“
What I didn’t say was: I know you too well. You live your life idealistically. You think it’s possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs—I called it integrity—but five years of watching you live this way has changed me. In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice.
”
”
Ling Ma (Severance)
“
I needed a vacation. I needed 5 women. I needed to get the wax out of my ears. My car needed an oil change. I'd failed to file my damned income tax. One of the stems had broken off of my reading glasses. There were ants in my apartment. I needed to get my teeth cleaned. My shoes were run down at the heels. I had insomnia. My auto insurance had expired. I cut myself every time i shaved. I hadn't laughed in 6 years. I tended to worry when there was nothing to worry about. And when there was something to worry about, i got drunk.
”
”
Charles Bukowski (Pulp: Charles Bukowski's Final Hardboiled Noir Comedy – Lady Death, Aliens, and the Absurd)
“
Our job-based health insurance system does the very thing we most want to avoid—it discourages businesses from hiring.
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Andrew Yang (The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future)
“
They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve. They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.
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Robert B. Reich
“
health, social life, job, house, partners, finances; leisure use, leisure amount; working time, education, income, children; food, water, shelter, clothing, sex, health care; mobility; physical safety, social safety, job security, savings account, insurance, disability protection, family leave, vacation; place tenure, a commons; access to wilderness, mountains, ocean; peace, political stability, political input, political satisfaction; air, water, esteem; status, recognition; home, community, neighbors, civil society, sports, the arts; longevity treatments, gender choice; the opportunity to become more what you are
that's all you need
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”
Kim Stanley Robinson (2312)
“
Let the workers in these plants get the same wages -- all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers -- yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders -- everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches! Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds. Why shouldn't they? They aren't running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren't sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren't hungry. The soldiers are! Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket -- that and nothing else. Maybe
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Smedley D. Butler (War Is A Racket!: And Other Essential Reading)
“
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look at thousands of working people displaced from their jobs with reduced incomes as a result of automation while the profits of the employers remain intact, and say: “This is not just.” It will look across the oceans and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing to prevent us from paying adequate wages to schoolteachers, social workers and other servants of the public to insure that we have the best available personnel in these positions which are charged with the responsibility of guiding our future generations. There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer. There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum—and livable—income for every American family. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from remolding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
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Martin Luther King Jr. (Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (King Legacy Book 2))
“
The system, in its irrationality, has been driven by profit to build steel skyscrapers for insurance companies while the cities decay, to spend billions for weapons of destruction and virtually nothing for children’s playgrounds, to give huge incomes to men who make dangerous or useless things, and very little to artists, musicians, writers, actors. Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.
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Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States)
“
Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can't help being one. You can't deny that. And it's best to be a rebel so as to show 'em it don't pay to try to do you down. Factories and labour exchanges and insurance offices keep us alive and kicking - so they say - but they're booby-traps and will suck you under like sinking-sands if you're not careful. Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax offices milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you're still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the army calls you up and you get shot to death. And if you're clever enough to stay out of the army you get bombed to death. Ay, by God, it's a hard life if you don't weaken, if you don't stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain't much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-eyed clocks to bits.
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”
Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning)
“
You can steal in this country, you can rape and murder, you can bribe public officials, you can pollute the morals of the young, you can burn your place of business down for the insurance money, you can do almost anything you want, and if you act with just a little caution and common sense you’ll never even be indicted. But if you don’t pay your income tax, Grofield, you will go to jail.
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Richard Stark (The Score (Parker, #5))
“
He had a penis one inch in diameter and seven and a half inches long. During the past year, he had averaged twenty-two orgasms per month. This was far above the national average. His income and the value of his life insurance policies at maturity were also far above average.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Breakfast of Champions)
“
THE SIX LAWS OF WEALTH The First Law of Wealth: Keep a part of all you earn. Save at least 10% of your income. The Second Law of Wealth: Put your savings to work for you. Invest it so that it will multiply. The Third Law of Wealth: Avoid debt. The poor pay interest, while the rich earn interest. The Fourth Law of Wealth: Don’t speculate in get-rich-quick schemes. Invest in solid businesses that you understand. The Fifth Law of Wealth: Invest in yourself. Gain knowledge and skills to increase your earning power. The Sixth Law of Wealth: Safeguard your growing fortune with diversification and insurance.
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Charles Conrad (The Richest Man in Babylon: Six Laws of Wealth)
“
You think it’s possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything,
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Ling Ma (Severance)
“
If a child, a spouse, a life partner, or a parent depends on you and your income, you need life insurance.
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Suze Orman
“
The earliest health insurance policies were designed primarily to compensate for income lost while workers were ill.
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Elisabeth Rosenthal (An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back)
“
if a bank failed to meet its quota for loans to low-income minorities, it ran a high risk of failing to earn a “satisfactory” CRA rating from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
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John Perazzo (Goverment versus The People)
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On, no. I hate those arty little places. I like dining in a hotel full of all sorts of people. Dining in a club means you’re surrounded by people who’re pretty much alike. Their membership in the club means they’re there because they are all interested in gold, or because they’re university graduates, or belong to the same political party or write, or paint, or have incomes of over fifty thousand a year, or something. I like ’em mixed up, higgledy-piggledy. A dining room full of gamblers, and insurance agents, and actors, and merchants, thieves, bootleggers, lawyers, kept ladies, wives, flaps, travelling men, millionaires — everything. That’s what I call dining out. Unless one is dining at a friend’s house, or course.” A rarely long speech for her.
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Edna Ferber (So Big)
“
The motivation for taking on debt is to buy assets or claims rising in price. Over the past half-century the aim of financial investment has been less to earn profits on tangible capital investment than to generate “capital” gains (most of which take the form of debt-leveraged land prices, not industrial capital). Annual price gains for property, stocks and bonds far outstrip the reported real estate rents, corporate profits and disposable personal income after paying for essential non-discretionary spending, headed by FIRE [Finance, Insurance, Real Estate]-sector charges.
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Michael Hudson (The Bubble and Beyond)
“
Contemporary American politics also revolve around this contradiction. Democrats want a more equitable society, even if it means raising taxes to fund programmes to help the poor, elderly and infirm. But that infringes on the freedom of individuals to spend their money as they wish. Why should the government force me to buy health insurance if I prefer using the money to put my kids through college? Republicans, on the other hand, want to maximise individual freedom, even if it means that the income gap between rich and poor will grow wider and that many Americans will not be able to afford health care.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
1. Start thy purse to fattening 2. Control thy expenditures 3. Make thy gold multiply 4. Guard thy treasures from loss 5. Make of thy dwelling a profitable investment 6. Insure a future income 7. Increase thy ability to earn
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George S. Clason (The Richest Man in Babylon)
“
In fact, they are not taught in any university departments: the dynamics of debt, and how the pattern of bank lending inflates land prices, or national income accounting and the rising share absorbed by rent extraction in the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector. There was only one way to learn how to analyze these topics: to work for banks. Back in the 1960s there was barely a hint that these trends would become a great financial bubble.
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Michael Hudson (Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy)
“
What I didn't say was: I know you too well. You live your life idealistically. You think it's possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs-- I called it integrity-- but five years of watching you live this way has changed me. In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice.
”
”
Ling Ma (Severance)
“
The system, in its irrationality, has been driven by profit to build steel skyscrapers for insurance companies while the cities decay, to spend billions for weapons of destruction and virtually nothing for children’s playgrounds , to give huge incomes to men who make dangerous or useless things, and very little to artists, musicians, writers, actors. Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes.
”
”
Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present)
“
Children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines. These medications often are used to make abused and neglected children more tractable. In 2008 19,045 children age five and under were prescribed antipsychotics through Medicaid.
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
“
Another example is the modern political order. Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction. Anyone who has read a novel by Charles Dickens knows that the liberal regimes of nineteenth-century Europe gave priority to individual freedom even if it meant throwing insolvent poor families in prison and giving orphans little choice but to join schools for pickpockets. Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism’s egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of daily life. Contemporary American politics also revolve around this contradiction. Democrats want a more equitable society, even if it means raising taxes to fund programmes to help the poor, elderly and infirm. But that infringes on the freedom of individuals to spend their money as they wish. Why should the government force me to buy health insurance if I prefer using the money to put my kids through college? Republicans, on the other hand, want to maximise individual freedom, even if it means that the income gap between rich and poor will grow wider and that many Americans will not be able to afford health care. Just as medieval culture did not manage to square chivalry with Christianity, so the modern world fails to square liberty with equality. But this is no defect. Such contradictions are an inseparable part of every human culture. In fact, they are culture’s engines, responsible for the creativity and dynamism of our species. Just
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
Gross rental income (including utilities fee) – Mortgage payment (including principal, interest, taxes, and insurance) – Cost of utilities – Vacancy allowance (10 percent of gross rents) – Maintenance and CapEx (estimated at 1 percent of the property’s value, divided by 12 for monthly cost) – Property management (10 percent of gross rents) Cash flow
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Scott Trench (First-Time Home Buyer: The Complete Playbook to Avoiding Rookie Mistakes)
“
The painful fact that the poor end up paying more than the rich for many goods and services has a very simple and systemic explanation. It generally costs more to provide goods and services in low-income neighborhoods. For example, insurance and security costs are often higher in poor neighborhoods due to high crime and vandalism rates. This is a factor frequently forgotten by those who look to personal intentions for an explanation for this phenomenon. For example, a shopping center within a populous neighborhood of a midtown city spent 15 percent more on security guards and night lighting than a shopping complex within a residential area of the same city. All these costs are passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
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Thomas Sowell (Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy)
“
The historian Stephanie Coontz, a debunker of 1950s nostalgia, puts some numbers to the depictions: A full 25 percent of Americans, 40 to 50 million people, were poor in the mid-1950s, and in the absence of food stamps and housing programs, this poverty was searing. Even at the end of the 1950s, a third of American children were poor. Sixty percent of Americans over sixty-five had incomes below $ 1,000 in 1958, considerably below the $ 3,000 to $ 10,000 level considered to represent middle-class status. A majority of elders also lacked medical insurance. Only half the population had savings in 1959; one-quarter of the population had no liquid assets at all. Even when we consider only native-born, white families, one-third could not get by on the income of the household head. 45
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Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
“
Here’s the bottom line: The most recent data compiling spending on social insurance, means-tested programs, tax benefits, and financial aid for higher education show that the average household in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution receives roughly $25,733 in government benefits a year, while the average household in the top 20 percent receives about $35,363.[36] Every year, the richest American families receive almost 40 percent more in government subsidies than the poorest American families.
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”
Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
“
• Auto and Homeowner Insurance—Choose higher deductibles in order to save on premiums. With high liability limits, these are the best buys in the insurance world. • Life Insurance—Purchase twenty-year level term insurance equal to about ten times your income. Term insurance is cheap and the only way to go; never use life insurance as a place to save money. • Long-Term Disability—If you are thirty-two years old, you are twelve times more likely to become disabled than to die by age sixty-five. The best place to buy disability insurance is through work at a fraction of the cost. You can usually get coverage that equals from 50 to 70 percent of your income. • Health Insurance—The number one cause of bankruptcy today is medical bills; number two is credit cards. One way to control costs is to look for large deductibles to lower your premium. The HSA (Health Savings Account) is a great way to save on premiums. The high deductible creates a much lower premium, and this plan allows you to save for medical expenses in a tax-free savings account.
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Dave Ramsey (The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness)
“
I needed a vacation. I needed 5 women. I needed to get the wax out of my ears. My car needed an oil change. I’d failed to file my damned income tax. One of the stems had broken off of my reading glasses. There were ants in my apartment. I needed to get my teeth cleaned. My shoes were run down at the heels. I had insomnia. My auto insurance had expired. I cut myself every time I shaved. I hadn’t laughed in 6 years. I tended to worry when there was nothing to worry about. And when there was something to worry about, I got drunk.
”
”
Charles Bukowski (Charles Bukowski Fiction Collection: Five Gritty, Unvarnished Classics from Bukowski’s Underground Canon — A Raw Tour of Loneliness, Humor, and Hard-Lived Truths)
“
The biggest problem that we now collectively face is that for many people, companies, nonprofit organizations, and governments, their incomes are low in relation to their expenses, and their debts and other liabilities (such as those for pensions, healthcare, and insurance) are very large relative to the value of their assets. It may not seem that way—in fact, it often seems the opposite—because there are many people, companies, nonprofit organizations, and governments that look rich even while they are in the process of going broke.
