want a comfortable margin, and those 10,000 letters would point to a possible bloc of 200,000 votes in a cycle when that's getting close to 10% of the total. Any election analyst will tell you that if you can secure 10% of the voters by championing a single issue that doesn't interfere with the general public sensibilities, you are almost guaranteed the victory.
When you look at House Representatives, the numbers are even better. People are less aware of the House than of the Senate, so letters that are received are treated with even greater respect, and this is compounded by the fact that there are far fewer voters in those districts (by definition, they're organized around centers of 500,000+ inhabitants, of whom 300,000 regularly vote in Presidential cycles and 100,000-200,000 will vote regularly). As such, tighter margins mean that smaller blocs are courted more regularly, so as few as 1,000 letters will be enough to secure attention to the cause.
Most people have some issue that they care about greatly. What's your issue? Have you written your three representatives about your view in order to convince them to represent you more fully? It is never a waste of time, and you might very well be surprised at what can happen if you get your friends and family, too, to send a letter at least once a year.
Just sayin'.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
"Tax the Speculators" - Ralph Nader
Ralph Nader's article (link) touches upon some interesting subjects. I believe he's correct in his assessment of the nature of taxation, for while it is primarily to generate revenue for the state, its secondary purpose has been, for a very long time, to divert people and organizations away from less desirable legal activities and towards those that are less expensive to society.
I have not run the numbers myself (nor, in all honesty, do I expect myself to), but the massive scale of those speculative buys on stock indicates that he's got a good bet to be right about the volume of revenue generated from the potential taxation. I understand, however, that businesses would be very wary of such taxation; the purchase of another company would now be a taxable purchase in a way that it wasn't before, as there'd be a tax on the shares bought. I can hear many people rumbling about how this would interfere with business or discourage investment, but I don't believe it for the same reason that I don't believe when people tell me that taxes discourage work.
I have not run the numbers myself (nor, in all honesty, do I expect myself to), but the massive scale of those speculative buys on stock indicates that he's got a good bet to be right about the volume of revenue generated from the potential taxation. I understand, however, that businesses would be very wary of such taxation; the purchase of another company would now be a taxable purchase in a way that it wasn't before, as there'd be a tax on the shares bought. I can hear many people rumbling about how this would interfere with business or discourage investment, but I don't believe it for the same reason that I don't believe when people tell me that taxes discourage work.
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