The next time you hear a politician use the word ‘billion’ in a casual manner, think about whether you want the ‘politicians’ spending YOUR tax money.
A billion is a difficult number to comprehend, but one advertising agency did a good job of putting that figure into some perspective in one of its releases.
A billion seconds ago it was 1959.
A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.
A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.
A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate our government is spending it.
While this thought is still fresh in our brain, let’s take a look at New Orleans. It’s amazing what you can learn with some simple division.
Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D), is presently asking the Congress for $250 BILLION to rebuild New Orleans . Interesting number, what does it mean?
Well, if you are one of 484,674 residents of New Orleans (every man, woman, child), each get $516,528.
Or, if you have one of the 188,251 homes in New Orleans , your home gets $1,329,787.
Or, if you are a family of four, your family gets $2,066,012.
Accounts Receivable Tax
Building Permit Tax
CDL License Tax
Cigarette Tax
Corporate Income Tax
Dog License Tax
Federal Income Tax
Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)
Fishing License Tax
Food License Tax
Fuel Permit Tax
Gasoline Tax
Hunting License Tax
Inheritance Tax
Inventory Tax
IRS Interest Charges (tax on top of tax),
IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax),
Liquor Tax,
Luxury Tax,
Marriage License Tax,
Medicare Tax,
Property Tax,
Real Estate Tax,
Service charge taxes,
Social Security Tax,
Road Usage Tax (Truckers),
Sales Taxes,
Recreational Vehicle Tax,
School Tax,
State Income Tax, State Unemployment Tax (SUTA),
Telephone Federal Excise Tax,
Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax,
Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Tax,
Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax,
Telephone Recurring and Non-recurring Charges Tax,
Telephone State and Local Tax,
Telephone Usage Charge Tax,
Utility Tax,
Vehicle License Registration Tax,
Vehicle Sales Tax,
Watercraft Registration Tax,
Well Permit Tax,
Workers Compensation Tax.
Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago, and our nation was the most prosperous in the world . We had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world, and Mom stayed home to raise the kids. AND NOW WE ARE THE MOST INDEBTED COUNTRY ON EARTH!!!
Every now and again you see something that just makes you go ‘Aaaaaahhhh!’. These images from my father-in-law did just that.
IF ANY OF THESE IMAGES ARE COPYRIGHTED PLEASE LET ME KNOW. I AM NOT THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER BUT I FOUND THESE IMAGES ENTIRELY TOO BEAUTIFUL TO NOT SHOW. IF THIS INFRINGES ON ANY RIGHTS, PLEASE LET ME KNOW AND I WILL DO WHAT I CAN TO COMPLY WITH THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS WISHES OR I WILL TAKE THEM DOWN.
My wife said something very profound the other day. She said that she felt like she was on a honeymoon.
We have never had a honeymoon. We got married on a Saturday, spent the night in Reno, drive home on Sunday and started moving in to our apartment that night. So our honeymoon consisted of a night in a cheap hotel after driving around the block on the Reno strip and getting so scared of our surroundings that we chose to head back to our hotel. So when I heard her utter those words I thought to myself that it sounded so fitting for our situation.
Our marriage has been totally transformed at the same time as Sandi and I have been transformed. I can totally relate to the idea that we are on a honeymoon. I feel like we are starting to, for the first time, learn about each other. We are exploring one another. We are sincerely trying to figure out who we are. And I am loving it.
If you have not been on a honeymoon in a while, I suggest your try it. It is an amazing marital experience.
No, I am not taking back any of the things that I wrote yesterday. I am talking about insurance.
A friend of mine recently graduated college, and after a few months of trying our for a few professional baseball teams with no success, decided to move into insurance with New York Life. He came to the house yesterday and showed us some of the things he is doing.
After getting over the initial shock of doing just his third solo presentation and after getting past the feeling that we were seeing an Amway plan, we got to the nitty gritty of seeing a few different insurance options. And I have to say that I have never seen permanent life insurance before and wish I had a lot earlier than I did.
While I am still a little confused about it, I have to see that from an investment standpoint it is one of the few “good deals” out there. I am going to be looking more at it next weekend, but if you have any insight on permanent life insurance, please let me know. It really looks too good to be true.
Something amazing happened last night and I think it will have an impact on me for the rest of my life.
Before I get to that though, I want to let you in on a little something. Up until yesterday evening I thought my marriage was over. That’s right, you heard me. I thought last night was the last that I would spend as a married man.