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Ray Dalio (Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail)
“
Henceforth, federal, state, and local governments shall make no law nor establish any program that transfers general tax revenues to some citizens and not to others, whether those transfers consist of money or in-kind benefits. All programs currently providing such benefits are to be terminated. The funds formerly allocated to them are to be used instead to provide every citizen with a Universal Basic Income beginning at age twenty-one and continuing until death. The maximum annual value of the grant at the program’s outset is to be $13,000, of which $3,000 must be devoted to catastrophic health insurance.
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Charles Murray (In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State)
“
In her book The Government-Citizen Disconnect, the political scientist Suzanne Mettler reports that 96 percent of American adults have relied on a major government program at some point in their lives. Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans' generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes. In 2022, this benefit is estimated to have cost the government $316 billion for those under sixty-five. By 2032, its price tag is projected to exceed $6oo billion. Almost half of all Americans receive government-subsidized health benefits through their employers, and over a third are enrolled in government-subsidized retirement benefits. These participation rates, driven primarily by rich and middle-class Americans, far exceed those of even the largest programs directed at low income families, such as food stamps (14 percent of Americans) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (19 percent).
Altogether, the United States spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks in 2021. That amount exceeded total spending on law enforcement, education, housing, healthcare, diplomacy, and everything else that makes up our discretionary budget. Roughly half the benefits of the thirteen largest individual tax breaks accrue to the richest families, those with incomes that put them in the top 20 percent. The top I percent of income earners take home more than all middle-class families and double that of families in the bottom 20 percent. I can't tell you how many times someone has informed me that we should reduce military spending and redirect the savings to the poor. When this suggestion is made in a public venue, it always garners applause. I've met far fewer people who have suggested we boost aid to the poor by reducing tax breaks that mostly benefit the upper class, even though we spend over twice as much on them as on the military and national defense.
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”
Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
“
Friedrich Hayek, who has become an iconic figure among today’s conservatives, was a strong proponent of the idea. In his three-volume work Law, Legislation and Liberty, published between 1973 and 1979, Hayek suggested that a guaranteed income would be a legitimate government policy designed to provide insurance against adversity, and that the need for this type of safety net is the direct result of the transition to a more open and mobile society where many individuals can no longer rely on traditional support systems: There is, however, yet another class of common risks with regard to which the need for government action has until recently not been generally admitted. . . .
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”
Martin Ford (Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future)
“
What I didn’t say was: I know you too well. You live your life idealistically. You think it’s possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs—I called it integrity—but five years of watching you live this way has changed me. In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice.
”
”
Ling Ma (Severance)
“
The results of that mistake are everywhere. In 1950, the median home price was 2.2 times the average annual income; by 2020, it was 6 times the average annual income.5 Between 1999 and 2023, the average premium for employer-based family health insurance rose from $5,791 to $23,968—an increase of more than 300 percent—and the worker contribution to that premium more than quadrupled.6 In 1970, the average annual cost of tuition and fees was $394 at public colleges and $1,706 at private colleges. In 2023, it was $11,310 at public colleges for in-state students and $41,740 at private colleges.7 Child care for an infant and a four-year-old costs, on average, $36,008 in Massachusetts, $28,420 in California, and $28,338 in Minnesota.
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Ezra Klein (Abundance)
“
Consider almost any public issue. Today’s Democratic Party and its legislators, with a few notable individual exceptions, is well to the right of counterparts from the New Deal and Great Society eras. In the time of Lyndon Johnson, the average Democrat in Congress was for single-payer national health insurance. In 1971, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, for universal, public, tax-supported, high-quality day care and prekindergarten. Nixon vetoed the bill in 1972, but even Nixon was for a guaranteed annual income, and his version of health reform, “play or pay,” in which employers would have to provide good health insurance or pay a tax to purchase it, was well to the left of either Bill or Hillary Clinton’s version, or Barack Obama’s. The Medicare and Medicaid laws of 1965 were not byzantine mash-ups of public and private like Obamacare. They were public. Infrastructure investments were also public. There was no bipartisan drive for either privatization or deregulation. The late 1960s and early 1970s (with Nixon in the White House!) were the heyday of landmark health, safety, environmental, and financial regulation. To name just three out of several dozen, Nixon signed the 1970 Clean Air Act, the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the 1973 Consumer Product Safety Act. Why did Democrats move toward the center and Republicans to the far right? Several things occurred. Money became more important in politics. The Democratic Leadership Council, formed by business-friendly and Southern Democrats after Walter Mondale’s epic 1984 defeat, believed that in order to be more competitive electorally, Democrats had to be more centrist on both economic and social issues.
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”
Robert Kuttner (Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?)
“
Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans’ generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes.
”
”
Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
“
During the year we interviewed him, Dr. South spent more than $70,000 for his most recent motor vehicle purchase, related sales tax, and insurance. Yet for the same period, how much did he place in his pension plan? About $5,700! In other words, only about $1 in every $125 of his income was set aside for retirement. The amount of time Dr. South took to find the best deal on his car was also counterproductive. We estimated that it took him more than sixty hours to study, negotiate, and purchase his Porsche. How much time and effort does it take someone to place money in a pension plan? A small fraction of this time and energy. It is easy for Dr. South to say he wants to accumulate wealth, but his actions speak much louder than his words. Perhaps that explains why he has lost a considerable amount of wealth through imprudent investing. Investing when one has little or no intellectual basis for one’s decisions often translates into major losses. T
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”
Thomas J. Stanley (The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy)
“
George Romney’s private-sector experience typified the business world of his time. His executive career took place within a single company, American Motors Corporation, where his success rested on the dogged (and prescient) pursuit of more fuel-efficient cars.41 Rooted in a particular locale, the industrial Midwest, AMC was built on a philosophy of civic engagement. Romney dismissed the “rugged individualism” touted by conservatives as “nothing but a political banner to cover up greed.”42 Nor was this dismissal just cheap talk: He once returned a substantial bonus that he regarded as excessive.43 Prosperity was not an individual product, in Romney’s view; it was generated through bargaining and compromises among stakeholders (managers, workers, public officials, and the local community) as well as through individual initiative. When George Romney turned to politics, he carried this understanding with him. Romney exemplified the moderate perspective characteristic of many high-profile Republicans of his day. He stressed the importance of private initiative and decentralized governance, and worried about the power of unions. Yet he also believed that government had a vital role to play in securing prosperity for all. He once famously called UAW head Walter Reuther “the most dangerous man in Detroit,” but then, characteristically, developed a good working relationship with him.44 Elected governor in 1962 after working to update Michigan’s constitution, he broke with conservatives in his own party and worked across party lines to raise the minimum wage, enact an income tax, double state education expenditures during his first five years in office, and introduce more generous programs for the poor and unemployed.45 He signed into law a bill giving teachers collective bargaining rights.46 At a time when conservatives were turning to the antigovernment individualism of Barry Goldwater, Romney called on the GOP to make the insurance of equal opportunity a top priority. As
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Jacob S. Hacker (American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper)
“
But voters who quite liked the new system gave Democrats such a strong majority in Congress that Johnson and the Democrats were able to pass eighty-four new laws to put the Great Society into place. They cemented civil rights with the 1965 Voting Rights Act protecting minority voting, created jobs in Appalachia, and established job-training and community-development programs. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 gave federal aid to public schools and established the Head Start program to provide comprehensive early education for low-income children. The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal investment in universities and provided scholarships and low-interest loans to students. The Social Security Amendments of 1965 created Medicare, which provided health insurance for Americans over age sixty-five, and Medicaid, which helped cover health care costs for those with limited incomes. Congress advanced the war on poverty by increasing welfare payments and subsidizing rent for low-income families.
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Heather Cox Richardson (Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America)
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What is a “pyramid?” I grew up in real estate my entire life. My father built one of the largest real estate brokerage companies on the East Coast in the 1970s, before selling it to Merrill Lynch. When my brother and I graduated from college, we both joined him in building a new real estate company. I went into sales and into opening a few offices, while my older brother went into management of the company. In sales, I was able to create a six-figure income. I worked 60+ hours a week in such pursuit. My brother worked hard too, but not in the same fashion. He focused on opening offices and recruiting others to become agents to sell houses for him. My brother never listed and sold a single house in his career, yet he out-earned me 10-to-1. He made millions because he earned a cut of every commission from all the houses his 1,000+ agents sold. He worked smarter, while I worked harder. I guess he was at the top of the “pyramid.” Is this legal? Should he be allowed to earn more than any of the agents who worked so hard selling homes? I imagine everyone will agree that being a real estate broker is totally legal. Those who are smart, willing to take the financial risk of overhead, and up for the challenge of recruiting good agents, are the ones who get to live a life benefitting from leveraged Income. So how is Network Marketing any different? I submit to you that I found it to be a step better. One day, a friend shared with me how he was earning the same income I was, but that he was doing so from home without the overhead, employees, insurance, stress, and being subject to market conditions. He was doing so in a network marketing business. At first I refuted him by denouncements that he was in a pyramid scheme. He asked me to explain why. I shared that he was earning money off the backs of others he recruited into his downline, not from his own efforts. He replied, “Do you mean like your family earns money off the backs of the real estate agents in your company?” I froze, and anyone who knows me knows how quick-witted I normally am. Then he said, “Who is working smarter, you or your dad and brother?” Now I was mad. Not at him, but at myself. That was my light bulb moment. I had been closed-minded and it was costing me. That was the birth of my enlightenment, and I began to enter and study this network marketing profession. Let me explain why I found it to be a step better. My research led me to learn why this business model made so much sense for a company that wanted a cost-effective way to bring a product to market. Instead of spending millions in traditional media ad buys, which has a declining effectiveness, companies are opting to employ the network marketing model. In doing so, the company only incurs marketing cost if and when a sale is made. They get an army of word-of-mouth salespeople using the most effective way of influencing buying decisions, who only get paid for performance. No salaries, only commissions. But what is also employed is a high sense of motivation, wherein these salespeople can be building a business of their own and not just be salespeople. If they choose to recruit others and teach them how to sell the product or service, they can earn override income just like the broker in a real estate company does. So now they see life through a different lens, as a business owner waking up each day excited about the future they are building for themselves. They are not salespeople; they are business owners.
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Brian Carruthers (Building an Empire:The Most Complete Blueprint to Building a Massive Network Marketing Business)
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The Libertarian Party platform on which Koch ran in 1980 was unambiguous. It included the following: • We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs. • We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services. . . . • We favor the repeal of the . . . Social Security system. . . . • We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes. • We support the eventual repeal of all taxation. • As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately. • We support repeal of all . . . minimum wage laws. . . . • Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended. . . . • We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency. . . . • We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system. . . . • We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration. . . . • We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and “aid to the poor” programs.44 The list went on from there, including ending government oversight of abusive banking practices by ending all usury laws; privatizing our airports, the FAA, Amtrak, and all of our rivers; and shutting down the Post Office.
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Thom Hartmann (The Hidden History of the War on Voting: Who Stole Your Vote—and How To Get It Back)
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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.
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Hernando de Soto (The Mystery Of Capital)
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In March 2002, the National Academy of Sciences, a private, nonprofit society of scholars, released a high-profile report documenting the unequivocal existence of racial bias in medical care, which many thought would mark a real turning point. Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care was so brutal and damning that it would seem impossible to turn away. The report, authored by a committee of mostly white medical educators, nurses, behavioral scientists, economists, health lawyers, sociologists, and policy experts, took an exhaustive plunge into more than 480 previous studies. Because of the knee-jerk tendency to assume that health disparities were the end result of differences in class, not race, they were careful to compare subjects with similar income and insurance coverage. The report found rampant, widespread racial bias, including that people of color were less likely to be given appropriate heart medications or to undergo bypass surgery or receive kidney dialysis or transplants. Several studies revealed significant racial differences in who receives appropriate cancer diagnostic tests and treatments, and people of color were also less likely to receive the most sophisticated treatments for HIV/AIDS. These inequities, the report concluded, contribute to higher death rates overall for Black people and other people of color and lower survival rates compared with whites suffering from comparable illnesses of similar severity.
