Archive for June 2014
Big Box Retailers and Their Support for an Increase in The National Minimum Wage
Posted on: June 18, 2014
Yesterday I tuned in to that national conservative radio talk show host who broadcasts during the day. He brought up the subject of the two major big-box retailers we all know of, one whose name begins with a W and the other a C, and their support for an increase in the minimum wage. The radio host contends that the two retailers support an increase in the minimum wage because they can afford it and it will displace their competition who cannot afford to pay their own workers an increase in the minimum wage.
That was my position regarding the potential onset of a national internet sales tax. Certain retailers such as big box retailers who also have an internet presence can absorb the cost to the customer of a national internet sales tax, thereby pricing their competition out of the market. Smaller retailers would by default be increasing prices when adding the sales tax to the total receipt. Previously the smaller retailers were able to keep prices close to or competitive with the big-box retailers when adding in the cost of shipping because their overhead was naturally lower. They do not have to pay to maintain a retail location or locations. The implementation of a national internet sales tax would change all of that.
An increase in the minimum wage is another issue altogether. The motivation by the two major big box retailers to seek an increase in the minimum wage is due to the fact that their customers are no longer able to afford to shop at their stores. Retail prices, all except those that are subject to governmental price controls such as that of milk and food staples in general, have seen a large and certain jump in prices since 2008 and just prior as a result of various economic stimuli at the national level.
As a country, we are now starting to see the real and detrimental effects of the various economic stimulus plans. We are seeing the effects of the economic stimuli in the form of substantial levels of inflation and the least affluent customer, that customer to which the two big-box discount retailers primarily cater can no longer afford to shop at their stores. Sales are down at those discount retailers because prices are up substantially due to inflation, inflation which the retailers can no longer control with their economies of scale and purchasing power. Yet, their customer base has not seen a corresponding increase in wages in five years if you consider the national minimum wage while at the same time prices are being driven substantially higher. The economic stimuli we have seen since 2008 and prior have done little for the poor and lower economic classes, quite the opposite in fact.
One issue, that of the internet sales tax is a price control issue, the other issue, that of the minimum wage, is one of money supply on the demand side. When the customer has no money, that’s bad for retail business. And the customer has no money to cover the cost of inflation. The economic stimulus made sure of that.
To prove my theory I did a rather unscientific study. I went to the closest big-box retailer whose name begins with the letter W. Of the thirty or so lanes located to check out, only two lanes were open right in the middle of the afternoon (a little after 4pm), and the only line that had formed was at the self-checkout lanes and that line had only three or four people in line. The store is new and is considered a “Supercenter.” By retail standards, I’m sure it would have been considered a bit of a ghost town.
Their customer simply has no money to shop there anymore.
Copyright © William Thien 2014
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Marital property laws and community property laws may not be about “equality” as was originally thought.
Marital property and community property laws are about wresting control of income from the breadwinner, traditionally the male of the household, though that is changing, and giving control of that money to the lady of the house. Why? Because all of the marketing sciences are directed at the consumer and the lady of the house has been designated as the focus of America’s marketing efforts. She was and still is the primary consumer of the household. She does most of the spending. Almost all of America’s discretionary income marketing is focused on her. By giving her control of all of the money, marketing can get her to spend more of it. It is as simple as that.
When divorces started increasing during the sexual revolution of the 1960’s and 70’s, and women were left with little or nothing, women were taken out of the marketing equation because they were not getting as much money from the divorce. The solution was for states to enact marital property laws and community property laws to stimulate sales. You have to remember, sales taxes play a key role in sales at the register. When consumers spend, they also pay sales taxes. When spending slows, so do tax revenues.
Marital property laws did not come about simply due to issues of equality, they were created out of economic necessity in the marketplace.
Copyright © William Thien 2014
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Gun Rights vs. Gun Control
Posted on: June 18, 2014
I think as long as the two major parties toy with this particular issue of Constitutional Rights, consideration of a third party at the voting booth may be in order.
As a political issue, gun ownership has been a significant point of contention between both major political parties in The United States during campaigns and following any major gun crimes.
