Debt (According to Shakespeare)
During a time of (formerly) cheap money and massive government pork on a scale that racked up $31.250 trillion in debt, the piper must be paid. In the US will the next congress impeach Pedo Joe and the Ho? If so will Democrat inner-city legions be turned loose to loot and burn? Whatever your house was worth, it won’t be worth it for much longer. The same can be said for your 401K. The nation can be saved, but not without pain.
Debt advice from Henry IV
“I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse: borrowing only lingers and lingers it out, but the disease is incurable” Henry IV, Part 2
Who would have thought it, Shakespeare gives out debt advice in his plays! Falstaff asks to borrow money from the Lord Chief Justice, a request that’s met with the rather blunt reply of “Not a penny, not a penny; you are too impatient to bear crosses”.
Falstaff admits he’s no good at managing money and moans about how borrowing to pay his debts will never get rid of the problem. You can see similarities to today’s world where we have so many ways of borrowing and getting into debt, including payday lenders.
Managing Money from Hamlet
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be; for loan doth oft lose both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry” Hamlet
In this line from Hamlet, Polonius gives his son Laertes advice on managing money. He starts off by telling him never to lend or borrow money from friends. You will often end up losing the money and the friend in doing so. Polonius goes on to make a wonderful point about how constantly borrowing money encourages bad spending habits.
Savings tips from Othello
“Put money in thy purse” OthelloIago says this many times as he tries to con money out of Roderigo.
With so many people not having much savings, maybe it is time we use this phrase differently – to remind ourselves to put some money away for a rainy day.
Money and well-being from As You Like It
“He that wants money means, and content, is without three good friends” As You Like ItIn the modern, material world, money is important to all of us, but in this passage from As You Like It, the poor, good-natured shepherd Corin tells us employment and happiness is just as important. Even though Corin says this jokingly to a court jester, you could read this as Shakespeare telling us that money can’t buy us happiness.
A cautionary tale of greed from the Merchant of Venice
“Pound of flesh” The Merchant of VeniceThe play is a morality tale about money and greed and features to infamous moneylender Shylock.
The pound of flesh is the price Shylock asks Antonio to pay for guaranteeing Bassanio’s loan. You have to admit, it’s a bit steeper than the usual APR. Another poetic line from this play is “All that glitters is not gold, often have you heard that told”. Put another way, if it seems too good to be true it probably is. A warning, perhaps, of not falling for money-making scams.
Bullet Points:
* Comrades in Canada! Since becoming Canada’s Prime Minister in 2015, Trudeau has embarked on a vigorous assault against Canadian citizens’ most cherished liberties to the point the nation is barely recognizable. Now he and his ruling Liberal Party will soon deliver the final blow. The bill, known as the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11), expands the authority of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to regulate the internet in addition to phones, radio, and television.
* Even though the Brandon regime is aware that a significant portion of the funds and weapons sent to Ukraine are not used for their intended purposes, they want to earmark another $50 billion. How much of it will come back to Democrats by way of kickbacks? Any bets?
* Pedo Joe just said that fees on airplanes for extra leg room in front mostly affect people of color. How is that possible? This man is a complete moron as well as a virtue-signaling idiot as well as a disaster and embarrassment to our country. Liberalism is a mental illness.
I can’t Help Myself:
Proverbs 22:7 (NIV): The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.
And now a reading from The Gospel according to Saint Billie of Holiday:
Them that’s got shall have
Them that’s not shall lose
So the Bible says and it still is news
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own, that’s got his own
You move 16 tons and what do you get?
87,000 armed and newly minted IRS agents, and deeper in debt.
The IRS SWAT Team – coming to a city near you. I’m sure that debtor’s prisons will follow.
Prov 6
1 My son, if thou be surety for thy friend, if thou hast stricken thy hand with a stranger,
2 Thou art snared with the words of thy mouth, thou art taken with the words of thy mouth.
3 Do this now, my son, and deliver thyself, when thou art come into the hand of thy friend; go, humble thyself, and make sure thy friend.
