Master CraftsMon - Aired Monday, December 26, 2005 at about 11pm CST - Segment 5

Master CraftsMon - Aired Monday, December 26, 2005 at about 11pm CST
Segment 5

You know... too many people believe that benefits from companies are a right. The company is backing you. The company is doing these great things for you. In actuality, the company when it gives you benefits is deciding for you how to spend your money. Benefits are part of your salary package. You pay taxes on benefits.

I think benefits are a stupid idea. Whether you know it or not benefits are a solution to a problem that no longer exists. During World War II, there were wage and price controls. Companies came up with the idea of benefits to get around the wage controls.

The problem companies are having is that the benefits have gotten out of hand.

I think there should be a company to handle your insurance, pension and other financial matters. I'm calling this project, Benefits Camber.

The goal of this project is to establish Benefits Camber to take your salary get the best group insurance rates available for you. It should invest in a pension fund for you. Instead of the company paying your withholding taxes, Benefits Camber should do that for you. If we could just get social security privatized, then Benefits Camber would take care of that for you. With this idea for a financial company, an individual would have their pension safe from their employers going bankrupt and they could move their pension from employer to employer. It also allows a person working for a small business to have the advantages of working at a huge company. A large employer can get the best rates on insurance and other services. A large financial company like Benefits Camber could do that as well.

The major question becomes: how do you start a company like that? And I don't know the answer. I do know that the company would have to have in its bylaws that the company would be dedicated to the long term wealth accumulation for its clients. I know that Benefits Camber would have the advantage of keeping the costs of an employee down, because the costs of pensions and insurance would suddenly be off the books.

I have been wondering whether Benefits Camber could purchase pensions from companies. I have been wondering whether Benefits Camber could contract to take over the insurance for companies that already have insurance as one of their benefits. The whole point of Benefits Camber would be to stand beside the worker and provide all the financial services they needed. Too many financial companies are dedicated to pleasing the stockholders. The thing is that Benefits Camber wouldn't be in the pension business, nor the insurance business, nor even the banking business. It would be in the people business. The goal of Benefits Camber would be to get the best deal for its customers from the specialist companies that already exist. By pooling customers they could get the best group rates possible. There is a practice in banking called securitizing loans. It means that you pool the risk of loans and sell the interest accrued from a set of loans. I believe that there is a way of doing this using customers as well. Camber Benefits could even have insurance for a pension fund going under, so that their customers would not be impacted in that unlikely event. Maybe not.

I talked about this last week. You didn't hear about it, because you do not exist. I am in reality talking to myself. Not the first time.

I need to get some more information before I do anything about Benefits Camber.

The Hiring Hall Association and The Deprived are projects that I will be activating this next week. I *REALLY* didn't want to do all the work on these projects, but no one wants to come whitewash that fence with me, so I'll just have to do it alone. Oh, woe, oh, pain.

Anyway. I've said all I am going to say tonight. I now turn it over to MacKenzie Pequa the third. She will play an eclectic mix of music and announce her presence every hour.

I know. I am supposed to sign off at the top or the bottom of the hour, but, hey, I am a radical. I don't need no stinking clocks. And Mac doesn't care, so what is the harm? In closing I will leave you with a poem I wrote.

I shall light one candle to the dark,
for I fear that there is real Evil out there
where no one can see it
If I do not reveal the Evil and strive to combat it,
then who will?

I must be responsible for myself, my community, my state,
my country and my planet.
Or give up the right to complain about what is wrong.
I shall light one candle to the Dark.
Will you come share the light with me?