Who controls your life: You or the system?

I would like to think I've worked hard my during the 24 years I've been working to make myself self reliant. My parents and grandparents instilled in me this idea that if I work hard, if I prepare for my future, and if I spend and allocate my money frugally and wisely I should be able to control my own destiny.


There are many people I work with, a majority perhaps, who contend that they won't be allowed to retire until they reach the so called retirement age. You know, the age the government sets as to which you can receive social security payments.


Many of these same people laugh when I tell them I have worked hard to control my own destiny. I have set aside money in a retirement account for a long time now, and when I'm 58 I'm going to retire.


"Well, you can't do that," they say. "You can't retire until you're 70."


Now I don't know where they get the idea I "can't" retire. There's no law that says a person "has" to work until the government says so.


The truth is, if you are 18 and you put aside $1,000 a year for five years and put it into a retirement account, you will never have to put any more money in the rest of your working years and by the time you are 62 you will have a million dollars in your retirement account.


If that's true, of which many financial experts contend it is (it may not be exactly as I write here, yet something like that), imagine how much money you'd have if you continue to put aside money the rest of your working years.


The point here is that if you take responsibility for your own life, you can have more control of it. YOU can decide when you retire. You can decide how long you have to work, or even how hard you have to work.


Yet there are obviously many people in our society who don't want you to know this, because it's obviously not taught in schools. It's not taught in schools, I think, because politicians want you to spend your money unwisely. The more of the money you spend, they think, the better off the economy is.


Yet it's this same thinking that leads to forclosures and bankruptcies. THEY -- the powers that be -- want you to spend your money when you make it, and save little. THEY want you to work as long as you can, because --they think -- this will keep the economy going.


Yet when the economy collapses, those who continue to live the way THEY want are the ones most affected by the economic downturn. Those of us who prepare and plan ahead and are smart with our money, we don't feel the recession as much.


Yet I also belieive it's ignorance that's responsible for economic upturns and downturns. If people would continue to spend their money wisely when after they got raises, or when the economy was good instead of buying a bunch of stuff, then there wouldn't be ups and downs in the market.


Plus if we spend our money wisely, the government will get less of it. So the more you spend, the more the government makes. The more money you waste on stuff you don't need, the more the government makes.


And the more of your money the government has, the more control over you they have. Thus, instead of you deciding how to spend your money, the government decides. Instead of you choosing the charity of your choice, the government decides.


That's just my frivolous theory. Of course I'm not the first to come up with such a theory. Ben Franklin wrote about it. Other wise people thousands of years ago wrote about it. Yet many teachers STILL don't teach about it. Many do, yet still many don't.


The funny thing is, many of those same teachers are among the same people who spend all their money and hope HOPE and Hope and Hope they don't get fired or laid off. Yet when they do get fired or laid off, they are screwed. They go bankrupt. They go into foreclosure. Or they get darn lucky.


Believe it or not, there are those among us who don't want us to take responsibility for our own lives. Then there are those who don't want that responsibility. Then there are those who don't know how to manage their own lives. They rely on others and just assume something will be there when they need it. These are your fools.


So it's been my career objective to take care of myself. I don't show other people much how I plan to do it, because I get tired of explaining it. One person had me explain it twenty times, and he still asks me how I do it. It's as though I'm talking to a wall. So it's easier to keep my mouth shut and just not tell anyone about my secret. Yet it's not a secret. It's awareness of wisdom. It's awareness of a fact.


If you are responsible, frugal and if you prepare, you can have control of your life. The alternative is THEY control you. What about you? Who do you want to control your life: the government or YOU?


You know what it comes down to is this: the more stuff you want, the more money you are going to spend. Yet when you want something bad enough and you don't have the money right now, you borrow it. And what is the borrower to the lender? That's right: A slave.


So by not educating you, you are a slave to the system.


Yet if we do our homework, we can escape the system. And anyone who becomes self sufficient and self reliant is a huge threat to the system.


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The forgotten Patient

I find I have no choice but to talk about the economy on this RT blog. I find I must do this considering we have been running on an extremely low census the past several months here at Shoreline. I'm talking half the hospital is closed kind of slow. I'm talking, like, 10 total patients kind of slow.

I'm talking many RTs and RNs who were living pay check to pay check before the recession hit are now finding themselves in a serious rough spot. Some are wondering if we will be able to pay our bills. Some are not paying them. Some of us have already become statistics.

Other hospitals in this area of Michigan are also experiencing a low census, although some of the larger hospitals have yet to get to the point where they have had to lay off RTs, some have been sent home early, and few hours are available for the pool RTs.

If you would have asked me two years ago how the recession would effect the medical profession, I would have predicted fewer elective surgical procedures, but I never would have predicted what is going on right now.

I think that not only are there fewer elective surgeries, I think there are a few people who require surgery who are staying home and suffering. In fact, I think there might be many people like this. I think there are many chest pain sufferers who are being modest and biting the bullet instead. I think there are COPD patients who are staying home until they can't stand the agony anymore.

Hence, I expect that some day soon we are going to be hit hard. The patients we get are going to be patients in critical condition; chronic lungers and asthmatics who have not taken their controller meds because they can't afford them, and chest pain folks who are coming in with the big one or a stroke because they ran out of their blood pressure medicine.

Sure, I bet, in this way, the recession may be responsible for many deaths this way. It will be slow, insidious, and agonizing. And yet it will not be seen, and therefore it will not be noticed, nor recorded in the annuls of history.

Yes, the recession is effecting the medical field. Since hospitals have little money, they are making do with what they have, and they are not expanding, not adding on, not making repairs, and not giving raises.

Actually, one hospital in my region is spending millions on room repairs, yet the money is from outside groups and donations. So, since no money is being spent this way, local contractors are not getting contracted out. They are -- the contractors -- having a lull time too.

