What’s amazing about the trump administration to me is the tariffs. There’s been a LOT of political discussion on Facebook, many of it from friends, even some whom don’t normally post on Facebook. What stands out to me about the Trump administration is the tariffs. While I have mixed feelings on them, as they are both beneficial for this country and bad, I think they are a major turning point in this country and a symptom of a bad leader. This country was founded on rebellion against taxes from Great Britain as the 13 colonies, as we were dependent upon their imports. However, as you should remember from very basic history class, they taxed those imports. Especially the tea. I’m not going to explain history to you, but don’t you think it’s a little hypocritical to tax imports in a country based on justice and fairness for all? We have become selfish in this way, among many other ways.
With the expanse of communications especially in the last 20 years, we now have smartphones, tablets, in addition to constant TV, email, texts, instant messaging (Teams anyone?)… We have so much exposure to the world around us we are so always connected that we want everything we can see. In other countries, people live very differently. Most of the infrastructure in this country was built in the 1960s and 70s by very smart investors who realized that with car and bus transportation, they could improve the productivity of our country, just like rail had. The problem is, our own selfishness and lack of business acumen meant that we didn’t invest in sustainability. Sustainability isn’t about being “green”, it’s about supporting your infrastructure financially so that it can be maintained. The “green” part follows suit because of the global warming claims, if you believe that or not. (Realize that natural gas is green, and so is oil, because while they are combustibles and release carbon monoxide, these resources will eventually replenish, even if humanity ends itself first, which, admittedly, it probably will, but not because of oil or gas).
As an unemployed test engineer, I work with manufacturing companies of all sorts. Here in Pittsburgh, there is a lot of medical research because Pittsburgh has a very impressive network of major hospitals. (When I lived across the street from Allegheny General Trauma Center and Hospital, there was usually a medical helicopter flying in at least every 30 minutes.) This just goes to show industry and how your geography can affect what industry your location has.
Florida is a perfect example for this post. Florida is usually subject to a hurricane every few years, and after Hurricane Andrew, safety codes for houses and buildings were made much stricter because of the loss of life. However, the climate is warm there, and it’s flat, and the ground is made of sand and not rock. So it’s cheap to develop. With the invention of air conditioning in the mid-1900s and the widespread availability of large amounts of electric power in Florida because of the relatively modern grid, development in Florida is fast and cheap, houses are sturdy and strong. I do want to go back home. But this post is about taxes. However, … wait … there’s more! Buy your house now in Florida and you’ll have to pay for serious property insurance from hurricane damage. Especially if you live somewhere where it floods. That’s basically everywhere in Florida. Green, sustainable living isn’t building houses in Florida. I’ve said it before, the house I rent now is over 150 years old. That predates electricity and maybe plumbing. Imagine that! Yet I have FiOS internet, 1gbps, right through the wall next to me.
Where am I going with this? Money, money, money, money, money… Spending more money means being taxed more. Making more money to spend more money means being taxed more. The more you make, the more you’re taxed, in this country. Don’t make anything? You probably don’t owe anything, and even might get a refund anyway! Some STATES have taxes on SSA, SSDI, and SSI income, even their own unemployment benefits. AND we want to tax imports, in the name of what exactly? Making this country Great again? Taxes are what freed us (or lack thereof, to be specific), and not the other way around. I see an economic recession coming.
What’s interesting though, is to get back to my point about being an engineer. Most of the manufacturing companies seem to actually be waking up to the fact that they need to “take a look at reality”, literally. Modern test engineering, like marketing, is about data analytics to improve production and lower cost. It’s like recycling, to prevent having to mine materials from the ground just to produce something new. A product fails the test? You don’t throw it away, you replace the damaged part, retest it, and send the customer that. A good company can even provide warranties (and they do this with… data!) to replace a failed product or repair it with minimal cost to the consumer. Watch some old TV commercials and see what TV was like back in the day and realize that commercials were actually informative, and not just repetitive. The concept was the same, play a TV commercial during a certain show to target your audience. Except now we do this with fancy computers and AI. All we’ve done is shift costs from human cost here in the US to some software engineer somewhere in India who can build the system that automatically plays the commercials for the TV studio during the commercial break. Watch the movie Hypercube. “All I did was work on was the doors” in reference to the fact that engineers are sometimes so siloed that they don’t realize how or where their own product is being used.
Don’t get me started on technology standards and bureaucracy. You know what they say… The great thing about standards is, there are so many to choose from. That’s the damn problem, you morons. The internet is falling apart, not being helped, by things like Web 3.0, which are sketchy and suspect for fraud. The internet, like road infrastructure and the space program, was developed in… a large part of the 1970s and early 80s.