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Linda Villarosa (Under the Skin)
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Since governments have the ability to both make and borrow money, why couldn’t the central bank lend money at an interest rate of about 0 percent to the central government to distribute as it likes to support the economy? Couldn’t it also lend to others at low rates and allow those debtors to never pay it back? Normally debtors have to pay back the original amount borrowed (principal) plus interest in installments over a period of time. But the central bank has the power to set the interest rate at 0 percent and keep rolling over the debt so that the debtor never has to pay it back. That would be the equivalent of giving the debtors the money, but it wouldn’t look that way because the debt would still be accounted for as an asset that the central bank owns, so the central bank could still say it is performing its normal lending functions. This is the exact thing that happened in the wake of the economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many versions of this have happened many times in history. Who pays? It is bad for those outside the central bank who still hold the debts as assets—cash and bonds—who won’t get returns that would preserve their purchasing power. The biggest problem that we now collectively face is that for many people, companies, nonprofit organizations, and governments, their incomes are low in relation to their expenses, and their debts and other liabilities (such as those for pensions, healthcare, and insurance) are very large relative to the value of their assets.
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Ray Dalio (Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail)
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If you are stuck in circumstances in which it takes Herculean efforts to get through the day— doing low-income work, obeying an authoritarian boss, buying clothes for the children, dealing with school issues, paying the rent or mortgage, fixing the car, negotiating with a spouse, paying taxes, and caring for older parents— it is not easy to pay close attention to larger political issues. Indeed you may wish that these issues would take care of themselves. It is not a huge jump from such a wish to become attracted to a public philosophy, spouted regularly at your job and on the media, that economic life would regulate itself automatically if only the state did not repeatedly intervene in it in clumsy ways. Now underfunded practices such as the license bureau, state welfare, public health insurance, public schools, public retirement plans, and the like begin to appear as awkward, bureaucratic organizations that could be replaced or eliminated if only the rational market were allowed to take care of things impersonally and quietly, as it were. Certainly such bureaucracies are indeed often clumsy. But more people are now attracted to compare that clumsiness to the myth of how an impersonal market would perform if it took on even more assignments and if state regulation of it were reduced even further. So a lot of “independents” and “moderates” may become predisposed to the myth of the rational market in part because the pressures of daily life encourage them to seek comfort in ideological formations that promise automatic rationality.
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William E. Connolly (The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism)
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If you're involved in a motorcycle accident, this can result in devastating injuries, permanent disability or perhaps put you on on-going dependency on healthcare care. In that case, it's prudent to make use of Los Angeles motorcycle accident attorneys to assist safeguard your legal rights if you are a victim of a motorcycle accident.
How a san diego car accident attorney Aids
An experienced attorney will help you, if you're an injured motorcycle rider or your family members in case of a fatal motorcycle accident. Hence, a motorcycle accident attorney assists you secure complete and commensurate compensation because of this of accident damages. In the event you go it alone, an insurance coverage company may possibly take benefit and that's why you'll need to have a legal ally by your side till the case is settled to your satisfaction.
If well represented after a motorcycle collision, you may get compensation for:
Present and future lost income: If just after motor cycle injury you cannot perform and earn as just before, you deserve compensation for lost income. This also applies for a loved ones that has a lost a bread-winner following a fatal motorcycle crash.
Existing and future healthcare costs, rehabilitation and therapy: these consist of any health-related fees incurred because of this of the accident.
Loss of capability to take pleasure in life, pain and mental anguish: a motorcycle crash can lessen your good quality of life if you cannot stroll, run, see, hear, drive, or ride any longer. That is why specialists in motor cycle injury law practice will help with correct evaluation of your predicament and exercise a commensurate compensation.
As a result, usually do not hesitate to speak to Los Angeles motorcycle accident attorneys in case you are involved in a motor cycle accident. The professionals will help you file a case within a timely fashion also as expedite evaluation and compensation. This could also work in your favor if all parties involved agree to an out-of-court settlement, in which case you incur fewer costs.
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Securing Legal Assist in a Motorcycle Accident
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Over the next few years, the number of African Americans seeking jobs and homes in and near Palo Alto grew, but no developer who depended on federal government loan insurance would sell to them, and no California state-licensed real estate agent would show them houses. But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family.
Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a 'Negro invasion' was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines-"Colored Buyers!"-which they ran in San Francisco newspapers. African Americans desperate for housing, purchased the homes at inflated prices. Within a three-month period, one agent alone sold sixty previously white-owned properties to African Americans. The California real estate commissioner refused to take any action, asserting that while regulations prohibited licensed agents from engaging in 'unethical practices,' the exploitation of racial fear was not within the real estate commission's jurisdiction. Although the local real estate board would ordinarily 'blackball' any agent who sold to a nonwhite buyer in the city's white neighborhoods (thereby denying the agent access to the multiple listing service upon which his or her business depended), once wholesale blockbusting began, the board was unconcerned, even supportive.
At the time, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration not only refused to insure mortgages for African Americans in designated white neighborhoods like Ladera; they also would not insure mortgages for whites in a neighborhood where African Americans were present. So once East Palo Alto was integrated, whites wanting to move into the area could no longer obtain government-insured mortgages. State-regulated insurance companies, like the Equitable Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, also declared that their policy was not to issue mortgages to whites in integrated neighborhoods. State insurance regulators had no objection to this stance. The Bank of America and other leading California banks had similar policies, also with the consent of federal banking regulators.
Within six years the population of East Palo Alto was 82 percent black. Conditions deteriorated as African Americans who had been excluded from other neighborhoods doubled up in single-family homes. Their East Palo Alto houses had been priced so much higher than similar properties for whites that the owners had difficulty making payments without additional rental income. Federal and state hosing policy had created a slum in East Palo Alto.
With the increased density of the area, the school district could no longer accommodate all Palo Alto students, so in 1958 it proposed to create a second high school to accommodate teh expanding student population. The district decided to construct the new school in the heart of what had become the East Palo Alto ghetto, so black students in Palo Alto's existing integrated building would have to withdraw, creating a segregated African American school in the eastern section and a white one to the west. the board ignored pleas of African American and liberal white activists that it draw an east-west school boundary to establish two integrated secondary schools.
In ways like these, federal, state, and local governments purposely created segregation in every metropolitan area of the nation.
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Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
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Unlike the house you live in, practically every expense attached to your rental property counts as a deductible business expense for tax purposes. Expenses to deduct include: • Mortgage interest • Property taxes • Insurance • Homeowners association dues • Advertising (to fill a vacancy) • Utilities • Repairs and maintenance • Pest control • Landscaping • Trash pickup • Depreciation What doesn’t count as an expense? Any major repairs or renovations you perform count as capital expenditures that get added to the cost basis of the property, effectively reducing your taxable income when you eventually sell.
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Michele Cagan (Real Estate Investing 101: From Finding Properties and Securing Mortgage Terms to REITs and Flipping Houses, an Essential Primer on How to Make Money with Real Estate (Adams 101 Series))
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Jobs that used to come with some guarantees, even union membership, have been transformed into gigs. Temp workers are not just found driving Ubers; they are in hospitals and universities and insurance companies. The manufacturing sector—still widely mistaken as the fount of good, sturdy, hard-hat jobs—now employs more than a million temp workers. Long-term employment has declined steadily in the private sector, particularly for men, and temp jobs are expected to grow faster than all others over the next several years. Income volatility, the extent to which paychecks grow or shrink over short periods of time, has doubled since 1970. For scores of American workers, wages are now wobbly, fluctuating wildly not only year to year but month to month, even week to week.
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Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
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Operating Expenses Operating expenses are the costs required to keep the business going from day to day. They include salaries, benefits, and insurance costs, among a host of other items. Operating expenses are listed on the income statement and are subtracted from revenue to determine profit.
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Karen Berman (Financial Intelligence: A Manager's Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean)
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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.
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Mariusz Skonieczny (The Basics of Understanding Financial Statements: Learn how to read financial statements by understanding the balance sheet, the income statement, and the cash flow statement)
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What American Healthcare Can Learn from Italy: Three Lessons It’s easy. First, learn to live like Italians. Eat their famous Mediterranean diet, drink alcohol regularly but in moderation, use feet instead of cars, stop packing pistols and dropping drugs. Second, flatten out the class structure. Shrink the gap between high and low incomes, raise pensions and minimum wages to subsistence level, fix the tax structure to favor the ninety-nine percent. And why not redistribute lifestyle too? Give working stiffs the same freedom to have kids (maternity leave), convalesce (sick leave), and relax (proper vacations) as the rich. Finally, give everybody access to health care. Not just insurance, but actual doctors, medications, and hospitals. As I write, the future of the Affordable Care Act is uncertain, but surely the country will not fall into the abyss that came before. Once they’ve had a taste of what it’s like not to be one heart attack away from bankruptcy, Americans won’t turn back the clock. Even what is lately being called Medicare for All, considered to be on the fringe left a decade ago and slammed as “socialized medicine,” is now supported by a majority of Americans, according to some polls. In practice, there’s little hope for Italian lessons one and two—the United States is making only baby steps toward improving its lifestyle, and its income inequality is worse every year. But the third lesson is more feasible. Like Italy, we can provide universal access to treatment and medications with minimal point-of-service payments and with prices kept down by government negotiation. Financial arrangements could be single-payer like Medicare or use private insurance companies as intermediaries like Switzerland, without copying the full Italian model of doctors on government salaries. Despite the death by a thousand cuts currently being inflicted on the Affordable Care Act, I am convinced that Americans will no longer stand for leaving vast numbers of the population uninsured, or denying medical coverage to people whose only sin is to be sick. The health care genie can’t be put back in the bottle.
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Susan Levenstein (Dottoressa: An American Doctor in Rome)
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Your mortgage, property tax, and insurance (called PITI) should not exceed 25% of your gross (pre-tax) monthly income.
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Suze Orman (The Money Class: Learn to Create Your New American Dream)
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The Financologist is a blog that focuses on topics about personal and business finance. Here you'll find plenty of information to help you make better financial decisions and improve your financial well-being.
Whether it be budgeting, financial planning, insurance, we have answers for you. For those in a higher income level, financing your retirement using life insurance can be a terrific strategy for tax-free income at retirement. Contact us to see if you qualify.
Phone: (888) 306-8895
Business email: mss@thefinancologist.com
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The Financologist
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Half a million children in the United States currently take antipsychotic drugs. Children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines.
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
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Commercial property insurance protects your assets in the event that they are stolen, damaged, or destroyed in a fire or natural disaster. We’ll partner with you to design insurance coverage that will protect your company’s property. It’s worth exploring the options available to you with a business property insurance policy, as they may cover risks you hadn’t thought of. For example, some policies protect against the additional costs you face if rebuilding a damaged business facility means no longer being exempt from local building codes. Other points to check include whether a policy covers the cost of removing debris before reconstruction begins, as well as whether the business property is covered against weather event damage while being rebuilt.
Commercial property insurance is a great way to ensure that your business’ location and assets, as well as your income, are protected. Have questions? We’re happy to help!
Write By- "JMW Insurance Solution
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JMW Insurance Solution
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The losers, according to the Times: “People Buying Health Insurance,” “Individual Taxpayers in the Future,” “The Elderly,” “Low-Income Families,” and people in high-income, highly taxed states like California and New York. “In the long run, most Americans will see no tax cut or a tax hike,” the Washington Post wrote in its own analysis.38 The final loser was the US Treasury, and government itself: by the end of the fiscal year in which the bill went into effect, the deficit had grown to $779 billion.39
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Andrea Bernstein (American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power)
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It is certainly true that one cause of segregation today is the inability of many African Americans to afford to live in middle class communities. But segregation itself has had a high cost for African Americans, exacerbating their inability to save to purchase suburban homes. Income differences are only a superficial way to understand why we remain segregated. Racial policy, in which government was inextricably involved, created income disparities that insure residential segregation continuing to this day.
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Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
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list of documents that may be required. It can look intimidating, especially if you’ve not been actively involved in your family finances, but don’t panic. If you can’t find all of them or don’t have access, there is a later step in the divorce process called “discovery,” when you can legally compel the other side to provide copies of anything else you need: •Individual income tax returns (federal, state, local) for past three years •Business income tax returns (federal, state, local) for past three years •Proof of your current income (paystubs, statements, or paid invoices) •Proof of spouse’s income (paystubs, statements, or paid invoices) •Checking, savings, and certificate statements (personal and business) for past three years •Credit card and loan statements (personal and business) for past three years •Investment, pension plan, and retirement account statements for past three years •Mortgage statement and loan documents for all properties you have an interest in •Real estate appraisals •Property tax documents •Employment contracts •Benefit statements •Social Security statements •Life, homeowner’s, and auto insurance policies •Wills and trust agreements •Health insurance cards •Vehicle titles and/or registration •Monthly budget worksheet •List of personal property (furnishings, jewelry, electronics, artwork) •List of property acquired by gift or inheritance or owned prior to marriage •Prenuptial agreements •Marriage license •Prior court orders directing payment of child support or spousal support Your attorney or financial advisor may ask for additional documents specific to your case. Some of these may not be applicable to you.
