Following the Tax Code is Wrong?

Following the Tax Code is Wrong?

Recently Apple CEO Tim Cook was hauled before a senate panel to be chastised for practices that shielded his company’s profits from taxes. He was not accused of anything illegal; he was not accused of committing any unethical act. The complaint was that he prevented the Elected Empty Suits on that panel from getting their hands Apple’s money.

We must all understand what happened here. Elected Empty Suits were both outraged and offended by a major corporation who followed good business practices and maximized their profits. They successfully shielded a portion of their success from greedy politicians. Profits are good and taxes are bad. Elected Empty Suits lose sight of that.
Their point of view was the loss of potential tax revenue, tax revenue that never materialized because the businessmen and women in Apple were smarter and more effective than the Elected Empty Suits.

Remember in the ugly confrontation that took place on that Senate panel, Apple was never accused of doing anything wrong; they were accused of following the tax code and avoiding taxes. This caused a great deal of stress and anxiety among the Senators. Elected Empty Suits don’t like that because they depend on tax revenue to further their nefarious and usually unethical plans.

Where are the Senate panels to investigate and bring to light the wasteful and stupid spending that occurs daily to the tune of millions of dollars? Where are the investigations looking into the money spent improving the roads from a Congressman’s home to his mistress’s house and then on to the Congressman’s favorite whorehouse?
Which Congressman am I identifying? Who is his Mistress? Where is this particular whorehouse? I admit all are figments of my imagination, but where any Congressman or Congresswoman is, a whorehouse is not far away. It may or may not be an establishment dedicated to sell sex for money, but it will be an opportunity to sell a favor for a favor and not for the common good of the taxpayers.

Elected Empty Suits cannot be trusted to look out for the taxpayer. The money they spend will go to what they think will get them reelected regardless of the burden they place on the taxpayer. They are self-motivated and will not consider the impact of their wasteful spending on the taxpayers.

This Senate panel should investigate what Apple did to be so successful, and teach those lessons to the struggling companies in our economy. Talk about a stimulus project to boost jobs and the economy, get more companies to market and sell products that are as popular as Apples products and our economy will jump like Elected Empty Suits around a free buffet table.

While they are investigating that they should learn what Apple did to protect their income from the tax man and teach that to struggling and successful companies. Profits are good and taxes are bad. We know that but Elected Empty Suits can’t understand that.

From their point of view the money earned by a company belongs first to the government and what is left goes back to the company. This is why an Elected Empty Suit is unfit for public service and must be voted out of office.

Spending millions of dollars on add campaigns to increase the number of citizens on food stamps make sense to Elected Empty Suits. The millions of dollars spent on the ad campaigns have to be borrowed, the money to support the new recipients of food stamps also has to be borrowed. Spending money to dig a deeper hole to go deeper in debt makes sense to Elected Empty Suits. That’s exactly like, not similar to but exactly like pumping gasoline on your own home while it is burning. Your house is on fire, but you want to increase the damage and accelerate the crisis so you pump, not pour gasoline on your burning home.

Any politician who does not look out for the tax payer must be voted out of office. Any politician who cannot see and understand the wasteful spending must be voted out of office. Any Elected Empty Suit who does not see the benefit of putting the taxpayer first is an idiot and should not be allowed in public without adult supervision.

Taxpayers are carrying this country and they are the backbone of this country. Every citizen has the right to vote, every taxpayer is bearing the burden of the decisions of government. We must vote for the men and women who understand this and understand the need to put the taxpayer ahead of the voter.

Courage Integrity and Honor

Courage Integrity and Honor

The dictionary defines “Integrity as a concept of consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations, and outcomes.”
Integrity is important as we live and work with others. Integrity is that quality that allows those around you to turn their backs on you. If you are short on integrity you are less of a man or a woman. A person of integrity doesn’t use the phrase, “I was just following orders”. A person of integrity does not follow orders that are questionable. Within the acceptable boundaries of the environment you work in, a discussion can take place about the details and ethics of a task.

When your boss instructs you to do an inventory of the same material you just inventoried, that may be a senseless task but a task you shouldn’t question other than for its repetitive nature. The boss has a legitimate or a less than legitimate reason for instructing you to do it. Performing that task may be unproductive but it is not an ethical issue. There is no problem ethically with performing that repetitive task.