So what does this mean? Well, the recent pullbacks on science funding (and remember, engineering is part of science), will affect this country. Isn’t it interesting to note, though, Elon Musk’s presence in the White House? Why is he there? Science isn’t going away, just *governments* investment in science. That’s why there are so many manufacturing jobs for test engineers right now to modernize test infrastructure in this country. With the tariffs, corporations, which are heavily bent on making profit, realize they now have less competition and hence more motivation to invest in their technology. Even though technology can sometimes be protected by a patent, it’s the general concepts behind technology that remains the same, and that’s even sometimes shared by large corporations such as National Instruments when they want their technology to be a part of that infrastructure. That’s why cars are so similar. They’re all made the same way, and all of these companies are incestual feeding off their own pool of engineers, who all get laid off eventually because of re-management (changes in business investment at higher management levels) and go to work elsewhere. So, unlike the 1960s as the turn of the century has come and slowly gone, we have 1) lost a level of job security, 2) because of item 1, companies have lost a level of intellectual rights protection. You would think item number 2 would be motivating not to have the practices they do, but they’re more concerned about making money and staying in power than protecting their employees.
Which gets back to taxes. The tariffs and the “drain the swamp” initiative seemed like a good idea to me until it actually started happening the way it did. Seems like Trump’s libertarian ideas are a bit too extreme, even for me. The problem with modern society is we are so “high strung” that if you have nothing, you lose your house, your car, your everything and it could take you months to years to recover that. The financial impacts if you don’t protect yourself can be extreme because of compounding interest. The real way to make money in this country is to invest. But I won’t get into that, because that’s an entire book I could write.
Don’t you think it’s ironic that taxes are a way to solve our problems by forcing companies in this country to do what they should have already been doing? I think this is a failure of Donald Trump who claims to be THE business man, not just any, but an instinctual, very, very good one. The failure here is he has so little control over anything, that he has to use money to manipulate them. It’s not just a weakness of the presidency (and government), but perhaps a problem with capitalism itself. Our own government is too inept to impose the right, moral and just laws to require companies to be sustainable and produce cheap and high quality product. My advice would be to limit maximum earned profit margin as a start, but I’m not an economist. In Peru, for example, DirecTV in the town of Henaro Jerrera was just $10/month. In this country you wouldn’t even pay the broadcast taxes on that alone.
I could keep going, but I want to end soon. I will get back to roads and my Florida example. In Pittsburgh, like many places, roads are known for potholes. In Florida, and in the south, it doesn’t snow. Up north though, duhhh. In Pittsburgh, and any city with bridges, potholes can actually form in the deck layer which is extremely dangerous. Having worked in a manufacturing environment with lots of dangerous things at one particular job, I was actually let go because of my disability (or at least, I have a strong suspicion). High voltage work. What does this have to do with roads? EHS. Environmental health and safety. This country was founded on war. War is never safe! Everything is a risk, and our rebellion from our colonist was especially. Getting out of bed is risky because you can fall. I’ve fallen, and gotten seriously hurt from it, even at a very young age. What amazes me though is this absolute infatuation with the mentality that anything unsafe should result in such serious liability precautions. If I die working on some 408 volt 3-phase, I die. It’s the mess they have to clean up that’s the problem. “Freedom is not free.” If we’re so obsessed about hurricanes and making sure you will still have a house after the next hurricane Andrew so YOU won’t be homeless, even though, technically you can’t afford to live in Florida if you need that insurance, what have we come to? Sure, there have been major fires recently, that killed a lot of people and destroyed a lot of homes. In the 1800s, if you had a fire, there wasn’t even a truck to bring you water. You rebuilt your house yourself. You reseasoned your cast iron skillet with lard from the meat you hunted. Now, we order Grub Hub at $35 plus tip. I make 6 figures and I can barely afford to live let alone buy a house. All this technology, this always on, we have everything we want. We have more freedom than ever. Yet we are all dancing on a high-wire, a self-imposed one, to some extent (and I don’t mean “you” as in, yourself, I mean as a society), and you think this is how it is because you can’t fix it or you want to spend time hand feeding your damn dog your Grub Hub on the couch.
The founding fathers of this country weren’t millionaires or billionaires. They were genuine, hard working people who wanted to free the 13 colonies of abuse from Great Britain. Now we have a tyrant as a leader and an ENTIRELY bought out government. This country has fallen apart. Completely. There IS NO saving it. We’re fucked and headed for disaster.
Taxes aren’t the answer, that’s just stupid. If I stay in the US, I’ll probably retire in Texas. Pennsylvania is cheap, but the taxes are high here. Texas is cheap, the taxes are low, so are property taxes, and there are rarely hurricanes, and it has both cold weather and (very) warm weather. This is of course, assuming, that the tariffs aren’t just a cover up to prepare our government for a coming world war that we need money for. If that happens, all bets are off.