You’re not your job.
You’re not how much money you have in the bank.
You’re not the car you drive.
You’re not the contents of your wallet.
You’re not your fucking khakis.
You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.
It is astounding how significantly one idea can shape a society and its policies. Consider this one.
If taxes on the rich go up, job creation will go down.
This idea is an article of faith for Republicans and seldom challenged by Democrats and has shaped much of today’s economic landscape.
But sometimes the ideas that we know to be true are dead wrong. For thousands of years people were sure that earth was at the center of the universe. It’s not, and an astronomer who still believed that it was, would do some lousy astronomy.
In the same way, a policy maker who believed that the rich and businesses are “job creators” and therefore should not be taxed, would make equally bad policy.
I have started or helped start, dozens of businesses and initially hired lots of people. But if no one could have afforded to buy what we had to sell, my businesses would all have failed and all those jobs would have evaporated.
That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is a “circle of life” like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than a capitalist like me.
Learn as if you are going to live forever
Live as if you are going to Die tomorrow
I read bad poetry
into your machine
I save your messages
just to hear your voice.
you always listen carefully
to awkward rhymes.
you always say your name.
like I wouldn’t know it’s you,
at your most beautiful.
At My Most Beautiful
R.E.M.
“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but…life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
― Gabriel García Márquez
I Assassin Down the Avenue
“Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s triumph was in how it captured a facet of human nature: the way we all send signals, hoping that someone will understand them but also anxious about what happens when someone does. You’ll sometimes hear the album get called cryptic, or self-conscious, or difficult. And that’s fine. It’s really a soundtrack for the ways in which people ask to be misunderstood.”