And so they are losing jobs, and, with their jobs, they are losing their health insurances. And with no health insurance, they stay home when they get sick. Sometimes this is fine, yet sometimes this can increase morbidity and mortality.

So the lull has lasted a while now. Instead of having 2 RTs working during the day shift, we have been doing 8 hour shifts three days a week. Sure we have vacation hours we can use, yet those will die out some day. This cannot continue too much longer. Bills need to be paid.

Actually, I wrote before how those of us who live frugally as though we are always in a recession don't have to fret so much. Yet look around at all the people who have 2 cars that are rented, a camper that is rented, a house that is too extravagant for their income. These folks have been living above their means, check to check, assuming the recession would never come.

Those folks are the ones being the hardest hit. Those folks did not prepare. Those folks are the ones who bought houses they couldn't afford and are thus going to have no choice but to file for bankruptcy.

Temporary jobs can keep an economy going for a while, yet will it pull us out of the recession altogether? What happens when those bridges are done? What happens when those dams are built? What happens when roads are repaired? What happens when that shrimp farm research in Florida is finished? (These are all things in the Obama Stimulus Plan).

And what happens when the Bush Tax cuts expire? Some economists write that some business people will continue to spend until those tax cuts expire, because they expect the economy will hit the skids at that time. And then the economy will slip into a prolonged recession or even a depression as they make cuts and further stop spending.

Yet some predict the Obama stimulus will eventually pull us out. What we do know is the business cycle history proves that the economic lull will end at some point. What we don't know is how long it will last. The Great Depression was the longest economic lull in history. Some say FDR got us out of it. Yet some say he prolonged it. Yet FDR was popular, and Obama is copying his economic strategy.

One of the neatest things about an economy is that most people only look at what they see. The job of the economist is to look at what is not seen as well as what is seen. For example, say you have three men. Man A is the owner of a shoe business. Man B just filed for unemployment. Man C sells suit coats for $100.

Man A is planning to buy a new suit coat. He has the $100. The public has empathy for Man B, so they encourage their Senators to sign a bill raising man As taxes by $100 so they can help out Man B. Since man A has to pay $100 in taxes, he can no longer afford to buy a new suit coat. While the unemployed man is being helped with that $100 and we are all happy about that, Man C is actually the forgotten man here. He will lose business, because during a recession people find better ways to spend money than buying things like suit coats and entertainment and other such things.

I imagine many medical care workers are forgotten men and women. Yes it's true many are still working, yet we are not getting raises to keep up with inflation, and we are not getting all our hours. So we cannot spend money on things like, say, suit coats. So man C suffers even more. He cannot pay for his hernia repair.

And, another forgotten man is the RT Student who has a family and bills to pay and just spent $100,000 to get through RT school and now he can't find a job. What is he to do? He in essence becomes man D. So, if man D has asthma, and he has an asthma attack, he might stay home because he can't afford the $50 nebulizer treatment, or the $100 mandatory ER Room fee, or the $500 for a chest x-ray.

He thus becomes the forgotten patient. We do not see him, yet he exists He is in agony. He is suffering. Yet he does not become a statistic because we do not see him. Some day, though, he will enter the doors of some ER room. The question is: in what condition will he enter this door when we finally do see man D.

It is the job of economists to see man A through D. It is the job of those in Washington to heed the advice of the true economists, and not make rash decisions based on sympathy for the men who are suffering that we do see.

Lest the recession will continue, and we RTs will continue to work during lull times, and one day all those forgotten man Ds will come strolling through those ER doors and it won't be pretty.

The elite amongst us need to wise up

"I imagine you're spending your money more wisely now that we're in a recession," the journalist said to the middle-aged lady who was shopping at the mall.

Every day I hear on the TV, radio or read here on the Internet or in some newspaper how people are spending their money more wisely now that we are in a recession. Of course we have to believe here that the same people who say this, or write this, must expect that people are going to start spending their money "unwisely" again once the recession is over.

You see, this is the kind of bunk that amazes me about the way the "elite" in this country think. They want us to spend, spend, spend so they can make money off of us. This is even true of the media that make money off money we spend. So it only makes sense that they want to encourage us to spend our money on material things we do not need. Or, in other words, they want us to spend money we do not have to help out the economy.

Then again, the same media folks who are making up comments like this are basically repeating the same bunk inculcated upon them by the people who make the news -- politicians, rich business folk, media moguls, etc.

Has it ever occurred to these good folks that the person who spends his money wisely, and saved accordingly, every day of every year is the person who is not effected by a recession. But instead of encouraging this kind of behavior, the elite amongst us are constantly encouraging us to spend, spend, spend even when we don't have any money because we spend unwisely when the economy is doing well.

A wise person wouldn't have $5,000 in credit card debt. Instead he'd have $5,000 saved in a bank. A wise person wouldn't buy a house he cannot afford only to later have that house foreclosed upon by a bank. A wise person would buy a small humble home he can comfortably fit his family in. A wise person doesn't jump at every advertisement on TV and say, "Oh, I gotta have that!" A wise person enjoys a humble life and buys only things he can afford.

A wise person doesn't have to live above his or her means and have all the best toys. A wise person, therefore, will not be effected by a recession. Yet, in the media, all we hear about is how Jane or Jack is spending "wisely because these are hard times."

Any person who loses his or her job bypasses recession mode and jumps right into depression mode. For the rest of us, what mode we are in is up to ourselves and our own money habits.

I'm certainly not a financial expert. I'm merely a humble RT who relies on simple common sense to get through my humble life. Likewise, I would like the people who report the news to wise up the same way I want the people inculcate their values on these media folk to wise up.