Very Cautiously Optimistic?

It’s Thanksgiving, and Poor Richard is thankful for a day off. It’s been over a month since I’ve written here. And it’s been a busy span of time. Poor Richard is very thankful for that and for the good customers who have provided work for all of us at the printshop behind the red awnings on Poplar Street (name withheld to protect the very delicate sensibilities of the franchise).

My fingers would be crossed if I had time to cross them.  I’m thankful that our business has been able to survive through this so far, and if business doesn’t tank again in the first months of 2010, we’ll probably pull through OK. OK doesn’t mean unscathed, though. We’re operating with fewer employees that we had when the company first opened in 1998. There is little time to work on the business for working in the business. Because our bank essentially bailed out on us early in the year, there is no money for investment in new technology or new talent. Assuming that the recovery has begun, it’s still going to take a long while to make up the lost ground of the last 18 months.

Last week, Mr. Obama’s administration stealthily held a small business forum to discuss “small business financing issues.”  The forum was announced to the public on November 16, two days prior to the date of the session and received resounding condemnation from at least one group (American Small Business League) representing small business who were neither notified of the event nor invited to attend.  Hosted by Treasury Secretary Geithner, the forum did not generate much excitement or much in the way of reporting after the fact.

That’s because nothing happened. Poor Richard managed to find the agenda for the meeting on the Treasury Department web site.  There’s nothing new there. The efforts of the SBA to open up credit for small business have been lacking and the banks have not been cooperative.  A change in the tax code to allow a 5 year carryback of losses may inject some cash into small businesses next year; but for those who have already failed it is too little, too late. At least 7 small business owners (bios listed on the Treasury site) were invited to the forum and the transcript of Secretary Geithner’s remarks contained several weighty statements, like the following:

“We need banks to be working with us, not against recovery.”

Little was reported in the press or on the internet from the day-long forum. According to a New York Times blog, most of the discussion centered on the needs of banks and their reluctance to get involved with small business.  They also stated that the Treasury Secretary and the SBA Administrator took careful notes. A report from Small Business Trends concluded that, “many lenders contend that small-business loans are too time-consuming and too small to be worth their while.” Hmmm . . .

The small business sector has long been our country’s engine for job growth and for innovation. Guess what? Small businesses are where large businesses come from. Hewlett-Packard started in a Palo Alto, CA garage. Ford Motor Company was launched in a converted wagon shop with a $31,000 investment.  In typical years, small businesses create over 50% of the new jobs in our economy.  In years like the last one, we try to preserve jobs for the folks who depend on us. The economic engine has choked down.

Nonetheless, small business owners are a fairly optimistic group. We have to be. None of us  are really looking for a bailout. Nor do we place a lot of trust in the machinations of government. Our businesses are made or broken by the decisions we make and with the risk we assume.  We have to be optimistic, tenacious, and now cautious. Many of us will come out of this with a healthy distrust and dislike of the banks who were anxious to provide funding for growth in good times but not so willing to help us survive when times got tough.  We will be less inclined to assume debt to finance growth and we will be careful about how debt is assumed.  Many of us will need to repay debt generated during the recession before we expand again.  It may take some time for small businesses to re-start the engines that produce growth and new jobs.

I suppose that I shouldn’t find the administration’s dispassion toward the small business sector particularly surprising. It makes as much sense as taking over GM with the stated goal of restructuring the  company to produce economical and fuel efficient vehicles and then promptly shuttering the Saturn division (which made economical and fuel efficient vehicles). But perhaps the worst really is over and we’ll make it on our own.

Maybe I should find time to cross my fingers.

The View from My Window

The view from my window is sometimes entertaining and sometimes thought provoking. Here’s what I see when I look out from under the red awnings at the printshop on Poplar Street (brand name omitted to protect the delicate sensibilities of the franchise):

The Poplar Street Park Congregation

At Gralpharaphics, we call them the Poplar Park Congregation. Their membership ebbs and flows with the weather and the economy. Lately, it’s been growing. It’s not that Poor Richard really minds the congregation that much most of the time.  It’s a public park and they have a right to be there. And they’ve been there or somewhere else downtown for a long time. My dad, who has worked in downtown Macon for over 70 years, knows many of them by name. They are loud, profane, occasionally drunken, and mostly harmless to others; if not to themselves.

