You are born with a finite amount of time on the planet, but you don’t normally think about that until you are older. If the oil companies are given a depletion allowance for selling the oil that they pump out of the ground, based on the fact they can only do that once and it reduces their supply, why don’t workers get a life depletion allowance, because every hour at work is something they will never get back.

Andrew W. Mellon was the Secretary of the Treasury under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. He was a banker and industrialist [founder of Alcoa], a very conservative individual when it came to economics. He wrote a book on taxation, and is often cited as the founder of supply side economics. With all of that he made the case that capital gains should be taxed at a higher rate than earned income. His thinking was that capital didn’t die and could earn forever, but people did die, and therefore needed to keep more of what they earned because their ability to earn was limited. Think about it.

Speaking of time, it would be really nice if the medical profession realized that their patients also have a limited amount of time. You will be charged if you miss an appointment without giving them notice, but there is no corresponding monetary exchange if they stretch a half-hour appointment into three hours. Too many doctors overbook, just like the airlines, and there should be penalties for the practice.

The front that dumped snow in the North and tornadoes in the Midsouth, provided me with some nasty thunderstorms. I shut everything down this evening because the close lightning strikes don’t do anything kind to computer equipment, even with surge protection. They can induce surges in the wires of your CAT 5 cable, even with twisted-pair and shielding, as I discovered to my loss a year or so ago.