Expense Policy Quotes

And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers.

Why did her family think pachinko was so terrible? Her father, a traveling salesman, had sold expensive life insurance policies to isolated housewives who couldn't afford them, and Mozasu created spaces where grown men and women could play pinball for money. Both men had made money from chance and fear and loneliness. Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes--there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? Etsuko had failed in this important way--she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps-absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.

Nowhere was the complacency of the establishment, with its blind faith in progress, more evident than in its attitude toward an elite degree: as long as my child goes to the right schools, upward mobility will continue. A university education had become the equivalent of a very expensive insurance policy, like owning a gun.

In a meat industry trade publication, an Alabama poultry science professor explained why we don’t have such a “heavy-handed” policy: “The American consumer is not going to pay that much. It’s as simple as that.” If the industry had to pay to make it safer, the price would go up. “The fact,” he said, “is that it’s too expensive not to sell salmonella-positive chicken.”99

Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people—the following preparations would be essential: 1. Concentrate the populace in megalopolitan masses so that they can be kept under close surveillance and where, in case of trouble, they can be bombed, burned, gassed or machine-gunned with a minimum of expense and waste. 2. Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered farm and ranching population into the cities. Such a policy is desirable because farmers, woodsmen, cowboys, Indians, fishermen and other relatively self-sufficient types are difficult to manage unless displaced from their natural environment. 3. Restrict the possession of firearms to the police and the regular military organizations. 4. Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. Large masses of people are more easily manipulated and dominated than scattered individuals. 5. Continue military conscription. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority. 6. Divert attention from deep conflicts within the society by engaging in foreign wars; make support of these wars a test of loyalty, thereby exposing and isolating potential opposition to the new order. 7. Overlay the nation with a finely reticulated network of communications, airlines and interstate autobahns. 8. Raze the wilderness. Dam the rivers, flood the canyons, drain the swamps, log the forests, strip-mine the hills, bulldoze the mountains, irrigate the deserts and improve the national parks into national parking lots. Idle speculations, feeble and hopeless protest. It was all foreseen nearly half a century ago by the most cold-eyed and clear-eyed of our national poets, on California’s shore, at the end of the open road. Shine, perishing republic.

The [carried-interest] loophole was in essence an accounting trick that enabled hedge fund and private equity managers to categorize huge portions of their income as ‘interest,’ which was taxed at the 15 percent rate then applied to long-term capital gains. This was less than half the income tax rate paid by other top-bracket wage earners. Critics called the loophole a gigantic subsidy to millionaires and billionaires at the expense of ordinary taxpayers. The Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, estimated that the hedge fund loophole cost the government over $6 billion a year—the cost of providing health care to three million children. Of that total, it said, almost $2 billion a year from the tax break went to just twenty-five individuals.

At this time we should take a brife moment to mention quacks: alternative therapists who sell vitamins and homeopathy sugar pills [the latter of which, by definition, contain no active ingredients], which perform no better than placebo in fair tests, and who use even cruder marketing tricks than the ones described in this book. In these people profit at all from the justified anger that people feel towards the pharmaceutical industry, then it comes at the expense of genuinely constructive activity. Selling ineffective sugar pills is not a meaningful policy response to the regulatory failure we have seen in this book

Many of the overlapping crises in American life, from our foreign policy disasters to the housing bubble to the rate of out-of-wedlock births, can be traced to the impulse to emphasize one particular element of traditional Christianity—one insight, one doctrine, one teaching or tradition—at the expense of all the others. The goal is always progress: a belief system that’s simpler or more reasonable, more authentic or more up-to-date. Yet the results often vindicate the older Christian synthesis. Heresy sets out to be simpler and more appealing and more rational, but it often ends up being more extreme.

It is worthy of note, however, that the exclusion of black voters from polling booths is not the only way in which black political power has been suppressed. Another dimension of disenfranchisement echoes not so much Jim Crow as slavery. Under the usual-residence rule, the Census Bureau counts imprisoned individuals as residents of the jurisdiction in which they are incarcerated. Because most new prison construction occurs in predominately white, rural areas, white communities benefit from inflated population totals at the expense of the urban, overwhelmingly minority communities from which the prisoners come.35 This has enormous consequences for the redistricting process. White rural communities that house prisons wind up with more people in state legislatures representing them, while poor communities of color lose representatives because it appears their population has declined. This policy is disturbingly reminiscent of the three-fifths clause in the original Constitution, which enhanced the political clout of slaveholding states by including 60 percent of slaves in the population base for calculating Congressional seats and electoral votes, even though they could not vote.

He looked like a posterboy for something expensive but ultimately soulless, like alcohol-free lager, or a New Labour policy initiative.

why the desire to increase and retain one’s own earnings should be characterized negatively as “greed,” while wishing to live at the expense of others is not.

Canada’s slow, complicated, and expensive emigration policy, which on one level nobody can admit exists mainly to keep out Americans who are desperate for healthcare.

The Home Office informs us that there are around 400 ex-offenders from overseas currently seeking refuge in this country. One geezer, who has 78 offences to his name, managed to escape deportation on the grounds that he’s an alcoholic! Drinking alcohol, it seems, is illegal in his homeland, so because he claims he’ll be persecuted and tortured we’ve said, “Oh, bad show, old chap. Tough call that. Enjoy a spot of scotch myself from time to time. Quite understandable. Well why don’t you stay here at our expense? You’ll be able to fondle and grope any woman you like. We’d never deport you for that, I can assure you. You’ll be perfectly safe here.

Dropping cluster bombs from the air is not only less repugnant: it is somehow deemed, by Western people at least, to be morally superior,’ says British psychologist Jacqueline Rose. 'Why dying with your victim should be seen as a greater sin than saving yourself is unclear.'The colonial West had created a two-tier hierarchy that privileged itself at the expense of 'The Rest’. The Enlightenment had preached the equality of all human beings, yet Western policy in the developing world often adopted a double standard so that we failed to treat others as we would wish to be treated. Our focus on the nation seems to have made it hard for us to cultivate the global outlook that we need in our increasingly interrelated world. We must deplore any action that spills innocent blood or sows terror for its own sake. But we must also acknowledge and sincerely mourn the blood that we have shed in pursuit of national interests. Otherwise we can hardly defend ourselves against accusations of maintaining an 'arrogant silence’ in the face of others’ pain and of creating a world order in which some people’s lives are deemed more valuable than others

Why did her family think pachinko was so terrible? Her father, a traveling salesman, had sold expensive life insurance policies to isolated housewives who couldn’t afford them, and Mozasu created spaces where grown men and women could play pinball for money. Both men had made money from chance and fear and loneliness. Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes—there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? Etsuko had failed in this important way—she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps-absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.

The majority of these old farts are content to crash out in a drunken stupor on the backbenches. They just want to pick up their company directorships at £200,000 a year, claim for everything they ever spend personally on expenses and make sure not to rock the boat. I have better things to do with my time than to waste it by voting a different yarn-spinning joker-in-the-pack in. Whoever's in power is not going to affect me in any way. And if you believe otherwise then you can truly nail your colours to the mast of stupidity

British colonial policy, quite simply, sought revenue for the greater good of the empire. But “that damned American war,” as North called it, forced the government to confront a displeasing dilemma: either accede to conciliation and forgo income from the colonies or prosecute a war that would cost more money than could ever be squeezed from America. Moreover, success in crushing the rebellion would likely be followed by an expensive, protracted occupation. Even from the lofty vantage of a throne, coherent British war aims were hard to discern.

