Quality of Life | All On You | Commentary by Mister Shortcut

Legislators are the most skilled at spending money that does not exist. When a consumer buys a product with money he or she has not earned yet, the pinch comes when the bill appears. The consumer naturally misses those chunks of paycheck from each and every paycheck that do not actually belong to the consumer, although they do get to briefly handle the money. What makes the consumer look more foolish is that, in every case, the value of what was purchased drops even faster than the remaining amount of the loan, right up to the last payments, at which point the purchased item might have as much as ten percent of its original value.

It's also important to keep in mind that taxation takes fully forty percent of most Americans' income. Even when you multiply the amount left over by a whopping two thousand (the number of paychecks most Americans receive in their lifetimes) it is a pitiful amount of money.

This is actually the fault of the consumer. By not being organized, there is no cooperative effort to purchase items at a far lower price. For example, on my street I observe eleven SUV's. Each person who paid forty to ninety thousand dollars for these large jeeps has demonstrated stupidity because they paid forty to ninety thousand dollars each. Without exception, each would have saved many thousands of dollars had they all simply shown up at the dealer as one group and said, "Hi, we'd like to buy a dozen SUV's." The truly petty details of make and brand, and which "options," these are all consumer-focused, and this is a nation of consumers.

As children we were discouraged from wasting paper towels unreasonably, although you could probably count ten thousand sheets in the big carton of paper towels purchased by the parents to save time, money, and lugging. By the time adulthood was reached, it became easy habit to wait until high-quality socks were on sale for a very low price, and then buy fifty or a hundred pair. That's five years' worth of not thinking about replacing socks. Same with razors, coffee, underwear, or anything you know you have to buy more of (obviously not children's clothing unless you have a never-ending supply of younger ones to "inherit" hand-me-downs, a time-honored tradition in all families. All that is, except for the very rich, who absolutely got that way by screwing somebody.

When we see a celebrities living lives of such excess as most of the world (literally) starves or is otherwise deprived, it is useful to remember that every luxury they enjoy came because a consumer paid an artificially inflated price for that celebrity's product. Are you actually telling us that the song this celebrity sings or the way they throw a football entitles that celebrity to ten times the reasonable price of a ticket is more important to you than the quality of your children's education or anything else you might otherwise spend that ticket money on? Do you recognize who is actually paying for those incredible luxuries? Your answers of "Yes, but..." have zero value. Yes, a baseball game is worth a few dollars, and yes, the song is worth a dime or two. By the time you get done with parking and super-priced food (never mind that it's the single most heart-engorging food, it IS tasty and we have to enjoy life, right?); and by the time you are done with advertising and all the other costs associated with bringing you that dubious treat or entertainment, you have paid one whole heck of a bunch more money than you should have. THIS is the power we refer to you regaining control over.

Coca-Cola believes they became the Number One soda in the world because of their advertising. Whether that is correct or not can be argued. What is more difficult to refute is that Coca-Cola would neither go out of business or have to fire even one employee if they reduced, for example, their broadcast advertising budget by ninety percent.

This is no million dollar advertising campaign. Like quite a number of other companies, their advertising runs into hundreds of millions of dollars. Let me restate that: hundreds of millions of dollars EVERY YEAR.

If you believe that the company is paying for that advertising, then keep buying their moderately and irrefutably toxic product, or you can wipe the coating from your eyes and realize that YOU are paying those dollars through an artificially inflated product price. Do you know that, for the majority of all food franchises that exist on the planet, soda is their number one profit-maker because it's pennies per gallon to make, dollars per gallon to sell. In math, they teach us that it means more than one hundred times your money back when you do this. Where I come from, charging a man more than one hundred times the intrinsic value of something is called "extortionate." Yet today we use those magic buzzwords and phrases such as "value added" and "perception of value." Reality and pragmatics do not sing the same tune.

The sooner that consumers in America, India, and Asia begin to understand the unlimited power they possess with their pocketbooks, wallets, and choices, the sooner they will begin the inevitable curve of cycle in the present scheme of power distribution throughout the world.

Guns are not always necessary to foment and complete a revolution. As of this writing, only 471 identified men and women own and/or control some 70 percent of all the cash on this planet. You cannot blame them for anything but their greed; their success is the fault of the foolish consumer who really believes they will wake up with a pair of bimbos in their bathroom if they'll only shave with the same shaving cream as Joe Namath. Americans beyond a shadow of a doubt prove how much they believe this with every purchase of that nationally advertised product. Last in this series of comments is the nationally advertised product. Also without exception we believe that if a product is nationally advertised, it is by the very tolerance of its presence by "the powers that be," both safe and probably priced within the realm of "reasonable." If this is true, then who is paying for the nationally distributed advertising?

Again and not coincidentally, the answer is the same as the previous question: YOU.

This particular day, you will either roll over and take it in a bad place or you will take control of your budget, your income, and, for most of you the most serious of all efforts, take control of your outgo.

When you pay fifteen dollars for a ten-cent CD with a nickel's worth of printed label, you're behaving in the way we expect an idiot to behave, like a teenager out of control rather than a teenger who knows where they want to head in life. When all Americans, especially Americans of color who are hugely victimized by those who grew up amongst them, stop paying artificially inflated, genuinely unreasonable prices for CD's, DVD's, and other inexpensively manufactured copies, that's when we'll stop paying performers such as Mariah Carey an astonishing forty million dollars NOT to sing.

This last was really done by Sony, controlled by her ex-husband Tommy Mottola, because they believed her career was all washed up. How she must have laughed hysterically when, just a few months later, she signed a one hundred million dollar contract with another company.

You are asked if her contract expected her to produce a cure for a disease, or to hire four hundred teachers to work for five years each at fifty thousand dollars per year each?

No, child, she was paid an ADDITIONAL one hundred million dollars to sing some new songs.

And you thought I was stupid?

You have far, far, FAR more power than you give yourself credit for!
The power is in your pocketbook, your wallet, your vote. Use them more judiciously, and watch the results.

When all Americans, particularly poor black Americans, stop paying fifteen and twenty dollars for overpriced, overvalued CD's which enrich very few people, you will see the prices drop by fifty and more percent. It's that simple.

When all Americans, particularly those who have limited personal goals and end up watchig professional sports for 20 and more hours per week rather than pursuing better relationships or better careers or better bank accounts or better skills or better hobby-practicing, stop paying obscene prices for professional ball games, WATCH the price of tickets go back to levels where MORE Americans will occasionally indulge in the football/basketball/baseball exhibitions of excellence and hard work that professional sports USED to personify.

Indeed you have more power at your fingertips than you may ever have imagined.

Vote out the professional politicians who are too comfortable sucking at the public teat, wasting hundreds of YOUR hours of income every single year on unnecessarily bloated taxes... taxes that are placed against you without representation of you and your interests.

Vote in some newcomers; give them ONE chance... and then boot them at the ballot next time unless they deliver for YOU and your family.
USE YOUR POWER INTELLIGENTLY!!
Or, continue to be laughed at
by wealthy and powerful politicians, sports stars, and entertainers.

Make no mistake about it. They ARE laughing at you... ... all the way to the bank.