There is an occasional preacher. There are frequent arguments and brief fistfights. If an event is upcoming, the Macon Police Department will clear them out for a day or so.  When the event is over, they come back. My customers have learned to always park on our side of the street to avoid jeers, comments, and requests for money. The money is used to buy a beverages in brown paper sacks from the Poplar Mart, the foodstore on the other side of the street that sells beer by the bottle.

We’ve had occasional fun with the congregation. There was the time when beautiful wife was given plug-in air fresheners by a friend who works at a bath boutique in trendy North Macon (where the congregants dare not tread).  Thinking to improve the atmosphere at the printshop, beautiful wife plugged in one of her new acquisitions in the lobby of the printshop during a brief Saturday afternoon visit. What she didn’t know was that there was a reason the trendy boutique had decided to dispose of the air fresheners at a deep discount. It was the fragrance–“Aroma de French Bordello.”

None of the printshop crew had ever worked in a bordello and they found the perfumed aroma somewhat strong for their tastes. With burning eyes, they unplugged the air freshener and transferred it to an outlet in the middle of Poplar Street Park just as the congregation began to arrive for the day.  It made for an entertaining morning as we watched the members of the congregation try to identify the source of the noxious odor.  One of them finally noticed the plug-in on the column in the middle of the park, and on hands and knees stuck his nose directly above the source of the smell and began to sneeze. The air freshener was removed by one of his fellow congregants, pocketed presumably to take to a location where Aroma de French Bordello would be better appreciated.

Now to the thought provoking part. The Poplar Street Congregation is indicative of a problem that is not getting any better. Macon, our lovely city, didn’t fare too well in the press last week. Forbes magazine published a top 10 article and we made #7. We’re #7 in the list of the top 10 most impoverished metro areas in the nation. That’s not a statistic that does much for civic pride. For the purposes of this short blog entry, it’s not worthwhile to go into the details of the problem . . . high unemployment, low incomes, poor education, etc. Fill in the blanks or read the Forbes article.

The causes of the problem are tough to tackle. The symptoms are visible from my window – the Poplar Street Congregation is a segment of the population that doesn’t even fall into the ranks of the unemployed. They haven’t been employed and they’re not looking for work. Goodwill, the agency whose motto is “Building Lives, Families and Communities – One Job at a Time,” used to operate the store behind the congregants. It shut down three months ago.

It seems that the Macon of my lifetime has always been a town just on the edge of getting it together. There was a time in the 1960s and 70s when we were a music mecca for Soul musicians and Southern Rock bands. We have a great university (Mercer) in town, plus Wesleyan College and Macon State.  The cultural scene is really pretty amazing. As is the case in many small cities, real estate and development interests have been allowed to run unchecked, leaving areas of abandoned and decaying buildings in their wake. Before the Decession, Poor Richard was convinced that downtown was on the verge of a renaissance and that may yet be the case. There are still signs of life and a great organization (Newtown Macon) that is devoted to the restoration of the city center. But the view from my window is troublesome today.

It seems that because the causes of the problems are tough to tackle, we don’t try. It’s easier to argue, to blame political incompetence and the inability to make rational decisions on race, to pretend that North Macon is part of another city entirely, to put personal aggrandizement ahead of the best interests of the community. Or perhaps it’s easier to pretend that there are no problems, that it’s all a bed of roses. Poor Richard is  afraid that the smell is more like french bordello air freshener than roses.

The Forbes article indicates where we are as a community. It is a warning of where we might wind up. It’s time to get behind the positive efforts to change Macon’s  direction. The list is long:  improving public schools, keeping the museum district intact, developing the College Hill Corridor, consolidating the City and County governments, reducing the number and improving the quality of our city and county representatives. It’s not impossible, though. Poor Richard is an optimist –  I’m sure that there are many like me who don’t want any part of politics, but will be glad to pitch in and help if we can all work together.

I’d like to still be looking out of my downtown window in a couple of years, and I’d like to see a different scene. Instead of the Poplar Street congregation, I’d like to see shoppers and tourists enjoying the park with open stores and businesses behind them that employ people.  Instead of the Poplar Mart selling beer, there will be a new grocery store to serve all of the folks who are moving downtown. Grant’s Lounge will be open every night, featuring the best Indie bands, who all want to play in Macon. It could happen, couldn’t it?