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Debra Doak (High-Conflict Divorce for Women: Your Guide to Coping Skills and Legal Strategies for All Stages of Divorce)
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as numerous individual colored folders, one for each of the following categories: • Insurance info • Mortgage info • Purchase docs • Monthly income statements • Bank statements • Tenant interactions • Rehab and maintenance • Tenant files • Receipts • Miscellaneous paperwork This way, each property will have one overarching folder file, as well as several color-coded folders for easy retrieval of information. Need insurance docs for 123 Main Street? Oh, that’s in the 123 Main Street file, red folder.
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Brandon Turner (The Book on Managing Rental Properties: Find, Screen, and Manage Tenants With Fewer Headaches and Maximum Profits)
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Gather six to 12 months of checking, savings, and credit card statements, and break your income and expenses down into categories and then line items. I have suggested some here, but add your own as needed. Check to see if your bank or credit card company provides reporting that categorizes charges or lets you assign categories—your work may already be almost done for you: •Income—paychecks, interest, dividends, rents, royalties, business income, pension, social security, child support, spousal support •Housing—mortgage/rent, property taxes, HOA dues, insurance •Utilities—gas, electric, propane, phone, TV/Internet, trash, water/sewer •Food—groceries, dining out •Auto—car payments, gasoline, repairs, insurance •Medical—health insurance, doctor/dentist visits, prescriptions, physical therapy •Entertainment—travel, concerts/shows, sports •Clothing—personal purchases, dry cleaning, uniforms •Personal care—hair/nails, gym/yoga, vitamins/supplements •Miscellaneous—gifts, pets, donations •Children—education, activities, school lunches, childcare You can use a spreadsheet or pen and paper to take note of income and expenses as you go through statements, then calculate a monthly average for each item.
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Debra Doak (High-Conflict Divorce for Women: Your Guide to Coping Skills and Legal Strategies for All Stages of Divorce)
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Disability insurance provides a portion of your income if you can't work because of an illness or non-job-related injury. To me, being over 50 doesn't lessen the need for it. On the contrary, it may increase it. Many people in their fifties are in their peak earning years and building their retirement nest egg. An extended disability at this time of life could completely derail their financial future.
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Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz (The Charles Schwab Guide to Finances After Fifty: Answers to Your Most Important Money Questions)
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Only a quarter of families who qualify for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families apply for it. Less than half (48 percent) of elderly Americans who qualify for food stamps sign up to receive them. One in five parents eligible for government health insurance (in the form of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program) do not enroll, just as one in five workers who qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit do not claim it.
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Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
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Consider the amount of money left on the table by low-income workers who don’t apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit. Roughly 7 million people who could receive the credit don’t claim it, collectively passing up $17.3 billion annually. Combine that with the amount of money unclaimed each year by people who deny themselves food stamps ($13.4 billion), government health insurance ($62.2 billion), unemployment insurance when between jobs ($9.9 billion), and Supplemental Security Income ($38.9 billion), and you are already up to nearly $142 billion in unused aid.[19]
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Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
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The Importance of an Accountant for Medical Professionals
Medical professionals, including doctors, specialists, and surgeons, often face the challenge of managing both patient care and the financial aspects of their practices. An accountant who specializes in working with medical professionals can alleviate much of this burden. By offering financial expertise tailored to the healthcare industry, accountants help medical professionals maintain the financial health of their practices while ensuring compliance with tax laws and regulations.
Unique Financial Challenges in Healthcare
Medical professionals face distinct financial challenges that other industries may not encounter. These include managing patient billing, insurance reimbursements, and government payments. Additionally, healthcare professionals often have to handle large expenses for medical equipment and office operations while ensuring they maintain a steady cash flow. With fluctuating income and the need to comply with healthcare regulations, financial management can become complex. A specialized accountant for medical professionals understands these nuances and provides essential support to navigate these challenges effectively.
Key Roles of an Accountant for Medical Professionals
An accountant plays a critical role in managing the financial side of a medical practice. They assist with bookkeeping, ensuring that all financial records are accurate and up-to-date. Furthermore, they handle tax planning and filing, making sure that healthcare-specific deductions are maximized while ensuring compliance with tax laws. Additionally, accountants offer strategic advice on managing overhead costs, optimizing cash flow, and planning for future financial goals, such as retirement or expanding the practice.
Benefits of Hiring a Healthcare-Specific Accountant
The benefits of hiring a specialized accountant for medical professionals are numerous. By entrusting financial management to a professional, medical practitioners can focus more on patient care. Specialized accountants understand the unique aspects of healthcare finance, offering tailored solutions that enhance profitability and reduce financial risks. Moreover, they provide peace of mind by ensuring all financial matters are handled efficiently and in compliance with the law.
Conclusion
In conclusion, medical professionals benefit significantly from hiring an accountant who specializes in healthcare finance. With their expertise, accountants help ensure the smooth operation of the practice while providing strategic financial planning. This allows medical professionals to focus on their primary responsibility—caring for their patients—while maintaining a financially sound practice.
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The Importance of Bookkeeping Services for Doctors
Managing the financial side of a medical practice can be challenging for doctors, as they are often focused on providing quality patient care. However, maintaining accurate financial records is essential for the success of any healthcare practice. Bookkeeping services tailored specifically for doctors help ensure that their financial transactions are organized, compliant, and manageable, allowing them to focus on what they do best—caring for patients.
Why Doctors Need Specialized Bookkeeping Services
Doctors face unique financial complexities, such as billing for medical services, managing insurance claims, handling payroll for staff, and keeping track of medical supplies and equipment. Additionally, they must ensure compliance with healthcare regulations and tax laws. Professional bookkeeping services designed for doctors take these unique needs into account, helping physicians streamline their financial operations. As a result, they can avoid errors, reduce administrative burdens, and improve cash flow.
Accurate Billing and Cash Flow Management
One of the key challenges doctors face is managing billing and cash flow. With a constant flow of patients and complex insurance claims, maintaining an accurate record of all transactions is essential. Bookkeeping services ensure that billing is handled efficiently, minimizing delays in receiving payments. This service also helps manage insurance claims, reducing errors that could lead to delayed reimbursements. By keeping track of revenue and expenses, bookkeepers ensure that doctors maintain a healthy cash flow.
Tax Compliance and Planning
Doctors often qualify for specific tax deductions related to medical equipment, staff salaries, and office expenses. However, navigating the complexities of healthcare tax regulations can be difficult. Bookkeeping services help doctors stay compliant by keeping their financial records organized and accurate, making it easier to file taxes and take advantage of available deductions. Additionally, bookkeepers can assist in planning for tax obligations throughout the year, ensuring that there are no surprises during tax season.
Financial Reporting for Growth
Bookkeeping services also provide doctors with valuable financial reports that offer insights into their practice’s performance. By analyzing income, expenses, and cash flow trends, doctors can make more informed decisions about expanding services, hiring staff, or investing in new equipment. These reports give a clear picture of the financial health of the practice, enabling better long-term planning.
In conclusion, specialized bookkeeping services for doctors are essential for maintaining accurate financial records, ensuring tax compliance, and improving cash flow. By outsourcing bookkeeping tasks, doctors can focus more on patient care while gaining peace of mind that their financials are in order.
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sddm
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The Importance of an Accountant for Doctors
Managing the financial side of a medical practice can be challenging for doctors who already have demanding schedules. This is why having a specialized accountant is essential for doctors. A qualified accountant can help doctors efficiently manage their financial records, optimize tax strategies, and ensure the overall financial health of the practice, allowing physicians to concentrate on patient care.
Unique Financial Challenges for Doctors
Doctors face unique financial challenges that are specific to the healthcare industry. These include managing income from multiple sources, handling billing systems for patient care, dealing with insurance reimbursements, and navigating complex healthcare regulations. Additionally, doctors often need to invest in high-cost medical equipment and balance personal and business financial planning. Without professional guidance, these financial aspects can become overwhelming. Accountants with expertise in the medical field understand these complexities and can offer valuable support.
The Role of an Accountant in a Medical Practice
A specialized accountant for doctors provides services that go beyond traditional bookkeeping. They help with financial planning, ensuring that the practice’s income and expenses are balanced effectively. Additionally, they manage payroll, tax filing, and compliance with healthcare regulations. Furthermore, an accountant can provide strategic advice on reducing costs and optimizing cash flow, making the practice more efficient and profitable. Doctors also benefit from tax planning services, ensuring that deductions specific to healthcare professionals are maximized while keeping the practice compliant with tax laws.
Benefits of Hiring a Specialized Accountant
By hiring an accountant who specializes in working with doctors, medical professionals can streamline their financial operations and reduce the risk of costly errors. This partnership allows doctors to focus on patient care, knowing that the financial side of their practice is being handled efficiently. Moreover, an accountant can provide financial insights that help doctors plan for the future, such as retirement planning or business expansion.
Conclusion
In conclusion, a specialized accountant is invaluable for doctors who want to ensure the financial success of their practice. With expertise in the unique financial challenges doctors face, accountants provide essential services that allow medical professionals to focus on their patients while maintaining a healthy financial standing.
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sddm
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prompting the United States in 1935 to join about twenty other countries that had already instituted a social insurance program. Social Security made moral sense. It made mathematical sense, too. At that time, just over half of men who reached their 21st birthday would also reach their 65th, the year at which most could begin to collect a supplemental income. Those who reached age 65 could count on about thirteen more years of life.32 And there were a lot of younger workers paying into the system to support that short retirement; at that time only about 7 percent of Americans were over the age of 65. As the economy began to boom again in the wake of World War II, there were forty-one workers paying into the system for every beneficiary. Those are the numbers that supported the system when its first beneficiary, a legal secretary from Vermont named Ida May Fuller, began collecting her checks. Fuller had worked for three years under Social Security and paid $24.75 into the system. She lived to the age of 100 and by the time of her death in 1975 had collected $22,888.92. At that point, the poverty rate among seniors had fallen to 15 percent, and it has continued to fall ever since, owing largely to social insurance.33 Now about three-quarters of Americans who reach the age of 21 also see 65. And changes to the laws that govern the US social insurance safety net have prompted many to retire—and begin collecting—earlier than that. New benefits have been added over the years. Of course, people are living longer, too; individuals who make it to the age of 65 can count on about twenty more years of life.34 And as just about every social insurance doomsdayer can tell you, the ratio of workers to beneficiaries is an unsustainable three to one.
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David A. Sinclair (Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To)
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It’s getting-up time,” Alessandro declares. “Today is the day.”
“What day?”
“The release date.”
“What are we talking about?”
“Daa-add. The new XBOX game. Hunting Old Sammie.”
Armand opens his eyes. He looks at his son looking at him. The boy’s eyes are only inches away. “You’re kidding.”
“It’s the newest best game. You hunt down terrorists and kill them.” Lifting his voice, “‘Deploy teams of Black Berets into the ancient mountains of Tora Bora. Track implacable terrorists to their cavernous lairs. Rain withering fire down on the homicidal masterminds who planned the horror of September eleven, two-thousand-and-one.’” The kid’s memory is canny.
Armand lifts Alex off his chest and sits up. “Who invented it?”
“I’m telling you, dad. It’s an XBOX game.”
“We can get it today?”
“No,” Leah says. “Absolutely not. The last thing he needs is another violent video game.”
“Mahhuum!”
“How bad can it be?” says Armand.
“How would you know? A minute ago you hadn’t heard of it.”
“And you had?”
“I saw a promo. Helicopter gunships with giant machine guns. Soldiers with flamethrowers, turning bearded men into candles.”
“Sounds great.”
“Armand, really. How old are you?”
“I don’t see what my age has to do with it.”
“Dad, it’s totally cool. ‘Uncover mountain strongholds with thermal imaging technology. Call in air-strikes by F-16s. Destroy terrorist cells with laser weaponry. Wage pitched battles against mujahideen. Capture bin Laden alive or kill him on the spot. March down Fifth Avenue with jihadists’ heads on pikes. Make the world safe for democracy.’”
Safe for Dick Cheney’s profits, Armand thinks, knowing all about it from his former life, but says nothing. It’s pretty much impossible to explain the complexity of how things work within the greater systemic dysfunction. Instead, he asks the one question that matters.