The single biggest structural problem facing leaders of meetings is the tendency to throw every type of issue that needs to be discussed into the same meeting, like a bad stew with too many random ingredients. Desperate to minimize wasted time, leaders decide that they will have one big staff meeting, either once a week or every other week. They sit down in a room for two or three or four hours and hash everything out—sales strategies, expense policies, potential mergers, employee recognition programs, budgets, and branding—so that everyone can get back to their “real work.

Our superhero foreign policy draws rivers of taxpayer dollars toward the center, empowering Washington at the expense of local governments. It also empowers the president at the expense of Congress in ways that upset the balance that the authors of the Constitution took great pains to design.

The state university is supported by grants from the people of the state, voted by the state legislature. In theory, the degree of support which the university receives is dependent upon the degree of acceptance accorded it by the voters. The state university prospers according to the extent to which it can sell itself to the people of the state. The state university is therefore in an unfortunate position unless its president happens to be a man of outstanding merit as a propagandist and a dramatizer of educational issues. Yet if this is the case--if the university shapes its whole policy toward gaining the support of the state legislature--its educational function may suffer. It may be tempted to base its whole appeal to the public on its public service, real or supposed, and permit the education of its individual students to take care of itself. It may attempt to educate the people of the state at the expense of its own pupils. This may generate a number of evils, to the extent of making the university a political instrument, a mere tool of the political group in power.

The gathering of information to control people is fundamental to any ruling power. As resistance to land acquisition and the new economic policies spreads across India, in the shadow of outright war in Central India, as a containment technique, India’s government has embarked on a massive biometrics program, perhaps one of the most ambitious and expensive information gathering projects in the world—the Unique Identification Number (UID). People don’t have clean drinking water, or toilets, or food, or money, but they will have election cards and UID numbers. Is it a coincidence that the UID project run by Nandan Nilekani, former CEO of Infosys, ostensibly meant to “deliver services to the poor,” will inject massive amounts of money into a slightly beleaguered IT industry?50 To digitize a country with such a large population of the illegitimate and “illegible”—people who are for the most part slum dwellers, hawkers, Adivasis without land records—will criminalize them, turning them from illegitimate to illegal. The idea is to pull off a digital version of the Enclosure of the Commons and put huge powers into the hands of an increasingly hardening police state. Nilekani’s technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with Bill Gates’s obsession with digital databases, numerical targets, and “scorecards of progress” as though it were a lack of information that is the cause of world hunger, and not colonialism, debt, and skewed profit-oriented corporate policy.51

Currying favor with special interests at the expense of the public good is a way for politicians to fund their campaigns and secure their future for when they leave government. It has been firmly enshrined as the primary source of money for politics since the Sherman Act did away with patronage. So long as politicians are able to tap special interests for these purposes, they will find ways to reward them with public policy—and they will do whatever it takes to protect the programs they have already put in place. What reformers really need to do first is attack the way the business of politics is conducted, rather than focusing on the products of that business. Then, and only then , will the cancer of cronyism be removed from the body politic.

Dropping cluster bombs from the air is not only less repugnant: it is somehow deemed, by Western people at least, to be morally superior,’ says British psychologist Jacqueline Rose. 'Why dying with your victim* should be seen as a greater sin than saving yourself is unclear.'The colonial West had created a two-tier hierarchy that privileged itself at the expense of 'The Rest’. The Enlightenment had preached the equality of all human beings, yet Western policy in the developing world often adopted a double standard so that we failed to treat others as we would wish to be treated. Our focus on the nation seems to have made it hard for us to cultivate the global outlook that we need in our increasingly interrelated world. We must deplore any action that spills innocent blood or sows terror for its own sake. But we must also acknowledge and sincerely mourn the blood that we have shed in pursuit of national interests. Otherwise we can hardly defend ourselves against accusations of maintaining an 'arrogant silence’ in the face of others’ pain and of creating a world order in which some people’s lives are deemed more valuable than others

Jot down a few important personal details and passwords. Assign or update your beneficiaries. Update (or finally get) the right insurance policies. Finish your will, living will, and power-of-attorney documents. Plan for at least six months of expenses in a savings fund. Save for a long and lovely retirement or an emergency tomorrow. Prioritize the urgent items from the not-so-important.

While states are sometimes associated with a religious or ethnic identity, a states’ prerogative to define its own identity and promote it is not unlimited; it is not a license to violate the fundamental rights of others. Laws and policies adopted by the Israeli government to preserve a Jewish majority have afforded benefits to Jews at the expense of the fundamental rights of Palestinians.

Elite support for so-called free trade is due to the fact that elites share a global perspective at odds with the best interests of the United States. Policies that produce world growth at U.S. expense are endorsed. Policies that benefit the United States while slowing world growth are rejected. Today globalization’s triumph over nationalism is energizing a nationalist revival as nations reassess their individual interests. Certain

The objective of policy should be to reduce human suffering. We aim for a lower U-index in society. Dealing with depression and extreme poverty should be a priority.” “The easiest way to increase happiness is to control your use of time. Can you find more time to do the things you enjoy doing?” “Beyond the satiation level of income, you can buy more pleasurable experiences, but you will lose some of your ability to enjoy the less expensive ones.

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine - the special pleading of selfish interests. While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible. In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of man to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.

It starts with what customers first see when they visit our Web site. In the United States, we offer free shipping both ways to make the transaction as easy as possible and risk-free for our customers. A lot of customers will order five different pairs of shoes, try them on with five different outfits in the comfort of their living rooms, and then send back the ones that don’t fit or they simply don’t like—free of charge. The additional shipping costs are expensive for us, but we really view those costs as a marketing expense. We also offer a 365-day return policy for people who have trouble committing or making up their minds. At most Web sites, the contact information is usually buried at least five links deep and even when you find it, it’s a form or e-mail address that you can only contact once. We take the exact opposite approach. We put our phone number (1-800-927-7671) at the top of every single page of our Web site, because we actually want to talk to our customers. And we staff our call center 24/7. I personally think it’s kind of funny when I attend marketing or branding conferences and

Read the notes.Never buy a stock without reading the footnotes to the financial statements in the annual report. Usually labeled “summary of significant accounting policies,” one key note describes how the company recognizes revenue, records inventories, treats installment or contract sales, expenses its marketing costs, and accounts for the other major aspects of its business.7 In the other footnotes, watch for disclosures about debt, stock options, loans to customers, reserves against losses, and other “risk factors” that can take a big chomp out of earnings

Since well-educated people are better voters, another tempting way to improve democracy is to give voters more education. Maybe it would work. But it would be expensive, and as mentioned in the previous chapter, education may be a proxy for intelligence or curiosity. A cheaper strategy, and one where a causal effect is more credible, is changing the curriculum. Steven Pinker argues that schools should try to “provide students with the cognitive skills that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with,” by emphasizing “economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics.”60 Pinker essentially wants to give schools a new mission: rooting out the biased beliefs that students arrive with, especially beliefs that impinge on government policy.61 What should be cut to make room for the new material? There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than elementary economics.62

To be antiracist is to never mistake the global march of White racism for the global march of White people. To be antiracist is to never mistake the antiracist hate of White racism for the racist hate of White people. To be antiracist is to never conflate racist people with White people, knowing there are antiracist Whites and racist non-Whites. To be antiracist is to see ordinary White people as the frequent victimizers of people of color and the frequent victims of racist power. Donald Trump’s economic policies are geared toward enriching White male power—but at the expense of most of his White male followers, along with the rest of us.

