A Mission To Stop The Abuse (of a phrase)

Assumptions could be made that most people do not "literally" have the ability to buy anything they would like. I would love to buy a 34 foot yacht, but I do not have the money....right now. The problem is, I don't realistically earn enough money to buy a yacht right now. That would mean my income is currently limited to not buying certain things others may be able to buy. Likewise, my income does allow me to buy many things others can not buy. I do not however say I live on a "fixed income", because I don't.

Very few people are forced to live on a fixed income and it "gets my goat" (http://www.drlaura.com/letters/index.html?mode=view&tile=1&id=11311) to hear people lament about the limits of their income. The phrase is over used and commonly associated with senior citizens. I love these people and enjoy hearing their stories and learning from them. However, many of them, including relatives of mine, made bad financial decisions over and over, thus limiting the lifestyle they could afford in later years. Still, their income is not fixed. Most "fixed income" people could unfix it by getting a part-time job or starting a business. Colonel Sanders didn't cook chicken commercially until he was in his fifties (http://www.kfc.com/about/colonel.asp). Mary Kay, the cosmetics queen, didn't start her business until she was pushing 50 (http://www.anbhf.org/laureates/mkash.html). All I'm saying is that people should ease up on the usage of the phrase "fixed income". Everybody has a fixed income until they decide to do something about it. Currently mine is fixed well belowe $170,000 a year. Well below!

For those few that are bedridden (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bedridden) I give them a pass. For those that are able, regardless of age...................STOP IT!

Road Trip In Support Of Th FairTax

Well, I wish you could have been there. Amy (my fiance) and Justin (my buddy) drove from Macon, GA as did my brother and his wife (Ryan and Kiem) to a FairTax rally that happened to coincide with the second Republican presidential primary debate. The energy was crazy, the looks on the official debate attendees was priceless and the statement we made with approx. 8000 FairTax proponents marching and chanting around the Republicans and news crews was worth the looks on their faces.

You would have thought 8000 people wearing FairTax shirts and hats were dropped from Black Hawk helicopters. One minute there were news ferrets taping Republicans in suits and ties swapping spit out front of the Koger Center……….the next minute there were, from out of nowhere, 8000 people holding FairTax signs and chanting “FairTax Now”. A Romney campaign staffer, stopped me and asked with a confused look on his face, “where did all these people come from?”.

Hell, it wasn’t like it hadn’t been publicized. The FairTax.org group had been preparing for this for weeks. It was amazing! We did miss a couple of the big talking heads that we had hoped to see, like Herman Cain and Sean Hannity, but we did get to see Mike Huckabee, Neal Boortz and John Stossel. These guys have and continue to do a lot for this movement, as has Congressman John Linder and 60 co-sponsors. However, to see 8000 people drive from different parts of the US to be in Columbia, South Carolina on a TUESDAY NIGHT in order to show their support for the FairTax put a little lump in my throat. (No, not the kind that makes me almost gag when I think about the IRS and our current unequitable code.)

If I had my "druthers" and could have made one little change, it would have been that Dave Ramsey attended. I'm not sure exactly how Dave feels about the FairTax, but I would bet (with my blow money of course) that he supports it. His presence, especially in the company of some of his friends and cohorts, would have taken that entire crowd to another level.

I wish everyone of you could have made it along with a few thousand more. But, there will be another one and even if it is on the other side of the country…you should go.