and CALL OFF CHRISTMAS!!!

Robin Hood is a heroic story of conservative principles, I’ve said that before on this blog.

Now the only real bright point of that Kevin Costner film that clip above is from is Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham. Especially his death scene.* It’s a crappy movie, but if you don’t judge my brain candy, I won’t judge you for that time you watched Jersey Shore.

The quality of the movie, or lack there of, isn’t the point of this post though.

You see, the Obama administration has effectively placed themselves as the Sheriff of Nottingham in America’s little version of Robin Hood.

They even threatened Christmas! What kind of monster does that?!

In a Monday report, the White House warned that failure to resolve the impasse over a tax and deficit deal could undermine consumer confidence this holiday season.

A new report from the National Economic Council and the Council of Economic Advisers timed to the online shopping holiday “cyber Monday” estimated that consumers could spend close to $200 billion less, while GDP growth could slow by 1.4 percentage points in 2013.

The report also warns that the psychological impact of a looming middle class tax hike could put a huge dent in retail sales over the holidays — traditionally the most important retail period of the year.

“Consumer confidence over the next several weeks is particularly important,” the report warns. “If Congress does not act on the president’s plan to extend tax cuts for the middle-class, it will be risking one of the key contributors to growth and jobs in our economy at the most important time of the year for retail stores.”

- Politico

As Doug Powers said in his article on MichelleMalkin.com: Raise taxes on the rich or Christmas gets it!

The funny thing about this is that the article was published on Politico on the 26th, but on the 25th Politico reported that there was a “Record start for holiday season”.

It’s estimated that U.S. shoppers hit stores and websites at record numbers over  the four-day Thanksgiving weekend, according to a survey released by the  National Retail Federation on Sunday.
…

All told, a record 247 million shoppers visited stores and websites over the  four-day weekend starting Thanksgiving, up 9.2 percent of last year, according  to a survey of 4,000 shoppers that was conducted by research firm BIGinsight for  the trade group. Americans spent more too: The average holiday shopper spent  $423 over the entire weekend, up from $398. Total spending over the four-day  weekend totaled $59.1 billion, up 12.8 percent from 2011.

- Politico

Hmm…so which is it Obama? Is the looming fiscal cliff really going to effect consumers that much? Because it seems like it isn’t doing much at all.

I argue that is because the majority of American’s are morons, I’m certianly not out spending tons of money this Holiday season, but then again my argument is confirmed by Obama winning the election.

People are idiots and sales will continue to pull them in. They are spending MORE now than they were in years previous, which means your little threats that Christmas will be ruined if we don’t let you raise taxes, we’re not buying it Scrooge.

Stop threatening to call of Christmas and do your damn job.

I’m on Robin Hood’s side here. If you are going to raise my taxes, I’m probably not going to be spending much at all. You can’t spend my money better than I can, especially not in the Holiday season. A welfare check doesn’t mean quite as much as buying my sister that new Taylor Swift songbook** and it doesn’t look as nice when wrapped up under the tree.

______________________________________________________________________

*Because if there is one thing Alan Rickman is fantastic at, it’s overblown death scenes.

**Here’s hoping she doesn’t read this blog.

Foreign aid now comes with strings attached and that’s a good thing. So why is it wrong when domestic government aid comes with strings?

Britain and the United States have both decided that enough is enough. They aren’t going to be handing out anymore foreign aid to countries that ban homosexuality or do not adhere proper human rights in other cases. David Cameron, the Prime Minister of Great Britain says that aid should come with more strings attached.

“Britain is one of the premier aid givers in the world. We want to see countries that receive our aid adhering to proper human rights. We are saying that is one of the things that determines our aid policy, and there have been particularly bad examples where we have taken action.”

- The Guardian

And in the United States

“I am deeply concerned by the violence and discrimination targeting LGBT persons around the world,” Obama said in a memorandum. “Whether it is passing laws that criminalize LGBT status, beating citizens simply for joining peaceful LGBT pride celebrations or killing men, women and children for their perceived sexual orientation.”

