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Vote Biden for the Economy

October 22, 2020 by Lazy Man 24 Comments

I usually don’t write political posts. I don’t think I wrote one in the first 8 years of Lazy Man and Money. I’ve probably averaged one every couple of years since. This article is a frank talk about the United States economy though, and it’s a discussion that is worth having whichever side of the political spectrum you are on.

I’ve been planning this article for over a month now. Unfortunately, every time I try to sit down to write it either life interferes or the nature of this article changes.

Fortunately, we have almost completed our 1031 exchange (expect a larger update around the end of the month). I can’t wait for the political news cycle to take a break for a day or two, so I’ll just have to go with it. It’s 2020, so we know the next catastrophe is just around the corner.

I had almost published this before the first Presidential debate. I shelved it for a couple of days so that everyone could focus on finding the best way to move to Canada.

In any case, when I started this, there was one area where Trump had the slimmest of advantages in the polling – the economy. Voters felt that Trump was the best for the economy. Going back to Thanksgiving last year, my mother felt this way too. She seemed surprised that I was a democrat. I think her reasoning was that I write about personal finance and economy, so I must be for Trump. I do like value fiscal responsibility (as we’ll find out), but there are other things to take into account when voting for President of the United States.

Those non-financial things are important, but they are outside the scope of this article. That means that I won’t cover Trump caging children, tear-gassing peaceful Americans, bragging about sexually assaulting women, being credibly accused of sexual assault dozens of times, inability to understand second-grade science, aligning with our enemies of Russia and North Korea, nepotism, violation of the emoluments clause, impeachment for trying to get a foreign country to attack Americans, racism, supporting white supremacists, telling members of US Congress to go back to their country, misinformation/disinformation/”alternative facts”, voter suppression, calling our war heroes losers, or trying to end health care for millions and millions of Americans during a pandemic.

I may have missed a few things, but I think you get the idea.

Before I get into the economic case to vote for Joe Biden, we have to recognize that we have a two-party system. We can’t simply say, “Well, I like Mark Cuban, because he would be the best candidate and vote for him.” I suppose you may be able to write his name on the ballot, but it is just as useful not to vote at all at that point. When you only have two choices, it’s completely valid to vote for the lesser of the two evils. Maybe you don’t like eating liver and lima bean soup, but it becomes attractive when compared to dog poop soup. Thus, it is just as useful to point out why Trump is bad for the economy as it is to point out why Joe Biden is good. You don’t want to get stuck eating dog poop soup for four years, do you?

I don’t want to suggest Joe Biden is bad for the economy. He’s actually put together a lot of policies that will help many low-income Americans. That alone would create and increase business opportunities for even more wealthy Americans.

Let’s get started:

Trump and Unemployment

Trump seems to measure the economy in two ways. The most common one is the performance of the stock market. Another way he does it is by measuring unemployment. First, let’s look at the stock market.

Trump and Stock Market Performance

The stock market has done well under Trump. I don’t think anyone can argue that. However, it’s important to note that the stock market had been doing very well for six years before Trump. In fact, there have been a number of monetary policies from both parties to juice the stock market and economy in general. You may remember a series of quantitative easing and “Cash for Clunkers.”

The Trump version of those two stimulus programs was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2018. It managed to cut taxes for corporations and those in the top tax brackets the most. People in lower tax brackets also saved on taxes, but not as much. It has been widely reported that many public companies used the tax savings to buy back shares of stock. This has the effect of making the owners of corporate stock wealthier.

While surely jobs were created, unemployment was already very low at the time. One could argue that a more effective policy would have been to raise the minimum wage. While that may have helped out many Americans it would have likely hurt the stock performance of companies that rely on that cheaper labor.

That naturally brings us to…

The Economy is more than the Stock Market

Here’s how Joe Biden describes the economy:

“Throughout this [COVID] crisis, Donald Trump has been almost singularly focused on the stock market, the Dow and Nasdaq. Not you. Not your families. If I am fortunate enough to be elected president, I’ll be laser-focused on working families, the middle-class families I came from here in Scranton. Not the wealthy investor class. They don’t need me.”

Admittedly, here at Lazy Man, I am mostly focused on the stock market economy. That’s what allows me to make my money work for me (creating the whole “Lazy” brand). However, I do recognize that there are millions and millions of Americans who are left behind by the stock market economy. As my friend Jim Wang of Wallet Hacks concludes in his stock ownership analysis: “When the stock market goes up, 75% of the Americans don’t participate in any meaningful way.”