Republicans have sought to claim the right to the issue of the right of gun ownership while the Democrats have sought to claim the issue of gun control. In that regard it would appear to an outside observer I’m sure that the Democrats fall flat on their faces when it comes to protecting the right to keep and bear arms in The United states, often hiding behind false statistics or fear mongering in an attempt change the laws governing firearms ownership and usage, clearly for matters of political expediency.
In reality the issue of gun ownership in The United States belongs to no political party and it is in fact a Constitutional Right which even the Supreme Court has found…
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Pardon my getting to this one so late, I don’t watch much television, don’t even own one really that gets a signal, but I was visiting someone and did you happen to watch that “hour long” news program last Sunday evening that is made up of a number of minutes, sixty of them to be sure? They opened with a piece on all of the mass killings, shootings in particular (they focused on gun crimes for some reason which is revealed later in this observation) that have occurred over the last couple of years, by men. The reporter interviewed two notable psychiatrists who concluded that the shooters were all suffering from some form of schizophrenia though the two psychiatrists/psychologists approached the matter from apparently different angles.
One of the psychiatrists suggested there was a genetic connection to the behaviors and showed some pictures of the brain. Wow, nothing like expert testimony. Another said people were not being treated in the United States who needed treatment. Millions, he concluded, need treatment and were wandering around cities, it was suggested, like zombies. There may be a lot of schizophrenics ambling around, but the story wasn’t really about them. The net effect, the hope of the producers I am sure was to create a panic, but not about schizophrenia, the hope was to create a panic about guns, another panic about guns.
For one thing, most of the people they were talking about, not the ones who committed the mass shootings, the ones who were ambling around in the cities the one psychiatrist suggested, wandering around “untreated” that needed treatment don’t have the financial wherewithal to purchase guns. Most don’t know how to put on their own clothes. Many may even be victims of the most recent “great recession” and haven’t eaten properly or had a good night’s sleep in years. That’ll make you look schizoid, I’m sure. They probably can’t even afford a good hair cut.
The segment focused on people with guns, pictures of people with guns, stories about people with guns, people pointing guns, people talking about guns, heresy about guns, word of mouth about guns, one of them pointing a gun at himself. Then they went to file footage of asylums and other treatment facilities of the past with lots of really strange looking people walking around and bumping into each other wearing improperly tied medical gowns, then right back to the issue of guns. See where I’m going with this? Clever bunch, they are.
Yes, their methods SHOULD be alarming to you.
The story didn’t talk about the woman who recently suffocated her baby boy with a pillow because she was having “troubles.” They didn’t talk about Susan Smith who drove her boys into a locked car into the pond, drowning them so she could have another lover, none of that. None of the really unusual murders committed by women were mentioned. Oh no. Can’t insult the female viewer, she controls eighty percent of the discretionary income in America because ‘genius’ comes home and surrenders his check to the little wife and that’s the last he’s seen of it because now the marketers actually have control of it with their science of advertising control and manipulation of the female brain. Oh yes, it’s a science, one of the most researched and one of the most effective. And you thought you were thinking on your own. Gotta fit in, right? Gotta lose weight, so buy that pill. Gotta be fashionable and buy those clothes made by children. That’s more important than keeping your own people in home-made threads, right.
But we can take away constitutional rights from the American male. That’s who they fear, anyway. Betties historically don’t show up and overthrow governments, but they buy what’s on TV, you can be sure, especially stuff they don’t even need. They’ve turned shopping into a form of therapy. How often have you heard one say she shops to relieve stress. Gotta keep those Betties happy, even if it means taking away George’s rights. George? George?! Are you there? He’s in there somewhere. Why don’t you psychiatrists see if you can find George instead of helping charlatans figure out how to get his wife to spend all of his money? What, you say? There’s no money in that? Betty spent it all, already? Well…I see your point.
What the report did not say is that sitting in front of the perpetual violence on television from a very young age brings on a lot of the type of behavior we are seeing today. In fact, in my opinion, therein lies the foundation for such behaviors, the television, not schizophrenia. Perhaps the television, with its constant, flickering images, its strobing lights, perhaps that is the real source of the violence in America. Epileptics have been known to have seizures after watching flickering television screens. Maybe that’s the real connection, the real source of all of this violence, the television. Haven’t they even done scientific studies on that? Of course they have. They didn’t mention that in the piece. Hmmn. Hey you guys, you left something out. I think it might be the main point.
