I just had a chance to drive out to Virginia Beach and check out a couple of our new destroyers. All I can say after wondering around inside and under them is that, "they are really big". They also account for a lot of our tax money. According to what I was told, they have a working life of about 35 years. This means we can expect them to have to be replaced before some of you kids are out of college. How is that? Once they have been built and manned by about 300 of our kids, our money has already been spent. This logic leads to the cost of blowing something up with one of them. What does it cost to use one of these destroyers to blow something up if it has already been paid for with our tax money and it is going to be sent to the scrap heap in just 35 years? The ones that I was on were a few years old, so they don't have 35 more years. Starting to see why we wonder into so many wars around the world? It does not cost us anything since the ships and bombs are paid for and are going to have to scrapped anyway. Crystal clear.
Just for the record, my plane was built in 1960 and is now 51 years old and still doing its job. Why don't our expensive ship last longer and thus save us taxpayers money? I guess I will have to leave this to the experts in Washington DC.
It was not the destroyers that interested my the most on the trip, it was the size of family homes. Once I got closed to Washington DC and the state of Virginia, it seemed that homes kept getting bigger and bigger. I am sure that anyone could have housed three or four families just fine. I don't have any problem with people who would like a nicer home, but we have gone way too far on this one. I know that people in the Washington DC are make a lot of money, but the homes look like they must average almost a million dollars each. I have always figured that the cost of a home is 1% per month of its selling price. If that is a million dollars, then the cost for whoever is living in it is about $10,000 per month. That is $120,000 per year. Just who are the people who can afford that much? If you look a little deeper, the problem is "not" who can afford it. The question is how can our country expect to survive if people who can afford $10,000 per month for a home are investing in a home that will be an anchor around the neck of the rest of the country. Don't follow me? Look at the energy that these "too" big homes will eat up over their life? It will be a lot more than 35 years. Further, how could we have had a tax or political policy that encouraged "us" t buy these big homes and thus mortgage our countries future? It is one thing to buy a car or a fur coat, but a home is another thing. I used to live in San Jose California and there were orchards every where. Streets were named after the types of fruit trees, yet today, San Jose is wall to wall homes and I mean big homes. There used to be 10 or 12 big canneries in San Jose, now there are none. The main reason is these big homes we sunk much of our national wealth into.
How does a big house help you put gas into your car or food on the table? It does not. Much of your labor is to pay the thing off and most of us will never pay off the homes we live in. Is that sick or what? How much different do you think the country would be today if you lived in the same home as your parents? What if the money that you spent on that big house had been spent on productive equipment or tools that made a product? Look at Home Depot. They saw us all dumping our savings and future earnings into our homes and tried to get a piece of the action. We should not have needed a Home Depot in the first place. Our parents got by just fine without Home Depot.
I have blogged on this before, but you can see backwards that we made a very big mistake when we bought into this idea of a big home for everyone. We sold our future and that of our kids for what? A big house that they will not be able to afford to heat? I was reading that in Detroit 25% of homes are abandoned and the only solution is to tear or burn them down. Isn't it interesting to look across the river to Toronto and see a much different picture. They did not fall for the big home craze like we did and they are doing fine. It is easy for me to call attention to all this, but how to dig out of it is not so easy. It is a deep hole and it took a long time for us to dig this deep. My point is that it is going to take a very long time for "our kids" to dig out of this one. Those of us who dug this hole are all going to be dead by the time our kids dig out. That is a fact. As long as Obama and his union friends keep on digging, it will be just that much longer before we really start to fill in the hole.