“How much does it cost?”
Alessandro’s mouth minces sideways. He holds up fingers, then realizes he needs more than two hands.
Armand can see the kid doesn’t want to say. “C’mon. ’Fess up.”
Alex sighs. “A one with two zeros.”
“One hundred dollars.”
Alex’s eyes slide away. Rapid nods, face averted. “Yeah.”
“For a video game, Alex.”
“Yhep.”
“No way.”
“Daa-add! It’s the greatest game ever!” The boy is beginning to whine.
“Don’t whine,” Armand tells him.
“On TV it’s awesome. The army guys are flaming a cave and when the terror guys try to escape, they shoot them.”
“Neat.”
“Their turbans are on fire.”
“Even better.”
“Armand,” Leah says.
“Dad,” says Alessandro.
He will not admit it but Armand is hooked. It would be deeply satisfying in the second-most intimate way imaginable to kill al Qaida terrorists holed up along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border—something the actual U.S. military cannot or will not completely do. But a hundred bucks. It isn’t really the money, although living on interest income Armand has become more frugal. He can boost the C-note but what message would it send? Hunting virtual terrorists in cyberspace is all well and good. But plunking down $100 for a toy seems irresponsible and possibly wrong in a country where tens of thousands are homeless and millions have no health insurance and children continue, incredibly, to go hungry. Fifty million Americans live in poverty and he’s looking to play games.
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John Lauricella (Hunting Old Sammie)
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Social Security Disability Plans: This segment of Social Security is different from the more common retirement benefit payout. Two programs are available: Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Both programs have stringent eligibility requirements.
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Michele Tagliati (Parkinson's Disease For Dummies)
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If your needs are not attainable through safe instruments, the solution is not to increase the rate of return by upping the level of risk. Instead, goals may be revised, savings increased, or income boosted through added years of work. . . .
Somebody has to care about the consequences if uncertainty is to be understood as risk. . . . As we’ve seen, the chances of loss do decline over time, but this hardly means that the odds are zero, or negligible, just because the horizon is long. . . . In fact, even though the odds of loss do fall over long periods, the size of potential losses gets larger, not smaller, over time. . . .
The message to emerge from all this hype has been inescapable: In the long run, the stock market can only go up. Its ascent is inexorable and predictable. Long-term stock returns are seen as near certain while risks appear minimal, and only temporary.
And the messaging has been effective: The familiar market propositions come across as bedrock fact. For the most part, the public views them as scientific truth, although this is hardly the case.
It may surprise you, but all this confidence is rather new. Prevailing attitudes and behavior before the early 1980s were different. Fewer people owned stocks then, and the general popular attitude to buying stocks was wariness, not ebullience or complacency. . . .
Unfortunately, the American public’s embrace of stocks is not at all related to the spread of sound knowledge. It’s useful to consider how the transition actually evolved—because the real story resists a triumphalist interpretation. . . .
Excessive optimism helps explain the popularity of the stocks-for-the-long-run doctrine. The pseudo-factual statement that stocks always succeed in the long run provides an overconfident investor with more grist for the optimistic mill. . . .
Speaking with the editors of Forbes.com in 2002, Kahneman explained: “When you are making a decision whether or not to go for something,” he said, “my guess is that knowing the odds won’t hurt you, if you’re brave. But when you are executing, not to be asking yourself at every moment in time whether you will succeed or not is certainly a good thing. . . . In many cases, what looks like risk-taking is not courage at all, it’s just unrealistic optimism. Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don’t know the odds. It’s a big difference.”
Optimism can be a great motivator. It helps especially when it comes to implementing plans. Although optimism is healthy, however, it’s not always appropriate. You would not want rose-colored glasses in a financial advisor, for instance. . . .
Over the long haul, the more you are exposed to danger, the more likely it is to catch up with you. The odds don’t exactly add, but they do accumulate. . . .
Yet, overriding this instinctive understanding, the prevailing investment dogma has argued just the reverse. The creed that stocks grow steadily safer over time has managed to trump our common-sense assumption by appealing to a different set of homespun precepts.
Chief among these is a flawed surmise that, with the passage of time, downward fluctuations are balanced out by compensatory upward swings. Many people believe that each step backward will be offset by more than one step forward. The assumption is that you can own all the upside and none of the downside just by sticking around. . . .
If you find yourself rejecting safe investments because they are not profitable enough, you are asking the wrong questions. If you spurn insurance simply because the premiums put a crimp in your returns, you may be destined for disappointment—and possibly loss.
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Zvi Bodie
“
Americans are devoting more of their income to housing, health care and personal insurance and pensions since 1984. After adjusting for inflation, their average annual expenses have risen 6 percent to $51,105 during that period. Their earnings have largely been flat for three decades — increasing only when factoring in government “transfers” such as tax cuts and Social Security checks.
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Anonymous
“
Senator Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the CHIP program, dismantle Medicare, and dismantle private insurance,” Chelsea said of Sanders’s Medicare-for-all health care plan. “I don’t want to empower Republican governors to take away Medicaid, to take away health insurance for low-income and middle-income working Americans. And I think very much that’s what Senator Sanders’ plan would do.
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Jonathan Allen (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign)
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Ironically, opponents of basic income on the grounds that it would lead to a dismantling of the welfare state tend to support some variant of social insurance. They should be reminded that social insurance was first introduced by someone vehemently opposed to the political ideology they purport to represent. Otto von Bismarck prohibited socialists and exiled their leaders from Prussian cities. So those criticizing basic income because, in their albeit incorrect view, it is advocated by enemies of socialism should logically be opposed to the fundamental base of old welfare states.
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Guy Standing (Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen)
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When out-of-pocket costs continued to rise for people, many faulted the ACA, rather than the underlying cost inflation. When doctors were forced to see more patients than before to maintain their incomes, they too pointed at the ACA, rather than the underlying inefficiencies of the health care system. And when insurers narrowed their networks, everyone concluded the ACA was the culprit, if only because both changes happened at around the same time.
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Robert Pearl (Mistreated: Why We Think We're Getting Good Health Care -- and Why We're Usually Wrong)
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Your breakthrough agency should have six specialized customer-facing departments: personal lines, commercial lines, life and health, front office and claims concierge, financial services, and marketing.
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Bart Baker (The Breakthrough Insurance Agency: How to Multiply Your Income, Time and Fun)
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Social policies that benefit everyone—Social Security and Medicare are prime examples—could help diminish resentment, build bridges across large swaths of the American electorate, and lock into place social support for more durable policies to reduce income inequality—without providing the raw materials for racially motivated backlash. Comprehensive health insurance is a prominent example.
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Steven Levitsky (How Democracies Die)
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In another cost control measure, it became mandatory in 2008 for employers to purchase medical insurance for low-income foreign workers, such as construction workers and maids.
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William A. Haseltine (Affordable Excellence: The Singapore Healthcare Story)
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We do this because a century and a half ago we embraced business
as the dominant model for our outer and inner lives. Ours is an ideology of achieved identity; obligatory striving is its method, and failure and success are its outcomes. We reckon our incomes once a year but audit ourselves daily, by standards of long-forgotten origin. Who thinks of the old counting house when we "take stock" of how we "spend" our lives, take "credit" for our gains, or try not to end up "third rate" or "good for nothing"? Someday, we hope, "the bottom line" will show that we "amount to something." By this kind of talk we "balance" our whole lives, not just our accounts. Willy Loman speaks this way. Choosing suicide to launch his sons with insurance money, he asks, "Does it take more guts to stand here the rest of my life ringing up a zero?" He insists that a man is not a piece of fruit to be eaten and the peel discarded, but he does not see that a man is not a cash register.'°
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Scott A. Sandage (Born Losers: A History of Failure in America)
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There had been seventy-five straight months of job growth under President Obama, and incomes for the bottom 80 percent were finally starting to go up. Twenty million more people had health insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act, the greatest legislative achievement of the outgoing administration. Crime was still at historic lows. Our military remained by far the most powerful in the world. These are knowable, verifiable facts. Trump stood up there in front of the world and said the exact opposite—just as he had throughout the campaign. He didn’t seem to see or value any of the energy and optimism I saw when I traveled around the country. Listening to Trump, it almost felt like there was no such thing as truth anymore. It still feels that way.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (What Happened)
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Net wages: “It’s not what you make, but what you net” after paying the FIRE sector, basic utilities and taxes. The usual measure of disposable personal income (DPI) refers to how much employees take home after income-tax withholding (designed in part by Milton Friedman during World War II) and over 15% for FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act) to produce a budget surplus for Social Security and health care (half of which are paid by the employer). This forced saving is lent to the U.S. Treasury, enabling it to cut taxes on the higher income brackets. Also deducted from paychecks may be employee withholding for private health insurance and pensions. What is left is by no means freely available for discretionary spending. Wage earners have to pay a monthly financial and real estate “nut” off the top, headed by mortgage debt or rent to the landlord, plus credit card debt, student loans and other bank loans. Electricity, gas and phone bills must be paid, often by automatic bank transfer – and usually cable TV and Internet service as well. If these utility bills are not paid, banks increase the interest rate owed on credit card debt (typically to 29%). Not much is left to spend on goods and services after paying the FIRE sector and basic monopolies, so it is no wonder that markets are shrinking. (See Hudson Bubble Model later in this book.) A similar set of subtrahends occurs with net corporate cash flow (see ebitda). After paying interest and dividends – and using about half their revenue for stock buybacks – not much is left for capital investment in new plant and equipment, research or development to expand production.
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Michael Hudson (J IS FOR JUNK ECONOMICS: A Guide To Reality In An Age Of Deception)
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Who upholds that the good is oft interred with our bones. ’Tisn’t true though it is Shakspeare who says it; if you leave your family or your pet hospital a good many thousands, you will get the cardinal virtues, and a trifle more, in letters of gold on your tomb; though if you have lived up to your income, or forgotten to insure, any penny-alining La Monnoye will do to scribble your epitaph, and break off with “C’est trop mentir pour cinq écus!
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Ouida (Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 26))
“
a basic income is arguably more justified by the need for economic security than by a desire to eradicate poverty. Martin Luther King captured several aspects of this rather well in his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here? [A] host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated.15 Twentieth-century welfare states tried to reduce certain risks of insecurity with contributory insurance schemes. In an industrial economy, the probability of so-called ‘contingency risks’, such as illness, workplace accidents, unemployment and disability, could be estimated actuarially. A system of social insurance could be constructed that worked reasonably well for the majority. In a predominantly ‘tertiary’ economy, in which more people are in and out of temporary, part-time and casual jobs and are doing a lot of unpaid job-related work outside fixed hours and workplaces, this route to providing basic security has broken down. The
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Guy Standing (Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen)
“
For example, in the 1960s, credit card companies, which host the two-sided merchant and cardholder platform, resisted insuring cardholders against fraud on their cards. They argued that insurance would promote fraud as consumers would become careless with their cards, and that banks forced to absorb more risk would become more reluctant to extend credit, hurting low-income consumers. Over the vigorous objections of major banks, the Fair Credit Reporting Act (1970) and a subsequent amendment required fraud insurance, imposing a limit of $50 on consumer liability for fraudulent use of a credit card. The disaster predicted by the credit card companies did not occur. Freed from the fear of fraud, consumers used their cards so much more often that the increase in interaction volume more than offset the increase in fraud. The business benefit from fraud insurance is so powerful that, in order to encourage adoption and use, many banks now waive the $50 charge if consumers report a lost or stolen card within twenty-four hours.45
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Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You)
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In a study Suzanne Mettler asked 1,400 Americans whether they had used a government social program. Fifty-seven percent said they had not. Then she asked if they had used one of twenty-one specific federal policies, including child-care tax credits, the Earned Income Tax Credit, employer-sponsored and thus tax exempted health insurance, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, mortgage-interest deductions, and student loans. It turned out that 96 percent of those who had denied using government programs had in fact used at least one, and the average responder had used four. This clear disconnect between Americans' perception of who benefits from government programs and the reality makes it easier to keep demonizing the "welfare state.
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Anu Partanen
“
A higher minimum wage can make employers less inclined to offer non-wage benefits such as generous leave policies or insurance, as well as on-the-job perks such as free meals and parking. Non-cash perks such as parking and food are not taxed. But when these non-wage benefits are converted to wages, they become subject to income and sales taxes. So not only do workers have to pay for perks that used to be free, they get taxed for them, too.