It was as if, no, it wasn’t as if, the producers WERE glossing over that very and oft-repeated fact for a more subtle argument that was supplanted in the story, that of gun control. Because the story did not focus on any other type of murders. All of the murders, if I’m not mistaken, involved guns or at least that was the main focus. There was talk of guns in every portion of the segment, use of guns, fear of guns, file footage of weird men bumping into each other in overpopulated asylums, then back to guns. Recognize a pattern?
What’s worse, the producers were doing what television does all the time, pointing its finger at the other guy, blaming him for the result of its own behavior. Instead of a ban on guns, how about a ban on disingenuous television news shows that purport to be news and not some form of subtle corporate/big government propaganda or how about a ban on the shoot-em-up shows that are nothing more than propaganda that kids watch? Why not have some real shows with people who are getting taxed to death and whose constitutional rights are constantly being trampled by the triad I speak of in my other essays?
If the media had their way, soon everyone who owned a firearm would have to take some sort of government authorized-standardized psychological battery where if you answered one question that indicated anything they determined they didn’t like, you picked the wrong color for example and people who like that color are statistically more violent, you wouldn’t be able to buy a firearm and you would probably have to go on some form of psychoactive medication when it was all the fault of the flickering television screen and not “guns.” Go figure. It is big pharma’s dream, disarm the population and addict them to psychoactive drugs. The news show is merely doing the dirty work is all.
Just thought I would share my interpretation of that particular segment of last week’s Hour Long BS News episode with you.
Copyright © William Thien 2014
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I became involved in a rather heated debate about the subject of gay/same-sex/homosexual marriage and if I had a dollar for every time someone bandied about the term “homophobia,” every time someone accused someone as an offensive debate maneuver of being “homophobic,” I’d have a lot more money than I have now to give to charity.
I think it is a myth, I said, that Americans are homophobic. Instead, I believe Americans are fearful of the diseases the homosexual community harbors such as AIDS and hepatitis. It’s a natural fear. Both of the diseases, AIDS and hepatitis, are frequently fatal. Phobias are irrational fears. Fear of contracting a deadly disease is not irrational. So, in that regard, “homophobia” is incorrectly waged.
In another regard, the term “homophobia” is being used incorrectly in its true context. The correct usage of the term “homophobia” involves fear of being labeled homosexual, not a heterosexual fear of homosexuals. It does not refer to straight people fearing gay people. Such usage of the term is incorrect.
What I didn’t like about the debate is that the “gay/same-sex/homosexual” side was so vehemently against any observation about their behavior and how it could affect the health of society that it amounted to little more than censorship and to me, that censorship is what is destroying any barriers that the heterosexual community is putting in place to prevent the spread of AIDS, whether those barriers be verbiage that identifies populations where the disease is prevalent or what behaviors are statistically unhealthy. In other words, you can’t tell us what to do and so what if you get sick and die. I’d be willing to wager that you are going to find some substantial disagreement with that sentiment.
The term homophobia has been levied by members of the gay community against the general population for some time as a means of suggesting some sort of inequality, and perhaps rightly so, but it turns out that the term is being used incorrectly and it involves the perspective of a single person’s fear of being perceived as homosexual, not that heterosexuals are afraid of homosexuals.
I would have let it go, but during the debate I was not only called “homophobic” but a few other choice names. So, I figured a public record of the correct usage and my perception and that of many, many others of what “homophobia” is was in order. Most Americans could care less about homosexuality these days. But the diseases historically associated with their community, that’s another issue. It’s no accident that the sexual promiscuity found in the gay community in San Francisco prior to the closing of the bath houses and the large number of intravenous drug users in that locality resulted in the wider distribution of AIDS. So, don’t hold it against the heterosexual population for being concerned about any change to the laws that govern homosexual behavior. Again, there is nothing irrational about such concerns.