Obama said, “I am directing all agencies engaged abroad to ensure that U.S. diplomacy and foreign assistance promote and protect the human rights of LGBT persons.”

- USA Today

Much to my chagrin, I have to say that if Obama actually enforces this plan, I’ll have to applaud his actions. We can’t give money to countries that are doing things we disapprove of. It would be like continuously giving out free money to people who are only going to spend it on drugs and not on bettering themselves.

Of course I would be a little happier if Obama had decided that any violations of human rights would be enough to nix foreign aid for a country, similar to David Cameron’s plan. Making it only about issues discrimination and violence toward the GLBT community just seems a bit like he is ignoring all the other violation’s of human rights that happen all over the world that have nothing to do with homosexuality.

Liberals are, of course, very excited about this move on both country’s parts. Most of the Conservatives I know are also pleased and if they aren’t, they should just remember something that The Conservative New Ager said to me a couple of days ago. If America is only giving aid to countries that don’t discriminate against against homosexuals, then the countries we give aid too will shrink drastically (good for the deficit) in fact the number will probably shrink down to only 1…Israel.

Of course there is something ironic about Liberals being okay with, even excited about, financial aid coming with more strings attached. Remember that comment I made about giving money to someone so they could just spend it on drugs? Yeah, you may not have read this post I wrote in June, but give it a read really fast.

Liberals were in an uproar about how wrong it was to give people drug tests before they could qualify for welfare. Isn’t that basically the same thing as telling other countries to shape up or we won’t give them money? America and Britain don’t want to subsidize the violence and bigotry of other nations, I think we can all agree that is great. So why is it suddenly wrong when the tax payer’s of America don’t want to subsidize someone’s illegal drug habit?

Can you be Christian and a capitalist.

Just a quick explanation of how you can deal with people like the one at 4 minutes and 30 seconds into this video.

She quotes Matthew 6:24 which says.

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

The issue here is that the Bible clearly states, in 1 Timothy 6:10

For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

Which the video maker mentions.

Love of money is the problem, not money in and of itself. It is perfectly fine to know that you are good at what you do and to expect to be paid to do it. As the Joker said in The Dark Knight “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.”

What is is with me and quoting Batman villains to make my point?

What is the difference between “the love of money” and “money”?

I mean, the phrase “love of money”, “loved money”, etc. appear over and over in a derogatory way in the Bible.,

Luke 16:14

The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus.

Ecclesiastes 5:10

Whoever loves money never has enough;
whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income.
This too is meaningless.

If you haven’t read Atlas Shrugged and don’t want to be “spoiled” then don’t read further. However go ahead if you’ve either read the book, or don’t mind a bit of story from part II.

Dagny Taggart leaves Taggart Transcontinental, retiring despite Directive 10-289, she stays away until she hears of a horrible train crash and then she returns to her job. Not because of money, but because she loved what she did. Yes, she did her job to get the most profits for her company, but that  just makes sense. She didn’t love money, though she lived comfortably. She loved doing her job, she loved it more than anything else.

That’s the difference between being rich, making money, and the “love of money”.

But these protester’s would never be able to understand that.

And as an answer to my the title question is this, Capitalism has nothing do with your religion, neither does Socialism.

However, you can’t use the Bible to destroy the ideas of Capitalism, because no where in the Bible does it say that money is evil.

“He started it!”

If any of my readers ever had a sibling you will know what that phrase sounds like. A little bit of a whine, a raised voice, a pointed finger, and always, always directed toward the authority figure who is telling us to behave.

I remember my dad’s chosen response to that particular exclamation when it came up between my younger sister and I. He would look straight at us, glare, and say in an absolutely calm and threatening voice.

“I don’t care who started it, either you finish it or I will.”

In other words, you are being  a brat and I don’t care who pulled who’s hair first or who started repeating every word the other said first, settle it between yourself or I will settle if for you and you won’t like the way I settle it.

We usually settled the issue on our own at that point and stopped whining about who “started it”.

Too bad liberals and President Obama haven’t figured out how to simply deal with the economy without constant exclamations of “he started it!” to the American people in reference to George Bush.