Priorities

The masthead says Georgia Student Finance Commission, but the cheap copied letterhead bears the seal of the guvnah, Sonny Perdue.  I’ll cite the first two paragraphs verbatim:

The Georgia Student Finance Commission (GSFC) is the agency responsible for administering the Governor’s Scholarship Program. We are writing to inform you that the State Budget Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2010, recently passed by the General Assembly, does not include funds for the Governor’s Scholarship Program.

The lack of funding for the program means there will be no Governor’s Scholarship Program awards made for the 2009-2010 academic year.

If you’re curious, the Governor’s Scholarship awards are given to Star Students and Valedictorians in each public high school in the stage of Georgia. Second daughter, who was a Star Student at Perry High School a couple of years ago, has received around $900/year from this scholarship for the last two years.  Admittedly, losing this money will not put an end to her college career, but it is money that must now come from elsewhere.  These days, elsewhere can be a little hard to find.

Our federal government, operating in hopeful desparation, has saddled my daughter’s generation with a mountain of debt (see Poor Richard’s post A Modest Proposal ). It would seem that the least we could do is attempt to provide them with the wherewithal to pay their way out of it.  This, it seems, runs directly counter to the priorities of Guvnah Sonny and the dimwits in the Georgia Legislature, who are more concerned with getting Georgians to go fishing or arguing over a resolution in support of President Obama than they are with education of the generations to come.

It is tempting to go off on a tangent about public education’s lack of concern for the best and brightest students, those with the most observable potential to get our nation out of the mess that my generation of politicians has gotten us into.  The prima facie evidence indicates that dabbling into education by mediocre politicians and their mediocre bureaucratic appointees within the educational system has resulted in the dumbing down of a couple of generations of students.

Poor Richard submits that it’s one thing to do this accidentally (i.e. from stupidity, not malice), but quite another to do it intentionally. I would remind my Georgia readers that the same state officials  who unaward scholarships have mandated significant budget cuts to education ($1.5 billion from the K-12 system and more from the universities, according to Bill Shipp and the Consortium for Adequate School Funding in Georgia), eliminated summer school for this year,  and even suggested that it might be a good idea to furlough teachers for a few days during the next school year to save money.

It’s a matter of priorities.  In the eyes of Georgia’s governor and legislature, stealth taxes on automobiles, indecision and endless argument about transportation, and questionable restructuring of the corporate tax code certainly trump education. Oh, and fishing . . . let’s not forget fishing (See the guvnah’s Press Release).

Postscript:

Daughter #1 will be graduating from Mercer in two short weeks.  Today we learned who the commencement speaker will be.  You guessed it . . . Guv’nah Sonny hisself.  Ironic, huh?  Isn’t life grand?

Bailout, Please?

At first, I wasn’t even interested.  After all, bailout funds have something of a stigma about them, don’t they? What with AIG, the big car companies, and greedy bankers all clamoring for more, it’s just a little embarassing for a small businessperson to go out looking for the government dole. We’re supposed to be the proud and determined entrepreneurs that keep the country productive and innovative and 16 other patriotic sounding adjectives.

After 17 continuous months of recession, though,  things were getting kind of desperate.  Actually, Poor Richard didn’t realize that it had actually been 17 long months until he heard it on the radio.  They kept the first year a secret for a while, you know. Anyway, because the level of desperation is inversely proportional to the level of funds in the company bank account; when the desperation got high enough, I made the phone call.  After all, I rationalized,  if all this money they’re printing isn’t  going to be worth a plug nickel in the long run, shouldn’t AlphaGraphics get some to spend before everybody else figures it out?

So Poor Richard called Saxby Chambliss’ office in Macon and asked to speak with the Senator. A very nice young lady informed me that the Senator doesn’t really actually even ever stay here in Georgia, because it’s too far away from the center of things where all of the important stuff happens. She asked me why I was calling.

“I’m looking for some bailout money,” I responded, then decided to sweeten the pot. “Of course, I’ll be willing to sell up to 99% of the stock in my company, if that will help.”

“Oh, that would be most helpful!” she answered, “and exactly how many billions of dollars does your company need to stay afloat?”

Not wishing to be greedy, Poor Richard responded that a few million would actually do quite nicely. This didn’t sit well with the young lady in Senator Chambliss’ office, though.

