PSA & mini-Rant

[etherial]

Today is "Not One Red Cent Day." Buy absolutely nothing today to protest that whackjob in the round room.

And now for the rant:

Dear Drivers of SUVs who do not clear the snow off of your car:

I am aware, as much as I might wish otherwise, that SUVs are a status symbol. While I disagree with any other things you might claim as 'merit,' your desire to appear to be the most wealthy and adenturous member of the small penis club is understandable, and I cannot begrudge your need to be the most loved man with a small penis.

But do you have no pride in your status symbol? Is it really necessary to create an even greater driving hazard with your vehicle? Surely the other members of the small penis club will find your vehicle that much more phallic if you keep it clean and shining, but no, you instead insist on just turning the wipers on high and driving at 70 miles an hour to clear off your vehicle.

Your Truly,
Man who takes pride in driving his real car.

Comments

[7threality.livejournal.com]

Today is "Not One Red Cent Day." Buy absolutely nothing today to protest that whackjob in the round room.

I really don't know why people keep trying to do this, because it doesn't do a darn thing. The only message that gets sent is that idealistic people don't have any idea how economy actually works and they look foolish for shouting it out loud.

Even if you could organize such a thing, all the buying that would be done on that day would either be done the day before or the day after, and the merchants profits (and taxes) would therefor be unaffected in the grand scheme of things.

The only time such things work is if you can organize a boycott of specific products when there is an alternative to that product. This causes a specific company to actually lose money because their product isn't selling.

Alternately, you could get people to consume less of a specific item over a long period of time, which would actually hit the bottom line of all the companies that sell that product. However, we've seen how well that works with cars/gas.

point taken

[etherial.livejournal.com]

What is the point of having a March on Washington? I mean, everyone can go to Washington on their own, room at a hotel at a reasonable price, make appointments to talk with their Congressman, find a bathroom without waiting for hours...why bother getting everyone to act all at once?

The point isn't to change people's spending patterns; the point is to show that we *can*. The point isn't to reduce the Government's income; the point is to remind the Government that we control its income.

Re: point taken

[invader-haywire.livejournal.com]

But your NOT threatening the governments income, or to be more specific not the Federal Income. You are only threatening Retail which depending on the state will minisculy effect their income.

Re: point taken

[(Anonymous)]

I'm gonna have to agree along with that. When i was back at school, a ton of people organized a walk-out to protest the war. I thought that was a really lame idea and overly zealous and idealistic - another reason why i don't like either sides. Basically what the walk-out disrupted was the classroom and the school, not the war. If the school was being complacent to the idea of war or supporting it in someway than the walk-out is fine to do, however no one in the whole protest made any statement to that affect, they were protesting the war not the school. Well if you want to protest the war, walking out of class is a dumb thing to do.

Along those lines, i also agree that the not a penny deal is also shooting the wrong bird. You disrupt the economy, you disrupt your local merchants, you disrupt your neighbors who work at the stores or own them, you disrupt bezos and jobs. But you're doing nothing to the government let alone the bush admin. you're pointing in the wrong direction.

o Caleb

Re: point taken

[7threality.livejournal.com]

The point isn't to change people's spending patterns; the point is to show that we *can*.

But you can't and you aren't.

A March on Washington for [insertcausehere] is a physical demonstration that a large number of people are willing to go out of their way to make a point. It's something that has to be noticed. First, because it's a large peaceful demonstration that is targeted properly, and second, because every person that went out of their way to travel to Washington is very likely willing to work on a local level to get a good sized group of folks that aren't willing to go far out of their way to go a little out of their way for this cause. A little in large numbers equals a lot.

As caleb pointed out, you might be affecting a few local merchants, but you aren't even on the radar of the government, and you aren't hurting their income.

This may work on a small scale, like state by state, but only in states that have sales tax. To my knowledge, sales tax is for the state and not the fed (except on things like tobacco and possibly liquor). For the most part, these types of protests should be product or company specific.

The point isn't to reduce the Government's income; the point is to remind the Government that we control its income.

Again, no. The federal government gets the lion's share of it's income from income tax. Unless you have a way to cause people to either not pay for income tax or reduce their income so they pay less tax, you aren't affecting the government.

Add to that, even if the fed doesn't get the money it thinks it needs for something, it'll just borrow against the future and increase the national debt. No one seems to be calling them to task for this, and there's a lot of otherwise intelligent folks that believe that the national debt isn't real debt.

If we can pay off the debt, not only will we be reducing inflation by a significant margin, strengthening the dollar and thereby our economy, and otherwise improving matters economically for everyone, we'll have hundreds of billions of dollars that we now pay for the interest on the debt for whatever programs we need.

The government needs to be reminded that they are our employees, and that we hired them to do a job. If we don't like the job they are doing, we should have the right to remove them from that job.