Friday, November 30, 2012

A Flippancy Floppancy



It’s a commonly held dictum amongst my peers that a writer should write. I’m a writer, a novelist by trade. Today that means more than stories. It means blogs, tweets and Facebook chatter, among other social media venues. I’ve resisted for years. Email and Facebook have been my only forays into the world of cyber communication, but perhaps it’s time for me to jump in. So here I am, at A Flippancy Floppancy, for anyone who might be perusing the blogosphere and happen upon my humble offerings, which shall be eclectic and erratic. I have no theme, except the random thoughts and memories that drift across my mind.

Why Flippancy Floppancy? What does that mean? Indulge me while I share a bit of my childhood.

My maternal grandfather was a dapper little Englishman. He stood five feet four inches tall, had a short, gray flattop haircut and a gray bristle-brush mustache. He chuckled a lot, which reminded me of cooing pigeons. Most days he dressed in properly creased slacks, a collared, button down shirt and a sweater vest and he sported a pocket watch, which he consulted often.

Born in 1886, Grandpa was a product of the Victorian era. Manners and gentility were important. When dining with friends, excellent manners included proper speech. And my grandfather was always proper, though with a twinkle in his snappy, dark eyes.

In the article, Among the Old Words, http://www.jstor.org/stable/454570, Frederic G. Cassidy of the University of Wisconsin noted: “Proper speech being an appurtenance of good manners, they composed, and taught their children, certain formulas of polite expression fitting to such social situations as they were liable to encounter. They knew well that informality is notoriously untrustworthy, that the spur of the moment can urge a speaker to disastrous infelicities. Far better to be prepared, to have an appropriate formula fall trippingly off the tongue. Imagine, for example, the dinner guest who, having partaken of everything in sight, is being plied by his hostess to stuff himself further. Smiling assuredly, he replies, “No thank you. I have had a genteel sufficiency—any more would be superfluity.” The occasion is met, the temptation resisted, and the formula has attested to the propriety of the guest’s upbringing.”

Perhaps due, in part, to my grandparents’ genteel manners and delightful quirks, I have become a lover of language, of manners and of history.

Grandfather Fox was a Renaissance Man: a Quaker preacher, a scholar, theologian, a man of letters—primarily to the San Diego Union Letters to the Editor column and to politicians, and a philanthropist who was instrumental in fundraising for the Humane Society and the Good Will in San Diego. He was born to medical missionaries in Madagascar, raised in Scotland, then immigrated to America by working his way across Canada as a cowboy, then coming into the United States through Washington State.

When we would eat a meal with grandpa, he had interesting habits, like lining peas up on his knife, and drinking his tea out of a saucer. He would tuck his cloth napkin into his shirt collar, and when he finished, he would remove the napkin, dab at his mouth and mustache, sit back and declare the meal was a flippancy floppancy, or a sufficiency floppancy (he used the two interchangeably). That was his proper speech to indicate he was full, and he couldn’t eat another bite, thank you very much.

My life has been a satisfying flippancy floppancy. Always filled with plentitude to the point of overflowing. That is not to say always easy or pleasant. Hunger can be assuaged with liver and onions or gruel, as well as turkey and gravy and pumpkin pie. But I’m a glass-half-full sort of person. I tend to ac-centuate the positives and e-liminate the negatives.

So, welcome. I hope today brings you a flippancy floppancy. And I hope my musings bring some pleasure, some nostalgia, some food for thought and some inspiration to those who stop by from time to time.  Blessings, ~ Sunni

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Perspective from a Small Business Owner



It occurred to me, listening to President Obama speak today about our country’s debt problem and the horribly scary coming-crisis, tagged “The Fiscal Cliff” that most people probably have no idea how a small business operates, financially. His plan calls for taking care of the middle class – a great idea – while socking it to the rich. Those making over $200,000 or couples making $250,000 combined. That doesn’t make sense. Why not make it double for a couple, to $400,000? But that’s not the point of my post.

We owned and operated a small business for 17 years in the Denver area. I did the bookkeeping. I watched government regulations come in and take over many areas of our business. Do you realize that as an employer, we could not give ourselves a benefit out of the business that was not offered to our employees? Remember, I’m talking about a small business. Perhaps 20-30 employees. For several years, starting in 1970, we paid all of our employees’ medical expenses: insurance, deductible and out of pocket, for their entire families. In 1978, the government first enacted the 125 Cafeteria Plan for employees. We started seeing big changes in our insurance. Costs went up. Preexisting conditions meant we had to pay for more expensive insurance for everyone. We could no longer pay the medical for our employees because it was considered taxable compensation for them. The government required businesses to institute the Cafeteria Plan system for employees. We were below the bottom number of employees, but it was our only option, so we began offering the government’s Cafeteria Plan. Such a great deal for employees. (Some people seem to think so.) They got to choose how much they thought they would spend for the following year. It was deducted from their pay before taxes. At the end of the year, if they didn’t guess right, and there was money left over, they lost it. Frankly, it increased my bookkeeping, and we didn’t want what was left-over, so we gave it back to the employees, in the form of a bonus, which was taxed. The government may not “raise” taxes, but they manage to collect more by approaching from a different direction. Over the years, insurance costs continued to rise, meaning more and more cuts to benefits, just to keep the business solvent.

We instituted a 401K plan with the company matching up to a certain level for all employees, but as employers, we were penalized in that we could not put into our 401K more than a percentage of what our employees contributed to theirs. One year we went over and had to pay a penalty.

About a small business’s big profits. That profit is after expenses. However, there are a lot of business expenses that are not considered expenses. Capital expenses. We had a fleet of service vehicles. They had to be replaced every 5-10 years. We had tools and machinery. None of those things can be expensed. They are purchased as assets with after-tax dollars. We had to have enough profit to pay our taxes and to keep our fleet on the road and any other capital expenses needed, including paying off debt. There are a lot of capital expenses that must be counted as assets and therefore, are not deductible as expenses. A company’s bottom line is truly not its bottom line. We purchased inventory to have merchandise to sell. We paid property taxes on that inventory.

A company that grosses one or ten or twenty million dollars is really a small business. The idea that businesses, and corporations – most small businesses have to be incorporated because of taxes and liability and insurance – are a bunch of greedy rich people just isn’t so. They are ordinary people, employers of ordinary people, trying to make a living for their own family and all the families that depend upon them. And the bottom line is a simple fact. They cannot grow under President Obama’s economic plan or health care plan. Government programs and regulations may sound good, but they are insidious. They creep in, and once in place, they are practically impossible to get rid of. All these programs and regulations and taxes strangle small businesses.

You’re welcome to disagree with me, but please don’t just throw stones. Be sure you can dispute my experiences because you have owned and operated a small business with employees, and had different experiences.