“Only a few million?” came the huffy response, “I’m not sure that the treasury department is set up to administer bailouts in such small amounts. I’ll refer your inquiry to the Senator, but perhaps you should contact the Federal Department of Largesse and see if they have a block bailout program for smaller concerns like yours.”

She was kind enough to give me the toll free number for the Department of Largesse and then hung up the phone muttering something about the time wasted by common citizens who feel entitled to call Senators’ offices. Feeling bold, nonetheless, Poor Richard placed a call to the Department of Largesse and immediately became entangled in the voice mail system.

“To assure the highest levels of service, please state your name and input your 9 digit Federal Employer number,” droned a disembodied voice.

I complied.

“Your call may be monitored to assure high levels of service,” continued the voice, “and your phone may be tapped to assure that you are not speaking regularly with Osama bin Laden or other Al Qaeda operatives. If you wish to continue, please enter your SIC code and the amount of governmental largesse that you wish to request.”

Once again, I complied. Not wanting to be greedy, I punched in 7,500,000.  “This is really kind of easy,” I thought.

“Please be advised that if you are awarded funds by the Federal Department of Largesse, your salary and bonus package will be limited to a measly $500,000 annually.  In addition, you are warned not to openly redistribute government funds among executive employees in such a manner that the news media or the public might discover your abominably irresponsible and unpatriotic behavior. If you agree with these terms and conditions, please press “1” to continue.”

Having no difficulty with the conditions, Poor Richard pressed “1.”

A long pause ensued, followed by a click as my call was transferred. Poor Richard could hardly wait. “Now I’ll get to talk with one of the customer service reps and tell them where to mail my $7.5 million,” I thought.

The phone clicked once more and another computerized voice queried. “Our records indicate that the asset value of your business is less than $10 billion dollars. Is this correct? If ‘yes,’ please press ‘1’ now, otherwise hold for the next customer service representative.”

With all good intentions and still hoping for the best,  Poor Richard pressed “1.”

“We regret to inform you that your business has been deemed insignificant by the Federal Department of Largesse,” sounded yet another automated attendant. “The SIC code you entered indicates that your company is involved in the business of printing. Printing is not considered to be a relevant economic activity, nor is it eligible for funding under President Obama’s 21st Century Initiative for Green, Energy-Efficient, Barely Conceivable and Totally Impractical Projects.”

“Please press ‘1’ if you’d like to speak with a customer service representative,” the voice continued. “Our current hold time is estimated at 16 years, 3 months, 2 days, 5 hours, 16 minutes and 35 seconds. Calls will be served in the order that they are received. If you’d like to be considered for a consolation prize, please press ‘2’ now.”

Feeling despondent, Poor Richard pressed ‘2.’ “Please hold,” came the voice.

It took a minute before I realized that the background music playing while I waited was familiar. It was Ray Charles singing about Greenbacks . . . “just a little piece of paper, coated with chlorophyll.”  I confirmed my mailing address with the last automated attendant and was told to look for my consolation check in the mail. In closing,  Poor Richard received a firm promise that the Department of Governmental Largesse would always endeavor to reallocate the resources of this great nation from each according to their ability and to each according to their need.

$100 Bill

I’m still waiting for the check. You know, Lincoln ain’t gonna get it, Jackson neither.  Maybe they’ll send a fresh, crisp $100 bill with Poor Richard on the front.

Just how green can you get?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against environmentalism. Poor Richard is just as worried about what we’ve done to the planet as the rest of you. And I’m really concerned when it’s 40 degrees on January 1st and 75 on the 2nd. But I think we’re taking the “green movement” a little too far. Right now, I’m remembering the lyrics to an old B.B. King blues song:

I gave you a brand new Ford
and you said “i want a Cadillac”
I bought you a ten dollar dinner
and you said “thanks for the snack”!
I let you live in my penthouse
you said it was just a shack!
I gave you seven children
and now you wanna to give ’em back!

In “How Blue Can you Get?,” B.B. has gone to the extremes for his woman . . . but nothing he can do is good enough for her. ‘Scuse me, but I think we’re taking the environmental thing just a little too far, too. I discovered a new font on the web the other day. It’s called Spranq Eco Sans. Here’s an example:

Spranq Eco Sans

You will note that the font has holes in it . . . small holes that can’t be seen when the type is small (below the blue line); but are visible in the large type.  Created by a (very clever) Dutch advertising agency, Spranq, the Eco Sans font is purported to use up to 20% less ink.  I’m not really sure how serious Spranq’s initiative was intended to be, but here’s what they say:

The Ecofont is developed by SPRANQ, based on a hunch of Colin Willems.