When your Boss instructs you to open someone’s purse and go through the contents, then you’re being given a task that can and should be questioned. If the owner of the purse is having a seizure and requires medication or their cell phone to contact a family member due to the medical crisis, then that extenuating circumstance would make the ethical decision easier to make. A minor invasion of privacy to save a life or notify the emergency contact person of the emergency makes sense. To invade someone’s privacy on the instructions of your Boss for whatever reason the Boss thinks is acceptable, should cause any of us to question why?

If the Boss expects me to invade another person’s privacy for no good reason, I can expect my privacy to be invaded as well. It’s wrong for my Boss to do it, it is wrong of me to do it: I will stand my ground and refuse to invade a coworker’s privacy.
Honor is defined by a dictionary as “an abstract concept entailing a perceived quality of worthiness and respectability that affects both the social standing and the self-evaluation of an individual or corporate body such as a family, school, regiment or nation.”

Honor is an abstract that defines who we are as individuals. Our actions define us, when we act in a way that negatively impacts our character and our credibility we impact our own honor. Our honor is defined by our code of conduct in the world. I want my friends, family, and peers in the world to see me as a man of honor a man of integrity, not a mind numb robot who is willing to do whatever my Boss tells me to do regardless of the consequences.

Actions have consequences. We don’t live in a vacuum; whatever we do will impact the people in our lives. When you as an individual go into the refrigerator in the break room and drink a cold bottle of water that belongs to someone else, or take someone else’s lunch and eat it as your own, you’re creating an environment where suspicion and distrust will rise to the surface. You are now a thief and your integrity and honor will suffer, even if you’re never identified as the thief.

Currently there are three scandals in the news, one involving the AP and some subpoenas, one involving Benghazi and one involving the IRS. As time passes more and more information will come to light about all three of these, but where did they all start? Someone in a superior position instructed someone in a subordinate position to do something that was unethical. To do something that was wrong. Time will tell how far along the chain of command the instruction started, but where exactly this point is, is immaterial for now.

The recipient of the unethical instructions did what they were told. They took the unethical action, knowing they were in the wrong. At what point did Integrity and Honor lose out to job security and pleasing the Boss?

The individuals, who did what they were told, had to know they were doing the wrong thing. Could they have been so naïve that they believed in the higher good they were doing when they did what was wrong? Could it be that they never recognized that the tasks they performed were wrong? Could they have believed that it was not their fault, they were only following orders?

Whatever the answer is Integrity and Honor were never considered. How an individual’s actions impact their own integrity and honor never became part of the thought process as they did what they were told.

I’m not naïve; I understand that significant pressures were probably identified as the consequences of a failure to obey. Direct or indirect threats were made to gain compliance as well as plausible deniability. We spend a lifetime building a reputation of Honor and Integrity, but it takes a few minutes to lose it with a lapse of judgment, making decisions for the wrong reason.

The loss of a job is a significant event in a man or woman’s life, especially when jobs are hard to get and the cost of living is so expensive. These are the value judgments we have to make in our lives. Most of the ethical questions we have to deal with involve shades of grey and rarely distinct black and white lines. We must make them based on our lives and our reputations. Integrity and honor demand it. We must all draw our lines in the sand and live within the lines we draw.

When my Boss instructs me to step outside one of my lines, I have to make a decision based on my own reputation. Will I draw a new line and expand my box? Or stand my ground and insist I stay inside the boundaries I’m comfortable with?

From what I see in the news the boxes we live in have become far too big. Not enough of us are trying to stand our ground and defend our own integrity and honor.
As these scandals see the light of day the individuals involved closer to the unethical actions will pay the price, not the ones who masterminded the unethical behavior. Those who pay the price will wish that Integrity and Honor were more important to them earlier in the process.

Some jobs are worth losing. Most Bosses don’t have the Courage to challenge an individual who refuses to perform an unethical task. When you stand your ground and defend your box, a Boss who wants to keep their hands clean will usually not challenge you, but if they do, stand your ground and accept the consequences. As I said, some jobs are worth losing.

Find the Courage to defend your Honor and Integrity. It may hurt in the short term, but in the long run you’ll always come out ahead. Courage is not the absence of fear; it’s the ability to act when afraid. In the workplace we occasionally have an opportunity to defend our box. Rarely but occasionally there is a price to pay for defending the box; Courage, Integrity and Honor determine for each of us when, where, and how far, we are willing to go to defend our own Honor.

We need more concern about Integrity, Honor, and Courage, and less concern about security. Men and women of integrity and honor should be in positions to protect and defend our tax money.