Joe Biden wants to undo most of Trump’s tax cuts. That may seem unpopular because most people like low taxes. Unfortunately, sometimes the unpopular choice is the best choice.

The problem with Trump’s lower taxes is that the government has to do more with less money. Predictably services get cut. In 2018, the government decided to disband the “Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense” team, which would have certainly been useful against the COVID-19 pandemic we are experiencing today. To pick another example, Trump proposed eliminating funding for PBS. Is it important to you that Jeff Bezos makes a few billion more dollars because Amazon has to pay less corporate taxes at the expense of excellent children’s programming like Sesame Street and Daniel Tiger? (PBS is much more than that obviously, but that programming was critical in our family.)

The other thing about lowering taxes is that it increases the national debt. I’m not a fan of debt. The Committe for a Responsible Federal Budget lists four main consequences of a large national debt:

Lower national savings and income
Higher interest payments, leading to large tax hikes and spending cuts
Decreased ability to respond to problems
Greater risk of a fiscal crisis

I feel like we are seeing the consequences of spending cuts and the lack of ability to respond to COVID today.

If corporations pay more taxes instead of buying back stock, we can fund great, popular, endangered programs like Social Security.

Trump and Unemployment

Trump has often said that he’s been great at reducing unemployment. That’s true. This graph shows unemployment went from about 10% when Obama inherited the subprime mortgage mess from Bush’s administration. He was able to steadily get it down to 5%. Under Trump unemployment continued its path down to 3.5%. Both presidents deserve credit when it comes to unemployment.

Of course, we all know what happened in 2020. COVID-19 happened. Unemployment spiked to nearly 15%. Trump didn’t create COVID-19, but he made it worse than it needed to be. I’ll get that a little later.

CEOs for Joe Biden

Companies can’t depend on Donald Trump. Believe it or not, it was only about 6 weeks ago that Trump called for a boycott on Goodyear tires. I can’t imagine another President of the United States openly trying to kill an iconic 100+ year-old American business. If the company posed some kind of threat to consumers, I can see it happening, but it doesn’t make sense to pick on a company that makes tires.

Before that, Trump asked people to boycott Harley Davidson. What did Herley Davidson do to deserve this treatment? They complained the tariff war caused them to lose $1.4 billion dollars. That’s the second 100-year old transportation manufacturing company.

Many of America’s CEOs are endorsing Joe Biden. They say that Trump’s response to COVID has made business terrible. Almost all of these very smart group of CEOs say that Trump’s lack of response hurt their ability to run their business. Other countries were able to open up. Other countries had fewer cases and deaths. The United States didn’t.

COVID-19 and the Economy

I’ve dug into Trump quite a bit now for his COVID-19 response. I personally blame him for countless tens of thousands of deaths because he wouldn’t say, “You should all wear a mask for two weeks. If you do that we can get back to work.” It took a long, long time for him to warm up to masks. And while he may carry one around with him for the show, he clearly doesn’t use them when he should. Of course, the COVID-19 superspreader event at The White House over the last 10 days is evidence of that.

Trump’s hatred of masks came at a tremendous economic cost. Back in late June, Goldman Sachs said that a a national mask mandate could slash infections and save economy from a 5% GDP hit. A growth of 5% to the GDP is huge – roughly a trillion dollars (using 2018’s GDP numbers of $20 trillion). Imagine saving a country a trillion dollars, not to mention more than a hundred thousand lives, with a simple stroke of a pen or two… and refusing to do it without explanation.

That’s not the kind of behavior of a person who is “good with the economy.” My 6-year old could have made the obvious economic decision that Trump couldn’t.

In sharp contrast, Joe Biden predicted all this mess would happen under Trump back in late January. Yes, that was 6 weeks before the US shut down in the middle of March. At the time only 80 people in China had died… there were only 5 cases in the United States. He wrote about the things he would do in an USA Today Op-Ed.

Wouldn’t you like to take your DeLorean back to January and see how things would have faired with a president who had a plan, even before it started to spread throughout the United States?

Trump’s “Businesses” and Taxes

Let’s turn our attention to Trump’s businesses and taxes. I think that’s where many people get the false impression that Trump is good with money. He’s not good with money. He’s a disaster. He inherited around $413 million from his father. According to that New York Times article, he was a millionaire by age 8 in 1954. A million dollars in 1954 certainly goes a long way, but the money kept coming over the years.