With the Ecofont SPRANQ hopes to increase environmental awareness. Some ideas are:
• End-users: print only when necessary, use a modern, efficient printer and use unbleached paper.
• Graphic designers: use modern color separation techniques to avoid unnecessary wastage in ink. In paper choice, take the environment into account.
• (Offset) printers: avoid modern laser techniques that make ink indivisible from the paper. Keep an eye on innovations, such as plant-based ink.
• Printer manufacturers: invest in environment-conscious innovation.

Poor Richard is convinced that the Eco font is fulfilling its purpose.  It’s getting Spranq a lot of attention. As to the company’s stated intent, I can’t resist a barely guarded response:

1. Print only when necessary.  Also, you should only use a bare minimum of toilet paper . . . only as much as is necessary. Staples and Office Depot don’t carry much in the way of unbleached paper, but AlphaGraphics can cut some kraft paper down for you if you would like to run it through your laser printers (or use it in your bathroom).
2. Graphic designers, does this mean that you can’t use 300% saturation for blacks any more (C=70, M=70,Y=60,K=100)? More about paper in following paragraphs.
3. Offset printers aren’t concerned with laser technologies, but there are no laser/toner/inkjet technologies that do not make the ink indivisible from the paper. Soy based inks don’t dry very well. Also, the dot gain is excessive . . . rendering the holes in the Eco Sans font completely useless.
4. Printer manufacturers — I’ll leave this one alone. I’d rather talk about the paper manufacturers.

For some time, AlphaGraphics, Inc. has been championing a chain of custody initiative. It’s called FSC (Forest Stewardship Council).  FSC is involved in the certification of timberlands worldwide for best management practices. All well and good. In the U.S., their stated goal is:

to coordinate the development of forest management standards throughout the different biogeographic regions of the U.S., to provide public information about certification and FSC, and to work with certification organizations to promote FSC certification in the U.S.  (Source: fscus.org).

Laudable goals. Great marketing. But completely unnecessary in the U.S. For 15 years prior to diving in to a small printing business, Poor Richard was employed in the lumber industry. At one time Poor Richard was actually a board member for the  Southern Forest Products Association. From this viewpoint, I can state without reservation that the U.S. timber industry is not the problem.

In 1994, the American Forest and Paper Association started a Sustainable Forestry Initiative setting Best Management Practices and goals  for American forests:

a set of forestry principles that would meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. These principles call for a land stewardship ethic which integrates the reforestation, nurturing, and harvesting of trees for useful products with the conservation of soil, air and water resources, wildlife and fish habitat, and forest aesthetics.

Weyerhaeuser Corporation, now defunct, was involved in sustainable forest initiatives decades before the SFI.  I will never forget a visit to Mt. Saint Helens in the early 1990s, about 10 years after the eruption. Weyerhaeuser owned most of the timberlands approaching the mountain. They had replanted almost all of the timber that was destroyed by the volcano.  They managed the timber they owned in South Georgia in much the same way, as did Union Camp and many other timber companies and private landowners.

Here’s the point:  We need to get real about our environmental concerns and about what we actually do (not just what we say we do).

On the AF&PA website, I found the following:

Nevertheless, despite its collective strengths, the industry is under intense cost pressure from foreign competitors. Many foreign competitors are not incurring government regulatory program costs comparable to those in the United States. The industry continues to look for the most efficient and cost-effective ways to improve environmental performance. This means that we will continue to press for regulatory approaches that are cost effective, performance-based and take business cycles into account.

Let’s take this to the microcosm — a small printshop in Macon, GA. AlphaGraphics buys FSC and SFI certified papers. We buy from American mills as much as possible. Most of the remaining  American made papers do  have some recycled content. We can and do buy a recycled gloss paper from Appleton Papers called Utopia.

But, we also buy an inexpensive gloss text that is imported by our distributors. Some of it comes from China. Why do we buy this stuff? Because we have to. Paper is a significant cost component in most printed products (duh?). Without an economically priced paper option, we would not be able to sell color printing. The FSC certification sound great and it’s a great marketing tool . . . but it doesn’t apply in China. The fiber in this stuff may come from waste paper imported from the U.S. or from the rain forests of Myanmar (Burma). Who knows?