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Anonymous
“
To understand what that means in commonsense terms, consider a person who plans to live off the income from $1 million invested in T-bills. Suppose he retires in a given year and converts his investments into an inflation-protected annuity with a return of 4% to 5%. He will receive an annual income of $40,000 to $50,000. But now suppose he retires a few years later, when the return on the annuity has dropped to 0.5%. His annual income will now be only $5,000. Yes, the $1 million principal amount was fully insured and protected, but you can see that he cannot possibly live on the amount he will now receive. T-bills preserve principal at all times, but the income received on them can vary enormously as return on the annuity goes up or down. Had the retiree bought instead a long-maturity U.S. Treasury bond with his $1 million, his spendable income would be secure for the life of the bond, even though the price of that bond would fluctuate substantially from day to day. The same holds true for annuities: Although their market value varies from day to day, the income from an annuity is secure throughout the retiree’s life.
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Anonymous
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Harvard’s Ichiro Kawachi agrees. He identifies a range of social policies that would be vital to promoting greater socioeconomic equality—and hence, better health. “Make an investment in education, for example, to give people a decent start in life,” he says. “We can subsidize childcare, which is a major stress for low-income mothers, especially those who are single parents. We can expand unemployment insurance and expand access to health care. This is controversial only in the United States. Other societies view health care as a basic human right.
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Jeremy A. Smith (Are We Born Racist?: New Insights from Neuroscience and Positive Psychology)
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The first is to never carry a mortgage larger than twice your gross income. The second is to spend less than 20% of your gross income on housing, including your mortgage payment, utilities, property taxes, insurance, and maintenance.
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James M. Dahle (The White Coat Investor: A Doctor's Guide to Personal Finance and Investing (The White Coat Investor Series))
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[In] NIVO 1, LLC v. Antunez, 217 Cal.App.4th Supp. 1 (2013) The Appellate Division of the Los Angeles Superior Court held that a tenant may not be evicted for failure to buy renter's insurance even if the lease requires purchasing insurance.
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Madeline Howard (California Eviction Defense: Protecting Low-Income Tenants 2014)
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The five major sources of income which are exempt for NRIs are: Proceeds from Life Insurance Policy - provided the policy complies with the exemption criteria/conditions Dividend from a domestic company or mutual fund scheme - provided the company or mutual fund scheme has paid the Dividend Distribution Tax (DDT), if applicable Interest on an NRE account – provided the NRE account is maintained as per the FEMA rules Interest on FCNR or RFC accounts – provided the account owner is a non-resident or RBNOR under the Income Tax Act Long Term Capital Gain on equity and equity based mutual fund – provided the Security Transaction Tax (STT) has been paid
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Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
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Sec. Particulars Amount 80C Tax saving investments1 Maximum up to Rs. 1,50,000 (from FY 2014-15) 80D Medical insurance premium-self, family Individual: Rs. 15,000 Senior Citizen: Rs. 20,000 Preventive Health Check-up Rs. 5,000 80E Interest on Loan for Higher Education Interest amount (8 years) 80EE Deduction of Interest of Housing Loan2 Up to Rs.1,00,000 total 80G Charitable Donation 100%/ 50% of donation or 10% of adjusted total income, whichever is less 80GGC Donation to political parties Any sum contributed (Other than Cash) 80TTA Interest on savings account Rs. 10,000 1 Tax saving investments includes life insurance premium including ULIPs, PPF, 5 year tax saving FD, tuition fees, repayment of housing loan, mutual fund (ELSS) (Sec. 80CCB), NSC, employee provident fund, pension fund (Sec. 80CCC) or pension scheme (Sec. 80CCD), etc. NRIs are not allowed to invest in certain investments, such as PPF, NSC, 5 year bank FD, etc. 2 Only to the first time buyer of a self-occupied residential flat costing less than Rs. 40 lakhs and loan amount of less than 25 lakhs sanctioned in financial year 2013-14 Clubbing of other’s income Generally, the taxpayer is taxed on his own income. However, in certain cases, he may have to pay tax on another person’s income. Taxpayers in the higher tax bracket (e.g. 30%) may divert some portion
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Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
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In order for a person to work at a church legally as an independent contractor, we believe it is prudent to consider the following guidelines: · The church cannot substantially direct the person’s duties; the church can only give them overall tasks to complete. · The church cannot control or set their hours that they work. · Since their “company” provides the service, they can send anyone to do the job. · They cannot have an office at the church that is their primary office. · It cannot be their only source of income. · The church needs to have a written contract in place including cost, delivery of Services, duration (i.e. six months, one year, etc.) and a termination clause. · They cannot participate in any employee benefits plans (insurance, retirement plans, etc). · The contractor must provide annual proof of worker’s comp and liability insurance naming the church as additionally insured or the church could be held liable in the event of a claim. · The church must issue a 1099 at the end of the year for all contract wages paid if the total amount for the year exceeds $600.00 to one contractor. We strongly recommend that no payments are made until an accurate and fully completed W-9 is completed by the contractor and on file at the church. Given these requirements, many workers such as those in the nursery, kitchens, and other service areas are not 1099 contractors, but employees. Regarding interim pastors, there is disagreement over whether they should receive a W-2 or 1099. Factors such as length of service, who supervises them, and whether they are a contractor, come into play in the decision on how to report their salary. For the best practice we recommend always using the W-2 to report salaries, but seeking tax and legal counsel would be wise to avoid any future IRS issues. While there are advantages to the church to pay independent contractors who regularly work for the church such as avoiding the need to pay the employer's part of the FICA tax and the ease of terminating their services, we would recommend against their regular use. We recommend against the use of independent contractors (that regularly work at the church) because we believe it can create the following problems for the church: · Less control over the position · Leaves the church open to an IRS challenge, which the church only has a 50/50 chance of defending, not to mention the cost and hassle of litigation · In the event of insurance claims, the church may encounter issues with worker’s compensation coverage or liability insurance coverage such as sexual misconduct, etc. · The church is open to contract disputes with the independent contractor · Based on how the individual/company is filing their taxes, it could bring an unwanted tax audit to the church Our conclusion is that we do not see enough cost-saving advantages for the church to move in this direction. It also creates unnecessary red flags for the IRS. The other looming question is, why is this such an important issue for such a small incremental (if any) tax break for the individual? Because the independent contractor will have to pay employer FICA, we don’t see any large tax advantage for this shift. They can claim mileage and some home office expense (maybe), but it just does not amount to enough to place the church at risk. Here are some detailed guidelines
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Jeffrey A. Klick (Pastoral Helmsmanship)
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The Black Church has no challenger as the cultural womb of the black community. Not only did it give birth to new institutions such as schools, banks, insurance companies, and low income housing, it also provided an academy and an arena for political activities, and it nurtured young talent for musical, dramatic, and artistic development.
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C. Eric Lincoln (The Black Church in the African American Experience)
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Government inflation-protected securities (in the United States, these are Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, or TIPS) A low-cost total U.S. domestic equity (stock) index fund, either a mutual fund or an exchange-traded fund (ETF—i.e., a sort of mutual fund that can be traded like stocks on an exchange) A low-cost total international equity index fund, either a mutual fund or an ETF Single-premium income annuities Low-cost term life insurance
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Michael Edesess (The 3 Simple Rules of Investing: Why Everything You've Heard About Investing Is Wrong—and What to Do Instead)
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ALEC is a reason states have cut taxes on income and on corporations; reduced unemployment insurance; shored up private property rights; instituted medical savings accounts; reformed public pension plans; cracked down on trial lawyers; and enacted sunshine laws. Few Americans have heard of ALEC. But there’s a case to be made that no one policy organization has touched the daily lives of more Americans.
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Kimberley Strassel (The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech)
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Children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines.
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
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The Atlantic puts it best: “It’s boring to point out that having more money affords you more food, more clothes, more housing, and more cars. But the richest families actually spend less on food, clothes, housing, and cars than the poorest families as a share of their income. The real difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich spend a larger share of their much larger income on insurance, education, and when you drill into the housing component, mortgages – all of which are directly related to building wealth, preserving wealth, and passing it down in the form of inheritance of direct investments in the lives of their children.
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Sim Pol (Million Dollar Habits: 27 Powerful Habits to Wire Your Mind For Success, Become Truly Happy, and Achieve Financial Freedom (Habits of Highly Effective People Book 1))
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Having life Insurance can help you replace the income from the job you hate in case of an accident.
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David Angway (How to Save Money, Create More Income, & Live a Happier Life: Simple ways how to get back on track in your finances)
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Insurance with investment is the 9th wonder of the world.
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David Angway (How to Save Money, Create More Income, & Live a Happier Life: Simple ways how to get back on track in your finances)
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I know you too well. You live your live idealistically. You think its possible to opt out of the system... no regular income, no health insurance... You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live... the scrimping and saving. And that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles, you move peripherally, on the margins of everything.. pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs. I called it integrity, but five years of watching you live this way has changed me. In this world, money is freedom
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Ling Ma (Severance)
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People trying to describe students of color often use words like “urban,” “inner city,” “disadvantaged,” or “at-risk” that gloss over the actual local needs of specific children and subgroups, such as racial groups (in some cases) or English language learners. Generic phrases like “low-income minority” can also mask differences in financial circumstance, like whether students are living in stable housing or rotating foster care or whether they have health insurance. These differences affect what assistance students need from educators and other opportunity providers to have an equal opportunity to succeed in school.
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Mica Pollock (Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School)
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The Bowie Bond, as it was known, was attractive to insurance companies, which have to make regular payments to their beneficiaries years into the future. Owning a long-term bond, like a Bowie Bond, is how they hedge risk, because they need an asset that offers a regular stream of payouts. Prudential paid $55 million and in exchange got a 7.9 percent interest payment on their principal for fifteen years.* These interest payments were financed by the income generated by royalties from Bowie’s albums recorded before 1990. If for some reason the music did not generate enough revenue (and exhausted a reserve fund), Bowie’s catalog would be owned by Prudential. But that did not happen, since the income from music royalties is fairly stable for older artists with established catalogs.
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Allison Schrager (An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk)
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Permanent life insurance that builds cash value can be a great tool in this situation. The premiums are paid with after-tax dollars. The policy grows tax deferred, and you can access those cash values before or after retirement on a tax-free basis as long as it is structured properly. Upon your death, the death benefit is paid to your beneficiaries generally income tax free and, if you set it up properly, estate tax free.
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Tom Hegna (Don't Worry, Retire Happy!: Seven Steps to Retirement Security)
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This is an asset I can leverage with good debt, the property covers all operational expenses, improvements, insurance, taxes, and debt while I patiently wait for the rents to increase and the value of the property then appreciates at which point we sell or refinance and own the property with no money invested. I never deviate from this criteria. I invest my surplus cash into income-producing machines, in great locations, where the rent is less than the cost of home ownership, and I am buying at or below replacement cost. When I do invest, I buy very large deals, typically 200 to 1,000 units at a time, in markets with decades of projected job growth, and market demographics more likely to rent than own.
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Grant Cardone (How To Create Wealth Investing In Real Estate: How to Build Wealth with Multi-Family Real Estate)
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Half a million children in the United States currently take antipsychotic drugs. Children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines. These medications often are used to make abused and neglected children more tractable.
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
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The rest of the world’s unwillingness to spend—which in turn was attributable to the class wars in the major surplus economies and the desire for self-insurance after the Asian crisis—was the underlying cause of both America’s debt bubble and America’s deindustrialization. Foreign financial inflows forced Americans to absorb their glut of manufacturing capacity at the expense of U.S. jobs and incomes. This necessarily required foreign savers to mitigate the impact of job losses on American spending by buying dollar-denominated assets, which pushed down interest rates, expanded credit, and facilitated a surge in household borrowing.
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Matthew C. Klein (Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace)
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The earliest health insurance policies were designed primarily to compensate for income lost while workers were ill. Long absences were a big problem for companies that depended on manual labor, so they often hired doctors to tend to workers. In the 1890s, lumber companies in Tacoma, Washington, paid two enterprising doctors 50 cents a month to care for employees. It was perhaps one of the earliest predecessors to the type of employer-based insurance found in the United States today.
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Elisabeth Rosenthal (An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back)
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All hospitals have a master price list—a chargemaster—and adjusting it to maximize income was the focus of Deloitte’s strategy. To squeeze more money from the purse, Deloitte advised hospitals to stop billing for items like gauze rolls, which insurers rarely or never reimbursed, and to boost charges for services like OR time, oxygen therapy, and prescription drugs.