You could compare Donald Trump to Paris Hilton – an extreme case of trust-fund baby turned into a reality TV star. Trump doesn’t have a lot of profitable business ventures on his own. The biggest one was The Apprentice, which again was based on a false narrative that he was good with business despite all the bankruptcies. The next biggest source of income for him was selling his fraudulent luxury lifestyle to MLM/pyramid scams (Source). As every reader of Lazy Man and Money should know, I’ve spent thousands and thousands of hours fighting those kinds of pyramid scheme fraud companies.

We learned a lot when Trump’s tax information came into focus a two and half weeks ago.

Trump for years has been said a lot about his taxes that don’t add up. When he was accused of not paying much in taxes, he’d claim that was because he was smart. That’s tacitly admitting that those accusations were correct. Minimizing taxes is something that I’ve praised in this space – it is indeed a smart thing to do if done legally. However, Trump has also said that he’s paid a lot in taxes. Obviously, you can’t be paying “almost nothing” and “a lot” at the same time.

Trump has also claimed that he can’t provide his taxes because they are under audit. The IRS has said that this is simply not true – anyone can show their own taxes. It is an excuse that he uses hoping to pacify people who may not be educated enough to know the truth.

I think we kind of knew what going on with Trump’s taxes, but New York Times reveal of his taxes confirmed what we thought. Trump doesn’t pay much in taxes. In ten out of 15 years he paid nothing. As President, he paid $750. While this could be legal, I look for a higher bar from a US President. He’s been charging US taxpayers to fund the Secret Service staying at his hotels. It costs millions and millions of dollars and the hotels are cashing all those checks. In return, he contributes $750 – when he contributes at all.

If you pay more in taxes than Trump and receive the worse health care you should not vote for him. It’s that simple.

One of Trump’s tax deductions included $70,000 for his haircuts during The Apprentice. We’ve all seen his hair, that isn’t $70,000 hair. A smart person doesn’t pay $70,000 for that kind of work. The Apprentice should have its own hair and make-up people that are funded by Mark Burnett. A reasonable person would say that doing some kind of financial favor and probably getting something in return. Is it even legal to deduct a $70,000 haircut? Let’s look at the first sentence of IRS guidelines:

“To be deductible, a business expense must be both ordinary and necessary.”

Is it ordinary for a male television star to spend $70,000 on their hair themselves? (I differentiate between male and female because we all know that women pay an extraordinary pink tax for hair cuts.) I don’t think $70,000 on top of The Apprentice’s own staff is very ordinary. I also don’t think it is necessary – people still watch America’s Got Talent and Howie Mandel has no hair. A $70,000 hair cut was never necessary for the success or failure of The Apprentice.

It doesn’t seem legal to me, but I’m not a lawyer.

One thing I can say is that the IRS doesn’t have the power to audit ultrawealthy people like Donald Trump. I know that sounds weird, so here’s the proof:

“For starters, [the ultra rich] can devote seemingly limitless resources to hiring the best legal and accounting talent. Such taxpayers tend not to steamroll tax laws; they employ complex, highly refined strategies that seek to stretch the tax code to their advantage. It can take years for IRS investigators just to understand a transaction and deem it to be a violation.
Once that happens, the IRS team has to contend with battalions of high-priced lawyers and accountants that often outnumber and outgun even the agency’s elite SWAT team.”

That certainly sounds like Donald Trump to me.

Additionally, the IRS admitted that it simply doesn’t have the funding and resources to audit the ultra-wealthy.

The average person may think of the IRS as this all-power entity, and it is to the average person. To the people with hundreds of millions of dollars, the IRS is more of an annoyance like a fly in the room.

Trump Ends Stimulus Bill Negotiations

In the latest development (10/5/2020), Trump Tweeted an end to the stimulus bill negotiations. The stock market tanked. This is another case where everyone was left puzzled. The Federal Reserve Chair had earlier said it was of extreme importance to get it done. It seemed that some progress was getting made. A stimulus bill would look very good for Trump politically with less than a month until election day.

The markets don’t like uncertainty. Trump has been nothing but uncertain. At any moment he could Tweet any kind of crazy thing. Everyone has to run around like chickens with their head cut off to make sense of that crazy thing. It’s dangerous to the economy to have that kind of extreme, unstable, liability.

In this case, many experts thought that the point of the Tweet is to get the Senate focused on the political job of confirming Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. At a time when many Americans need financial help, Trump was turning his back on them.

