Friday after lunch at Ft. Wilderness Campground.  I (Chuck) laundered and paid bills this morning.  I have other chores and work on my Florida tree identification program for this afternoon.  The forecast is for showers over the weekend, but we will still attempt a walk tomorrow morning in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and we may on Sunday go paddling on the Tuckaseegee River.  Anne will be off work on Wednesday, but we have made no plans for that day yet.  We would like to make a long day-hike, but we will watch for a break in the showery weather.

Anne has enjoyed work at the clinic at the small and elegant Cherokee Hospital, but there are, as always with work, challenges.  She tries to provide sensitive care to patients, many of whom have “medically complicated problems.”  Her four-day workweek is good; she works nine to ten hours usually when she is on, so the schedule is almost full-time.  She has friends now at the hospital and enjoys their company.  Still, the setting is institutional and bureaucratic, and personnel issues are also often “complicated.”  I have never ceased to be amazed that some people find unhappiness at a good job and elect to be petty. 

Medicine at Cherokee is socialized; sadly this does not result in a healthier community.  Patient compliance is even tougher when there is no economic penalty for non-compliance.  The wealth of Cherokee provides billboards about such things as diabetes and smoking hazards, but many folks seem to expect that these are problems to be managed by the medical community.  Too many young people appear at the clinic wanting “pain pills” for chronic discomforts.  Others choose to avoid doctors until the ailment has become very serious.  The mixture of routine and more difficult cases makes the medicine at least interesting.  

We will now be staying almost through June, and then be off to the Midwest after a short visit to Pennsylvania.  That means we will be here through the rhododendron blooming season.  Hurrah!

Alex is visiting this Thursday through Tuesday of next week.  We look forward to some playtime with him before he migrates to central California. 

I have tried to walk at least every other day on one or another local trail, watching the arrival of spring and the associated budding and blooming of plants and the arrival of migratory songbirds.  This has been great fun.  Spring is still arriving at elevations above 5K feet.  The road to Balsam Mountain campground opened last week, and I visited it for the first time on Tuesday.  The leaves were just coming out and already an eastern wood peewee and a black-throated blue warbler had made nests among the spruce trees.  Alder-leaved viburnum shrubs were in bloom in the shadows of the balsam trees.  The light breeze was chilly on the mountaintop, but the sunlight was brilliant and I could make out with binoculars the tower on Clingman’s Dome some thirty miles away.   

Evenings are quiet.  I cook as fine a dinner as is practical with the motorhome facilities, and then we work on small projects and watch TV or video from 9-10.  With an early bedtime we have caught up on our reading and sleep.  We listen to the news, but ignore it as best we can.  The federal government has become a blackhole sucking up more and more.  Already there is no market for money.  Interest paid is much less than inflation.  Bonds are outrageously overpriced with inflation looming, and while stock has become cheaper, the new administration seems to enjoy bashing business.  We expected “a correction” with the change of administrations, but now expect a long recession and punitive taxation.  Our retirement may not go so well on the long run, but then again the outlook for working and saving now don’t look so good either.

Bizarrely, we ended up paying no federal income taxes for last year.  Health care is our largest expense.  We have to wonder how much a “nationalized health care” will add to that bill.  No point in worrying, but the future looks less bright.  A massive contraction of government will come; let us hope that it can somehow be done cleanly.  It will be painful, however it happens.  Meanwhile, private wealth is contracting and will continue to do so.  We’ll continue to putter along, but there may not be much to putter with.  Too bad.

Our society also seem to be more “crisis driven” than ever, though we should be wiser with education and universal communication.  Last week “global warming” this week
“the flu.”  Excuse me, I guess that is already old news.  Our expansive technology seems to give us the capability to overreact to everything, and the public seems to have bought government’s line “that it can make things better.” 

When house, medical, and education expenses were exploding, the government said inflation was running at 3%.   With private credit growing in tandem with these expenses the government maintained and expanded Fannie May and Freddie Mac to promote the securitization of mortgages and credit, credit, and more credit.  When journalists complained that these institutions failed to maintain adequate reserves and that their failure would saddle the government with their liabilities and cause a rippling financial crisis, Congressmen excoriated the journalists for crying wolf.  So, the Federal Reserve Bank kept making money and all banks kept pushing loans.  I shorted houses in 2005.  The herd waited until 2007.  The government banks, Fannie May and Freddie Mac, collapsed at the end of last year and brought down several private banks with them.  Congress, of course, blames the bankers, and the government solution is to make money like crazy.  It says that inflation has gone to zero, but why then did the cost of my health insurance policy, my largest expense remember, go up by 10% this year? 

