Amex 5 Budget Pages: Fill & Download for Free

In 1995 I was only two years out of high school but I had amassed twelve years of practical experience doing computer stuff. By comouter stuff I mean programming, system building, networking, whatever… I did it all.. I was fortunate enough to be raised in an environment where I had access to all of the things.My father passed when I was 10. For the last 3 years of his life I was his mini-me as he taught himself computer programming. His goal was to write a program that would help him win a Readers Digest word puzzle competition. So that's what we worked on every free moment we had.He nstilled in me a learn by doing mentality. I was his right hand man at the weekly computer club meetings. I was his student assistant at his university classes. I was his equal to his nerd friends that seemed to formally the core of that early community.Many of those friends of his where Navy guys. One such friend was the officer in charge everything related to the PC at the base. This guy had a Navy budget and a passion for technology.In the early 80s a Navy budget for all things Personal Computer meant all of the things, and in many two or three or a dozen of the things. As such I was exposed to everything, had access to everything and spent all my time playing with everything.So… two years out of high school actually translated into twelve years of real world, hands on, cross discipline experience. The type of experience that most people just didn't have. The system building experts rarely wrote prolog code. The application developers rarely understood networking technologies.None of the classic disciplines knew a thing about HTTP, HTML, or CGI with PERL. Of the guys that did know an internet thing or two was a subset of about fifteen that were invited to Orlando by Microsoft for a presentation of their new Active Server Pages.I was one of those 15.The beauty of back then was nobody knew that [email protected] was a teenager with an impressive home lab, lots of free time and a passion to actually do everything. Actually setup a website… Actually write PERL code… Actually bring up a Windows for Workgroups workgroup attached to an OS/X server running onto of 4Mbt token ring via IPX/SPX… at home.I paid for my technology addiction by selling cars. I never considered doing technology for a job. It was always just a hobby. That was until after I helped my sales manager upgrade his home computer to a beta of Windows 95.He said to me, “Lildog, why the fuck are you humping on my lot when you can do all this?”I fed him my line about no college education and being to young and no actual experience. He pointed out that seventeen year old me, just days out of high school, walked into his office slinging bullshit and walked out with a job amongst the most grizzled dishonest cutthroat motherfuckers on the planet - used car salesmen.So I answered a newspaper employment listing I found online out of the Tampa Tribune the next day for Systems Engineer the next day. A few days later I drove from Jacksonville to Tampa, checked in to the Marriot for the night, and met two guys twice my age with half my experience over breakfast.Four hours later one guy was my boss and the other guy was my contemporary. The three of us represented The Vanstar Corporation for the state of Florida. At the time Vanstar was Microsofts largest solution provider by size, scope and sales volume.I drove home with the title Senior Systems Engineer Enterprise that came with a salary of $96,000 per year, full benefits and way to much responsibility for a nineteen year old kid.My first on-site was with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida. My role was data migration, data integrity, and disaster recovery. The project was to migrate 5000 employee desktops from Windows for Workgroups against Netware to Windows NT 4.0 client and server. The desktops and servers spread across nine buildings, six in Jacksonville and three in Miami. The actual migration would occur on the 24th and 25th of December while everyone was at home.We had three months to make it happen. We did, of course, on schedule, absolutely no data loss, 100% transparent to the employee.My second on-site was to represent Vanstar and Microsoft for the grand opening of the first Gateway country store. At the time Gateway 2000 was the largest catalog supplier of Personal Computers in then world. Dell was a distant second.The concept of the country store was internet commerce in a safe retail environment. Gateway was second to Dell with an e-commerce website.They were starting to figure out that their catalog business was doomed to a slow painful death and that if they didn't catch up to Dell with e-commerce, the company would as well.So I drove to Tampa and basically stood in an empty store all day. Nobody gave a shit. Not one customer walked in the door.Near the end of the day one of the Gateway guys wanted to show me the new e-commerce website coming soon. It featured a system builder configuration form, a shopping cart, real time credit card processing and was all written using VBScript for ASP in Visual Interdev with COM components written in Visual Basic 6.So he walked me through the order process as a test. I configured the whale of a computer. Dual Pentium Pro processors, 64Mb of Ram, 8Gb RAID 5 SCSI disk subsystem, and dual 21" Sony Trinotron Monitors.When it came to checkout the total price was just shy of $15,000. I joked with the rep about charging it to my corporate Amex. He joked back and said use mine.Expect he wasn’t joking. He wanted to show me the checkout process. I was hesitant, but he assured me that the order would be canceled on the backend and his card would not actually be charged.So I did. And then I drove home. And I told everyone how stupid Gateway was for trying to retail e-commerce. And I ordered my stuff and company stuff from Dell.About two months later I get home from work and there are all these boxes on my door step. Heavy boxes. Branded like a Holstein cow with white, brown and black circular shapes.No fucking way. This can't be. Can it? Yup, it was.My wet dream computer.Free. Totally free.

