Can't you hear the silence? No campaign ads. It turns out you can't buy the White house, or the Senate after all.  I hope all those super PAC donors think hard about donating to support the "I got mine" philosophy the next time. Most of us want our government to look out for the little guy. After all, the tycoons don't appear to need any help.


So there's a little post-election correction. Sorry, y'all bet wrong, and bidding up stock prices didn't help much. Now there's the issue of the "fiscal cliff". I'm betting it's going to by like Y2K...remember that? We all thought the world was going to come to an end, and it didn't. Likewise the 'fiscal cliff'. Taxes go up a bit, for folks who can handle it. The government lives with less. It's exactly what we need; we're living beyond our means, collectively. We have to stop spending money we don't have,  pay down our debt.
 Life goes on. Washington is like the stock market; too much hype and over-reaction to news.
I think the companies I own will continue to sell their products, continue to pay dividends, and i'll continue to invest them. Even if we get a real correction, what should I do? Abandon a strategy to grow yearly income and put the cash under a mattress? Come taxes, come recession, the best strategy I know is to be invested in the best companies on earth, selling things that people can't do without.

The following trends seem inevitable; we need energy, will produce more domestically. I own the pipelines and regulated utilities, as well as big oil and domestic, land-based oil and gas, a fair piece of renewables buried in there.
The population grows, and each member grows. That means food. I own food distribution, food production, groceries and the like.
We need shelter; I own REITS, rental property.
We need health care; I own the property where health care is delivered.
We need technology infrastructure; I own the best of breed amongst them.
 We want and need to communicate more; I own a bunch of the telecom infrastructure.

I'm dabbling back into some financial institutions; so far not too successfully. I have a couple of speculative investments in the energy space, also taking a beating. Don't know why I don't learn those lessons...but by percentage, just a bit of my investments. I can afford to wait these out and see if the theses play out as expected.

The passing of another election makes me think about chunks of time and the events that mark the end of one thing and the beginning of another. Early in life there was the onset of school. Then high-school, college, med-school, residency and fellowship. All defined amounts of time, with endpoints and new beginnings. I skipped the academic ladder, with tenure, associate and full professor, etc., o what I had was starting practice and retirement, with some unofficial landmarks in there...becoming medical director, becoming managing partner, but nothing all that solid.

Really, though, the career interval is age 35-67; 32 years, arbitrarily divided into 4 8-year segments, or 8 4-year segments.  So, at age 52, I'm through 4 1/2 of those 4 year segments, with 3 1/2 to go. 
If I work until age 67 (fat chance!), I have another 15 years to stash away about 50k per year if I can keep working the pace I do now. Actually, I can't imagine doing that. at least 2 of those 4 year segments need to be directed to doing something different than I'm doing now, perhaps 3 of them. That means only 2-6 more years of humping it, before bailing out of my current activities and finding meaning elsewhere. I have plenty of ideas. I wonder if I have adequate courage?