4 Give not sleep to thine eyes, nor slumber to thine eyelids.
5 Deliver thyself as a roe from the hand of the hunter, and as a bird from the hand of the fowler.
Ancestors on my mother’s side were surety for a stranger – very charming and a good talker so everyone thought he was great. He took the money and skipped town. Ancestors only had enough left to buy boat tickets to the US; happened sometime after the Civil War.
On my father’s side, a different story – well-to-do family’s son married the maid, it was a big scandal. They gave him boat money to go to the US so he(and his wife) wouldn’t be around to embarrass them.
‘Merica
X2 rinse and repeat millions of times.
Your house, if you own it, has two values. One is the dollar value, the money you put into it as an investment, as a means to building wealth.
The other is it’s a place to live, shelter from the elements… something everyone needs (& has).
If the value drops it’s ugly on paper but it still provides shelter.
I just realized that I haven’t seen an ad for a reverse mortgage in a while.
I saw Tom Sellick peddling them on Fox the other day.
A neighbor, not a friend, called me, distraught. He’d been counting on a reverse mortgage going through. However, because his wife was 20 years his junior, the company wanted a huge co-pay to make it happen. I forget the number but it was about $350K. Those companies are in business to make money in the long term. He ended up selling and moving and I hope that all ended well with him. But I doubt it. He was a putz. He will be. a putz wherever he goes. (an unproductive person who is also an idiot)
Theoretically a house can never be worth less than its replacement value, ie the cost to build an identical structure including land, utility connections etc. And construction costs keep climbing.
The exception being those $5000 shacks in Detroit in uninhabitable neighborhoods.
The Chinese were buying those.
Land value. Buy enough of them, and you can own a whole lotta land for cheap.
You’ll have to service the taxes, and those will go up.
+1 to the other comments above (and likely below today, as always).
MrsPaulM has saying, came to light with her early years in the budding printing/computer as an entrepreneur, then codified when chucking that and going back to Veterinary School:
“If you have enough money they it away, if you don’t have any money – and are of a certain class – they give it to you from those who they took it from.”
Forced Earning Redistribution is immoral, and theoretically constitutionally illegal. Being a joyful giver is, however, Biblical.
Everything said by those who desire firther societal chaos, dragging the decent and good further down the Socialism slippery slope, is designed to redistribute more monies from producers to lay-around’s and the lazy, solely based on social class (which they are redefining in realtime).
Pushback is the only answer. One friggin’ week. Pins and Needles in the waiting.
We are headed for an insipid – or hot – civil war. More on that with the next blog post.
Missing iPad words aside (proof read…again! fed the horses in between)…like a lot of woman MrsPaulM does not like politics, but pays attention in the background (plus listens to me when she asks my take).
She has been saying for a year we are headed for a hot civil war. In a week we’ll know which way this will go assuming (a massive assumption) the R’s grab their loins to rediscover them, then actually stick up for half of America and do their dang job.
I completely believe that Oatmeal Joe thinks that 12% of the US population suffers more than the other 88% from discrimination against tallness. That’s right up to his intellectual capabilities.
-Kle.
If asked why, I’m sure he’d say “it’s ’cause of them funny bones in their feet”.
Or perhaps “Mabel, get the flapjacks!”.
-Kle.
Or he wouldn’t say anything but would wave toward the refrigerator and one of his minions would fetch a pudding cup for him.
Harrison Bergeron.
Debt. For those who profit from inflation paying back with cheaper dollars work. For the rest of us? Screwed.
Well it’s all very odd. You borrow money only to find someone obstinately wants to be repaid. And you can’t do that. Problem.
Solution? Inflation! Lo and behold, debt gone, like so much “vile jelly.”
Selling short on America.
