Ahhh, here it is, almost the end of the year. With New Year’s Resolutions coming up in a couple of weeks it is time to reflect on how things went this last year, and what we can do better.

Normally I am not someone that loves to do budgets, but with expenses pilling up, I decided I better get going on things.

We cannot always pick our relatives, but I wanted to share some juicy tidbits of a crazy cousin that I have and the trouble into which he is getting. This story made me aware of how I need to get my own house in order.

To protect the innocent, I will just call this cousin “Joe”. Joe has a pretty wild lifestyle, what used to be called a “champagne lifestyle on a beer budget”.

Currently his finances look like this:

• Annual family income for 2021 is around $38,000 a year.

• His budget for next year, on what he is planning on spending, is around $60,000.

• The way he can keep his lifestyle flowing is to use credit cards — problem is, his outstanding debt on his credit cards is over $227,000.

That sounds like a recipe for disaster!

But he tells me “not to worry” — he produced a new scheme. By trade, Joe is a printer — he has some new digital printers that he just bought that are good enough to be able to print U.S. currency.

He plans on just printing up some extra dollars to make up the difference! What can go wrong with that?

Oops – my mistake. My calculator is broken. It did not display all of the numbers correctly. Just take all of the above numbers and add five zeros to them, and you will see where this is going.

Joe and his “family” is the current U.S. government and their plans to “Bring Back Better”.

Now, I am not a financial genius — and I watch mainstream media tell me how the plan is not going to affect middle-class America by making up the difference through taxing those evil “Scrooge McDucks” that are in their vaults counting all of their money.

We are going to have to see how that plan is going to work. The media and government cannot lie, so I am sure that everything will work out all right.

When I was in school, they used to teach sophisticated economic theories like “supply and demand”. When the supply of something is low, the price on those items goes up. You increase the supply, and the prices go down.

Let us look at some examples of that.

Back during the years of the former President “He-who-shall-not-be-named”, the average price of gas never exceeded $3 per gallon, and in fact, was at one point as low as (an estimated) $1.70, according to Gas Buddy. As I understand it, there was a focus on developing energy supplies in America, so we did not have to play international games with other world powers. We were more self-sufficient.

A few years later, there was a new regime. This regime, as one of its first projects, cancelled the Keystone XL Pipeline. This pipeline was designed to bring 800,000 barrels of oil per day down to the Gulf, where it could be processed for American use.

Wait a minute — I thought with supply and demand, decreasing the supply would drive up the prices, and increasing the supply would drive down the prices? Let’s see how that worked out. Here in Enumclaw, the gas price at the pump is in the $4 bracket.

What are the options that we have available? According to a Nov. 23 article by CNN Politics: “One option was increasing domestic oil production, but the White House has been wary of the optics of the President and his aides pushing for more drilling at home on the heels of the major U.N. climate summit COP26, where Biden promised that the U.S. would ‘lead by example’ on clean energy initiatives.”

So instead, our current leader and his handlers decided to make a bold step. America has what are called “strategic petroleum reserves” where we stockpile oil in case of need.

On Nov. 23, Joe Biden said that it was going to release 50 million barrels of oil from the reserves.

Hey that’s great news! That oil could be used to drive down the gas pump prices! But wait a minute — the president went on to announce that 18 million barrels of oil were going to be used to battle international gas shortages, and that it was shipping the oil primarily to China and India. Shouldn’t we be taking care of our gas prices first? After all, China and India didn’t elect Biden — we did.

When I take my wife out to a dinner or a lunch at a drive-thru hamburger stand, and come away with a bill for $27, I have to think — what direction is this world coming to?

I see advertisements for thousands of “help wanted” positions. In my humble opinion, why are we paying anybody for unemployment? There are businesses that are crying out for people to come to work.

America used to be a place where people rolled up their sleeves and were able to make a living.

Coming up with plans to fire large quantities of people, because they are not obedient or compliant, just doesn’t make sense to me. We need to get back to work. I believe that when agendas and politics are removed, most people would rather work, then just being put on “the dole” where the government just hands you a check.

America is still a land of opportunity. But you must be able to work to make those dreams come true. Have government get out of the way, and let business and people thrive.