Watching The Five tonight on Fox News and Bob Beckel proved that point by once more reverting to the accusation of “Well, George Bush was the one who started that” when the others on the panel brought up their distaste for bail out programs.

First of all, George Bush was no economic conservative, so that’s a completely useless argument. I didn’t agree with the bailouts when Bush arranged them, I didn’t agree with a lot of Bush’s decisions.

Secondly, I really just don’t care. Bush may have started the bail out programs, but Obama chose to become President. He chose to take that responsibility on his shoulders. He told the voters he would fix the economy, he took that burden on by himself. Therefore he is now responsible for the decisions he makes during his term as President, he can’t blame his failures on the previous President.

If he continues to do so, or the left continues to do so for him, he just looks incompetent and childish.

Let me explain something about the bailouts and Solyndra, both of which “began” during the Bush administration.

Obama chose to continue the bailouts and, in fact, chose to spend more money which has not had the promised effect of fixing the economy. Bush didn’t hold a gun to his head and make him continue that practice, he chose to do it. If the policy fails, Bush is not at fault, Obama is.

As for Solyndra, what person signs off on an investment without doing their own due diligence on it? So when people say “Well, the Solyndra deal started back in the Bush administration.” It just makes Obama look lazy. What? He couldn’t be bothered to check the facts again himself…or get an intern to check it for him? He just couldn’t be bothered to read any emails with the heading of “WARNING: SOLYNDRA DEAL IS BAD!!!”?

All I can say is that, I don’t care who started it Mr. President. Either you finish it, or the voters are going to finish you. That’s what happens in democratic republics.

Laws for the GOP to pass: A cheaper, healthier alternative to food stamps (via The Conservative New Ager)

So I was in the grocery store the other day looking at whole grain/fruit bars for snacks when I realized something. Most of the bars like this are small and cheap and they seem to have a lot of calories for their size. I’ve seen them have the full amount of protein, fiber, vitamins, calories, what have you. Theoretically you should be able to easily put a whole day’s dietary needs in three or four bars (probably at an incredibly cheap cost). This … Read More

via The Conservative New Ager

Response to Peter Singer’s Solution for World Poverty: fin

Yes, this is the final piece in this series.

I’m breathing a bigger sigh of relief than you are, believe me.

I almost decided to just forget this last part, since there isn’t really that much new to add to my side of the argument, but I guess I can just mock the last remaining paragraphs of Singer’s argument. He deserves it. I had to write a goddamned essay about this article…and I couldn’t use these blogs as part of it either….too partisan.

Anyway, I’m still editing the rough draft of the essay, but ranting over here is nice.

(parts I, II, III, IV)

At this point various objections may crop up. Someone may say: “If every citizen living in the affluent nations contributed his or her share I wouldn’t have to make such a drastic sacrifice, because long before such levels were reached, the resources would have been there to save the lives of all those children dying from lack of food or medical care. So why should I give more than my fair share?” Another, related, objection is that the Government ought to increase its overseas aid allocations, since that would spread the burden more equitably across all taxpayers.

LOLWUT?!

Sorry, that was unprofessional.

What I meant to say was, what makes it our government’s job to take care of these countries anymore than it is my job?

Singer, find me the section of the United State’s constitution that says that we must take care of impoverished nations around the world…to the detriment of our own economy and society no less.

The United Nations is batshit crazy and I don’t even think their charter says such a thing.

Never mind the fact that it would be totally unethical and against the constitution (not like our current president gives a rat’s ass about that anyway really…) to raise taxes to fix the problems in some other country. That action is suspect enough when it’s done to help our own country’s economic woes, suspect even more so because it doesn’t work…

Yet the question of how much we ought to give is a matter to be decided in the real world —and that, sadly, is a world in which we know that most people do not, and in the immediate future will not, give substantial amounts to overseas aid agencies. We know, too, that at least in the next year, the United States Government is not going to meet even the very modest United Nations-recommended target of 0.7 percent of gross national product; at the moment it lags far below that, at 0.09 percent, not even half of Japan’s 0.22 percent or a tenth of Denmark’s 0.97 percent. Thus, we know that the money we can give beyond that theoretical “fair share” is still going to save lives that would otherwise be lost. While the idea that no one need do more than his or her fair share is a powerful one, should it prevail if we know that others are not doing their fair share and that children will die preventable deaths unless we do more than our fair share? That would be taking fairness too far.