Of course, a few hours later Trump demanded that a stimulus bill gets on his desk so he could sign it right away. At this point, everyone had a choice: 1) run around with their heads cut off again or 2) simply ignore the President of the United States. That’s a lose-lose situation. It simply isn’t productive and it’s terrible for America.

Final Thoughts

After nearly 3,000 words (around 4x longer than my typical article), I’m not sure there’s too much to more say. I realize that much of this article has been more why not to vote for Trump’s economic platform instead of why to vote for Biden’s. I wish I had more time to get into the merits of Biden’s economic policy – it is a good one. I could probably round a good 4000 words in total.

For now, I want to make sure people understand that Trump being a businessman is simply a show and an illusion. When it comes to helping Americans economically, he failed the biggest test. He could have used an ounce of prevention early and saved us multiple tons of cure.

Update – Experts all know that Biden is best for the economy. See this article about six [bipartisan] former secretaries of Commerce endorse Joe Biden. Specifically, they say, “We believe that a Biden presidency will mark the return to the certainty and security that our economy needs to thrive.” That’s one of the points I tried to make in the article

The Best Financial Independence, Retire Early Articles of the Week (#3)

November 20, 2016 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

This is the third installment of great Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) articles of the week.

Typically, I like to say a few personal things in this space. This website isn’t just money, but it covers a variety of interests of mine such as health and technology. And if I have something that I really feel is worth sharing, I’ll write it. So when I say, watch Crazy Ex-Girlfriend on the CW, I mean it.

However, I feel I should write a few words about the election stuff of the last couple of weeks. First, I’d like to reflect on what I wrote 4 years ago:

“I think regular Lazy Man and Money readers know I’m not one to side with any political party. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t write about politics in this space. I believe in voting for the person, not the political party. Most of the time I just hope I’m not in a situation of voting for Kang or Kodos, but far too often it feels like I am.
… According to the [a tool mentioned in the article above], Romney winning will net me a cool $3,500 more than Obama. So you might think I’d be a Romney person. Well, due to Romney’s history of support of MLM/pyramid schemes, I have decided he isn’t the person I want to see as President. I estimate that these scams cost consumers around $20 billion dollars a year. (If there is reader interest, I could explain the calculation in more detail.) That’s the equivalent damage of a hurricane Sandy every two and half years (using the $50 billion damage estimates I’ve seen)… and few people seem to care.”

Now, I don’t view everything through an MLM/Pyramid Scheme lens. However, I think it is a view into someone intelligence and integrity. If they are aligning themselves with such companies it tells me that they either A) aren’t intelligent enough to understand the scheme and/or B) are willing to take the money anyway. It becomes very easy for me to eliminate a candidate that doesn’t have intelligence and integrity.

The current President-elect has even stronger ties to profiting from such schemes… plus one or more other alleged other ones.

So these last two weeks, I’ve been absorbing anything and everything I can that is related to politics. It’s wildly interesting to me. The articles are never-ending. I can’t imagine I’d be reading the same kinds of things if Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio won the election. I don’t we’d be having conversations about how to unite the country to the extent we’re having it now.

Today’s “list” of FIRE articles is actually just one. I think it’s an important topic in these times and it focuses deeply on financial issues:

Our Next Life writes, How Subsidies Make Early Retirement Possible, Even Without Obamacare.

The article extends beyond just early retirement. It explains that so many things are subsidized and very few people realize it. When you think about it, nearly every American qualifies for some subsidizing, but we give it different names to make us feel good about it. The Affordable Care Act is really no different. Here’s a quote that’s worth focusing on:

“Drawing the line here, saying ‘No, this ACA subsidy is bad, but all the others are fine,’ is arbitrary, and ignores how much of our lives are subsidized in reality, especially for the rich. (Consider: Tesla drivers literally pay nothing toward maintaining the roads that they use every day, because roads are funded by gas taxes. Guess who drives the least fuel-efficient cars on the road and therefore pays the most to maintain them? People who are forced to drive old cars because they can’t afford new ones. The poor subsidize the rich in more ways than most of us can imagine.)”

At the end of the day, Americans of all kinds receive different “hand-outs” and subsidies. That’s not a bad thing and no candidate wanted to see them going away.

She ends by asking the question, “Do you think you’ve ultimately been a good investment?” I have an answer to that, but the details are part of a guest post for another website. When it’s up and posted, we may revisit that question.

What is this Fiscal Cliff Thing?