As others noted, it means they're clueless if they say seven trillion. We have government debt more than three times that high, when you count state and local debt. Most people talk about the US federal government debt, especially on Quora. That federal government debt is rising so fast that almost anyone's answer is out of date by the time they click "write answer".As this handy page shows,U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time, our level of debt can be compared to many other numbers. As I write on February 5, 2015, the federal debt is $18,108,305,000,000.00 (and will grow another three hundred million dollars while I write this answer).That's an unimaginably large number. That's why it's not completely terrifying. (I tried to find a decent graphic or video depicting what a trillion is, much less eighteen of them. I didn't find one.) Our country is growing, and it's the third largest in the world in terms of population. It's the richest, by far. Our economic conditions rise and fall. I think it makes sense to consider this number, therefore, not in isolation, but as a percentage of gross national product and on a per capita basis. If our economy grows, we can handle a bigger debt, and if we have more people in our country, we can handle a bigger debt. Right?Here's the chart since 1900, of debt vs GDP. You can see that our current level of debt, looked at as a percentage of GDP, is not unprecedented. All we have to do is convince the next two generations of Americans to not spend the taxes they collect. And like "The Greatest Generation", who did all that deficit spending in the first half of the 1940's to save the world from Hitler, our generation will be given some suitable nickname.Still looking at the graphic above, let's examine it carefully. We see that debt to GDP was humming along at under 10% until the first World War. After we paid off the debt from the War to End All Wars (we are consistently optimistic) and we were at 18%, it went up again with the New Deal, and never got below 30% after that. It skyrocketed in, hmmmm..., looks like 1942. This makes complete sense, obviously. It costs a lot to prosecute a war, and it can't be done with state or local spending. As I said above, we ran budget surpluses for decades after the war. New workers in the baby boom (plus millions of women not in the work force before the war) were paying off our World War II debt by working in a booming economy and paying taxes. We won't see the likes of that again, in my opinion. There is no gender that doesn't work yet and is waiting in the wings to step in and make the economy boom, for one.Okay, so total debt is now at 100% of GDP. So what? What can we compare that to? Well, it probably makes some sense to compare the US to other countries. Nobody disputes that the US spends less of its GDP on government than many countries in Europe do. But let's look at Norway and Sweden and Finland. Everybody wants to be more like Scandinavia, with its generous safety net and public services. Here are some 2012 numbers from Wikipedia. List of countries by public debt Oh. Interesting. They aren't in any debt. Other countries owe them a huge amount of money; their governments are net lenders. They don't have an interest expense in their budget - they have interest income. Okay, that doesn't count. The only countries like that are Saudi Arabia and the UAE. And Scandinavia. Oh, I guess that's because Scandinavia is rich with oil, and not at all comparable to the US economy in any way at all. A little like Alaska, maybe, in many ways. Where they get a negative state income tax.Okay, okay, at the other end of the scale, who has 100% debt to GDP ratios? There are some very small economies that aren't comparable. Grenada and Lebanon. Japan I can't explain. Their ratio is over 250%. I really, really don't get that. Okay, larger countries? Looks like Portugal, Ireland, Italy, and Greece. (Spain is still at 94%. Underachievers.) Granted, France and Belgium aren't far behind. But the solid 100% club matches the list of PIGS, the most famous developed failed economies. Does it follow that the US will be like Greece in a couple of years? No, of course not. Ten years ago, Italy and Greece were already at 100%. The US was only at 62%. See Page on forbes.com This can't be the club we wanted to join a mere decade ago.My hobby is blaming the debt on Democrats. Or blaming it on Obamacare. But let me be clear here. It doesn't matter. Think of this as opening up your AMEX bill and see that you have run up $150k debt. Maybe it was on heart surgery for your sister. Maybe it was cheap champagne that time you made it rain on Rio, at the club. Doesn't really matter. It's gone. If you like, blame it on Medicare Part D and the fact that we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. I think I've shown that's not the cause but that's not my argument in this answer. The point I want to leave you with is that we are carrying tons of debt. We have to cut now, not because it will be fun, or it fits some ideology we have, but because we can't keep doing this, at this rate.Let's look at some individual components of spending. (Still looking closely at that first graph), everyone knows that madman Reagan and his henchman Bush 41 went crazy with defense spending and drove the debt way up