As I’ve blogged previously I support same-sex marriage if it doesn’t raise my taxes because I think my tax dollars are already being misused to pay for the results of what I call government sponsored “sex for dollars” to pay to raise children being born out-of-wedlock. I also support gay/same-sex/homosexual marriage if it means monogamy and a decrease of certain STD’s being spread due to sexual promiscuity, which again was the reason bath houses were closed in San Francisco at the onset of the arrival of AIDS in The United States. First, there were only a few cases, then there were hundreds, do primarily to the promiscuity of homosexuals interacting in the bath houses, and then it got into the heterosexual population through blood transfusions and intravenous drug users. It started off as a few, deadly cases in The United States. Now it is everywhere. Just take a look at this map, AIDSVu
There have been cases of infected victims sticking people with contaminated needles. Infected people have been known to deliberately sleep with unwitting partners merely to infect them. Law enforcement personnel have become infected during searches by being stuck by the needles of drug users. Medical personnel have been stuck and infected or have been infected by blood spatters during surgical procedures. There are also statistics now that indicate the method of transmission in certain cases is unknown and unidentifiable. Has the disease mutated?
The concerns are real. They are not irrational. They are not phobias. They are valid.
So, not to make homosexuals appear like outcasts, but the concern coming from certain segments of society about any change to the laws governing homosexual marriage is real and genuine and justified. The concern is not the result of an irrational fear or phobia. I add that it is my opinion that driving such sexual behavior as homosexuality into the closet may have brought the plague of AIDS upon society to a certain extent to begin with. Maybe not. Perhaps social acceptance of homosexuals earlier on may have prevented the situation the world faces now.
So, to wrap this up, I favor homosexual marriage if it means monogamy and prevents the spread of disease. Just take a look at that map once again AIDSVu. In some counties on the eastern seaboard as many as five percent of the population are infected and the number is still growing! It was and still is an epidemic.
AIDS, once confined to a small section of the country, is now everywhere. I think the map tells enough of the story to reach a conclusion that there is nothing irrational about “homophobia,” even if it is used incorrectly.
I would not wish AIDS on anyone. Perhaps the gay community shouldn’t either.
Copyright © William Thien 2014
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Getting Back to The Health Care Debate, Since We Seem to Have Wandered Off, Or Perhaps Have been LEAD ASTRAY!
Posted on: June 5, 2014
Some things to remember about socialized medicine in The United States are that we actually pay in to several socialized systems already, to include Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security (which has its own medical programs). But that’s just at the Federal Level. Most states have their own programs as well. If we wrapped them up all in to one system, that would certainly bring the costs down. Europe has figured that out. Read on.
I participated in a healthy debate on an email list about socialized medicine versus privatized medicine in 2004 and 2005. A fellow conservative had remarked that Canada’s health system required long waits for substandard care and concluded that all socialized health care programs produced the same results.
At the time I was paying for my own health insurance to the tune of about $6,000 per year. But when I went in to have some blemishes removed from my skin where my backpack straps (I like to hike) rubbed them, which was painful, the health insurer said it was a “pre-existing condition” and refused to pay for the doctor’s visit. Upon discovering the greed of the health insurer I stopped paying the monthly premium and was in fact better off by about $6,000 the next year. But people need health care.
The online debate I had caused me to use my…
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William Thien 
Interesting Study on The Realities of Domestic Violence
Posted by: William Thien on: June 26, 2014
Here is an interesting study on domestic violence that I wanted you to read. Click here, Male Victims of Domestic Violence, or copy this link into your address field, http://www.saveservices.org/2012/02/cdc-study-more-men-than-women-victims-of-partner-abuse/
To me this information is significant because it supports my position that domestic violence laws discriminate against men. It turns out women are frequently not the statistical majority when it comes to domestic violence and related victimization. On an annual basis, men frequently comprise the statistical majority of victims. Yet, all of the laws governing domestic violence are primarily aimed at curbing historically male behaviors. After hearing in the media about the subject of domestic violence on any given day, you would think the statistical majority of victims of domestic violence would be female. As it turns out, that is not the case.
Go figure.
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