You see, up until yesterday I was certain that my wife was going to leave me. She had already had plans to spend the weekend with her sister and and, as she put it, “maybe stay longer”. To me that meant that she was preparing to move out and preparing to start over. She had never done this before. She had never even vocalized a thought to do this before. This was a first for me and it had me rattled.
She had made these plans in response to a discussion we had a few days ago in which she asked me a very pointed, direct question about me. It was a question that I have for some time been almost wanting her to ask me yet have been dreading for years the time when she would. She asked. I answered. Honestly. The next day she told me she was going to her sister’s house on Friday night.
During the day yesterday Sandi emailed me and told me that she was tired and that she was not going to be going to her sisters house. I wasn’t really sure to make of that, but I was happy that she was not going.
On my way home Sandi called me and asked me to pick something up for her at the store. It was a bit of a strange request I thought, a woman’s shaver. But I told her I would. And I did.
When I got home I did what I normally do. I kissed my wife, kissed my kids, had dinner and began to prepare for the night. During this time Sandi managed to sneak away and take a shower. After taking care of the usual night time “rituals” Sandi and I finally had a little time for us. I noticed she was showered and was oddly peaceful with me. While we were talking she mentioned something about a surprise for me which sparked my interest for a brief moment. Sometime after 9:00 PM Alaynah, our youngest daughter, started showing signs that she needed some attention so I went to her room and prayed for her, tucker her in and talked to her for a little while.
As I was leaving her room Sandi was standing in our door way. She motioned for me to come to the bedroom, which was dimly lit with candles. There were some massage oils on the night stand. And our room was clean and orderly.
What happens behind the closed doors of a married couple should stay behind those doors. Sorry, but I am not going to go into the details of what we experienced last night. I can say that for almost an entire night we were able to, for the first time in our marriage, connect with one another on several different levels.
I have never experienced a sense of closeness, openness, attachment, peace and love in my marriage like that, ever. I have never felt so like a man as I did last night. And the experience has carried through to this morning.
Now I am sure that you are probably thinking that a single cannot redeem an entire marriage. I think you are wrong. A night like last night (and get the idea that sex was at the root of it out of your mind now because it wasn’t) can change nations just as easily as it can change people. And it certainly has changed my marriage.
My wife, in very much a leap of faith, did something that has planted the seeds of recovery and revival in our marriage. I am looking forward to carrying on with some of the things we talked about last night. I am looking forward to seeing how much we can love each other. And I am looking forward to being married for the rest of my life.
You can be sure that I will be mentioning more of this change over the next few weeks. I may even be so inclined as to make a weekly post about our marriage and what we are doing. As a brief sign-off, let me say that if you are married, make it a point tonight to serve your spouse. Practice being open, honest and straight forward with one another. And be willing to make yourself vulnerable. You are probably going to get hurt in the process. But when your spouse steps up to help you put the pieces back together you, your spouse and your relationship will be all the more better for it.
I am writing this post about two weeks from now (February 10, 2008). If you have ever read this blog you would know that I tend to do this sometimes… sit on posting then update all at once.
For the most part this has to do with me being busy (pronounced “Lay-Zee”). But this time it is totally different. Starting with the post tomorrow I will share with you a little bit of what has happened in the January 25 to February 10 time frame and hopefully you will see for yourself why I was away from posting.
I am so behind in my work right now that I feel I may never complete the new WWW site for my company.
What started out as something that I knew I could accomplish in a fairly nominal amount of time turned out to be something so large that there would not be a chance that I could ever get it done on time. And the worst part of it is that what I am building is basically a clone of the current, crappily coded site.
Well, not really the same. The content is the same. And therein lies the problem.
A lot of the content of our current site is static. Well, no, all of it is. And I am trying to make it cleanly dynamic and related throughout the database so that changes to the site will not require touching of any of the underlying markup or application code. And this is proving to be a more work intensive process than I had thought it would be.
Now it could all be my fault. I may have put myself into this mess with my desire to do things right, out of the chutes. But when I look at how flat and difficult to change the content is at the moment I can’t help but think that it needs to change now so in the new site structure change will never be more than an admin screen away.
Am I wrong for thinking this way?
Well, enough ranting. I need to go code some more. There is a lot of stuff to do and not nearly as much time to do it in as I’d like to have.