It wasn’t always this way.  In days of yore, before the U.S. abdicated our manufacturing crown (regulated and free traded it away), it was possible to buy a variety of domestic papers:  in different colors, in different grades, at different price points. Now, many of the remaining U.S. mills are owned by overseas companies and the selection has been reduced to “white ” or “natural” (see Poor Richard’s post “If Counterfeiters are dinosaurs, can printers be far behind?”).

I’m banging the drum again. What the AF&PA advocates is practical, not idealistic. It’s time we get beyond the nonsense of “green” marketing and get back to the critical issue of how we control our own destiny. Selling green is meaningless. Doing green is not.  Doing green and competing is even better.

We’ve got our priorities wrong. Like B.B.’s ungrateful lover, we’re dissatisfied with what we don’t have and didn’t earn. Perhaps we also want to regulate the impractical.  The U.S. did very well with Fords and ten dollar dinners. We still can. It’s time to make the most of what we have. We have done it responsibly before . We can manufacture things responsibly again. It’s time to get back to work.

Here’s B.B. King, for your listening pleasure:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “BB King — “How Blue Can You Get”“, posted with vodpod

A Modest Proposal

Way back in the early 1700s, Jonathan Swift wrote a clever essay entitled “A Modest Proposal.” If my recollection serves me well, it was directed at the concurrent problems of poverty and population growth in Ireland. Swift’s hyperbolically satirical solution was simple . . . sell the children as foodstuff.

Swift maintained that the market for the delicacy was adequate, though the price might be somewhat steep:

“I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.”

Could it be that our paternalistic leaders in Washington D.C., tiring of the practice of insignificant populist one-upmanship, have finally come upon the holy grail of dissipation? It seems that they’re now willingly selling our children to finance their own political (and assuredly financial) well-being.

Meager billion dollar pork-barrel projects (a la Senator Byrd) have become passe. I mean, what’s an FBI crime lab or two in comparison to a $600 billion dollar distribution of political largess?

And there’s really no need to face up to the problems we’re creating right now, is there? Surely very few of the respected Senators or Representatives hope to live long enough to even see a small dent made in the Federal debt. It’s our children they’re selling anyway . . . why should they care?

The market for children has changed a bit, too. Rather than selling our kids as delicacy for persnickety aristocrats, instead they’ve been sold piecemeal to China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. But we don’t have to deal with that uncomfortable fact right now, do we? So, let’s just mint a little more money, increase the debt another trillion or so and leave the problem of how to pay it back to the next generation.

Let’s do the math. As I figure it, $600 billion divided by the population of the U.S. (roughly 300 million), comes to only roughly nearly precisely $2,000 per capita. For a small family like mine, with nine (including grandparents) in the household, we’ll only have to cough up $18,000 to pay off this bit of Congressional generosity. That’s really only chicken feed compared to the total obligation owed by our country. According to the The National Debt Clock , the per capita debt at 6:47 EST this evening (November 22, 2008) stood at $34,946.20. For my family, that’s a note of only $314,515.79.

In all fairness, the debt is owned by all kinds of different entities. 22% is owned by foreign and international investors. Roughly 4% is owned by some of the same domestic banks that are currently being bailed out. If you have Savings Bonds, you actually have bought up some of the very debt that you owe . . . take a minute and think that one over.

Here’s the point. It’s not just that we’re electing the wrong people to Congress. We are. But we’ve developed a political system that virtually guarantees that the last thing an ethical, responsible and honest human being will do is run for public office. Take the current Senate campaign in Georgia as an example . . . but I digress.

Back to the proposal. Let’s cut to the chase . . . let’s have an end to our politicians and their Lilliputian attempts to solve our country’s difficulties. Poor Richard proposes a sheerly Brobdingnagian solution . . . let’s sell the children outright! It’s reasonable, even if it does involve a little slavery or indentured servitude. We’ve incurred a debt for them, why not offer them up on the open market and turn some of the debt they owe into cold, hard cash? After all, what’s the likelihood that a 10 year old will ever be able to pay off the debt that our leaders are obligating them to? Sell them to the rich.