“Solution? Inflation! Lo and behold, debt gone”
I think it was a few years ago some politician very high up in the South African govt said they’d print their way out of their financial problems. He was roundly mocked as an idiot in the right-leaning blogosphere. While the man undoubtedly WAS an idiot, it wasn’t a terrible idea politically. His natural constituency (not all co-ethnics due to the multiple tribes, but politician was not white) were generally dirt-poor impoverished, uneducated, and unskilled. Adding another zero to prices would not hurt them short term as long as their handouts were similarly scaled up 10x. But the people who would be devastated were those with saving and investments (read whites and mixed-race). Which was the idea. Punish the whites, and simultaneously make it harder for them to emigrate by impoverishing them. The serious political players would be fine because their assets were offshore and not held in rand.
I’d say that they’ll need to print $1000 bills for us to use at the drive through to get a burger and a shake, but it’s all going digital, and how could THAT go wrong?
Had a 5 hour trip, needed a burger, stopped at a Mickey-Dees because it was convenient (sort of a rescued Tony Stark moment). Before ordering I was asked if I was using the App? I was at the Drive-Thru box, which usually sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher. l had to ask her what she was talking about. She repeated it, this time I realized what she was saying and answered with an emphatic “No!”.
Already pushing the digital society. I won’t participate as it affords too much control over my finances and purchases…including real time tracking.
a couple/few thoughts:
1. a putz has been translated from the Yiddish where it’s come to be a kinder(?) word for schmuck. I’m no linguist (far from it since I speak, no matter where I go, a NYC version; read: ’40’s Bronx, but I believe the word may come directly from the German “putzen” (Wikipeda: Perhaps derived from Middle High German butze [“lump, piece, stump”]. In Yiddish I believe the verb came to describe the way an animal, particularly a dog, cleans itself (or a part of itself) and the noun putz, of course, the person who is the desciption of that act.
2. We’d been given Shakespeare (a least one play per year) to read from 6th grade ’til graduation. at that time in my life I had no interest (read: the brains to understand) the greatest, by far, poet and playwright who wrote in my native language, albeit one which had changed significantly over three centuries.
3. I think people who’ve worked from 0 dark hundred before daylight ’til closer to 0 dark hundred prior to midnight at least 6 days per for most of the year every year for as long as they could and have put aside a few ducats every week forthe future are getting very angry (read: infuriated). Even the Liberals who wasnt to give every else’s money away and those who have minimal knowledge of household economics are beginning to join that group; they won’t vote Conservative (G-d forbid) just yet, but they know something’s horribly wrong and they just don’t know whom to blame.
He’s a schmuck. Definitely. And he moved to Eastern Arizona so I won’t see him again. I felt sorry for him until I got to know him better. I feel sorry for his kids. They used to come by the house and hang out.
My parents lived through the Depression and taught all of us kids that we should avoid debt like the plague. My kid also took that to heart but not as much as my wife and I did. My grand kids have even less of a desire to keep out of debt. Maybe it is the government accepting that a massive national debt is no big deal and that makes personal debt more acceptable, maybe it is social pressure or the constant barrage of advertising but it seems like personal debt is now no big deal. Want something then buy something…instant gratification. Debt will be the death of the country as we know it.
My grandparents lived through the depression and raised me. Debt was a dirty word in our house. And there was Shakespeare…
Both my parents were in their mid-teens when The Depression hit. They saw other family and friends lose most everything. They were both very frugal, but would spend money when and where it had to be spent even after my Dad satrted making “Good Money” when I was little. They only debt they carried was the mortgage on our house, and they paid it off 5 years early. No “Home Equity Line of Credit” back in those days to saddle you with a life-long debt based on speculation.
I still remember the “Mortgage Burning Party” they had when they paid the house off.
Painful is exactly what it is going to be… OUR pain… sigh
“Pedo Joe just said that fees on airplanes for extra leg room in front mostly affect people of color. How is that possible?” Easy, drop your IQ 50 points and put your racist glasses on. People of color are poor and cannot afford the extra charge on top of the price of the ticket. You can afford it and they can’t, so it is de facto discrimination. That’s why people of color never fly full fair and never fly in the front of the plane (sarc).
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