The Free Market Economy in the 21st Century

The Free Market Economy in the 21st Century

The Free Market Economy, which is based on supply and demand with very little government interference, is still the best engine to move our economy along at a rapid rate. There are a few issues that are different today than about 30 years ago, but not in any way that prevents the free market from thriving and being effective.

Government is interfering more and more, that hurts all by itself and it slows growth and progress. The Free Market can still move forward, but not as fast and strongly as it would without so much government interference.

Blue collar jobs used to provide long term stability for blue collar workers but they are fewer and less stable than before. Unskilled and semi-skilled jobs are harder to find and harder to keep. Robots and technology can and will do more work for less money and do not require benefits or retirement.

The global economy provides the opportunity for unskilled and semi-skilled jobs to move to remote parts of the world where labor is significantly cheaper. The cost of labor in the US has become so expensive that outsourcing and contracting work out to remote corners of the world are practical alternatives. Government regulations, minimum wage requirements and health benefits have caused the cost of doing business in the US to become so expensive that producing many things thousands of miles away and shipping material across an ocean is cheaper than producing them here at home.

Government spending is out of control and as more and more tax payers and voters realize and understand the consequences of this, the very small steps we’re taking right now to get spending under control will become bigger and bigger steps. Government spending will get tighter and tighter as time moves on. Government excesses and poor spending decisions will be highlighted and even Elected Empty Suits will have to back off. Spending for the sake of spending will slow down and eventually stop.
The Defense Department is spending billions on defense; politicians (AKA Elected Empty Suits) are pushing for some spending that the military doesn’t even want in order to buy the love and loyalty of tax payers and voters in their district. The Abrams tank that the Army doesn’t need or want is a clear example.

The Army feels more tanks wouldn’t help, they would rather spend that money elsewhere. Elected Empty Suits disagree; they want the money spent in their home districts no matter what. No one has actually said this in their own words, but their actions are screaming “I don’t care if you need the product or not, spend the money in my voter’s back yard; we need to artificially support their businesses and let them keep their jobs and let them keep collecting money that the government can’t afford to spend. Damn the consequences take care of the voters I need to convince to love me by spending money that doesn’t belong to me.”

There are so many flaws with this argument I’m not sure where to begin. Let’s start with the Army doesn’t want the tanks. The Army has lots of them and they are a tremendous military weapon and asset, but the Generals responsible for making the decisions have decided that money identified to make more tanks should go elsewhere. Elected Empty Suits disagree; they don’t care what the customer says, they want to build and charge the government for a product that is not needed or wanted.

I won’t argue if the question is they don’t want or need any more tanks, or if in tough budget times they have other needs with a higher priority than buying more tanks, but the Generals who are responsible for the military should have more say than the Elected Empty Suits. The money identified to build more tanks either should not get spent at all, or should be used for the purpose that the Generals think is more important.

The Elected Empty Suits are charged with appropriating the money and making it available for the military to use, not to insist on spending, what is not needed or wanted. That’s clearly a waste of the tax payers’ money especially when they’re looking to tax us even more.

If the question is do we buy more tanks and artificially prop up the tank manufacturer and suppliers to keep thousands of employees working who would be out of jobs otherwise, or even to keep us from losing facilities that could build tanks in the future if we shut them down now, it’s still a bad idea.

My opinion is, let the companies die and let the employees go out of work, let us lose the tank building facilities. That’s a better choice than taxing all of us to make poor spending decisions now. The Free Market should be free to do its magic. If the tank building company let itself be dependent on the tank orders from the military they should go out of business. To survive and thrive they must make themselves diverse enough to survive a loss of a government contract not dependent on them for survival.
When businesses, especially defense companies, want money spent to benefit their companies, Elected Empty Suits make the spending happen. That adds to the burden of all taxpayers. We are spending money we don’t have. We have to borrow a portion of every check the government issues.

What are the consequences of thousands of people in a few small communities going out of business at the same time? It wouldn’t be pretty, but if the only way to prevent it is to spend too much money on something that isn’t needed, then let the pain start now so we can overcome the pain quickly. Communities across this country have survived this before and will have to again, some individuals will move some will stay new businesses will come in and new jobs will be had. It may take ten or twenty years but the answer cannot be piling more bad spending decisions on already bad spending decisions.

The free market will balance things out. Profit is an exciting motivator, and it works every time it’s tried. When a profit can be made there will be one or more smart people who will want to make that profit.

What we can’t accept is Elected Empty Suits compelling spending that is not needed