I would like to see a government that said: "We're going to stop this preposterous obsession with economic growth at the expense of all else. Great economic success doesn't produce national happiness. It produces Republicans and Switzerland. So we're going to concentrate on being lovely and pleasant and civilized. We're going to have the best schools and hospitals, the most comfortable public transportation, the liveliest arts, the most useful and well-stocked libraries, the cleanest streets, the most enlightened social policies. In short, we're going to be like Sweden, but with less herring and better jokes." Wouldn't that be delightful? But of course it will never happen.

Too often when a publisher entertains an author at the midday meal a rather sombre note tinges the table talk. The host is apt to sigh a good deal and to choose as the theme of his remarks the hardness of the times, the stagnant condition of the book trade and the growing price of pulp paper. And when his guest tries to cheer him up by suggesting that these disadvantages may be offset by a spirited policy of publicity, he sighs again and says that eulogies of an author’s work displayed in the press at the publisher’s expense are of little or no value, the only advertising that counts being—how shall he put it—well, what he might perhaps describe as word-of-mouth advertising.

While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible.

Currying favor with special interests at the expense of the public good is a way for politicians to fund their campaigns and secure their future for when they leave government. It has been firmly enshrined as the primary source of money for politics since the Sherman Act did away with patronage. So long as politicians are able to tap special interests for these purposes, they will find ways to reward them with public policy—and they will do whatever it takes to protect the programs they have already put in place. What reformers really need to do first is attack the way the business of politics is conducted, rather than focusing on the products of that business. Then, and only then , will the cancer of cronyism

It could be argued that one of democracy’s greatest weaknesses is the ability to reform itself. Reform of democracy must, however, be at the heart of a successful plan to improve economic growth and global prosperity. So far this chapter has detailed how the democratic system inherently contains incentives for policymakers to implement bad policy choices that undermine long-term economic success. Nevertheless, as we seek solutions to remedy democracy’s failings, we should acknowledge that politicians in a liberal democracy need not be malicious or even inept to fall prey to short-term thinking. They are wholly rational actors—responding to voters, succumbing to media pressure, and battling to stay in office, even if it means they do so at the expense of the economy’s longer-term success. When democracy works, it delivers economic growth and fundamental freedoms in a way that no other system can. And when it fails, it is rarely, if ever, replaced by a system that can do a better job of delivering for its population. Therefore, creating growth requires that we preserve democratic capitalism’s core strengths—freedom, efficient markets, transparency, and correctly constructed incentives—and reform its weaknesses. Something must be done to remedy the political class’s severe case of myopia, correcting the mismatch between long-term economic challenges and election cycles, safeguarding independent economic choices from political pressures, and eliminating dysfunction and gridlock.

The worldview of the underdog socialist is that the neoliberals have mastered the game of reason, judgment, and statistics, leaving the left with emotion. Its heart is in the right place. Underdog socialists have a surfeit of compassion and find prevailing policies deeply unfair. Seeing the welfare state crumbling to dust, they rush in to salvage what they can. But when push comes to shove, the underdog socialist caves in to the arguments of the opposition, always accepting the premise on which the debate takes place... The underdog socialist forgets that the real problem isn't the national debt, but overextended households and businesses. He forgets that fighting poverty is an investment that pays off in spades. And he forgets that, all the while, the bankers and the lawyers are polishing turds at the expense of waste collectors and nurses.

The demographic ageing of Europe and other leading industrial countries is multiplied by the economic burden of immigration. For the time being, we can still hold out, but this will not last. The lack of active workers, the burden of retirees and the expenses of healthcare will end, from 2005-2010, with burdening European economies with debt. Gains in productivity and technological advances (the famous ‘primitive accumulation of fixed capital’, the economists’ magic cure) will never be able to match the external demographic costs. Lastly, far from compensating for the losses of the working-age native-born population, the colonising immigration Europe is experiencing involves first of all welfare recipients and unskilled workers. In addition, this immigration represents a growing expense (insecurity, the criminal economy, urban policies, etc.). An economic collapse of Europe, the world’s leading commercial power, would drag down with it the United States and the entire Western economy.

With women, as with racial and ethnic minorities, the effects of policies must be carefully separated from the intentions of those policies. The crucial question is not the desirability of the professed goal but the incentives and constraints created and what they are most likely to lead to. The imposition of monthly equality in pensions, rather than lifetime equality, has the net effect of making pension plans more expensive, the more female employees there are [because women live longer than men]. Viewed as prospective behavioral incentives, rather than as a retrospective status pronouncement, this means that employers will find it more costly to hire female work- ers with a given pension plan and more costly to institute a given pension plan when there are more female workers. Reducing the demand for female workers or reducing the likelihood of creating a pension plan is hardly the intention of the courts, but it can easily be the result. It is not clear that anyone is economically better off after such a symbolic ruling.

In the first place, there must be a reckoning with France, “the inexorable mortal enemy of the German people.” The French aim, he said, would always be to achieve a “dismembered and shattered Germany… a hodgepodge of little states.” This was so self-evident, Hitler added, that “…if I were a Frenchman… I could not and would not act any differently from Clemenceau.” Therefore, there must be “a final active reckoning with France… a last decisive struggle… only then will we be able to end the eternal and essentially so fruitless struggle between ourselves and France; presupposing, of course, that Germany actually regards the destruction of France as only a means which will afterward enable her finally to give our people the expansion made possible elsewhere.”2 Expansion elsewhere? Where? In this manner Hitler leads to the core of his ideas on German foreign policy which he was to attempt so faithfully to carry out when he became ruler of the Reich. Germany, he said bluntly, must expand in the East—largely at the expense of Russia.

What about patriotism? Is it permissible for a Christian to be patriotic? Yes and no. It depends on what is meant by patriotism. If by patriotism we mean a benign pride of place that encourages civic duty and responsible citizenship, then patriotism poses no conflict with Christian baptismal identity. But if by patriotism we mean religious devotion to nationalism at the expense of the wellbeing of other nations; if we mean a willingness to kill others (even other Christians) in the name of national allegiance; if we mean an uncritical support of political policies without regard to their justice, then patriotism is a repudiation of Christian baptismal identity. It is extraordinarily naive for a Christian to rule out categorically the possibility of any conflict between their national identity and their baptismal identity. But it’s precisely this kind of naiveté that is on display every time a church flies an American flag above the so-called Christian flag. Or perhaps it’s a bit of unintended truth-telling. Flags are powerful symbols that have the capacity to evoke strong emotions—think of the passion connected with protests involving flag burning. In the world of symbol, flags are among the most revered signs. So when a church flies the American flag above the Christian flag, what is the message being communicated? How can it be anything other than that all allegiances—including allegiance to Christ—must be subordinate to a supreme national allegiance? This is what Caiaphas admitted when he confessed to Pilate, “We have no king but Caesar.”[8] When the American flag is placed in supremacy over all other flags—including a flag intended to represent Christian faith—aren’t we saying our faith is subordinate to our patriotism? Is there any other interpretation? And if you’re inclined to argue that I’m making too much out of the mere arrangement of flags on a church lawn, try reversing them and see what happens! For the “America First” Christian it would create too much cognitive dissonance to actually admit that their loyalty to Christ is penultimate, trumped by their primary allegiance to America, but there are plenty of moments when the truth seeps out.

If there are costs to becoming legal, there are also bound to be costs to remaining outside the law. We found that operating outside the world of legal work and business was surprisingly expensive. In Peru, for example, the cost of operating a business extralegally includes paying 10 to 15 per cent of its annual income in bribes and commissions to authorities. Add to such payoffs the costs of avoiding penalties, making transfers outside legal channels and operating from dispersed locations and without credit, and the life of the extralegal entrepreneur turns out to be far more costly and full of daily hassles than that of the legal businessman. Perhaps the most significant cost was caused by the absence of institutions that create incentives for people to seize economic and social opportunities to specialize within the market place. We found that people who could not operate within the law also could not hold property efficiently or enforce contracts through the courts; nor could they reduce uncertainty through limited liability systems and insurance policies, or create stock companies to attract additional capital and share risk. Being unable to raise money for investment, they could not achieve economies of scale or protect their innovations through royalties and patents.