again from 1981 to 1993. But that's not what happened at all. (Careful! this is a log scale chart below, so it understates the y axis as it goes up.) As you see, Reagan certainly increased defense spending, but not to the levels seen during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. And once the Navy had been rebuilt, defense spending went back down to where it had been at the beginning of that twelve year Republican White House era. And then, we see that Defense Spending went back up during the Bush 43 Presidency. But not to the levels where it had been when Clinton took office. And this includes the two wars.Shifting gears completely, let's look at this debt on a per capita basis. Oh, but there's a problem with that, too. See the Labor Department's official Labor Participation Rate stats (made into a custom graph at U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which I recommend!) When Reagan took office, 64% of Americans 16 and over were working and paying taxes (or not, depending on how much money they made). That grew to a rate over 67%, and then during the Bush 43 presidency, fell back to 66%. Then in 2009 it started way downhill, and is currently below 63%. So the percentage of people who are paying taxes is still going down. They are supporting the rest. The 63% include all the people struggling along on minimum wage; this isn't an indictment of anyone; it's a demographic fact that will affect our ability to raise money by taxing income.On a per capita basis, some conservatives note that a baby born today already owes more than $50k. That's a little off in several ways; a baby clearly doesn't have to start paying their share for many years. The actual debt per active taxpayer is over $150,000.00. But wait! That would assume that everyone pays the same amount of taxes. So if you're in the top 10% of earners, your debt is really more like fifteen times that, because you pay fifteen times what the average taxpayer pays.Needless to say, that's more debt than any of us can pay off in our whole lives. The more money you make, the bigger share of the debt is yours, at a progressive rate. Since we won't be able to pay it down, that's what leads to the concept of "generational theft". There is absolutely no question at all that this debt will be paid by our grandchildren, and depending on how they do, their grandchildren's grandchildren. If you hope that your children will live below the poverty line or just manage to make something in the bottom 40% of earners, and therefore pay no income tax, that's your business. I certainly hope my two children will be healthy and happy more than rich, but I know that if they would like to attend live music events or travel the world or have savings for health emergencies, they are capable, valuable people who someone may compensate highly to do important work. So the rate of inflation and the relative deficits over the coming forty years are certainly impossible to foretell, but suffice it to say that your children and their children will pay taxes that will do nothing to help the needy of their time. It's already spent. How can we call ourselves generous if we don't even pay the taxes necessary to make all this spending possible? It's just false to say that we're taking from the most productive income producers and giving to those who can't produce income. We're taking money from everyone who will make anything above median income in the future, and giving it to whoever we want to, right now. Middle class tax breaks. Even infrastructure that will wear out before the debt is gone. Medical care for the affluent. Social Security payments to those who have investment incomes larger than what most of us are making today when we are working fifty hours a week.I will be the very first to note that we could raise taxes. But there will be a harsh impact on the economy. The Laffer Curve is quite real - the only argument can be where we lie on that curve. It says that if we tax people at 0%, we get no revenue, and if we tax people at 100%, we also get no revenue. Everything in between zero and 100 lies somewhere on a curve. Most economists agree that higher taxes hurt the economy at large. That's why the Obama administration made no move to raise anybody's taxes in 2009 when they controlled both chambers of Congress and we were in a recession. Eventually they proposed making the Bush tax cuts permanent for all but "millionaires and billionaires" (in campaign lingo), which turned out to be people making $400k or more. Many Democrats will say, well, we could raise taxes a little without doing much harm. And they're right. But they make that argument every day, no matter what the current rate is. We could always raise rates just a little. But raising rates just a little does almost nothing to solve this problem.Didn't the debt balloon because of the Bush tax cuts (which are now the Obama tax cuts, because they were scheduled to expire and Obama made them permanent, except for the highest earners)? No, I don't think so. I think that lower taxes stimulate the economy, increasing income, and thereby increasing revenues. Of course entire Economics Departments at a thousand universities have debated this, and will do so forever, but this is a chart of federal revenues from 2000 (before Bush took office) to 2012. The tax cuts took effect in 2002 and 2004, not 2007. Unemployment caused the plunge in tax receipts.