Over this weekend I went to The Blue Door at the Delano Hotel in Miami Beach.  It’s run by restaurateur Claude Troisgros.  A fusion of Brazilian, French, Japanese and other cuisines and as this month is some food festival thing, you can order a 3 course prix fixe at many restaurants for $35 per person.  It’s a good opportunity to try-out some of the best that Miami has to offer.

Truth be told, the best that Miami has to offer is, in my experience so far, only mediocre, and, truth be told, the dishes we had at The Blue Door should be added to that list of mediocrity.  I’m quite sure that Mr. Troigros is quite the exceptional chef, however, when you throw in chef’s trained with poor taste that prepare the dishes, as per my experience eating at local culinary institutes would lead me to surmise, the results can be rather mediocre.

For a $35 prix fixe the portions were very large .  The amount I consumed over the 3 courses must have been equal to the amount of cuisine I dined on at Mugaritz in the Basque-country of Spain.  Granted, the price that I paid for that meal was about 12 times as much, and if you account for airfare and the like… in the end, though, it was worth it.

I’ve commented on it several times in the past but today, in my Inbox, was a letter from Porter Stansberry of Stansberry Research on the ignorance spewing from the morons on Capitol Hill. I’ll leave my comments out on this but from anyone whom has read my blog should know how I feel.

“Let me begin with Hillary Clinton. God bless her. Has there ever been a more unfortunate woman in history? She wasn’t qualified to pick a spouse, let alone run the foreign affairs of the United States. And now this… Let history record that economics has never entered her mind. Hillary was comparing the United States to Brazil recently when she said: “Brazil has the highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere and guess what – it’s growing like crazy.”

She was implying that if we raised tax rates on the rich, our economy would improve. And just to remind the audience exactly what she meant, she began her talk by pointing out a theme that’s growing in popularity in Washington these days: “The rich aren’t paying their fair share,” she said. Never mind the fact that the “rich” pay for the vast majority of government and roughly 50% of American citizens pay no federal income tax at all.

What Hillary either didn’t know or didn’t care to mention was the highest income tax rate in Brazil is 27.5% – even lower than the Reagan-era rates her husband jacked up. Compared to the 43% rates “the rich” will be paying this January, Brazil seems like a tax haven for wealthy Americans.

It’s hard to believe Hillary could be so woefully ignorant of the real lesson the Brazilian economy demonstrates: Lower rates of tax generate far more revenue (as a % of GDP) than do steeply progressive rates like we have in the United States. The reason is utterly simple and intuitive to every person who has ever had a real job: Nobody likes to give half his paycheck to the government.

As any economist (liberal or conservative) would tell you, steeply progressive taxes result in lower economic growth, higher unemployment, and vastly more tax avoidance. When will the Democratic party cease its attempts to capitalize on class demagoguery and adopt sensible economic policies?

Washington D.C. is the Daytona 500 of uselessness, ignorance, and vaingloriousness. I never imagined someone could overtake Hillary on the race to the bottom. But I seriously underestimated the mind-blowing ignorance of Nancy Pelosi…

On July 1, Pelosi proclaimed in a weekly press briefing that the best way to stimulate the economy was to extend unemployment benefits – beyond the two-year limit. “It injects demand into the economy… It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name.”

Silence. There’s nothing but stunned silence. And the growing realization that these people (our leaders) have no idea what they’re doing…

Pelosi is the daughter of a congressman. She went to college in Washington D.C., interning for senators. She married out of college and raised five children. Then, in 1987, she won a special election in California’s Eighth District, where only 15% of the voters are registered Republicans. It is probably the “safest” Democratic seat in Congress.

In short, Pelosi has spent her entire life in government – sitting in a guaranteed seat. She has never run a business, held a regular job, or employed anyone in her entire life. I’m sure she believes what she said – that the government should simply support everyone and doing so is the quickest way to improve the economy. It is all she knows. As she said: “It’s impossible to think of a situation where we would have a country that would say we’re not going to have unemployment benefits.”

Actually, Nancy… until 1935, there was no federal role whatsoever in unemployment benefits. Such arrangements were organized voluntarily by trade associations and unions – and were self-funded. It didn’t occur to Americans that they ought to be responsible for someone else’s unemployment insurance until Franklin Delano Roosevelt showed how the newly expanded electorate had changed politics in America forever. Campaigning with the explicit promise to rob your neighbors was good politics. And it has been ever since.

The irony is, such policies have now become so mainstream that politicians like Pelosi don’t even remember where they came from… or their party’s role in creating them. Nor do the politicians yet understand that believing in these ideas – that everyone can live at the expense of their neighbors – will lead to a catastrophic financial collapse, a situation that’s well underway right now.

