If there is anything in life on which you can make a sure bet, it’s death and taxes.  Yes, the age-old axiom still holds true.  The chances of winning the lottery or a huge haul via a Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes are rare.  But the sure bet of life insurance will indeed pay off!

Insurance companies use actuarial tables, basing their statistics of paying out policies upon life expectancy of the insured parties.  Therefore, they sell insurance to people that have the longest life expectancies.  Newborns are not insurable due to their high death rate, while younger people in good health are welcomed with open arms.

Insurance companies are not the only ones hot to take your money; they have friends. Some of those friends are financial planners.  Financial planners always urge their clients to assume a hefty life insurance policy in order to protect the clients’ families in case the breadwinner (policy holder) should die.

Think about the money that you gamble away on lottery tickets, and consider investing that money in a life insurance policy instead.  In time, the policy will pay out to the beneficiary the amount for which you are insured.  By the grace of God or some legal loophole, Uncle Sam cannot touch this payout.  But, if by chance you hit the lottery, Uncle Sam and his good buddy, the IRS (Income Removal Service), will be at your door with their hands out.

Think of a life insurance policy as forced savings for a rainy day.  Just like a savings account, you can borrow against your policy, provided you continue to make your payments (premiums).  You’ll receive a low interest rate against the loan, because you are borrowing your own, non-taxable money.  The only problem is, you have to die to be a winner.  But, your beneficiary will smile all the way to the bank!

On the opposite side of the coin, taxes are a financial drain on your income, not to mention, your psyche.  You need a man like our Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, to fill out your tax-exemption forms. Hopefully, he’ll use Turbo-Tax as a back up on which to lay blame (computer errors!), in case you get caught overstating your exemptions.  You’ll want to avoid that nasty interest and those hefty penalties, of course, which the tax collectors will exact like a pound or more of flesh.

From the beginning of time, tax collectors were looked upon with disdain.  Remember the Biblical story of Jesus and the tax collector?  In modern times, there’s been little evolution with respect to tax collectors, except for the fact that now, instead of taxpayers hating one individual, we hate an entire governmental agency: the aforementioned IRS.

Our national motto, “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” has been tarnished by taxes.  Once upon a time, a man’s home was his castle.  In the real world, however, no man and no woman owns his or her home if he or she does not pay the required taxes.  So powerful a thing are taxes that they remain attached to your property even after you quit this Earth!

There is a saying that goes, “You come into this world with nothing and you will leave this world with nothing.”  Long before you meet your Maker, however, there’s a very good chance that whatever you did own will be eaten up in ever-escalating taxes.  Maybe life insurance is the answer … or perhaps, the best revenge! 

In the James Hilton novel, Lost Horizon, the High Lama reveals to his predecessor that a great storm is coming to engulf the world.  At the storm’s conclusion, the treasures of Shangri-La (heaven-on-Earth) were promised to emerge, thereby restoring a ravaged world.  In his prognostications, the spiritual leader also echoed Jesus Christ in predicting that the meek would inherit the Earth.

Unfortunately, Lost Horizon is a work of pure fiction.  The truth of the matter is, it will not be a happy ending after the great storm in America subsides.  The storm in question is, of course, the collapse of our financial institutions and, fittingly, the government that allowed it to happen. Although our present administration pontificates that our “recovery” in the wake of the $710 billion bailout is working and the future looks brighter, this storm has been brewing for quite a while now, and no hurricane hunter’s device tossed into its eye is going to deflate it.

California’s Governor has announced that his State can no longer fund itself, and has requested that the Federal government bail it out.  If the former mighty “Conan the Barbarian” can be felled by such a storm, what shelter exists for the common man and woman?  And, California is just the tip of the iceberg, as more States totter on the edge of financial ruin.  How many bailouts can the taxpayers afford?

Despite the rape and pillage of our economy by big business buying off elected officials, there has been no fiscal restraint in Washington or even at the State level. Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul is a strategy that does not work when our President asks citizens to tighten the belt even further as he uses that belt to strangle taxpayers with the costs linked to a proposed national healthcare system.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen! Americans had enjoyed an increasingly prosperous economy from the time that World War II ended, until President Bush, Senior, marched us into Saudi Arabia, thus sending interest rates skyrocketing.  The post-WWII boom began with an exploding housing industry, the advent of technology, and the race to space, which we won.  Considering that a relative blink of an eye earlier, our people were hurling themselves out of buildings due to the Stock Market crash, our fiscal rebound was an amazing accomplishment on a national level!  We pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps following the Great Depression, thanks largely to the institution of FDR’s social programs (including Social Security and Medicare).  Once the war ended, peace and prosperity reigned.

Now deeming these programs “entitlements,” our government claims that their wells of funding are running dry and cannot be sustained. I don’t know about you, but when I hear our Congressmen and media reps talk about “entitlements,” as if it is a dirty world, it makes my blood boil.  If the perks given to our so-called leaders of industry and government are not entitlements, then what is?

The difference between their entitlements and ours is that we average, law abiding, hard-working slobs actually contributed to our programs with our hard-earned dollars, the same as we do when we buy any insurance policy!  There is no doubt in my mind that the program funds were mismanaged, misappropriated, and (oh, why don’t I just come out and say it?) stolen, period, for purposes other than their original intent, which was to support the common workingman and woman!

When the government decides that it is time to take fiscal responsibility and make the first cut in spending, what will be cut?  Will we as a nation reduce aid to foreign countries (a calculated ploy to buy their friendship)?  Will we cut future bailouts to institutions whose CEO’s still crisscross the country in private jets and give immense bonuses to their higher-ups, even as they plead for the handouts?  Will we continue to reward corporations who export American jobs?  My guess is, we will, and thereby will escalate the screwing over of the taxpayers!

If we all manage to survive somehow until 2012, the results of the Presidential election will herald the path that America will take. I portend that fiscal responsibility will not come without pain to America’s citizens.  Cutting spending is akin to attempting to break a bad habit, without being armed with the necessary resources.  Hopefully, wise men and women will step forward to suggest a solution that will ease the suffering while we go through an even bigger withdrawal: the separation from our earnings and the social programs into which we have paid.

Perhaps, in the end, the meek will not inherit the earth.  Perhaps, in the end, only those robust taxpaying souls strong enough and resilient enough will survive yet another national crisis.