(My super simple Excel graph from official US Government data.)Of course one of the pernicious effects of a big national debt is that we have to pay interest on it. Right now, that interest is not that much larger than it has been historically. That's not because we don't owe more, obviously. It's mostly because we're paying nearly no interest - last August we were paying 0.1% for three month notes. Normally that rate oscillates between 1% and 6%. The Fed is trying to get it back to 3%, because they've only been able to keep it this low by printing money - quantitative easing. So the interest expense is high now but will go way, way up, and be roughly the same as the defense budget within five or so years. Where will that money go, exactly? Into the pockets of capitalists. Again, it would be great if my children made that list - I hardly think that capitalists are evil, but my children won't inherit any t-bills, sadly. I rather hope that rich people will risk their wealth in the private sector, making electric cars and sites like Quora. But as long as there's a virtually limitless hunger for an almost risk-free investment, people all over the world will invest in deficit spending. They will be thrilled that the United States spends with abandon, because this provides them with the safest investment on the planet. If they park $50k, or $50 million in Treasury bonds, they will not lose their shirts. So when you start off thinking that all this deficit spending is going to help poor people, keep in mind that it largely helps rich people at the expense of the workers of the future.I find it shocking that Americans have more student loan debt than credit card debt. (That's shown on the cool debt clock in the first link.) I have been reading that the solution to that crisis is to "forgive" debts after ten or twenty years, and after collecting a limited percentage of the graduate's income. That's good for students, but don't think that the money to do that comes from outer space; it just adds to the national debt.Okay, so what has all this money been spent on, if it's not interest, and not defense spending?Here's Social Security spending as a percentage of GDP. (Social Security is made up of Old Age Survivor Insurance and Disability Insurance.)Now here's a look at Medicare, below. Pretty similar as a driver of spending. (I hate to be a cynic, but it seems like future projections always show a miraculous recovery. I wouldn't bet the farm on how this flattens out; Obamacare is adding people to Medicare by the millions.)So let's look at three snapshots from this same site to see how the federal government has allocated what it spent. Here's the final year of Carter's Presidency, 1980, when the Congress was also controlled by Democrats. Defense spending was 28% of the budget, Healthcare 9%.Below is the final year of the 12 years of Republicans in the White House - though they never controlled the House of Representatives during that time. Welfare has gone up. Defense has gone down. Healthcare has increased by more than 50% as a percentage (and far more than that, as a real number, since overall spending increased).Finally, let's look at the current budget. Defense has gone down further under the Republican House. Welfare is steady. Education is up some. Pensions eat up more of the budget. But the blueberry slice. Take a look at that. Health care has gone from 9% in 1980 to 27% in 2014. I think we have found what we're looking for.The numbers don't lie.

This is a very tricky issue. Because marijuana is a federally controlled substance. Which means one is automatically in violation of the law.Lets make an analogy to Uber. Its illegal in most if not all the jurisdictions within which it operates. Yet it flaunts the law. Because the Taxi & Limousine Commissions around the country should be strung up on racketeering charges and prosecuted under the Rico Act used for prosecuting organized crime. And everybody knows that. The same case could be made for county by county liquor licensing. It invites graft and political corruption. So everybody knows Uber is violating the law, and nobody does anything about it.Uber has no intention of changing the law. Which is how a nation of laws operates. They choose not to because they have billions in the bank, and are perfectly happy fighting the municipalities in court. It can afford the legal fees and the fines.Because fining them is like fining Microsoft 1 billion dollars for anti-trust violations. A week's profits, no more no less. Same story for Google page ranking Soros funded policy positions at the top of the page and putting everybody else on page 13. Who cares if the EU anti-trust authorities fine them billions? They pay them and move on. They can afford to flaunt the law.And so does JP Morgan Chase: every year for the last five years they have paid billions upon billions in fines. Who cares? Cost of doing business. Since October 2013 they have agreed to nearly $18 billion in fines (4688 + 13,000). Shit, I forgot the $2b paid to settle the assist they gave Madoff & Sons. Make it a square $20b in three years.The issue here is that if every municipality in the country scrapped their Taxi & Limousine commission, and allowed everybody to play on