Rose Cottage Ltd

Anyone familiar with this blog knows I love my wood stove so it won’t be any surprise that I use it to attempt to make a point. I’ve saved a LOT of money by gathering my own kindling and chopping my own wood – to keep my house very comfortable in winter.

Say I acquire a job where I make $100,000 dollars per year. I get ALL the income on April 15th and that income or the likelihood of even higher income per year is guaranteed for life. One heck of a job I know but hang with me for a minute!

So on April 15th I am feeling flush! Say I get the income all in one dollar bills. The pile of cash looks enormous and now I just have to decide how to spend it. I may make a few home improvements, I may give some to needy friends or family, and since the money is guaranteed I might take an expensive vacation or go hand out money to strangers on the street. Disposing of the funds is pretty much ALL up to me. But I do notice I have a LOT of new “friends” and there are so many exciting things to do with my money I hardly have time to sit down!

One year along around February when the morning temperatures are in the 20’s, I realize it’s getting cold in my house. I see that it’s starting to now snow outside, and realize that I have been too busy with my social engagements to chop wood for the stove and now it’s also too wet to even gather kindling . I haven’t bothered to do this in the fall of the prior year as I used to because I was on a Caribbean cruise paid for with my guaranteed income.

So what do I do? I decide those paper dollars I still have will work really well as kindling in my wood stove so I start throwing them in. It doesn’t matter if I burn these dollars for kindling because I have just about enough to get me to April 15th, when the next $100,000 will magically appear in my hands. Who cares if my self-importance and laziness is WHY I’m down to burning dollars? I know I’m getting more so there will be no “penalty” for my lack of planning.

Welcome to the US Federal Government and their police arm, the Internal Revenue Service.

They just got an estimated $1.4 TRILLION dollars from US taxpayers and I all but guarantee that by the end of the fiscal year in October 2015 many of the government entities will either be whining (as the IRS is right now,) that they don’t have enough money or, they will be spending like crazy (or throwing dollars into a wood stove) to ensure they get the same or more dollars next year!

And there is NO PENALTY! None! It’s Federal guaranteed income no matter how unwisely they spend it or how wasteful they may consistently be.

It’s enough to make you want to bang your head against a wall. I’m no economic expert but common sense tells you that if you keep giving money to someone or some THING that wastes it, they should not get MORE for doing so. That $18 TRILLION dollar debt just doesn’t seem to faze the masses and I don’t understand why. Latest figures are that “our” debt – due to years of fiscal mismanagement, has now reached approximately $54,000 per every taxpayer in the US! $54,000!

This is no more sustainable than me throwing my dollars into the wood stove. My poor planning – because I don’t NEED to plan and keep to a budget or keep chopping my own wood, will guarantee I eventually have cold days in some winter – and probably in the near future.

UPDATE: Someone, quite rightly, asked me why I just didn’t turn on the house’s heat. Good point. But if I am living the free-style, money-is-no-object lifestyle I’ve described here, I probably forgot to pay THAT particular bill!