It is often sadly remarked that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the good economists present their truths. It is often complained that demagogues can be more plausible in putting forward economic nonsense from the platform than the honest men who try to show what is wrong with it. But the basic reason for this ought not to be mysterious. The reason is that the demagogues and bad economists are presenting half-truths. They are speaking only of the immediate effect of a proposed policy or its effect upon a single group. As far as they go they may often be right. In these cases the answer consists in showing that the proposed policy would also have longer and less desirable effects, or that it could benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The answer consists in supplementing and correcting the half-truth with the other half. But to consider all the chief effects of a proposed course on everybody often requires a long, complicated, and dull chain of reasoning. Most of the audience finds this chain of reasoning difficult to follow and soon becomes bored and inattentive. The bad economists rationalize this intellectual debility and laziness by assuring the audience that it need not even attempt to follow the reasoning or judge it on its merits because it is only "classicism" or "laissez faire" or "capitalist apologetics" or whatever other term of abuse may happen to strike them as effective.

In January 2004 President George W. Bush put NASA in high gear, heading back to the moon with a space vision that was to have set in motion future exploration of Mars and other destinations. The Bush space policy focused on U.S. astronauts first returning to the moon as early as 2015 and no later than 2020. Portraying the moon as home to abundant resources, President Bush did underscore the availability of raw materials that might be harvested and processed into rocket fuel or breathable air. “We can use our time on the moon to develop and test new approaches and technologies and systems that will allow us to function in other, more challenging, environments. The moon is a logical step toward further progress and achievement,” he remarked in rolling out his space policy. To fulfill the Bush space agenda required expensive new rockets—the Ares I launcher and the large, unfunded Ares V booster—plus a new lunar module, all elements of the so-called Constellation Program. The Bush plan forced retirement of the space shuttle in 2010 to pay for the return to the moon, but there were other ramifications as well. Putting the shuttle out to pasture created a large human spaceflight gap in reaching the International Space Station. The price tag for building the station is roughly $100 billion, and without the space shuttle, there’s no way to reach it without Russian assistance. In the end, the stars of the Constellation Program were out of financial alignment. It was an impossible policy to implement given limited NASA money.

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In the absence of expert [senior military] advice, we have seen each successive administration fail in the business of strategy - yielding a United States twice as rich as the Soviet Union but much less strong. Only the manner of the failure has changed. In the 1960s, under Robert S. McNamara, we witnessed the wholesale substitution of civilian mathematical analysis for military expertise. The new breed of the "systems analysts" introduced new standards of intellectual discipline and greatly improved bookkeeping methods, but also a trained incapacity to understand the most important aspects of military power, which happens to be nonmeasurable. Because morale is nonmeasurable it was ignored, in large and small ways, with disastrous effects. We have seen how the pursuit of business-type efficiency in the placement of each soldier destroys the cohesion that makes fighting units effective; we may recall how the Pueblo was left virtually disarmed when it encountered the North Koreans (strong armament was judged as not "cost effective" for ships of that kind). Because tactics, the operational art of war, and strategy itself are not reducible to precise numbers, money was allocated to forces and single weapons according to "firepower" scores, computer simulations, and mathematical studies - all of which maximize efficiency - but often at the expense of combat effectiveness. An even greater defect of the McNamara approach to military decisions was its businesslike "linear" logic, which is right for commerce or engineering but almost always fails in the realm of strategy. Because its essence is the clash of antagonistic and outmaneuvering wills, strategy usually proceeds by paradox rather than conventional "linear" logic. That much is clear even from the most shopworn of Latin tags: si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war), whose business equivalent would be orders of "if you want sales, add to your purchasing staff," or some other, equally absurd advice. Where paradox rules, straightforward linear logic is self-defeating, sometimes quite literally. Let a general choose the best path for his advance, the shortest and best-roaded, and it then becomes the worst path of all paths, because the enemy will await him there in greatest strength... Linear logic is all very well in commerce and engineering, where there is lively opposition, to be sure, but no open-ended scope for maneuver; a competitor beaten in the marketplace will not bomb our factory instead, and the river duly bridged will not deliberately carve out a new course. But such reactions are merely normal in strategy. Military men are not trained in paradoxical thinking, but they do no have to be. Unlike the business-school expert, who searches for optimal solutions in the abstract and then presents them will all the authority of charts and computer printouts, even the most ordinary military mind can recall the existence of a maneuvering antagonists now and then, and will therefore seek robust solutions rather than "best" solutions - those, in other words, which are not optimal but can remain adequate even when the enemy reacts to outmaneuver the first approach.

The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels. Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.

BULGARIA had more cause than any other of the Balkan countries to be grateful to Nazi Germany, because of the considerable territorial aggrandizement she received at the expense of Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Greece. And yet Bulgaria was not grateful, neither her government nor her people were soft enough to make a policy of “ruthless toughness” workable. This showed not only on the Jewish question. The Bulgarian monarchy had no reason to be worried about the native Fascist movement, the Ratnizi, because it was numerically small and politically without influence, and the Parliament remained a highly respected body, which worked smoothly with the King. Hence, they dared refuse to declare war on Russia and never even sent a token expeditionary force of “volunteers” to the Eastern front. But most surprising of all, in the belt of mixed populations where anti-Semitism was rampant among all ethnic groups and had become official governmental policy long before Hitler’s arrival, the Bulgarians had no “understanding of the Jewish problem” whatever. It is true that the Bulgarian Army had agreed to have all the Jews—they numbered about fifteen thousand—deported from the newly annexed territories, which were under military government and whose population was anti-Semitic; but it is doubtful that they knew what “resettlement in the East” actually signified. Somewhat earlier, in January, 1941, the government had also agreed to introduce some anti-Jewish legislation, but that, from the Nazi viewpoint, was simply ridiculous: some six thousand able-bodied men were mobilized for work; all baptized Jews, regardless of the date of their conversion, were exempted, with the result that an epidemic of conversions broke out; five thousand more Jews—out of a total of approximately fifty thousand—received special privileges; and for Jewish physicians and businessmen a numerus clausus was introduced that was rather high, since it was based on the percentage of Jews in the cities, rather than in the country at large. When these measures had been put into effect, Bulgarian government officials declared publicly that things were now stabilized to everybody’s satisfaction. Clearly, the Nazis would not only have to enlighten them about the requirements for a “solution of the Jewish problem,” but also to teach them that legal stability and a totalitarian movement could not be reconciled.

The policy lessons here are clear: growth helps the poor most when governments avoid policies that raise demand for high-skilled labor at the expense of low-skilled labor, when governments fund generous investments in basic education and health, and when governments pursue policies of broad global economic engagement rather than economic disengagement.

IKEA’s adroit coordination of policies is a more integrated design than anyone else’s in the furniture business. Traditional furniture retailers do not carry large inventory, traditional manufacturers do not have their own stores, normal retailers do not specify their own designs or use catalogs rather than salespeople, and so on. Because IKEA’s many policies are different from the norm and because they fit together in a coherent design, IKEA’s system has a chain-link logic. That means that adopting only one of these policies does no good—it adds expense to the competitor’s business without providing any real competition to IKEA. Minor adjustments just won’t do—to compete effectively with IKEA, an existing rival would have to virtually start fresh and, in effect, compete with its own existing business. No one did. Today, more than fifty years after IKEA pioneered its new strategy in the furniture industry, no one has really replicated it.