the same level playing field, a thousand and one small startups would go after the market. Maybe you would have one winner in NY, a different winner in Chicago and another winner in LA. Maybe the startups in NY could grab Boston and Washington. Maybe the startups in SF would get the business in Seattle.Because small operators on a shoe string budget cannot possibly think of fighting City Hall and the entrenched racketeering commissions that regulate that market. It would be stupid to go against Rahm Emmanuel in Chicago unless you owned a 7-11 franchise and had three Slush Puppy machines on the right side of the free coffee for officers counter.But regardless of the winners or the losers, the taxi business would quickly become commoditized under all the competition. And that is bad for vertically integrated monopolies. Clear rules are very bad for monopolies. Which is why anti-trust used to be applied. And is no longer. Because the powers that be want a winner take all market. Because only "national champions" can win in a open border globalized world. Fair enough, if that is your policy position. Make your case, its an election year.How is this relevant to marijuana? In every way possible. Marijuana is a controlled substance. The State of Colorado has decided that they will ignore federal law. And so has California with Sanctuary Cities which directly contradict immigration policy being a Constitutionally granted privilege of the Federal Government.Of course it helps if the Executive Branch decides not to enforce the law on the books. Which means not prosecuting the laws on the books, or changing them in Congress.So the first important caveat emptor is that a new administration will have a say in enforcing existing laws, and writing new ones. Which is why Google is sponsoring that fine gladiatorial spectacle know as the Google-Fox Republican Debates.Nobody wants clear rules over the marijuana industry because that would favor a thousand and one marijuana new business formations. What everybody wants is an Uber play. Where only the ones with deep enough pockets to tie it up in court for years can win. Where only the ones that can pay the fines, survive. And that also takes out all the take-no-risk business types, since it requires some testicular fortitude to go against the Feds and the morons at ATF (Duuudes! I got 500 Ar15's if you want to do some more channel control on the other side of the Rio Grande...), and risk serious jail time for selling and distributing a controlled substance.Marijuana will eventually be legalized. Because it should never have been banned in the first place. Nobody expects to keep their job if they show up in the morning with a flask of whiskey in their back pocket. Because its an intoxicating substance, like marijuana. Pari passu, the case can be made that a jug of shine has more fight in it, than a simple joint, or better yet a magically infused gummy bear.If a clear federal law is put on the books, there will be as many brands of marijuana as there are brands of wine. Because its part science and part art. I have a friend in Colorado that only feeds his babies horse manure and cuts his leafs on a full moon, like some Italian farmers cut the grass to feed their cows so the Parmigiano Reggiano tastes better.But that is not the american way. Monopolies and trust making cabals is the american way. Which means there will be 3-5 clear winners. And right at the inflection point where it becomes perfectly legal across the Union, the tobacco companies will swoop up the clear winners, because they are in the drug delivery business, and know how to work the system to their shareholder's advantage.So a Snapple play is perfectly viable. Let sugar water companies fight it out, and a couple of billion lets the various Coke's and Pepsi's rationalize the business.And of course the hypocrites and the cognitively challenged will immediately say that tobacco is bad and marijuana has medicinal value. Poppycock, a stoner is no different than a drunk. And thank the Good Lord for the Cognac terroir, and never let me hear you call it brandy.Red Rose Fortified Wine: Devil worship. Remy Martin Cognac: Saintly. Coke: is OK, but Crack is Wack. And as they say, the trade mark is the only thing of value on the balance sheet.Incidentally, the same play is playing out in the Bitcoin ecosystem. NY and CT have made it really hard and onerous to start a bitcoin business. They have made the regulatory environment so complicated and expensive, that the only ones that can operate in that environment, are the ones that took Goldman Sachs money. This way by the time the inflection point of legality comes around, they will ask the regulators at Treasury to fine them "one last time for good measure", and then promptly raise the cash to buy out the scared, brutalized and violated entrepreneurs that made those companies what they are. But interestingly enough, the too big to fail banks are already in the game. Because they can afford to pay the fines, and assume the liabilities. Because if anybody is going to extermediate the 3% Visa/MC/Amex monopoly its going to be the banks themselves. Insurgents not welcome...The safe bet is to buy Phillip Morris stock.The not so safe bet would be to fund the brands that Phillip Morris will buy out.Veni Vidi Vici, its on the pack Bubba.