Because Without You, I Probably Wouldn't Be Me...

The majority of self-help books aside, the truth is very few of us would be who we are today without having spent time interacting with some very good people, and no less true, some very bad people. We are shaped by people who come into our lives, some for brief periods, and some for years. Parents, siblings, relatives, teachers, bosses, co-workers, friends, and even enemies all contribute to that unique being that we become because of time spent with them.

I can't imagine printing anything without it looking like my father engineered it, or not comparing every enchilada I eat to my mother's homemade ones. I spent an evening recently with the Los Angeles Philharmonic enjoying a program of Rossini's opera music combined with classical music from Latin composers, amongst which was a piece from Agustin Lara, Granada, which was a favorite of both of my parents, as was Rossini.

The loves, and heartbreaks, in our lives shape us often in equal parts happiness and pain, for nobody can make you feel happier than someone you love, yet few people can hurt you as much as someone you think you love who doesn't love you. The woman I chose to marry keeps my heart young and always makes me laugh, many times even when I don't want to laugh, because she is inherently funny. She helps me be happy and always expects me to keep up my part of the bargain.

My sons remind of days gone by as they stumble across many of the same situations that made me stumble, and somehow still manage to move forward. The journey is not always easy, but they persevere, reminding me to be there for them, yet let them grow at the same time. Watching their excitement during a soccer match rejuvenates me, and even gets me on TV as we watch the US soccer team play in the World Cup. I know their loves of sports reflects my love of sports, and it has always made my life better because they allowed me to share some of their triumphs with them.

Your friends are there to share life with you, and true friends share the end of life you, so they too contribute to the fires that forge the person you are. They call out of the blue just to talk, or to ask trivia questions or financial questions, but they call. They contribute to conversations that wind through myriad subjects, until you remember what you started talking aboutg, each stop along the way providing something, be it funny, touching, poignant, or just plain absurd.

I can remember the advice of a high school teacher to always look for something to challenge me, because if I didn't I would lose interest rapidly, and even though she was a Green Bay Packer fan, her freckled countenance is still ingrained in my memory, because she was so right. Another teacher told my mother to make sure I always had a Dell crossword puzzle book for school because she was tired of me disrupting the class. To this day, I cannot step away from a crossword puzzle, and yes, I do them all in pen.

More later on this thread, but to all the people that recognize something in this passage, "Without you, I probably wouldn't be me."

How Long Has This Going On?

There was a time when medical care was affordable and doctors made a good living out of providing affordable care to people when they really needed it. This wasn't a fantasy world, it was the United States before insurance companies took over the medical system, promising us more access to medical care and to manage the costs.

It seemed counterintuitive to inject another layer of costs onto a system that by and large was already working, but of course deep wallets kept paying for the message to lull everyone into thinking this was a good time.

In the United States today, cash flow, like water, seems to finds its way into only the deepest pockets. What drove most of the frenzy behind the mortgage collapse, besides the insane concept to consume more based on never-ending equity increases? The capitalization of mortgage payments into asset-backed securities so that Wall Street could feed off that cash flow to create even more wealth for the already wealthy, and get towns in Norway looking for a slightly better investment vehicle to pay them for putting together all these asset pools.

Why would towns in Norway do that? Because, prior to the mortgage meltdown, Americans would do almost anything to not get behind on their mortgage. Everyone believed the safest cash flow stream around was American's paying their debts. Most of the world still believes that because we are now by far the world's largest debtor nation.

So the question is why do we owe so much money? Because like a lot of the people caught in the mortgage meltdown, we as a nation have made promises we cannot keep, while somehow convincing the world we would find a solution. Can we keep those promises if we so choose?

The answer is, yes, but at a much higher cost than we currently pay. Higher taxes are only part of the solution. with reduction in entitlements to a more affordable level being even more important. Even if we could find a way to eliminate all government waste and obvious "pork", rein in public employee costs, and reduce the unfunded pension liabilities, it still wouldn't make a dent in our public debt. No matter how much some people may want us to believe that cutting all those items will balance the nation's budgets, they can only nibble away at the margins.

Continuing to improve our national savings rate, already improving from a negative savings rate in 2007-2008, will help too. How do we achieve that? By consuming better, by making every dollar we spend go the farthest. By consuming only when we have the money to spend it, which many have already been forced to do because there just isn't an easy way to get credit any more. This helps because with less debt we are less susceptible to the effects of inflation.

More thoughts on this later, but we need to stop vilifying public employees, because they are not the enemy. They are our neighbors who provide the services that many of us do not have the skill set to provide, nor the desire to work at day in and day out, yet we want all of those services provided without question.