December 10, 2012 by Lazy Man 4 Comments

I’ve got a bit of a confession to make and it may solidify my standing as one of worst personal finance bloggers ever. After the election results came through with Obama projecting to win Ohio, I saw a bunch of tweets on my Twitter stream with two messages: 1) “Congrats Obama” and 2) “Next up, tackle the fiscal cliff.”

To the Google ~~phone~~ website: What is this fiscal cliff thing?

This Wikipedia article does a much better job explaining the fiscal cliff than I ever could. It’s too complex to break down in this post, so I’ll do a grand generalization and let you get all the fine details from there if you are interested.

The grand generalization is two-fold:

Some tax cuts that President Bush created during his time in office are expiring
Some planned budget cuts from the past would expire resulting in more spending

As I mentioned before it gets complicated especially with the politics of the Republicans and the Democrats slinging a bunch of nonsense. On my recent drive across the country, talk radio had Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity on the multiple channels. I’m not into politics, but these big three of conservatives made it sound like Obama was out to purposely kill America, by raising taxes on the wealthy to help balance the deficit. Sounds like a very logical thing to me, but I’ve lived in blue states my whole life.

During the week, I ended up listening to a good 30 hours of their unproductive hatred of the democrats… stuff that makes a Red Sox fan and Yankees fan having a “discussion” after a few beers seem downright civilized. I finally came to this conclusion…

I don’t care about the fiscal cliff… and neither should you.

Well, you should care about the fiscal cliff a bit, because it can have a real effect on your financial situation. If taxes go up, you’ll have less money to spend. If spending is cut, you might lose on some key benefits you were counting on.

However, unless you happen to have the ear of the politicians working on it, you can’t change anything that’s going to happen with it. It’s out of your hands. With that being the case, let’s look at the things you can control:

Limit Your Tax Liability – If nothing is done long term capital gains tax will go up. So if you are sitting on a pile of stock and are looking to use the money any time soon (I love the real estate market), this may be a good time to sell some stock and hold on to cash. I’m personally not going to sell any stock, choosing instead to stay invested and hope that the gains of the market surpass the tax liability. This is also a good time to think about putting more money in a Roth IRA as you’ll get it tax free no matter what the tax rate is. If income tax rates go up, there will be even more incentive to stash money in your company’s 401k plan.
Minimize Your Expenses – Look into cutting down on any unnecessary subscriptions. I know multiple who have Netflix subscriptions that they admit they don’t use. It may seem like a drop in the bucket, but it adds up to a couple of hundred dollars a year. I’ve compiled hundreds of ways to save money on nearly everything.
Double up on your Investment in your Career – Learning a new skill or two can not only help you keep your job, but also get a raise. Sure, some careers have limited ceilings, but you’d be surprised how many do not. I learned that lesson when I worked at Papa Gino’s (a New England Italian food chain) at the age of 16. While being a cashier was my specialty (no one knew the PLU codes like me), I soon learned that if I could make pizzas and man the grill area, I’d be more valuable to them. I was one of the first to do dishes during the slow period, which showed management that I had the drive to do even mundane tasks if it helped the business (the truth was that I was just bored). In the end, it didn’t take long before I was getting raises and as many hours as I wanted to work.
Don’t know what you can do to make yourself more valuable to your company? Ask your manager that question, she/he should be able to give you a good and hopefully productive answer.

If you going to waste your time with pointless debates, I suggest you move away the Republicans and Democrats debating the fiscal cliff and go all out and check out some Skip Bayless / Stephen A. Smith debates on the Patriots (ESPN is good for one of these annoying things a month):

Geriatric Monolith Getting Money, Giving Misery

December 3, 2010 by Lazy Man 12 Comments

The following is a guest post by Greg McFarlane. He is an advertising copywriter who lives in Las Vegas and Lahaina. Greg runs ControlYourCash.com and recently wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can reach him at [email protected]. Finally, please note the opinions of Mr. McFarlane do not necessarily represent those of Lazy Man and Money

Read into this post what you want, but it’s not intended as political commentary.

Last week, the New York Stock Exchange relisted General Motors’ stock at $33. GM had spent much of the past year drawing billions from one taxpayer-funded account to pay its obligations to another. The automaker is celebrating its new viability by spending yet more money taking out ads thanking the American people for our “generosity”, as if we had a choice.