One of the best things about the fact that this article was written in 1999 is that you can now look back at the countries that he references and see A.) Japan’s population since 1999 has been in a state of stagnation or downright decline…as has their economy. And Denmark’s economy is going through it’s own struggles.

Now, of course, I am not an economist. I am not claiming that large amount of money these countries put toward foreign aid every year is what has caused their problem.

I am saying it problem can’t have helped…

Thus, this ground for limiting how much we ought to give also fails. In the world as it is now, I can see no escape from the conclusion that each one of us with wealth surplus to his or her essential needs should be giving most of it to help people suffering from poverty so dire as to be life-threatening. That’s right: I’m saying that you shouldn’t buy that new car, take that cruise, redecorate the house or get that pricey new suit. After all, a $1,000 suit could save five children’s lives.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Because if we had them we would have to feel like murderers.

I know I already said this in the fourth part of this series, but Singer is advocating for a world in which he takes jobs away from people who need them here in our own country as well. Or has he forgotten that people build those cars (I thought the auto industries were some of the ones that were “too big to fail”?),  staff cruises, build houses, decorate houses, and make clothing.

I guess we aren’t as deserving since we were born in America…

So how does my philosophy break down in dollars and cents? An American household with an income of $50,000 spends around $30,000 annually on necessities, according to the Conference Board, a nonprofit economic research organization. Therefore, for a household bringing in $50,000 a year, donations to help the world’s poor should be as close as possible to $20,000. The $30,000 required for necessities holds for higher incomes as well. So a household making $100,000 could cut a yearly check for $70,000. Again, the formula is simple: whatever money you’re spending on luxuries, not necessities, should be given away.

That may be your bucket, but you don’t need that bucket, it is a luxury item. Those are big no-no’s. Hand it over.

(can you tell I’ve ceased to be serious and just started to mock Singer?)

Now, evolutionary psychologists tell us that human nature just isn’t sufficiently altruistic to make it plausible that many people will sacrifice so much for strangers. On the facts of human nature, they might be right, but they would be wrong to draw a moral conclusion from those facts. If it is the case that we ought to do things that, predictably, most of us won’t do, then let’s face that fact head-on. Then, if we value the life of a child more than going to fancy restaurants, the next time we dine out we will know that we could have done something better with our money. If that makes living a morally decent life extremely arduous, well, then that is the way things are. If we don’t do it, then we should at least know that we are failing to live a morally decent life —not because it is good to wallow in guilt but because knowing where we should be going is the first step toward heading in that direction.

Maybe it’s not a matter of valuing a meal at a nice restaurant over the life of a child, Singer. Did you ever stop to consider the fact that you might be simplifying this a bit too much?

Maybe I value the efforts of a local entrepreneur. Maybe I value the job security of a college student, working their way through their bachelor’s degree. Maybe I value the economic stability of my own country over the economic stability (well…let’s face, not the economic stability. You weren’t trying to build a stable economy with this charity.) false loyalty of some impoverished country that you’ve chosen to feed for the time being. When you get bored you’ll move on to another country, another project…and screw the fact that you haven’t actually helped the country accomplish anything.

At least you looked good for your 15 minutes.

When Bob first grasped the dilemma that faced him as he stood by that railway switch, he must have thought how extraordinarily unlucky he was to be placed in a situation in which he must choose between the life of an innocent child and the sacrifice of most of his savings. But he was not unlucky at all. We are all in that situation.

Response to Peter Singer’s Solution for World Poverty: Quatre

Quatre, French for four and also the name of the fourth (and slightly crazy) Gundam pilot in Gundam Wing, but that’s not important right now…except for the fact that Quatre, even when he was blowing up entire space colonies for no good goddamn reason, he was still more sane than Singer.