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Elisabeth Rosenthal (An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back)
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During his life, Brunetti had often heard people begin sentences with, ‘If it weren’t for him . . .’ and he could not hear the words without substituting Sergio’s name. When Brunetti, always the acknowledged scholar of the family, was eighteen, it was decided that there was not enough money to allow him to go to university and delay the time when he could begin to contribute to the family’s income. He yearned to study the way some of his friends yearned for women, but he assented to this family decision and began to look for work. It was Sergio, newly engaged and newly employed in a medical laboratory as a technician, who agreed to contribute more to the family if it would mean that his younger brother would be allowed to study. Even then, Brunetti knew that it was the law he wanted to study, less its current application than its history and the reasons why it developed the way it had. Because there was no faculty of law at Ca Foscari, it meant that Brunetti would have to study at Padova, the cost of his commuting adding to the responsibility Sergio agreed to assume. Sergio’s marriage was delayed for three years, during which time Brunetti quickly rose to the top of his class and began to earn some money by tutoring students younger than himself. Had he not studied, Brunetti would not have met Paola in the university library, and he would not have become a policeman. He sometimes wondered if he would have become the same man, if the things inside of him that he considered vital would have developed in the same way, had he, perhaps, become an insurance salesman or a city bureaucrat. Knowing idle speculation when he saw it, Brunetti reached for the phone and pulled it towards him.
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Donna Leon (A Noble Radiance (Commissario Brunetti, #7))
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Doug is more valuable alive and earning an income, then dead with a life insurance policy.
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Alec Peche (Death On A Green (Jill Quint, MD, Forensic Pathologist #4))
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In the United States, interest income from state and local bonds isn’t taxable. Life insurance proceeds are also tax-free.
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Tom Wheelwright (Tax-Free Wealth: How to Build Massive Wealth by Permanently Lowering Your Taxes)
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In the past, I used to say don't quit your job until your real estate income matches or exceeds your job income. Because of health insurance, you must bump this income up a bit. Perhaps one and a half times or maybe double your job income. This will allow for health insurance expenses as well.
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Mike Butler (Landlording on AutoPilot: A Simple, No-Brainer System for Higher Profits, Less Work and More Fun (Do It All from Your Smartphone or Tablet!))
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A thorough flip budget includes: • Investment property purchase price and settlement costs • Loan costs (such as application fees, points, and lifetime interest) • Repair and renovation costs (based on estimates from experienced contractors) • Inspection fees • Staging costs • Selling costs (including real estate agent commission and other closing costs) • Professional fees • Insurance • Property and school taxes • Utilities • Income tax provisions
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Michele Cagan (Real Estate Investing 101: From Finding Properties and Securing Mortgage Terms to REITs and Flipping Houses, an Essential Primer on How to Make Money with Real Estate (Adams 101 Series))
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Pooling can be accomplished either by the government exercising some form of mandate such as income tax and compulsory health-related contributions, or by allowing people to voluntarily purchase some form of insurance.
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Amitabh Kant (The Path Ahead: Transformative Ideas for India)
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A good rule of thumb is to have six months of expenses tucked away in liquid savings like an interest-bearing checking or savings account. In other words, if you need $5,000 a month to pay your mortgage, car payments, utilities, insurance, and food, you need $30,000 in your emergency account. But you don’t have to go overboard, especially in a two-income family; you may be fine with just three months in your emergency account.
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Anthony S. Park (How to Invest for Retirement: A Simple Path to Retiring Rich, Independent, and Free)
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Louisiana’s fiscal troubles can be traced to the economic boom that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when rebuilding efforts, insurance payouts and federal money pushed cash into the state budget. Many lawmakers expected the heady times and increased revenue to last, and they made the bold decision to cut income taxes by roughly $700 million annually for the highest brackets — a decision some are now second-guessing.
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Anonymous
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While Brazil is not much of a role model for India in terms of income equality, its effective focus on inclusion over the last decade has some lessons for us. Article 7 of the Brazilian constitution speaks forcefully in favour of employee rights, minimum wage, unemployment insurance and a social safety net for those who lose their jobs or are retired.
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N. Ramachandran (A Visible Hand: Essays on the Intersection of Economics, Politics, and Society)
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FIGURE 5.1 Buying and closing checklist.
1. Identify a potential bargain purchase; ask questions.
2. Write down the one urgent problem you can solve for the seller.
3. Establish the fair market value, give or take 5 percent.
4. Research the market rent and likely net income the property will produce.
5. State your minimum acceptable profit on this house.
6. Formulate an offer that solves the seller's one urgent problem.
7. Make the offer. Insist on either an acceptance or a counteroffer (Don't tell me what you won't do; tell me what you will do).
8. Make another offer based on any new information.
9. If the seller is unresponsive but you remain convinced there is opportunity, go away and come back in a week with another offer.
10. Get the contract accepted-signed by all parties.
11. Make your earnest money deposit with the closing agent.
12. Retain rights to house inspector and termite inspector if needed.
13. Order a title search with a title company, attorney, or escrow company, and furnish these agents a copy of your fully signed contract.
14. Talk with the agent or attorney who will prepare the closing documents to alert him to any unusual clauses in the contract.
15. Get copies of any documents you will be required to sign the day before the closing, and get a copy of the title insurance commitment-read to check for exceptions.
16. Read closing documents (very carefully!!!).
17. Walk through the house the day of the closing after the sellers are completely out of the house.
18. Go to the closing, review the documents, and collect the appropriate items listed on the closing documents list, and get the keys and garage door opener.
Note: When you are buying, take your time. Time is on your side. Having both the buyers and the sellers at the closing can work to your advantage. When you are selling, sign documents in advance. Only go to pick up your check after the buyer has signed everything and left. Source: Reprinted from John Schaub, "Making It Big on Little Deals," seminar by permission
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John W. Schaub (Building Wealth One House at a Time: Making it Big on Little Deals)
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A society that expects most individuals to take responsibility for the management of their own expenditure and income after tax, that expects most adults to own their own homes and that leaves it to the individual to determine how much to save for retirement and whether or not to take out health insurance, is surely storing up trouble for the future by leaving its citizens so ill-equipped to make wise financial decisions.
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Niall Ferguson (The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World: 10th Anniversary Edition)
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I felt I had a calling in my life to be in full-time ministry, and although I was very successful in the insurance business, earning a very large six-figure income, I gave notice to my company and sold out in January 2007 to go into the ministry full-time.
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Michael Richard Stosic (Thirty-Nine Days)
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Income volatility can also interfere with the existing social safety net. Some welfare programs require beneficiaries to work a certain number of hours each week, assuming that the number of hours worked is under the control of the employee, rather than the employer.53 Qualification for programs like food stamps and health insurance subsidies is based on an average monthly income threshold. But of course volatile incomes mean that families bounce in and out of eligibility.54 Bouncing in and out of Medicaid ineligibility causes interruptions in care for chronic conditions, particularly in places where the doctors who accept Medicaid and private insurance don’t overlap.55 There can also be severe penalties for “fraud” in these programs, receiving benefits when your income is too high. But households subject to volatile incomes may not, themselves, know when or whether they will cross thresholds of eligibility. For instance, as of 2016, the Pennsylvania Medicaid Application asks whether anyone in the household has a hard time predicting their income, but in the very next question requires applicants to do exactly that—for the next twenty-four months—in order to establish eligibility.
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Jonathan Morduch (The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty)
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Children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines. These medications often are used to make abused and neglected children more tractable.
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
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Maybe Sloan would agree to a deal. I’d talk to someone about some of my issues if she would agree to go to grief counseling. It wasn’t me giving in to Josh like she wanted, but Sloan knew how much I hated therapists, and she’d always wanted me to see someone. I was debating how to pitch this to her when I glanced into the living room and saw it—a single purple carnation on my coffee table.
I looked around the kitchen like I might suddenly find someone in my house. But Stuntman was calm, plopped under my chair. I went in to investigate and saw that the flower sat on top of a binder with the words “just say okay” written on the outside in Josh’s writing.
He’d been here?
My heart began to pound. I looked again around the living room like I might see him, but it was just the binder.
I sat on the sofa, my hands on my knees, staring at the binder for what felt like ages before I drew the courage to pull the book into my lap. I tucked my hair behind my ear and licked my lips, took a breath, and opened it up.
The front page read “SoCal Fertility Specialists.”
My breath stilled in my lungs. What?
He’d had a consultation with Dr. Mason Montgomery from SoCal Fertility. A certified subspecialist in reproductive endocrinology and infertility with the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology. He’d talked to them about in vitro and surrogacy, and he’d had fertility testing done.
I put a shaky hand to my mouth, and tears began to blur my eyes.
I pored over his test results. Josh was a breeding machine. Strong swimmers and an impressive sperm count. He’d circled this and put a winking smiley face next to it and I snorted.
He’d outlined the clinic’s high success rates—higher than the national average—and he had gotten signed personal testimonials from previous patients, women like me who used a surrogate. Letter after letter of encouragement, addressed to me.
The next page was a complete breakdown on the cost of in vitro and information on Josh’s health insurance and what it covered. His insurance was good. It covered the first round of IVF at 100 percent.
He even had a small business plan. He proposed selling doghouses that he would build. The extra income would raise enough money for the second round of in vitro in about three months.
The next section was filled with printouts from the Department of International Adoptions. Notes scrawled in Josh’s handwriting said Brazil just opened up. He broke down the process, timeline, and costs right down to travel expenses and court fees.
I flipped past a sleeve full of brochures to a page on getting licensed for foster care. He’d already gone through the background check, and he enclosed a form for me, along with a series of available dates for foster care orientation classes and in-home inspections.
Was this what he’d been doing? This must have taken him weeks.
My chin quivered.
Somehow, seeing it all down on paper, knowing we’d be in it together, it didn’t feel so hopeless. It felt like something that we could do. Something that might actually work.
Something possible.
The last page had an envelope taped to it. I pried it open with trembling hands, my throat getting tight.
I know what the journey will look like, Kristen. I’m ready to take this on. I love you and I can’t wait to tell you the best part…Just say okay.
I dropped the letter and put my face into my hands and sobbed like I’d never sobbed in my life.
He’d done all this for me. Josh looked infertility dead in the eye, and his choice was still me.
He never gave up.
All this time, no matter how hard I rejected him or how difficult I made it, he never walked away from me. He just changed strategies. And I knew if this one didn’t work he’d try another. And another. And another.
He’d never stop trying until I gave in.
And Sloan—she knew. She knew this was here, waiting for me. That’s why she’d made me leave. They’d conspired to do this.
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Abby Jimenez
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THE SIX LAWS OF WEALTH The First Law of Wealth: Keep a part of all you earn. Save at least 10% of your income. The Second Law of Wealth: Put your savings to work for you. Invest it so that it will multiply. The Third Law of Wealth: Avoid debt. The poor pay interest, while the rich earn interest. The Fourth Law of Wealth: Don’t speculate in get-rich-quick schemes. Invest in solid businesses that you understand. The Fifth Law of Wealth: Invest in yourself. Gain knowledge and skills to increase your earning power. The Sixth Law of Wealth: Safeguard your growing fortune with diversification and insurance.
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Charles Conrad (The Richest Man in Babylon: Six Laws of Wealth)
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Tax-Deferred does not mean Tax-Free
It never ceases to amaze me when I meet with people who do not know that tax-deferred does not mean tax-free. You mean I have to pay taxes when I take this money!? This is not all mine!? These are common remarks I hear as we are looking at their most recent retirement account statement. Somehow this consideration was missed when they enrolled in the savings plan and each year when they postponed the tax when filing their tax return. I am not a tax professional but I can understand how an accountant or tax preparer wouldn’t think to make sure the client understands that they are postponing taxes and the tax calculation during their working years.
I met an accountant that expressed how difficult it is when he gets the client that believed they were ready to leave work only to find out that because of taxes they are coming up a little or a lot short. This happened to one of my relatives that worked at least 30 years as an x-ray technician and then supervisor at a very large hospital. While working, they always had the nice houses, the nice cars, and a nice upper-middle class lifestyle, nothing fancy. After he retired and even though his wife still worked as a school principal, he had to take a sales clerk job at a nearby liquor store so that his family could maintain their lifestyle. I will never forget other relatives joking and laughing about him miscalculating his retirement. I’m certain that his unsuccessful retirement and that of other relatives influenced my interest in retirement planning if for no one else but me.