Earlier this year the president spoke to autoworkers in Detroit, defending his and his congressional cohorts’ decision to confiscate an average of $283 per American and award it to the managers of General Motors, Chrysler, and the United Auto Workers to distribute as they saw fit.

The president didn’t just impoverish critics of the auto bailout, he chided them ““ adding insult to inconvenience. GM and Chrysler sales rose since the bailout: of course they did, those companies can name their own taxpayer-subsidized prices. The president argues that the relative “success” of GM and Chrysler proves that those of us who criticized the bailout weren’t just wrong, but unpatriotic. As he phrased it, “Don’t bet against the American worker. Don’t bet against the American people.”

Speaking up in favor of the 99+% of American people who aren’t autoworkers is now betting against the American people. In 2010, the intercontinental, universal language is not English so much as it is hyperbole. If the stock market retains 95% of its value on a given today, and is all but certain to regain much of the losses the following day, it indicates a “crash”. The Gulf of Mexico is “destroyed” even though it suffered the aquatic equivalent of a fingernail cut too short. A Congress with large majorities in each house, and a president of the same party is in a “lame-duck” session. A bunch of football players from across the nation happen to get drafted by, traded to, or signed as free agents by the one NFL team that plays in a sub-littoral zone, and those players win sufficient games to “save“ that city and turn it into a magical Utopia free of crime and graft.

And so to the auto bailout, which has “saved a million jobs.” If you’re skeptical, which presumably means you’re betting against the American people, you want to see those jobs quantified.

Unedited, from an Agence France-Presse story:

“In the year before the bankruptcies, these companies lost almost 340,000 jobs,” said Ron Bloom, a senior advisor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

“In the year since then, 55,000 jobs have been added into these companies; if we hadn’t stepped in when we did, most observers believe at least a million jobs would have been lost.”

Bloom appeared to be referring not just to Chrysler and GM, but to the large web of suppliers which manufacture components for the plants, which would also likely have gone under if the big auto giants had collapsed.

That quote is provably nonsense. Considering it was uttered by an economic advisor, it shows a powerful misunderstanding, intentional or otherwise, of fundamentals.

Let’s say the man in the White House ““ whether the incumbent or his predecessor ““ had done the humane thing, preserved sacred taxpayer money, and stood by as General Motors and Chrysler went the way of Packard, American Motors, Studebaker, and Pierce-Arrow. What would have happened?

Suppliers disappearing (for any reason other than reduced demand) doesn’t have the slightest effect on demand. Last year, about 10 million Americans bought new cars. Had GM’s total unit sales gone from 2 million to 0, viable car manufacturers would have picked up the slack: specifically, the efficient market players who didn’t sign masochistic union contracts and had enough economies of scale to make things work.

One of the most dangerous and foolish assumptions you can make is that jobs, or any other component of an economy, are static. Sure, GM and Chrysler folding would have meant a few thousand people would have been temporarily displaced. But their skills and experience would still have had tremendous value for someone, somewhere; maybe the Honda plant in Marysville, Ohio, or the Toyota plant in Princeton, Indiana. The auto bailout didn’t save one job ““ it merely preserved some at the expense of other, more dynamic ones with greater potential for growth. For every Band-Aid placed on GM’s debilitated carcass, its competitors forwent expansion that we’ll never see.

Keeping decrepit automakers alive doesn’t do a thing for the ancillary companies who are one step removed from the bailout, either. Were Chrysler to go under, Interstate would still need to sate America’s demand for batteries. Why is it inherently bad that those batteries be installed in more Fords and fewer Chevys?

How viable is a job when taxpayers have to subsidize it, anyway? Autoworkers aren’t soldiers, providing a service that requires a national monopoly and doesn’t cotton to multiple market players. General Motors proved itself incapable of selling cars at sufficient price and quantity to satisfy shareholders, customers and employees. Only under the fallacy of composition does it stand to reason that no one else can, either.

What does this have to do with you? Everything. When you patronize a business that sells its wares less efficiently than someone else does ““ which usually means for a higher price ““ not only are you not doing yourself a favor, you’re not helping out the economy at large, either. That applies to your own position as a salesperson in the labor market, when you sell yourself to the highest or most promising bidder. When you work merely to preserve your job, acting defensively, you’re not growing. You’re not making yourself adaptable, and you’re setting yourself up for failure should your employer ever go under. Working 45 years leading to a gold watch was nonsensical then, and nonexistent now.

If you enjoyed this post I encourage you to buy Control Your Cash here (physical) or here (Kindle).