It’s also possible to revise the rules of globalization to reduce the amount of damage done by speculative private finance and to expand the role of transparent social investment. We could provide a lot more debt relief, as well as imposing a Tobin tax (see Chapter 3) on short-term financial transactions. Though the West has less economic influence than it once did, the markets of Europe and North America are still the world’s largest, which gives the West immense power to influence the rules for the global economy as a whole. Those rules were once used to promote balanced domestic social contracts. Lately, they have been used to enrich the already rich, often in concert with the repression of labor in the third world, and at the expense of decent labor standards in the West as well. The point is not that Japan, South Korea, China, and other emergent economies are doing something fundamentally wrong or inefficient by having industrial policies, subsidies, and managed trade strategies to promote their own economic growth. This is precisely what the West did at earlier stages of its own development. The point, rather, is that the system needs more realistic rules and norms, so that there is a fairer balance of benefits. That means balance between developing and developed countries, balance between capital and labor, and balance between market norms and social standards. Today, both the global trading system and US trade policy are promoting imbalance.

These policies would come back to haunt Europe in the aftermath of the 2008 collapse. Instead of the vigorous, countercyclical fiscal, monetary, and debt relief policies called for in the wake of a 1929-scale crash, Europe’s institutions promoted austerity reminiscent of the post–World War I era. The debt and deficit limits of Maastricht precluded strong fiscal stimulus, and the government of Angela Merkel resisted emergency waivers. Germany, an export champion, which in effect had an artificially cheap currency in the euro, profited from other nations’ misery. Germany could prosper by running a large export surplus (equal to almost 10 percent of its GDP), but not all nations can have surpluses. The European Central Bank, which reported to nineteen different national masters that used the euro, had neither the tools nor the mandate available to the US Federal Reserve. The ECB did cut interest rates, but it did not engage in the scale of credit creation pursued by the Fed. The Germans successfully resisted any Europeanizing of the sovereign debt of the EU’s weaker nations, pressing them instead to regain the confidence of capital markets by deflating. Sovereign debt financing by the ECB went mainly to repay private and state creditors, not to rekindle growth. Thus did “fortress Europe,” which advocates and detractors circa 1981 both saw as a kind of social democratic alternative to the liberal capitalism of the Anglo-Saxon nations, replicate the worst aspects of a global system captive to the demands of speculative private capital. The Maastricht constitution not only internalized those norms, but enforced them. The dream of managed capitalism on one continent became a laissez-faire nightmare—not laissez-faire in the sense of no rules, but rather rules structured to serve corporations and banks at the expense of workers and citizens. The fortress became a brig. There was plenty to criticize in the US response to the 2008 collapse—too small a stimulus, too much focus on deficit reduction, too little attention to labor policy, too feeble a financial restructuring—but by 2016, US unemployment had come back down to less than 5 percent. In Europe, it remained stuck at more than 10 percent, with all of the social dynamite produced by persistent joblessness.

First, let’s consider the notion that using services, by their nature, is an architecture. This is patently untrue. The architecture of a system is defined by boundaries that separate high-level policy from low-level detail and follow the Dependency Rule. Services that simply separate application behaviors are little more than expensive function calls, and are not necessarily architecturally significant.

6.​Pay your brokers well: the power of good advice Sometimes I see people posting a sign in front of their house that says, “For Sale by Owner.” Or I see people on TV claiming to be “Discount Brokers.” My rich dad taught me to take the opposite approach. He believed in paying professionals well, and I have adopted that policy also. Today, I have expensive attorneys, accountants, real estate brokers, and stockbrokers. Why? Because if, and I do mean if, the people are professionals, their services should make you money. And the more money they make, the more money I make.

The problem of the Unemployable is not created by the fixing of a National Minimum by law. The Unemployable we have always with us. With regards to certain sections of the population, this unemployment is not a mark of social disease, but of social health… If we desire to reduce these Unemployable to a minimum, it is necessary … to pursue a twofold policy. We must … arrange our social organisation in such a way that the smallest possible amount of such degeneracy, whether physical or mental is produced… [Referring to the ‘Unemployables’] These physical and moral weaklings and degenerates must somehow be maintained at the expense of other persons. They may be provided for from their own property or savings, by charity of from public funds, with or without being set to work in whatever ways are within their capacity. But of all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites the most ruinous to the community is to allow them unrestrainedly to compete as wage-earners for situations in the industrial organisation. For this at once prevents competition from resulting in the Selection of the Most Fit, and thus defeats its very object.

What are the policies that will bring back growth? Repealing Obamacare. Reining in abusive regulations. Stopping the EPA from strangling the American energy renaissance that can create millions of high-paying jobs, in energy and in heavy manufacturing. Sound money, auditing the Federal Reserve and stopping its endless quantitative easing that is debasing our currency and making daily life more expensive for hardworking Americans.

Although pundits and politicians, usually male, often claim that motherhood is the most important and difficult work of all, women who take time out of the workforce pay a big career penalty. Only 74 percent of professional women will rejoin the workforce in any capacity, and only 40 percent will return to full-time jobs.14 Those who do rejoin will often see their earnings decrease dramatically. Controlling for education and hours worked, women’s average annual earnings decrease by 20 percent if they are out of the workforce for just one year.15 Average annual earnings decline by 30 percent after two to three years,16 which is the average amount of time that professional women off-ramp from the workforce.17 If society truly valued the work of caring for children, companies and institutions would find ways to reduce these steep penalties and help parents combine career and family responsibilities. All too often rigid work schedules, lack of paid family leave, and expensive or undependable child care derail women’s best efforts. Governmental and company policies such as paid personal time off, affordable high-quality child care, and flexible work practices would serve families, and society, well.

His friends and advisors would later agree that he had one overarching reason for challenging President Gerald Ford in 1976: détente with the Soviets. It had been Nixon’s policy, and now it was Ford’s, formalized in the Helsinki Accords in 1975. Reagan believed that the president’s concessions to Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev had been damaging to human rights and extended Soviet power in the region. He saw détente as a one-way street that had enabled the Soviets to grow stronger at our expense.

The focus on the market has made most economists neglect vast areas of our economic life, with significant negative consequences for our well-being. The neglect of production at the expense of exchange has made policy-makers in some countries overly complacent about the decline of their manufacturing industries. The view of individuals as consumers, rather than producers, has led to the neglect of issues such as the quality of work (e.g., how interesting it is, how safe it is, how stressful it is and even how oppressive it is) and work-life balance. The disregard of these aspects of economic life partly explains why most people in the rich countries don’t feel more fulfilled despite consuming the greatest ever quantities of material goods and services. The economy is much bigger than the market. We will not be able to build a good economy — or a good society — unless we look at the vast expanse beyond the market.