With a limited amount of retirement income, most retirees would prefer to keep their dollars rather than give them to Uncle Sam. Even those with an unlimited source of funds don’t want to pay more taxes than necessary. Fortunately, there are some ways to decrease your tax burden once you’ve done the obvious work of ensuring you’ve taken all the deductions and credits to which you’re entitled when you file your taxes.
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Annette Wise
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Contrary to popular opinion, a home is not an asset for creating real wealth, it is a liability.22 Your home does not generate any income; it is a Money Pit. You have to pay the mortgage, utilities, maintenance, property taxes that continue to go up each year, and, insurance that tends to also increase annually. After so many years, kitchens need remodeling, carpets & flooring replaced, and, painting and decorating requiring new furniture to match the updated changes. And, the larger the home the more furniture that is needed to fill it up.
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Robert G. Beard Jr. (The Best Kept Secret to Financial Freedom)
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Seven cures for a lean purse ;
1. Start thy purse to fattening
2. Control thy expenditures
3. Make thy gold multiply
4. Gaurd thy treasures from loss
5. Make of thy dwelling a profitable investment
6. Insure a future income
7. Increase thy ability to earn
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George S. Clason (The Richest Man in Babylon (Illustrated) the Original Classic Edition: Timeless Principles of Wealth Management)
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Among the best solutions: using disposable blood-pressure cuffs on incoming patients; infusing hospital equipment with silver ion particles to create an antimicrobial shield; and forbidding doctors to wear neckties because, as the U.K. Department of Health has noted, they “are rarely laundered,” “perform no beneficial function in patient care,” and “have been shown to be colonized by pathogens.
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Steven D. Levitt (SuperFreakonomics, Illustrated edition: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance)
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It is a fact of life that people love to complain, particularly about how terrible the modern world is compared with the past. They are nearly always wrong. On just about any dimension you can think of—warfare, crime, income, education, transportation, worker safety, health—the twenty-first century is far more hospitable to the average human than any earlier time.
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Steven D. Levitt (SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance)
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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.
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Mariusz Skonieczny (The Basics of Understanding Financial Statements: Learn how to read financial statements by understanding the balance sheet, the income statement, and the cash flow statement)
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The Sixth Cure — Insure A Future Income
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George S. Clason (The Richest Man in Babylon)
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Anticipated receipt of a fixed amount from life insurance proceeds represents a virtual fixed-income asset, suggesting a diminished role for bonds in an investor’s portfolio.
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David F. Swensen (Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment)
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If your company has any credible strategy for providing equity-based returns with muted volatility, you have not just a value proposition, but one of the most important value propositions of our time.... What's the concept in an operating real estate REIT? Operating real estate (as distinct from net leases or mortgages, which are other financing concepts) has the potential to produce equity-like long-term returns, but isan extremely powerful diversifier, in that real estate correlates positively with inflation while stocks and bonds correlate negatively with it. Inflation, with it attendant higher interest rates, chokes off new supply of real estate: new expensive to build, to expensive to finance at prevailing market rents. When new supply dwindles, normal growth absorbs the available space and puts upward pressure on rents, increasing cash flows to the owners... until rents get to a point where new construction pencils out again. (Meanwhile, in an inflation/interest rate flareup of any consequence, stocks and bonds are usually getting hit, and sometimes hit hard.) This, to me, is a trifecta of a conceptual value proposition: (a) the potential for the equity-like long-term returns investors need, (b) historically correlated positively with inflation, unlike all financial assets, and (c) just when you think this story can't get better, with 90% of available income paid out currently to income-starved investors.... What's the concept for variable life insurance? It's certainly the least expensive long-term form of life insurance, in that, as the investment portion grows, it extinguishes the insurance company's exposure. (As Ben Baldwin gnomically and brilliantly observes, 'All insurance is term insurance.') It may also be, in a given situation, the cheapest way of funding an estate tax liability, leaving the maximum legacy to one's heirs. And, of course, if the ownership is vested in an insurance trust, one may (under current law at this writing) be bequeathing wealth without income or estate taxation. As long as there is an estate tax - any estate tax - there will be a financial planning issue in the life of every affluent household/family: how do you want the heirs to pay it? And it seems likely that, conceptually, VUL will always be an answer.... Small cap equities? The concept is, clearly, higher returns with - and precisely because of - their higher volatility.
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Nick Murray (The Value Added Wholesaler in the Twenty-First Century)
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At 50, people are still looking for a stockbroker to work a miracle for them, but at 60 they start looking for an advisor to help them negotiate a truce with reality. Regardless of when people are actually planning to retire, 60 is psychologically the beginning of the end of the accumulation period in their lives, and the beginning of the beginning of the distribution phase.... Variable annuitization offers genuine hope to people who (a) need to live on more than six percent of their capital, (b) need their income to grow in some relation to equity returns, which have historically been more than three times the inflation rate, and (c) at the very, very least, need to be assured that some income will continue for their entire lives. Variable annuitization is the only chance these people have. ...If Americans understood how the capital markets actually work, most folks would choose variable universal life insurance over variable life and whole life as the cheapest form of permanent insurance they could buy for the long run. That's simply because the insurance cost of an insurance policy is a pure function of how much of its own money the insurance company has exposed. Since the policyholder's own cash value builds up most significantly over time - and therefore the insurance company's exposure falls further, faster - in variable universal policies than in other debt-based (or general account-based) contracts, the net premium dollars allocated to the purchase of the death benefit must be lower, at the end of the day. And the policyholder's equity must be commensurately greater.
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Nick Murray (The Value Added Wholesaler in the Twenty-First Century)
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Here’s how it works: let’s say your income is $150,000 per year, or $12,500 a month gross. At 36% DTI, your total monthly payments, including your proposed mortgage, taxes, homeowners insurance, and homeowners’ association (HOA) or condo fees can’t exceed $4,500.
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Anthony S. Park (How to Buy Your Perfect First Home: What Every First-time Homebuyer Needs to Know)
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Consider a study that Tom conducted in conjunction with a large insurance company. Half of the respondents, drawn from a national sample of relatively affluent households, were asked whether they could comfortably save 20 percent of their income, and the other half were asked whether they could comfortably live on 80 percent of their income. Of course, to save 20 percent of your income is to live on 80 percent of it. Nevertheless, whereas only half of the respondents thought they could save 20 percent of their earnings, four out of five thought they could comfortably live on 80 percent.
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Thomas Gilovich (The Wisest One in the Room: How You Can Benefit from Social Psychology's Most Powerful Insights)
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Popular accounts portray Europe as either an economic phoenix or a basket case. The phoenix view observes that output per hour worked has risen from barely 50 percent of U.S. levels after World War II and two-thirds of those levels in 1970 to nearly 95 percent today and that labor productivity so measured is actually running above U.S. levels in a substantial number of Western European countries. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the euro zone has created more new jobs than either the United States or the United Kingdom. Its exports have grown faster than those of the United States. It provides more of its citizens with health insurance, efficient public transportation, and protection from violent crime.
The basket-case view observes that the growth of aggregate output and output per hour have slowed relative to the United States since the mid-1990s. Between 1999, when EMU began, and 2005, euro-zone growth averaged just 1.8 percent, less than two-thirds the 3.1 percent recorded by the United States. Productivity growth has trended downward since the early 1990s, owing to labor-, product-, and capital-market rigidities, inadequate R&D spending, and high tax rates - in contrast to the United States, where productivity growth has been rising. The growth of the working-age population has fallen to zero and is projected to turn significantly negative in coming years. High old-age dependency ratios imply large increases in the share of national income devoted to health care, lower savings rates, potentially heavier fiscal burdens, and an aversion to risk taking. All these are reasons to worry about Europe's competitiveness and economic performance.
One way of reconciling these views is to distinguish the distant from the recent past and the past from the future. Comparing the European economy at the midpoint and the end of the twentieth century, there is no disputing the phoenix view. Economic performance over this half century was a shining success both absolutely and relative to the United States. More recently, however, Europe has tended to lag. Although this does nothing to put the past in a less positive light, it creates doubts about the future.
One way of understanding these changing fortunes is in terms of the transition from extensive to intensive growth. Europe could grow quickly for a quarter century after World War II and continue doing well relative to the United States for some additional years because the institutions it inherited and developed after World War II were well suited for importing technology, maintaining high levels of investment, and transferring large amounts of labor from agriculture to industry. Eventually, however, the scope for further growth on this basis was exhausted. Once the challenge was to develop new technologies, and once growth came to depend more on entrepreneurial initiative than on brute-force capital accumulation, the low rates of R&D spending, high taxes, conservative finance, and emphasis on vocational education delivered by those same institutions became more of a handicap than a spur to growth. Consistent with this view is the fact that Europe's economic difficulties seem to have coincided with the ICT revolution and the opportunities it affords to economies with a comparative advantage in pioneering innovation, as well as with globalization and growing competition from developing countries such as China that are moving into the production of the quality manufacturing goods that have been a traditional European stronghold.
The question is what to do about it. Is it necessary for Europe to remake its institutions along American lines? Or is there still a future for the European model?
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Barry Eichengreen (The European Economy since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond)
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80–85% of options are unexercised and worthless! Options were originally “invented” as protection for large accounts. They are basically like buying Home Owners Insurance.
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T.R. Lawrence (Options Trading: How to Turn Every Friday into Payday Using Weekly Options! Generate Weekly Income in ALL Markets and Sleep Worry-Free!)
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On top of everything else, you need to learn to make a fuss. If you don't, no matter how your care's paid for—private insurance, public insurance, out of pocket—you may get passed over or rushed through when you need something more. If my parents hadn't pushed for a second opinion that, frankly, I didn't want, I'd have been discharged post-suicide attempt with negligible follow-up. Being pushy takes determination and time and a degree of confidence in the system and your place in it. People who are marginalized in other aspects of their lives—by race, by income, by language, by immigration status— are less likely to have that confidence.
And the people least able to haggle effectively are those with the most severe mental illness—either because they lack the wherewithal to do so or they don't think anything will make them better or they simply don't believe they deserve care. Or because their haggling isn't effective—it's easy to dismiss a crazy person's kvetching no matter how justified. I've spoken to so many people who felt they weren't heard, weren't listened to when making concerns known.
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Anna Mehler Paperny (Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person)
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A neomaterialist explanation has been offered by Robert Evans of the University of British Columbia and George Kaplan of the University of Michigan. If you want to improve health and quality of life for the average person in a society, you spend money on public goods—better public transit, safer streets, cleaner water, better public schools, universal health care. But the more income inequality, the greater the financial distance between the wealthy and the average and thus the less direct benefit the wealthy feel from improving public goods. Instead they benefit more from dodging taxes and spending on their private good—a chauffeur, a gated community, bottled water, private schools, private health insurance. As Evans writes, “The more unequal are incomes in a society, the more pronounced will be the disadvantages to its better-off members from public expenditure, and the more resources will those members have [available to them] to mount effective political opposition” (e.g., lobbying). Evans notes how this “secession of the wealthy” promotes “private affluence and public squalor.” Meaning worse health for the have-nots.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
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Charlie treats financial reports and their underlying accounting with a Midwestern dose of skepticism. At best, they are merely the beginning of a proper calculation of intrinsic valuation, not the end. The list of additional factors he examines is seemingly endless and includes such things as the current and prospective regulatory climate; the state of labor, supplier, and customer relations; the potential impact of changes in technology; competitive strengths and vulnerabilities; pricing power; scalability; environmental issues; and, notably, the presence of hidden exposures. (Charlie knows that there is no such thing as a riskless investment candidate; he’s searching for those with few risks that are easily understandable.) He recasts all financial statement figures to fit his own view of reality, including the actual free or owners’ cash being produced, inventory and other working capital assets, fixed assets, and such frequently overstated intangible assets as goodwill. He also completes an assessment of the true impact, current and future, of the cost of stock options, pension plans, and retiree medical benefits. He applies equal scrutiny to the liability side of the balance sheet. For example, under the right circumstances, he might view an obligation such as insurance float—premium income that may not be paid out in claims for many years—more properly as an asset. He especially assesses a company’s management well beyond conventional number crunching—in particular, the degree to which they are “able, trustworthy, and owner-oriented.” For example, how do they deploy cash? Do they allocate it intelligently on behalf of the owners or do they overcompensate themselves or pursue ego-oriented growth for growth’s sake?
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Charles T. Munger (Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger)
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