We should take this action sooner, rather that later; while the value of a small child still exceeds the $34,000 in debt that they owe.

Acknowledging my obligation to Swift, I’ll end with his words:

I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the
least personal interest in endeavouring to promote this necessary
work, having no other motive than the publick good of my country,
by advancing our trade, providing for infants, relieving the
poor, and giving some pleasure to the rich. I have no children,
by which I can propose to get a single penny; the youngest being
nine years old, and my wife past child-bearing.*

*With tongue firmly in cheek, my youngest is 12 and far too contrary to make a good servant and while my lovely bride is still of childbearing age, a crafty surgeon precluded this option for us several years ago.

The Health Insurance Debacle

Realizing the risk of total ostracism from my conservative friends, I’m going to write it anyway:

I hope that Hillary wins the election.

There, that’s over with. Now I can explain myself. Things are broken now, but our elected officials are still trying to put them back together in a weak, kind of half-witted sort of way. Poor Richard’s hypothesis is that after 8 years of Hillary, the United States will be so irrevocably broken that we’ll have to start all over again. Maybe then we can elect responsible people to put it back together in the way that the founding fathers intended.

It’s just difficult to resist an occasional political diatribe. I’m afraid that last week’s headlines have provoked one. Here’s what the headline read:

Number of Uninsured Jumps to 47 Million.

15.4% of the population is now uninsured. That means that the other 84.6% are paying for their healthcare in one way or another. In the South, the percentage uninsured is higher – 18%. Only 34% of small businesses my size (10 people or less) offer health insurance for their employees. And those of us in the 34% are wondering how we’re going to continue.

This has been a struggle for 10 years and I’ve almost reached the breaking point. Alphagraphics has used the services of several PEO (Professional Employers Organizations) firms to try to short circuit the devastating premiums that insurance companies charge small groups. Essentially, the PEO is the employer of record. In our case, AlphaGraphics’ employees are technically employees of a Conyers based company. We are pooled with other small businesses who also used the PEO’s services to theoretically procure lower health insurance rates.

I don’t think the insurance companies like the arrangement very much. We’ve had to change PEO’s about every three years as their insurance options dwindled. The company we’re with now is the best we’ve ever had, but we just received our premium notice for next year. The increase was over 30%. Our premium for a single employee will be in excess of $3600 per year. My family’s premium will be more than $12,000. That’s more than I earned in the early days of my career and a more than measurable chunk of what I take home now.

A couple of weeks ago, Guv’nah Sunny made a big announcement. He proposes a subsidy to help small businesses buy insurance for employees who are not currently covered. No details yet, but Sunny made one thing perfectly clear. Small businesses who currently offer insurance for their employees aren’t allowed in. I can’t put a finger on it, but that just chaps me a little.

When our state senator, Ross Tolleson, first ran for the Senate we talked about this issue. AlphaGraphics was new, we had one employee with a bad health history, and it was nearly impossible to get coverage. Ross was all for legislation that would allow small businesses to pool together to purchase health insurance. He had been a small business person and understood the problem. I was encouraged.

Six months after his election, I ran into Ross again and asked about the idea. He had developed amnesia . . . didn’t recall the conversation. It wasn’t even on his radar screen. I think the insurance companies got to him.

I know the insurers don’t like the idea, because California actually got an insurance pool for small businesses started. It even lasted for a couple of years . . . until all of the insurance companies pulled out. The small business pool idea was also introduced as part of a Senate bill in 2006 called HIMMAA, the Health Insurance Marketplace Modernization and Affordability Act. Pronounce it like you’re clearing your throat. This bill got all tangled up in political wrangling and never made it to a vote. It was expectorated.

Which brings us back to Hillary. I make no prediction that the Empress in waiting will be capable of solving this gnarled up mess. But I do believe that in her efforts to implement governmental control, she might be very successful in completely destroying the system.

Maybe then we can give healthcare back to the free market. Maybe then patients will actually pay for healthcare services with real money and will buy the services they can afford. Maybe doctors and hospitals will also be subject to market forces and prices will be set according to John Maynard’s laws of supply and demand. Perhaps the providers will even charge patients who pay cash less than they would the insurance company who makes them wait 90 days for payment. Maybe even the insurance companies will learn to behave ethically and limit their intervention into the private lives of those they insure.

Maybe Hillary’s husband actually didn’t inhale.