Quatre was unprepared for the mental stress caused by the Wing Zero’s neural interface, Zero System; it drove him to the point of insanity and he destroyed an OZ-occupied resource satellite and an evacuated civilian colony.

Back to Singer’s essay. (Parts I, II and III)

We ended last time with Singer guilting readers into donating through an overblown comparison to Nazi Germany. (I shouldn’t have to say this, but I will. If that actually worked on any of my readers and you actually donated without researching and finding out if the charity was worthwhile first then shame on you. I would ask you to leave and not come back, but I suffer from the hope that I can teach you something…someday. So stay…read…don’t be a moron.)

Now that you have distinguished yourself morally from people who put their vintage cars ahead of a child’s life,

Wow! Wow! That was…I’m not linking to that article on Poisoning the Well again. If you haven’t read it yet, you can find the link in one of the previous sections. I hope you can see how this comment has no place in a rational philosophical discussion though. He is outright saying, if you did not just donate to charity, you are no better than Bob who sacrificed a child to save his Bugatti. It doesn’t matter if you have a good reason for not donating, such as not being able to find a worthwhile charity whose long term-affects on the livelihoods of the poor you could support, you are still a child killer. You gotta love the size of Singer’s balls, thinking he can get away with bullshit like this…oh wait, he has.

how about treating yourself and your partner to dinner at your favorite restaurant? But wait. The money you will spend at the restaurant could also help save the lives of children overseas! True, you weren’t planning to blow $200 tonight, but if you were to give up dining out just for one month, you would easily save that amount. And what is one month’s dining out, compared to a child’s life? There’s the rub. Since there are a lot of desperately needy children in the world, there will always be another child whose life you could save for another $200. Are you therefore obliged to keep giving until you have nothing left? At what point can you stop?

I don’t know Singer. Since you are using guilt as your main point of control here, I suppose I can stop when I stop feeling guilty about the amount of money I earn at my job. Oh wait, I don’t feel guilty about that now. Jokes on you.

The fact is, most people don’t feel guilty about the amount of money they make. As long as they deserve the amount they are receiving…and I’m well aware that that is not always the case. I’m sure there are many actors and athletes who may feel a smidgen guilty about the size of their paychecks, since I’m fairly certain no one deserves pay checks that large for the jobs they do. More politicians should feel guilty about the size of their paychecks as far as I’m concerned…they certainly aren’t doing the work to deserve the pay.

Hypothetical examples can easily become farcical. Consider Bob. How far past losing the Bugatti should he go? Imagine that Bob had got his foot stuck in the track of the siding, and if he diverted the train, then before it rammed the car it would also amputate his big toe. Should he still throw the switch? What if it would amputate his foot? His entire leg?

Well at least he admits the example was farcical…or could have been farcical if he took it further. I argue that it was farcical from the start, but…whatever.

I already went over why it would have likely been less ethical to switch the train to the second track, so there isn’t really any reason to address this second argument from Singer. If you would like me too, just ask in the comments.

As absurd as the Bugatti scenario gets when pushed to extremes, the point it raises is a serious one: only when the sacrifices become very significant indeed would most people be prepared to say that Bob does nothing wrong when he decides not to throw the switch. Of course, most people could be wrong; we can’t decide moral issues by taking opinion polls.

When pushed to extremes?

Okay, okay, I’ll stop harping on the Bugatti scenario. It just irked me…

When sacrifices become significant? Would that mean the death or injuries of hundreds of passengers on the train? Or hundred or thousands in the city? After all this is a hypothetical situation, I can change it to suit my needs. (Did I say I was going to stop harping on this? I meant the Bugatti part of the scenario. I’ve moved over the my part of the scenario that I outlined in the II part of this response). When I say that the death of that child would be less wrong in that scenario, I’m not deciding that based on an opinion poll (though I doubt an opinion poll would decide the other way, unless the train was full of prison inmates), I’m decided it based on ethical grounds of the number of lives lost. A truly utilitarian way of looking at the situation, which I’m sure Singer couldn’t argue with.