Regards,

Porter Stansberry“

I’m currently reading the book The First Tycoon – The Epic Life Of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles. Recalling some of the first few chapters, I find it interesting that competition was so fierce when Mr. Vanderbuilt was first developing his ferry business in New York that they even took fare down to the point where it was free so that they could take customers from competition.

As a business, they had to develop the fastest ships with the best lodging and food to become the mode of transportation of choice. Now, though, almost ALL forms of transportation have degraded to the point of being commodity businesses. No real manner in which to differentiate your product from that of your competitor.

Did I mention this is frustrating?

I’m laying out a paper form as a web-app and after two days of trying to accomplish this using tables and failing miserably once it started becoming more complex I’ve considered moving to CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, and have begun work on it. Sadly, though, using CSS to perform the layout is quite a bit more frustrating than I had thought it would be. I have used CSS on several occasions in the past; however, this is appearing to be much, much more complex than the rather simple layouts that I have done in the past.

Yesterday, after work, on the same street as my company’s office is, there’s a sushi restaurant called “Kenji” and there’s the picture of a round ninja with a sword.  Although they didn’t have the Chinese characters up, I’m presuming that, based off the name and the picture, that it would be 剣人, meaning “Sword Person”.

My sister believes she might know the owner of that restaurant as, if she is whom she thinks she is, she was a former employee of the restaurant my sister is employed at. Returning to the subject, I stopped by and, although the rice was a bit dry, the wasabi tasted like powdered wasabi (which it was and 99.9 times out of 100 in the U.S., it is)  it was pretty fresh fish and the hot tea, 抹茶, matcha,was pretty good for powdered tea.  Then again, after drinking bad coffee at work, anything of a different flavor might be considered good.  Having the best coffee I’ve ever had and in, of all places, in Utah has changed how I view coffee. The coffee shop I’m talking about is Jack Mormon Coffee Co.. It has spoiled me.  They purchase their beans from around the world and what they roast that day they serve… the flavor, complexity and depth of each roast is something to be experienced.

Timing-wise, I do believe it’s possible that the owner of this restaurant was the one that worked along side my sister, as from what my sister said about her coworker departing a few months ago and the restaurant’s sushi-chef mentioned they just had recently opened.

Talking about tea makes me want to go drink a cup.  Most likely a cup of  ほうじ茶、houji-cha, or green tea that’s been roasted over hot charcoal.  This eliminates a good amount of the caffeine and also changes the flavor significantly.

I was hired by a company called IDS, Integrated Document Solutions, out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  They are a company that develops custom IT solutions for healthcare companies.  I start working for them tomorrow.

It should be the type of fast-paced environment that suits me well.  I was informed that I was accepted out of the applicants while in Bend, Oregon on, I believe it was, Monday, June 21st and asked if I could attend my first day on Wednesday, June 23rd.  Sadly, I was out competing for a spot on the U.S. Paralympic Cycling’s Worlds Team and informed them I wouldn’t be able to make it.  Working and attending Nationals would be one heck of a commute if I did (and probably wouldn’t have been possible).  Truthfully, if I had the gift of foresight, staying home would have been more fruitful as I failed, miserably, might I add, at qualifying.

I say miserably, although, I did get 4th in my division which to most wouldn’t be something that one considers horrid.  I needed a top 3 spot to qualify for a spot on the U.S. Elite Team.  Qualifying as an Elite Athlete is the biggest hurdle one needs to overcome to provide ones self with the opportunity to compete alongside my team-members .  I have next year, I suppose, and can hope to get invited to the camps that are going to be held in Chula Vista, California and Colorado Springs, Colorado.

I can’t really fathom why I did so poorly.  I though I rode strong and hard.  On the climb I passed all the hand cyclists that had begun before me, the H1 and H2 classification, except 2 men before the half way point.  Those that were descending while I was still ascending are most assuredly the individuals that got 2nd and 3rd place.  First place went to a tricycle that isn’t in the same classification as me.  I started before him so I really have no point of reference to judge his performance…

Not only is today the 235th anniversary of the Battle Of Bunker Hill in the war for American Independence, it is also my little sister’s 22nd birthday. Happy Birthday to her.

Whoa, hard to believe, I had a return call from Wells Fargo. I thought I had done rather poorly in the interview that I had conducted while in Japan. The position was going to be in, I think, one of the Dakotas. I’m quite sure that I’m wrong on that; however, I do recall that it was a north central state… maybe. I also received a return call from the City of Miramar for a temp position setting up the network at one of their new buildings, along with a few others companies.

I lose track of my phone for a few days and people actually call me; however, when I do have my phone on me I receive few calls… irony abound.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the biggest baffoun of them all?”

