posted August 28, 2008
I'm an engineer, not an accountant, but I can usually make sense even of numbers that deal with money. My problem is when people start lying about what the various numbers dealing with money actually mean.
What I keep seeing about money in the news disturbs me. Someone will mention a special detail once or twice, and then omit it from future explanations. I'm almost positive that the water company, for instance, first said that they needed the huge increase they're asking for to expand their infrastructure - not to improve it, but to extend water service in preparation for new customers. And I sure know that the gas stations raise the price of gasoline as soon as someone even thinks the price of oil may go up; we pay next week's price for last week's gasoline (except when oil prices drop, you understand; it's very difficult for them to reduce the price at the pump).
My gripe is that I've always understood that a business is started by 'investors.' Maybe that investor is the individual who will own the business; maybe the investors are partners in the business; and big businesses, we know, usually have many stockholders. The point is, the people who hope to make a profit from the business put up their own money to get it started. And then, theoretically, some of those profits are set aside for future expansion.
Now, more and more, the messages I hear, or perhaps only think I hear (because I'm not really supposed to hear it), the message that I am getting is that businesses expect their existing customers to put up the money required for that business to expand. That's right, customers of the water company, for instance, or of the corner gas station, are being required to 'invest' in those businesses so that they can grow.
Evidently they've already spent or distributed the profits, and are forcing the rest of us to subsidize their future activities. But I sure haven't seen anything from any of these outfits informing me that I'm ow an honored shareholder in their corporation.
I know, the whole doggone world is just about upside down from what it was 50 years ago, but that still doesn't make this current trend right. Unfortunately, I don't know what to do about it. Some folks would say that I'm welcome to drill my own water well, but I remember back about 1971 when some famous visiting water-company expert told the
local folks that if a city has an existing public water supplier, then no one in the community should be allowed to have his own well.
And I remember a few years ago when we all became so energy-conscious and so
cost-conscious that the Chattanooga Gas Company wasn't selling as much gas as they expected to, and announced that they were raising the price of gas to compensate for our conservation.
Yeah, they've got us covered, all right; we're covered both ways, and there's not much we can do about. So I suppose we'll just keep 'investing' in the water company's expanding infrastructure, and we'll keep paying for the gas station's next delivery, etc.
Oh, by the way: I don't want to be the last guy in town to get on the VW bandwagon. So, here it is: I owned a VW bug in 1967. I actually moved to Chattanooga in a VW bug. In fact, I owned two Bugs, in order to keep one of them running. My name is thus forever linked to Volkswagen, which evidently makes a person nearly famous around this town now.
Larry Cloud
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