In that case I would demand no sacrifice from Bob, nor from the people on that train. They do not all deserve to die, or be severely injured, to save the life of one child. Sorry, that may seem heartless…but I’m only using the same philosophy as Singer to make that judgment call.

But consider for yourself the level of sacrifice that you would demand of Bob, and then think about how much money you would have to give away in order to make a sacrifice that is roughly equal to that. It’s almost certainly much, much more than $200. For most middle-class Americans, it could easily be more like $200,000.

Once again, Singer fails to define what he means. Does he mean $200,00o a year? (if so, what fantasy world does he live in and how can I move there?) or $200,000 a lifetime? Even $200,000 a lifetime seems drastic, in 2011 or in 1999, in 2011 that’s more than I will spend on my entire college education. Not counting my housing costs, my tuition for all 4 years will be about $40,000. I consider my family to be middle class (currently, we weren’t always) and $200,000 a lifetime? Probably not possible. $200,000 a year? Singer would have to be LSD to think that was possible for a middle class family.

Though I suppose he could be working off the context of “middle class” and “rich” that they IRS have. I don’t know what it was in 1999, but today the cut off for “middle class” is over $100,000 a year and “rich” is over $250,000 a year. If he was working from that idea, which is a completely ridiculous one in the real world, I suppose I could understand his confusion.

Isn’t it counterproductive to ask people to do so much? Don’t we run the risk that many will shrug their shoulders and say that morality, so conceived, is fine for saints but not for them? I accept that we are unlikely to see, in the near or even medium-term future, a world in which it is normal for wealthy Americans to give the bulk of their wealth to strangers. When it comes to praising or blaming people for what they do, we tend to use a standard that is relative to some conception of normal behavior. Comfortably off Americans who give, say, 10 percent of their income to overseas aid organizations are so far ahead of most of their equally comfortable fellow citizens that I wouldn’t go out of my way to chastise them for not doing more. Nevertheless, they should be doing much more, and they are in no position to criticize Bob for failing to make the much greater sacrifice of his Bugatti.

Before I go any further, I have to note that, according the New York Times, Peter Singer only give 20% of his income to charity. He is falling awfully far short of the bar he sets for everyone else isn’t he? He says that “they are in no position to criticize Bob for failing to make the much greater sacrifice of his Bugatti.” but he feels like he is in the perfect position to criticize the rest of us, when he falls so far short of his own ideal? How hypocritical of him.

Now I’ll address another issue I take with his philosophy. His sheer inability to understand his own country’s economy and what his ideals will do to it.

Alright, fine, say that everyone in this country stops going out to eat, stops buying luxury items, stops sending their kids to college, saving for retirement, or doing anything outside of paying for “necessities”. Which apparently come up to $30,000 a year. So our country is doing a great thing for the impoverished countries around the world…sure we may not be helping them in the long run, but we are helping. We are at least giving the starving man a fish, even if we aren’t teaching him how to fish, as the saying goes.

That’s great.

Now what is happening to our economy at home? Well that restauranteur has to shut his restaurant because no one is going out to eat any more, because it’s a “luxury item”, so he has to lay off, on average, 2 cooks, 3 cook’s assistants, 5 waiters, 3 bussers, 2 bartenders and a hostess. So that’s 17 people out of work right there and that’s just one restaurant in one town. The shops selling “luxury clothing” such as that $1000 suit that Singer mentions, has to shut it’s doors, so it stops making suits, laying off dozens of tailors and seamstresses in the process. And on and on and on it goes, right down the line. A stream of unemployed, impoverished people right here in our own country.

Soon the charities that were working overseas see the problem at home and return to their own country to work, feeding and clothing the poor, handing out free medical care for those that have no jobs.

And who is paying for that?