The biggest one of them all has to be me. I bought Ford debt when everyone thought it was going to die and sold it when it was still in the crapper but now that GM and Chrysler, reborn as Government Motors, are dead, Ford had outlived some of it’s competition. Now it’s debt is selling for close to par. I bought AIG when the credit markets were dying and when things went from horrible to bad I decided to sell.

In the case of AIG, I bought and sold preferred shares that paid out quarterly, the Ford debt that I had bought paid out semi-annually and were offering a yield of almost 33% with the potential for 225% gain if it again traded at par. I would have had them at no cost within 3 years which would be about now.

Furthermore, through my failed attempts at trading to service my debt I’ve nailed the hammer into my coffin and have begun to pile dirt onto my own grave… the obvious solution to that would be that no one shouldn’t let the mentally handicapped near phones to call their broker…

“O! say can you see by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming
whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight…
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er land of the enslaved, home of the coward.”

A few of the first lines, the second to last line and my adaptation to the final line of “The Star Spangled Banner” in support of how I feel America is at this point in time, or, at least, my fiscal situation as it now stands thanks to the powers of coercion.  Thankfully, my woes aren’t alone, the Euro is suffering a similar fate that I am suffering.   Misery loves company.  Seems to be that the world is waking up to the sovereign debt problem and that, out of all the blundering governments, the European Union is bad, the Japanese Yen is bad, the British Pound is bad, the U.S. Dollar is bad; however, the Dollar is the best of the worst.

Enough of my blabbering though, I’m back in the U.S. after 3 weeks in Japan and 5 weeks in Utah designing a accounting firm’s website that had a bunch of tax related blather on it’s pages as well as a secure, 256-bit -encryption backed portal for clients to submit tax documentation to the firm’s accountants.  My search for full-time employment continues to find pot-holes.  If all continues to do so poorly I might consider Japan, although, that would pretty much put a halt to my Paralympic dreams, unless, I became a Japanese citizen, which is probably a rather difficult option to pursue.

Teaching English in Japan is something I am looking in to that wouldn’t require a change of citizenship.  The Japanese government offers a program called the JET program which is the Japan English Teachers program where the Japanese Government hires U.S. citizens to teach English in Japan.  One of the requirements, and the biggest hurdle one must overcome for consideration in this program, is college graduation, something which I have recently acquired.  My mother knows some people that work with the Japanese Embassy so that is something I will look into for next year if the employment picture continues to be as grim as it is now for me.

I’m reading today’s Casey’s Daily Dispatch written by Doug Casey, whom is an American-born free market economist, best-selling financial author, and international investor and entrepreneur.   Today he’s commenting on taxes, of course, as today is the day that vampires suck a portion of the life-blood from the productive so that they can buy votes from the non-productive, for example, the Economic Recovery Act, and other such things, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

I spent the day working in a tax office.  One would think this would be a long day for the tax preparation organization that I’m designing a website for, but, it was a rather brief day as most everything has been filed over the past two weeks and today was just finalizing the stragglers.

Today Doug Casey is lamenting about an article written by David Leonhardt for the New York Times in which Leonhardt comments; “If anything, the government numbers I’m using here exaggerate how much of the tax burden falls on the wealthy. These numbers fail to account for the income that is hidden from tax collectors — a practice, research shows, that is more common among affluent families. “Because higher-income people are understating their income,” Joel Slemrod, a tax scholar at the University of Michigan, says, “We’ve been overstating their average tax rates.”” which is absolute bull-hockey.  The amounts collected from high net-worth individuals and their multiple-streams of income, which I was building up towards until I was coerced into taking an investment that hampered my business’s cash flow to the extent that financing it has taken me to the edge of insolvency, is a large percentage of the government’s total income stream and history has shown that when the tax-base is small but, as a percentage, it removes a large portion of income from that small tax -base, things begin to collapse.

One of Mr. Casey’s comments later in the article regarding our newest overlord’s plans at picking the pockets of us peasants is closest to how I feel about government sympathizers… “regardless of what Mr. Leonhardt might have to say on the topic, progressively picking the pockets of the productive in order to expand the scale and scope of the government may just be the opposite of building a more competitive economy.“  I’m sure that Mr. Leonhardt would be the same type of person as those older individuals you find marching around Red Square in Moscow praising Communism.  Of course, I’m not just against President Obama, no, that would be too simple, I’m anti-Big Goverment Republicans, as well.  Heck, I’m more or less against anyone whom tells me how I should live my life if my means of living does no harm to them…

Of course, it has been that way in the U.S. for quite a while, as well.  For example, the creation of the Federal Reserve following the bank solvency panic that occurred in 1907 is a good example of how what starts out as a novel idea to stabilize something with Government turned into the giant-bloodsucking parasite that is the FRB… I wonder if they’re hiring Tech Geeks?