Think about it. How could white nationalism not be on the rise, when movement conservatism has depended on white resentment to win elections despite following policies that benefit a wealthy elite at the expense of most Americans? How could the paranoid mind-set of Trump followers not emerge from a political movement that sees everything that doesn’t confirm its preconceptions—from the reality of climate change to low inflation—as the product of vast conspiracies? And although people tend to forget it, the corruption and cronyism of the Trump administration were prefigured in the Bush years. In many ways, what Trump has done to America since 2016 is similar to what the Bush team did to Iraq in the disastrous first year of occupation. And

Read the notes.Never buy a stock without reading the footnotes to the financial statements in the annual report. Usually labeled “summary of significant accounting policies,” one key note describes how the company recognizes revenue, records inventories, treats installment or contract sales, expenses its marketing costs, and accounts for the other major aspects of its business.7 In the other footnotes, watch for disclosures about debt, stock options, loans to customers, reserves against losses, and other “risk factors” that can take a big chomp out of earnings. Among the things that should make your antennae twitch are technical terms like “capitalized,” “deferred,” and “restructuring”—and plain-English words signaling that the company has altered its accounting practices, like “began,” “change,” and “however.” None of those words mean you should not buy the stock, but all mean that you need to investigate further. Be sure to compare the footnotes with those in the financial statements of at least one firm that’s a close competitor, to see how aggressive your company’s accountants are. Read more. If you are an enterprising investor willing to put plenty of time and energy into your portfolio, then you owe it to yourself to learn more about financial reporting. That’s the only way to minimize your odds of being misled by a shifty earnings statement. Three solid books full of timely and specific examples are Martin Fridson and Fernando Alvarez’s Financial Statement Analysis, Charles Mulford and Eugene Comiskey’s The Financial Numbers Game, and Howard Schilit’s Financial Shenanigans. 8

Racial reformers have customarily requested or demanded that Americans, particularly White Americans, sacrifice their own privileges for the betterment of Black people. And yet, this strategy is based on one of the oldest myths in the modern era, a myth continuously produced and reproduced by racists and antiracists alike: that racism materially benefits the majority of White people, that White people would lose and not gain in the reconstruction of an antiracist America. It has been true that racist policies have benefited White people in general at the expense of Black people (and others) in general. That is the story of racism, of unequal opportunity in a nutshell. But it is also true that a society of equal opportunity, without a top 1 percent hoarding the wealth and power, would actually benefit the vast majority of southern Whites poor. It is not coincidental that slavery kept the vast majority of southern Whites poor. It is not coincidental that more White Americans thrived during the antiracist movements from the 1930s to the 1970s than ever before or since. It is not coincidental that the racist movements that followed in the late twentieth century paralleled the stagnation or reduction of middle and low income Whites’ salaries and their skyrocketing costs of living. Antiracists should stop connecting selfishness to racism, and unselfishness to antiracism. Altruism is wanted, not required. Antiracists do not have to be altruistic. Antiracists do not have to be selfless. Antiracists merely have to have intelligent self-interest, and to stop consuming those racist ideas that have engendered so much unintelligent self-interest over the years. It is in the intelligent self-interest of middle and upper income Blacks to challenge the racism affecting the Black poor, knowing they will not be free of the racism that is slowing their socioeconomic rise until poor blacks are free of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of Asians, Native Americans, and Latinos to challenge anti-Black racism, knowing they will not be free of racism until Black people are of racism. It is in the intelligent self-interest of White Americans to challenge racism, knowing they will not be free of sexism, class bias, homophobia, and ethnocentrism until Black people are free from racism. The histories of anti-Asian, anti-Native, and anti-Latino racist ideas; the histories of sexist, elitist, homophobic, and ethnocentric ideas all sound eerily similar to this history of racist ideas, and feature some of the same defenders of bigotry in America. Supporting these prevailing bigotries is only in the intelligent self-interest of a tiny group of super rich, Protestant, heterosexual, non-immigrant, White, Anglo-Saxon males. Those are the only people who need to be altruistic in order to be antiracist. The rest of us merely need to do the intelligent thing for ourselves.

Synethetic devashare isn’t expensive. You can print it from readily available components, if you are someplace with a permissive substance policy. But the good stuff-the nightmare stuff-that’s not the sort of thing that you can get just anywhere. It’s virulantly illegal everywhere with a government, as you’d hope any intoxicant from a murdered flesh of presumed would be. So it’s the sort of thing you heard rumors about the wealthy and dissolute obtaining, or try to obtain-the same way you hear rumors about certain debauched priveleged types throwing noncon kink parties and similiar nasty things.

When you rent a unit to a person with a disability, the Fair Housing Act requires that you accommodate reasonable requests for changes in rules, policies, practices, or services, and that you accommodate the tenant should they have a reasonable request to modify the dwelling or common areas—at their expense—to better suit their needs. Should the tenant choose to make modifications to the rental, they are legally obligated, when reasonable, to return the unit to it’s previous condition once they have vacated.

Why did her family think pachinko was so terrible? Her father, a traveling salesman, had sold expensive life insurance policies to isolated housewives who couldn’t afford them, and Mozasu created spaces where grown men and women could play pinball for money. Both men had made money from chance and fear and loneliness. Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes—there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could we get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? Etsuko had failed in this important way—she had not her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps-absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.

Why did her family think pachinko was so terrible? Her father, a traveling salesman, had sold expensive life insurance policies to isolated housewives who couldn't afford them, and Mozasu created spaces where grown men and women could play pinball for money. Both men had made money from chance and fear and loneliness. Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes - there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? Etsuko had failed in this important way - she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps-absurd possibility that they might win. Panchinko was a foolish game, but life was not.

With these two elements in place you can now . . . - Reduce controls. Start by ripping pages from the employee handbook. Travel policies, expense policies, vacation policies—these can all go. Later, as talent becomes increasingly denser and feedback more frequent and candid, you can remove approval processes throughout the organization, teaching your managers principles like, “Lead with context, not control,” and coaching your employees using such guidelines as, “Don’t seek to please your boss.

It is state’s rights—as imperfect as that system is—that protects us from the WHO/globalist power grab to leverage public health to compromise the sovereignty of the United States. The current strategic agenda of those seeking to advance globalism and global governance policies at the expense of the autonomy of nation-states is often referred to as the New World Order. Those advocating for the New World Order include the World Economic Forum, transnational corporations/globalized investment capital, the UN, the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and now the World Health Organization.

When removing travel and expense policies, encourage managers to set context about how to spend money up front and to check employee receipts at the back end. If people overspend, set more context.

Today the entirety of the travel and expense policy still consists of these five simple words: ACT IN NETFLIX’S BEST INTEREST That works better. It is not in Netflix’s best interest that the entire content team fly business from L.A. to Mexico. But if you have to take the red-eye from L.A. to New York and give a presentation the next morning it would likely be in Netflix’s best interest that you fly business, so you don’t have bags under your eyes and slurred speech when the big moment arises.

A scientific discovery in our time is likely to be not the work of a solitary researcher or a small team working with improvised equipment, but the product of a big team in an expensive lab operating with government funds. In such conditions the scientist is less and less likely to speak out against government policies. Today, for example, there is scarcely a physicist who thinks the Strategic Defense Initiative or its successor, National Missile Defense, can be made to work in anything like the way the Defense Department claims. Some disbelievers, however, accept government funds for the project in hopes of making an ancillary contribution to science, and cover their doubts with silence. The public has been lied to as a result, and billions of dollars have been wasted on an illusion.

It requires no imagination at all to see that our own contemporary monetization of social relationships (concerning health care, tax policy, bank deregulation) serves to enhance the powerful with endless expansion of economic resources at the expense of the vulnerable who are without resources. Such monetization of social reality permits and authorizes the endless predatory exploitation of the vulnerable other. In the midst of that economy where we now live, to “love God” is a mighty alternative to the idols, an act that intends to interrupt such practice and policy.

Prepaid expenses are expenditures that have already been made for benefits that the company will receive in the near future. Examples of prepaid expenses are advances for insurance policies, rent, and taxes. Prepaid expenses are classified as current assets, not because they can be turned into cash, but because if they had not been prepaid, that cash would have to be spent within 12 months. Some prepaid expenses also result in cost savings, such as paying insurance premiums annually instead of monthly.

