for comparison, a friend of mine owns a feedstore just south of me. his son in law purchased a tractor trailer rig for about $160,000 that he's making payments on over $3000 month. supposedly he clears 3-4k per week. he also has a flatbed trailer he owns outright and i think another tractor, i could be wrong on that. in the bay area, they pay regular truckers that don't have the tractor trailer rig, about 12-15 an hour. if you drive a tractor trailer out of a large company, they hit you big on gas surcharge, don't always have something for you on the way back, lot's of problems. my house payment is 2500/mo and i feel poor. i can't remember the last button shirt i purchased. how many shirts equal one cow?
anyway, the point of this is that america has too many subsidies, too many black markets, labor, illegal drugs etc that compete with people who are trying to follow the rules. there are a lot of "cattle" people who have them for tax right offs, a few friends in OK do this, and have an oldster run their herds. CA is notorious for this, the packard family of hewlett and packard fame do this and a few others. when other countries don't have to compete with our infrastructure and regulations, tariffs seem outdated, but what do we do? we let the USDA put OUR stamp on meat from another country. OUR government, ourselves allow this to happen because companies that are transnational in nature recognize countries as an outdated system to limit commerce. the problem begins when cultures collide and black markets are created within the void of lack of enforcement of contracts. the more i think about it, " capitalism is a game of massive musical chairs, everyone knew it 75 years ago, but along came fdr and put in massive safety nets, ie more chairs at each round instead of less and things got out of control and strangely incentivised. our economy is now based on speculation, ie land prices, that we are starting to see redistribution of wealth via house rich, cash poor infrastructure. this will place assets in new hands, create some pain. the more we manipulate it with safety nets, subsidies without real costs retained within the "fair trade" window, the more assets are transferred to those who don't provide services or a product. a sign of financial weakness, is not accumulating anything, ie capital, cash, assets beyond your business cycle window, ie droughts, market corrections, excess head of cattle, ie the sale yard we all dread as a marketing outlet. remove one of them like slaughter in horses, and there is a hickup people are not prepared for and there is bag holding frenzies and unmodeled for pain. yet people still want to come here because we have one thing most places don't have, property rights, though those are fast disappearing. cash was merely an exchange between two parties if they didn't have something the other wanted. now cash is a market all unto itself with more clout than the goods and services it greases. when this happens, like it did in roman times, civiliazations have problems. get involved locally in your government somehow, go to city council meetings, run for office, talk about politics not at sunday dinner, but talk about, do something about it.
back to the original point of not having vets to respond, it's bigger than just the vet and the large animal person, it's your community, and i'm not being hillary about the whole it takes a village thing, but i am saying communities choose what they want to do, and the best way to start is to develope a revenue infrastructure that is not dependent on matching funds from either the state or federal government or you get restrictions like no child left behind. i leave this topic with a quote from james madison, who was a notorius self admitted waffler,
"if congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands: they may appoint teachers in every state, county, and parish, and pay them out of their public treasury: they may take into their own hands the education of children establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union: they may assume the provision for the poor: they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, everything, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of congress." folks we are there, it's time to take our country back.
