The Contrarion ViewPoint

  Standard Viewpoint:  Your INCOME is not your wealth. Wealth Venn Diagrams:  What do you believe is correct?  Top or Bottom THE CONTRARION VIEWPOINT YOUR Income is YOUR WEALTH!! The discussion regarding wealth tax and/or taxing of unrealized capital gains seems to have a serious flaw. Unless you believe the bottom Wealth/Income Venn diagram to be true and correct.  However, I believe most would agree your income is your wealth. So what is going on with Income tax.  It seems that several things might be true. The term income when discussing taxation has been cleverly used to confuse most into believing that income and wealth are separate. The income tax system favors certain types of income, and therefore certain types of people, mostly the wealthy stock and real estate investors. INCOME TAX is really a WEALTH TAX that Taxes some types of wealth transfers and not others. TAXED to the MAX Paychecks are heavily taxed. Asset transfers between individuals and businesses are taxed. Business

The accepted viewpoint.  Large companies and the wealthy bear no responsibility for consumer inflation exceeding wage inflation, meaning workers are getting poorer even while fully employed.  Remember it's not a zero sum game. The Contrarian Viewpoint Big businesses which dominate the economy owned and run by the wealthy front run inflation, a significant portion of inflation is driven by expectations both by businesses and consumers.  If businesses believe their costs are going up they raise price to compensate. If things on the sales side are especially good and inflation is hot, they will raise prices even more to be safe and pad profits when they can.  Consumers just pay up and eat it with the expectation that things can get worse, and often they have little choice but to buy what they need regardless of price. While businesses are rapidly raising their prices, they are also working as hard as possible to control their input costs, which means knowingly attempting to keep their

So I believe the Income Tax should be repealed and replaced with a wealth tax.  Who wouldn't want Warren Buffett's effective wealth tax rate of 0.02%, or $200/million of wealth?  Fortunately, or Unfortunately if that was applied to the entire $150 Trillion of wealth in the US it would only raise $30 billion.  More on that in future posts. But onto the origination of income tax and did JD Rockefeller subvert the whole intent of the 16th Amendment and redirect more taxes to the middle class?  I believe he was very influential in this and probably the leader. This starts with me investigating the basic history of income tax in the US.  I knew it was originally unconstitutional at the federal level, but an amendment changed that.  So I read about the 16th Amendment, "The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."  Sounds pr

  The standard viewpoint especially on the right and to some extent on the left, is the country isn't that wealthy.  I've even said, "We're poor, we have $30 trillion in federal debt.  But what is true is the average wealth for every man, woman and child in the US is $455k, the average household net worth is $1.15 million but the median household net worth is only $121k.   The bottom 30% of households are worth less than $23k. PACMAN Wealth Comparison    This graphic attempts to show the relative wealth and power of the tiny top 10% group (1%+9%) to everyone else by comparing average wealth of the members.  Some say eat the rich.  Well the reference to the rich eating everyone else isn't accidental.  More on that in future posts. I believe the wealth distribution of the company I discussed in the last post,  parallels the wider economy.  Our revenue (wealth) pie was very lopsided as well.  But also all those profits went to a very tiny portion of the worker/owner

  Unbelievable Money Pie :  Represents $13.5 million in total annual revenue, and $6.57 million in Actual Operating Income/Pretax Profit I decide to start this blog with a work experience that sounds absolutely crazy.  But I believe is crazy, interesting, enlightening and has parallels elsewhere.  Or maybe it drives me so nuts I feel I need to keep sharing. I had been with this company for 8 years and we grew revenue from $5.5MM to $13.5MM in that time.  Profits went from about 19% at the beginning to almost 50% or a whopping $6.57 million in that time.  I know, sounds unbelievable but it's true.  And what is even more unbelievable is the work environment was about as toxic as it gets. Why you ask?  At the time I was in charge of the Research and Development Department, R&D in the pie chart.  The companies growth in that 8 year window was almost entirely from new product developments some of which were private label versions of products,  But we added close to $1M each year fro

I've been thinking about doing a blog for a long time.  To go into some of my experiences, thoughts and ideas on business, engineering, leadership and government/politics.  I believe we all have experiences that are eye opening and helpful to ourselves and others and should be shared. I have a wide variety of work experiences with a wide variety of different people and from very different perspectives.  I've done things like farming and construction when I was young, took the long road through college to get my electrical engineering degree, worked as an electronic engineer and up to VP of Engineering in a small to midsize company and worked for larger publicly traded companies, and now have my own carpentry/construction business. I believe a lot of my thoughts will be somewhat contrarian.  And will provide a different perspective for many.  I've found sometimes if you want to or need to find the truth or the root cause of a problem in my engineering days, sometimes the con