A year ago, our nation’s foreign adventurism was no more than something I saw stories about on cable TV when there was nothing better on, and now I suddenly have no less than three relatives dodging bombs and rockets in the desert wastes of Iraq and Afghanistan.  In a family which had a combined total of exactly three weeks of presence during the Viet Nam hi-jinks, despite having eligible male members up the ying-yang at that time, this seems like a high degree of carelessness.  I cannot account for this sudden collective lapse on our part.  I have spoken of my cousin Warren and his IED-removal activities during which he witnessed the death of his group leader, and I believe I touched on another cousin, who in his mid-fifties suddenly finds himself seeking and destroying poppy crops in Afghanistan, driving up the value of our personal heroin stashes, making them a hell of a lot better investment than any of the stocks in my 401(k).  Now I suddenly find that the spouse of George’s daughter Graciela, he being a lad of Mexican heritage from Texas (who inexplicably speaks nary a work of Spanish while Graciela is fluent), who has been happily hauling in the Yankee dollars by the bushelsful in Kuwait for one of the major American players in infrastructure projects, is IM-ing me from Balad in Iraq.  “What ho?” I queried, and although I never learned exactly how the geographic shift came about, I have learned that his IT career currently consists of time on a computer punctuated by the donning and doffing of flak jacket and ducking for cover.  It certainly makes my current IT position look even more wan and boring than I had felt it to be hitherto.  I would be totally green with envy, were his work schedule not consisting of seven-day weeks of 12 hour days.  He tells me he works, goes to a gym, and sleeps (the sleeping and gym are two different activities, he does not sleep in the gym).  He fails to mention any pauses to pick stray bits of shrapnel from his epidermis, but one reads between the lines.  Even I would not accept a job in such interesting surroundings if it meant a work week of so many hours.  One does not, parenthetically, think of there being gyms in Balad, Iraq; I wonder if he lifts sheep or tries camel-pulling.

Alberto has found a position back in Texas which he will be starting after this month, although he is considering a position in Nigeria on an oil rig where he would earn $140K a year, and better yet, have three week vacations after every 8 weeks.  Now that sounds more my style, except that he will be out on a rig, and the whole point of these jobs for me is getting to meet the local populace.   One of the more pressing reasons for Alberto to leave his current location is that the USA tax exemption for offshore earnings comes to a crashing close this month.  This exemption was always under threat, since it was portrayed as a gift to the corporations which had overseas business.  Indubitably it benefited those corporations, but even more it benefited the nation.  My facts are from the mid-nineties, when I was more concerned with such things, but I doubt that much has changed.  Other than Korea, NONE of the industrialized nations tax offshore earnings of their citizens (by offshore earnings, I am not speaking of investments, but of earned wages by citizens who are actually working and living outside the country).  The reason for this is simple: very few people are willing to live in foreign lands, especially those of the Third World, without a compelling financial reason to do so, and any money earned by company or individual there and sent back here is pure gravy for the nation.  Other than me, few Americans in Saudi would have stayed a minute longer if they were not making substantially more than they could earn at home.   This difference largely arose from the fact that their earnings were not taxed.  So companies from the U.S. remained competitive because they could bid on projects knowing that their labor costs were not out of line with those of their foreign competitors.   Though American wages were still somewhat higher, this was offset by the generally good reputation American companies had for expertise and jobs well done.

Now, in a time when our economy is crashing and unemployment is rising we have, with good old American know-how, set up a situation where 1) our companies must pay double the wages of their competitors and/or 2) our companies must hire non-American workers either from lands which do not tax their offshore citizens (such as Britain, Germany, Ireland and so forth) or where the wages are so low that even with taxes, the workers are happy to get the wage offered.  I do support the idea that offshore workers should pay Social Security taxes, since most will collect Social Security at some point if the system doesn’t crash, but income taxes should remain exempt.  The U.S. exemption was only on the first 80 or 90 thousand dollars per year anyway, which is not so generous as one might think since one had to include the value of company-paid travel, lodging and other company supplied bennies.  So just when jobs are becoming scarce, a bunch of experienced workers, workers like Alberto who have proved they are willing to work under adverse conditions will be coming home to compete with our recent high school and college graduates.  And our companies may be losing bids which put some money into the economy; although you may be sure that this new law may be closing the loophole which most benefits the actual workers, it surely is not closing anything that is really allowing old Exxon-Mobil or Halliburton to screw the body politic.  Much of the money earned abroad is spent back in the USA; many of the younger workers I met overseas were putting in an unhappy two years solely to get the down payment for a house.  We all know that the real estate market here is so robust that the loss of new entrants into the market is no cause for concern.  Way to go, Uncle Sam! 

On a more local note, I seem to have lucked into the one company in America that is growing by leaps and bounds when I came to Smallville Solutions for Everything, Inc.  It turns out that everything is just what the country needs solutions for, and the village here is humming with the vigorous effort of my company to supply them.  Our revenue has been doubling yearly and we had, last I knew, some 150 positions seeking workers.  We are at it 24/7, and any day that our computer is not working at full blast (it tells all the line workers what to do next, and directs some highly complex manufacturing processes) we lose a couple of million bucks.  So the management views such natural disasters as a national holiday much as the residents of New Orleans viewed hurricane Katrina.  “But wait,” they cry, “Maybe we can save something from the wreck!”  And reviewing their options, they realize that the IT department is on salary, and that such upgrades as require a computer shut-down can be done while the wage-earners are relaxing on their yachts with about ten tall cool ones, with no overtime costs.  And the cry goes out: “Let Dave do it!”

Thus it was that I worked yesterday evening, and will shortly be headed workwards on this fine Saturday to work until 11 p.m. if all goes well, and until next week at this time if all goes badly.  Ah, Retirement, where is thy sting?  While Alberto is about 20 days from a return to his homeland, I am a similar number of days from my first full social security cheque and I am lovin’ it.  The additional cash will be used to pay off the last of my debts (other than my mortgage) which should take about 3 months and then I will make one or two discretionary purchases I have in mind and then FREEDOM!!  I have heard of folks complaining that retirement gave them a big bunch of time with nothing to do, and I ask, “And what is the downside?”  Nothing is my favorite thing to do.  What part of retirement don’t they comprehend?  Some days I will do nothing in a hammock; some days I will do nothing on my deck and maybe, if I can still afford gas, some days I will visit folks and do nothing at their houses.  And don’t think, if I find them cleaning their gutters or mowing their lawns, that I will be guilted into some foolish remark like, “Is there any way I can help?”  John Milton was a terrible human being and a boring poet, but he did pen the single greatest line in all of poetry:  “They also serve who only stand and wait.”  (He was bitching about being blind at the time – he fails to mention in the poem that he kept his daughters home and treated them like servants at the time, but hey, we all have our flaws).  I plan to serve my ass off, in the deepest Miltonian sense.

And now it is time for me to go to work.  Today.  Saturday.  Our nation’s ‘morning after’ when any decent American is lying in bed with a cold towel over his or her eyes. 

Do you believe that shit?