The solution, no doubt will be to increase taxes.  These are probably not included in the inflation index either. 

The life strategy going forward may be to earn so little that you minimize taxes and reap the most federal benefits.  This may go on for a long time, until there is so little left to reap that we tire of waiting for it.  In the 1970’s I expected the fall of the Soviet Union.  I have since heard arguments that we had something to do with that.  I find that funny.  I said then that even the policeman’s wife had to stand in line for bread.  I said that they wouldn’t take it much longer.  Within a few years they threw out the government that provided everything – and nothing.  I’d like to think that we are smarter than to have to go through the same process, but I begin to wonder. 

The government has said not to save.  So, most don’t save.  I understand the pressure against it, but still!  The government has perverted our health care system so that people do not expect to pay for routine care out of pocket.  They expect insurance or someone else to do that.  Huh?  Who is going to pay for your health care?  The rich?  What is the point of working hard to get rich if the government takes half of your money?  A few may persist, but most will say, what for?  We quit work in large part when our largest expense became taxes.  We could keep working to save more, but the more we earned, the more taxes we paid.  We just stopped, and our expenses went way, way down. 

The penalty for saving really came home to us when we had children in college.  Our daughter laughingly told us one time that she might be the only student she knew who was not receiving “financial aid.”  I told her she was, but it was coming from Mom and Dad.  Education was, behind taxes, our largest family expense.  We saved furiously for it.  Our bonds earned about 6%.   The feds took 2% of that in taxes and 3% in inflation.  College tuitions went up 12% a year.  That was criminal, but the government kept throwing more and more money “into education.”  Educators smiled and kept increasing the cost of tuition.  College presidents are not stupid.  Students and parents smiled when they received financial aid thinking that somehow they were being helped, but for some reason they still had to pay bills.  The few who didn’t get assistance fumed because we had to pay not only the basic cost, but also the cost added by the federal contribution.  A double whammy. 

No house of cards lasts forever.  Years ago, I was concerned when some politician said that government could not do this or that because we were indebting our children or grandchildren.  I sort of believed him.  I have since learned that the consequences of actions seldom take that long.  Simply put, a society has to support itself.  We can promise a government dole to everyone, that the U.A.W. will not go bankrupt, and that we will tax coal out of existence.  But, when the government can provide nothing, we will still have to make a go of it.  Look at the people of Cuba.  When in Florida, I looked at a collection of marvelous hand-made little motorboats.  People worked long hours illegally for foreign currency to obtain the old auto engines, repair them, and have them installed.  Then they waited for a calm night and hauled ass to los Estados Unitos.  Too bad they could not instead have created wealth in Cuba.  Here we have the freedom, but we seem to be thinking that the Cubanos have it better than we do.  Some idiot even made a movie suggesting that the Cubans have a better health care system than we do.  How does the song go? “When you have nothing, you have nothing left to loose.” 

Nothing is sustainable, I suppose, but I see no reason that this country should not continue to expand wealth.  We still, in my view, have taken the best and the brightest and those most willing to work.  We have, so far, kept the world from starving and lead the development of computer technology that has enriched both the world and us.  I trust that we are not now going to become two nations, government and union employees and the rest of us.   We, as a people must put some proportion to everything.  We can’t do that if we don’t pay for it.  If we are paid for work we don’t do, if we receive benefits beyond our contributions, if our employer or the government pay for our health care, and if  “only the rich pay taxes,” we loose the connection between what we get and what it costs us.  That is a recipe for disaster.  The current recession is a hint of what can happen when you play games with money.  Sadly, we seem not to be learning a lesson.  We may face hard times if we do not start.

Sorry, if I sound gloomy today. I am not, just frustrated. It is a rainy day.  I’m glad we quit work and started spending some of the savings before the government turned a portion of it to dust.  We’ll keep earning and spending a little and doing just fine.  I worry about our children.  I hope that they are looking at houses now that the bubble has gone down.  There is an old saying, “buy low and sell high.”  People tend to do just the opposite.  Good things can happen even in bad times.