When analyzing the cost of U.S. health care, it’s important to remember that spending is not spread evenly among all patients. According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, in 2009, 21.8% of health care spending came from just 1% of patients. That’s roughly three million people in the U.S. who each spent about $90,000 in a year on health-related expenses. Further, the AHRQ states, “[T]he top decile of spenders were more likely to be in fair or poor health, elderly, female, non-Hispanic whites and those with public-only coverage. Those who remained in the bottom half of spenders were more likely to be in excellent health, children and young adults, men, Hispanics, and the uninsured.”44 The fact that so many resources go to so few patients led to the term “super-utilizers.” Increasingly, policy efforts focus on how to reduce costs among this group.

Pay your brokers well: the power of good advice Sometimes I see people posting a sign in front of their house that says, “For Sale by Owner.” Or I see people on TV claiming to be “Discount Brokers.” My rich dad taught me to take the opposite approach. He believed in paying professionals well, and I have adopted that policy also. Today, I have expensive attorneys, accountants, real estate brokers, and stockbrokers. Why? Because if, and I do mean if, the people are professionals, their services should make you money. And the more money they make, the more money I make.

Germany exported its problem of a lack of competitiveness to other member states. Since 1999 this country has followed a tight policy of wage moderation while the rest of the euro zone maintained more or less constant wage increases of around 3 per cent per year. Thus, each year Germany tended to improve its competitive position vis-à-vis the rest of the euro zone – a trend partly explained by the fact that the power of German labour unions has declined significantly, more so than in other euro zone countries. Other countries with particularly close economic ties to Germany are forced to intensify their policies of wage moderation, inducing the leading country again to restrict wage increases. A vicious circle may result when everybody attempts to improve its competitiveness at the expense of the others. As in the case of the so-called race to the bottom in environmental policy, the final outcome is that these countries will not have improved their relative position, but will have adopted wage policies that do not correspond to the preferences of their citizens. At the same time, the distance between the leading group and the other member states keeps growing.

Two days later, Republican senator William Borah of Idaho, though widely considered a progressive Republican, warned that Roosevelt’s policies were endangering the very foundations of American liberty and that their “creeping paralysis of bureaucracy threatens freedom of the press, placing the yoke of torture, colossal expense, and demoralization on the nation.

DON’T ATTACK SADDAM,” read the headline of a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Thursday, August 15, 2002. The twelve-hundred-word opinion piece argued that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be “very expensive” and have “very serious” and “bloody” consequences. It cautioned that a campaign against Iraq would divert the United States from the real war against terrorism for an “indefinite period” and that such a war, if conducted without full international support, would strain relations between the United States and other countries. And without “enthusiastic international cooperation,” especially on intelligence, it was by no means clear the United States could win the global war against terrorism.1 The op-ed argued that Saddam Hussein was first and foremost a “power-hungry survivor” who had little cause to join with Al Qaeda and that he could be deterred just like other aggressors. It warned, too, that should the United States attack Iraq, the ensuing war could “swell the ranks of terrorists,” sidetrack US foreign policy from grappling with the more important Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and possibly “destabilize Arab regimes in the region” (the irony being that “one of Saddam’s strategic objectives” was precisely such destabilization).

In a nutshell, over the decades the national policies of the Republicans had raped the region while the actions of many state and local Democrats too often were designed to preserve the assets of a select few at the expense of just about everyone else.

It may seem to readers that I talk too much about the bankers and corporate CEOs, too much about the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, especially (as I’ll explain) since the problems of inequality in America are of longer standing. It is not just that they have become the whipping boys of popular opinion. They are emblematic of what has gone wrong. Much of the inequality at the top is associated with finance and corporate CEOs. But it’s more than that: these leaders have helped shape our views about what is good economic policy, and unless and until we understand what is wrong with those views—and how, to too large an extent, they serve their interests at the expense of the rest—we won’t be able to reformulate policies to ensure a more equitable, more efficient, more dynamic economy. Any

The economic elite have pushed for a framework that benefits them at the expense of the rest, but it is an economic system that is neither efficient nor fair. I explain how our inequality gets reflected in every important decision that we make as a nation—from our budget to our monetary policy, even to our system of justice—and show how these decisions themselves help perpetuate and exacerbate this inequality.13 Given

The comprehensive integrity level was calculated based on the results of surveys (by internal, external, and policy customers) after deducting the points for corruption cases, rebate, and not implementing the systems to exempt medical expenses

confidence in policy implementation; openness about the breakdown of hospitality expenses; and operation of integrity ombudsmen

When you have a cash cushion to fall back on, you can opt for higher deductibles (the amount you pay before the insurance kicks in) on your auto, homeowners, and other insurance policies. If you think of your insurance policies as safeguards against major catastrophes rather than something that covers smaller expenses, the savings can be huge.

Getting U.S. public debt on a sustainable path will require more sacrifice from the American public. Just to slow debt growth to the rate of GDP growth (or a steady debt-to-GDP ratio) from today through 2040, changes to current policy would have to be dramatic: cut entitlements by 10 percent or cut discretionary spending by 24 percent or increase tax revenue by 6 percent, or some combination of the three.27 Adjustments to actually lower the debt-to-GDP ratio would be even more painful. Ideally, the debt-reduction burden would be shared by all Americans. But one thing is certain—less generous entitlement programs and tax increases will need to be part of any balanced solution. PUBLIC OPINION: FOR A BALANCED BUDGET, BUT AGAINST SACRIFICES TO BALANCE THE BUDGET Changes in entitlement programs and tax increases, however, collide with an American public that largely wants neither. Almost as a rule, Americans support a balanced federal budget. But public opinion moves decisively in the other direction when Americans are asked about the specific actions necessary to balance the budget.28 Entitlement programs are broadly popular. Although most Americans understand that entitlements have a financing problem, they oppose making them less generous. When given the choice between preserving entitlements and reducing the deficit, Americans prefer the status quo. A solid majority, or 69 percent, would rather keep entitlements as they are and incur the debt consequences, whereas only 23 percent say the country should take steps to reduce the budget deficit that would include entitlement cuts.29 It is understandable that older Americans are more inclined than their younger counterparts to want to preserve entitlements. But even so, most Americans age eighteen to twenty-nine, who will foot the future debt interest bill, still favor entitlement preservation over debt reduction. Perspectives differ depending on party affiliation: Republicans are more likely than Democrats to favor making deficit reduction a priority. There may be a “tax more” option. Americans do appear to favor increasing taxes on the rich, though Democrats more so than Republicans.30 It is unclear, however, whether Americans would favor raising their own taxes to cover their entitlement expenses. This suggests a fundamental disconnect between the services Americans want and what they are willing to pay in taxes to fund them.

He rejected the policy of seeking a direct accommodation with the Nazis at the expense of the smaller states of Europe.

He rejected the policy of seeking a direct accommodation with the Nazis at the expense of the smaller states of Europe. The full extent of Nazi persecution was evidence, as he saw it, that there would never be any meaningful accommodation between Nazism and Parliamentary democracy. From the earliest successes of the Nazi movement, even before 1933, he expressed his repugnance of Nazi excesses, and he continued to do so after 1933, despite repeated German protests at his articles and speeches. Nothing could persuade him to accept the possibility of compromise with evil at the expense of others, or to abandon his faith in the rule of law, the supremacy of elected Parliaments and the rights of the individual.

India, in particular was a horror story about a ‘lost country’ that had failed miserably in the international struggle: ‘small capitalists’ from Britain had taken over an entire continent by training Indians to be soldiers; Indians enforced British policies at the expense of their own compatriots. China was in danger of repeating that experience because her people had developed no sense of a corporate interest or national solidarity- the basis of European power and prosperity. One reason for this was that the country’s neighbours were so vastly inferior that the Chinese people had felt themselves to be the whole world. The conceit, once shared by Liang himself, could no longer be maintained in an international system where China had to either recognize the reality of conflict and competition with other societies or sink. For, ‘In the world there is only power- there is no other force. That the strong always rule the weak is in truth the first great universal rule of nature. Hence, if we wish to attain liberty, there is no other road: we can only seek first to be strong.