Why the people who still have jobs of course. They are still working, plodding along and donating every single cent of their excess money because it’s the “moral” thing to do. Except, now, instead of supporting foreign countries all that work is going into keeping their own country afloat. Am I the only that sees a problem with this scenario? We do not destroy our own country’s economy in a desperate attempt to shore up the economy of a third world country that needs far more than a stopgap measure of food and medical aid to cure its ills.

For that matter, Mr. President, we don’t destroy our own economy to keep huge banks afloat and keep paying out money into sinking ships with names like Social Security and Medicare either.

Singer doesn’t understand the economy, not here and not overseas. He doesn’t understand how to stop World Poverty because he doesn’t understand how poverty happens. Until he understands that, listening to anything he says on the subject is pure folly.

Obama doesn’t understand the economy either, but I think we already knew that.

Obama the Economy Slayer (via The Conservative New Ager)

So I got sent a recent article that basically said that despite all the whining, Obama had done nothing at all to ruin the economy, Republicans could point to nothing Obama had done to ruin the economy…and implicitly that it was all the fault of Bush and Republicans that the economy was in the trouble it was. Now I will not completely defend the Republicans here. Bush was an idiot who backstabbed his party by applying the name NeoCon to the most … Read More

via The Conservative New Ager

The blog post I wrote when I should have been packing.

I’m a terrible procrastinater when it comes to packing for a move. I will say “I’m going to pack today” and then I’ll find myself on the other side of town, at Starbucks, reading Atlas Shrugged until 8pm. I don’t plan to procrastinate, but it always seems to happen.

Today I managed to put it off until after 3 in the afternoon. I still have two weeks until my lease is up, which is amazing for me really…when I moved into this apartment I packed everything in the space of a single evening…the night before I moved.

The other problem I have is that I am a packrat of the absolute worst kind. I inherited the problem from my mother and her mother before her. When packing starts we always say “we are going to get rid of all the stuff we don’t need!” only we don’t specify what we don’t need, so my mother finds herself saying “I know I haven’t worn this purple polyester pants suit in nearly a decade, but you never know when I might need it again!” and into the box it goes. Or my grandmother who has dozens of years worth of  Better Homes and Gardens and other magazines and can’t bring herself to throw them out because she really just loves the articles.

When I moved into this apartment, space wasn’t an issue for me, time was. So I threw absolutely every single one of my possessions into boxes without even considering what was important or not. Considering I was moving out of a two bedroom apartment where I was sharing a room and bathroom and closet with my teenage sister and the rest of the apartment with my parents, it wasn’t like I had too much stuff for a one bedroom, one bath apartment of my own.

In fact, my apartment looked a little bare. So I went shopping with my mother. We went to a used furniture place and picked up an art easel that turned into an interesting table in the living room and bought a dining room set. I went through my parent’s storage unit and took a love seat and end table and a massive dresser that was gathering dust in the corner from lack of use.

I was given extra room and I expanded to fill it. That’s what people usually do. We don’t really think about the future. I wasn’t even considering the possibility that I might have to pare down the amount of possessions I had in a year so that I could move into a dorm room.

But now I’m facing that problem and I can’t afford to be a packrat anymore. I’m axing some of the sentimental stuff that I’ve kept for years and throwing out and giving away clothing that I kept because “You never know when I might need it/it might come back into style.” (I feel the need to note that plaid dress pants have never been in style in my era, and are not likely to come back, and the fact that a pair were even in my closet is mildly scary. I think my mother’s closet is trying to migrate to mine.)

And you know what, it’s sad, because some of things that I’m having to give away or put in storage for a year or so are things that I really like having around. My dresser is, arguably, my favorite piece of furniture. Real wood, great workmanship, but it’s huge and would take up way to much space in my dorm room so it can’t come with me.

I think we can all say this same thing about this country’s budget. There are a lot of nice things in it that we wish we could keep, but we just don’t have room for right now because they aren’t necessary (like my dresser and bedside table and couch and…*sob*) and there is a lot of crap that we just need to get rid of because saying “you never know when we’ll need it again” is not a good excuse for spending billions of dollars to keep it. (like the 20 pairs of shoes, pants and shirts that I through out while I packing my closet up. That was just scary.)