Yet, at bottom it is all illusion—a charade. For expensive accouterments and conspicuous consumption are merely the epiphenomena of power…they are not insurance policies against oppression by other peoples, or against insidious diseases and self-destructive impulses. Unsupported by power—ownership of land, resources, production and distribution facilities, a brain trust, an army—a nation of individual consumers is doomed to continued subordination, exploitation and ultimate annihilation.

We Do Not Have a Trade Deficit. We have a capital surplus. ... Trade deficits are partly a question of consumer preference — American consumers really do like Hondas more than Japanese consumers like Buicks — but they are not mainly a question of consumer preference. They are mainly a question of investor preference — and investors prefer the United States, which is why there is almost twice as much foreign direct investment in the United States as in China, even though China’s economy has grown at a much faster rate over the past 20 years. ... Trade deficits don’t happen because the wily Japanese juke us on trade policy. They happen because intelligent people holding a fistful of dollars very often decide to forgo the consumption of American consumer goods in order to invest in American assets. In economics terms, what this means is that the trade deficit is a mirror image of the capital surplus. ... The trade deficit might remain unchanged, but there would be a large cost attached: Without that foreign investment capital flowing into the United States, money gets more expensive. That means entrepreneurs have a harder time raising capital. ... One of the problems, I suspect, is that people hear the word “deficit” and they think of the trade deficit as being like the budget deficit, i.e. a mounting debt that one day will have to be paid. It is something closer to the opposite: We get more stuff in return for the stuff we sell, and we get cheap investment capital on top of that. Foreigners get access to a dynamic economy with a stable government (miraculously stable, considering the jackasses in charge of it) and a stable currency. Everybody benefits.

Management of policy-making and planning processes across all areas of the Commission's activities, and organizational and personnel coordination ○Budget planning, management of income and expenses and accounting

Liberal Protestantism had exalted humanity at the expense of God,12 proclaiming an optimistic view of human religiosity and ethics. Yet despite its preoccupation with ethics, it was an ethical failure—something that became painfully evident to Barth in 1914 when all of his teachers and mentors endorsed the war policy of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

We are not panicking; we are not laying off people, but we are making a real effort to cut expenses. The other side of the coin is we have hired a large number of number one draft picks in the last few months. This is the time to hire good people. We have followed this policy in the past, and I am convinced that we will be proven correct once again.

This book is for anyone who wants to understand how the economy works and their role in it, anyone trying to make sense of the way monetary policy plays games with their bank account balance, anyone wondering why borrowing money is expensive and how a downturn could impact their home buying opportunities, anyone intimidated by the terrible terminology and dusty theories, and anyone who’s ever looked outside their window into the world beyond and said, “Hmm, what really is going on out there?

Into this situation, came the Reagan Administration’s bizarre collection of “free market” economic conundrums, called by their advocates, “Supply-Side” economics. The idea was thin cover for unleashing some of the highest rates of short-term personal profiteering in history, at the expense of the greater good of the country’s long-term economic health. While policies imposed after October 1982 to collect billions from Third World countries, brought a huge windfall of financial liquidity to the American banking system, the ideology of Wall Street, and Treasury Secretary Donald Regan‘s zeal for lifting the government “shackles” off financial markets, resulted in the greatest extravaganza in world financial history. When the dust settled by the end of that decade, some began to realize that Reagan’s “free market” had destroyed an entire national economy. It happened to be the world’s largest economy, and the base of world monetary stability as well. On the simple-minded and quite mistaken argument that a mere removing of the tax burden on the individual or company would allow them to release “stifled creative energies” and other entrepreneurial talents, President Ronald Reagan signed the largest tax reduction bill in postwar history in August 1981. The bill contained provisions which also gave generous tax relief for certain speculative forms of real estate investment, especially commercial real estate. Government restrictions on corporate takeovers were also removed, and Washington gave the clear signal that “anything goes,” so long as it stimulated the Dow Jones Industrials stock index.

Usually labeled “summary of significant accounting policies,” one key note describes how the company recognizes revenue, records inventories, treats installment or contract sales, expenses its marketing costs, and accounts for the other major aspects of its business.

We’ve looked at over a dozen policies and processes that most companies have but that we don’t have at Netflix. These include: Vacation Policies Decision-Making Approvals Expense Policies Performance Improvement Plans Approval Processes Raise Pools Key Performance Indicators Management by Objective Travel Policies Decision Making by Committee Contract Sign-Offs Salary Bands Pay Grades Pay-Per-Performance Bonuses These are all ways of controlling people rather than inspiring them.

Table of Contents Things About House For Rent Barrie Excitement About House For Rent Barrie The 15 Second Trick For House For Rent Barrie If you're looking to move into a home that's not going to be taken over by an estate agent, then you should seriously consider taking a house for rent to stay. There are many reasons why you might want to rent a home rather than staying in your own. Perhaps you've just bought a house and you're trying to find somewhere to stay before you move in. Maybe you're simply on holiday and need somewhere to stay until you're back at home. Things About House For Rent Barrie There are many things to think about when you are considering renting a house instead of buying one. Before you decide whether or not you want to rent a house, you will need to consider what you'll be doing in the house for the majority of your stay. Will you be living alone, with a friend or partner or as a couple? How long do you want to stay in the house to avoid being tempted to move away once your new home is complete? The main reason why you might want to rent a house instead of buying it is because you can save money in the process. You won't have to spend months paying rent, or put down a deposit, or arrange for an insurance policy or rental repayments to take care of everything in the event that you move out. With the economy currently, people don't like to have to spend money, but they also like to save money. If you live in Barrie, then this will be an ideal place to rent a house to live for most of the year. Although you may have to pay some sort of rent during the summer months, and during the colder months you may have to find some other way to pay the costs involved in staying there. Most people who rent a house often decide to move back into their own homes once the lease on the property is up. However, they often find that moving back in isn't as easy or comfortable as when they first moved into the home. So, they choose to take a house to rent to stay for a few months, until they're back in their own home. Renting a house is also a great way to get a place to work in London. Because London is so popular, there are many people working in various different places all across the city, and they are not all living in one place. A house to rent to stay in is a convenient option for many people, and it allows them to work from home. This way they will be able to continue to work, pay their bills and other expenses at home, but still have access to other activities throughout London. Excitement About House For Rent Barrie When you are thinking about taking a house to rent to live in, there are also a number of benefits for you. First, you won't have to put up with the expense of all the costs that go along with having a property to rent and buying a property. Even if you do want to buy a property you may be able to buy it cheaper. The other benefit to owning a home is that you'll be able to easily get a tax return back on the money you have saved by taking on a house to let in Barrie. Although not all landlords give out tax returns on the money you owe them, it is worth asking. The truth is that more people are choosing to rent out their homes to tenants, and this gives them an opportunity to help themselves to some of that money.

Emissions of carbon dioxide are largely by-products of productivity-- of industry, governments, and individuals producing things that we want more of (including heating, cooling, food, transport, hospital care, and so much more)..When countries promise to reduce their emissions, they are effectively promising to make all these things a touch more expensive. That acts as a slight brake on the economy, leading to a small reduction in growth… “This cost is the relevant social cost of climate policies-- the reduction in welfare that comes from each nation insisting on using energy that is slightly more costly and less reliable than fossil fuels.” -p. 112