Your Survival Guy

Preparing your investments and family for when disaster strikes.

Disclosure

  • Home
  • Your Survival
    • Special Report: FOOD SHORTAGE: Crazed Hoarding Is Not Preparing
    • Your Survival Guy’s Super States
    • Constitutional Carry
    • EMP Threat
    • Tucker Explains
    • Newport Gas Outage
    • Water
      • Emergency Water Storage
      • Let There Be Water
    • Get Your Gun and Your Training Now
    • Satellite Phones
    • Navy SEAL Survival Kit
  • Your Money
    • Coronavirus Infects Stock Market
    • Looking for a Better America
    • You Invest, They Win
    • Where to Keep Your Cash
    • Paris
    • How to Buy a Boat
    • Dead or Alive? The Future of Long-Term Investing
    • Is Vanguard too Big?
    • Cryptocosm and Life After Google
    • The Last Intelligence Report
    • The Truth Behind the S&P 500
    • RAGE Gauge
    • How Many “Retirees” Will Keep Working?
    • Your Retirement Life
    • You’ll Love This if You’re Dreaming of an Active Retirement Life
  • Weapons
    • Self Defense
    • Every Family Should Own at Least One Shotgun: Here Are Three
  • About Me
    • Your Survival Guy: “Life on Main Street Hasn’t Been This Hard in a While”
    • Preparing for Times Like These
    • My Videos/Pics
    • Music
      • RIP Neil Peart: You Will Always Be Remembered as a “Modern-Day Warrior”
    • Your Survival Guy: Make Your Bed and The Hero Code
  • You
    • Our Cabin on Kodiak, Alaska
    • If You Are in Pain, this May Help. It Helped Me.
    • How to Save for a Grandchild
    • FIRE! Financial Independence, Retire Early
    • Compound Interest
    • Arithmetic of Portfolio Losses
    • Maximum Portfolio Withdrawal Rate
    • An Efficient Frontier
    • Retirement Compounders
    • Counterbalanced Total Returns
  • Survive & Thrive
    • January 2023: Stacking Wood and Compounding Money
    • December 2022: Your Survival Guy Prefers Bombardier’s Global Express 7500
    • November 2022: Arriving in Style at Le Bristol Hotel, Paris
    • October 2022: Sink Your Teeth into These Bond Yields
    • September 2022: Do You Have the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People?
    • August 2022: “Watch This Boat off Our Stern,” My Dad Said “He’s Coming in HOT”
    • July 2022: MONEY TALKS: Your Survival Guy’s Best Service in Paris
    • June 2022: “I’ve Been with Richard Young for Over 30 Years Now”
    • May 2022: Survive “If You Fail to Plan, You Plan to Fail”
    • April 2022: Dream On! Fishing the Double Down in Key West
    • March 2022: Your Survival Guy Hears the Craziest Investing Stories
    • February 2022: Your Survival Guy’s 2022 Super States
    • January 2022: The Least Affordable Housing Market in the U.S.
    • December 2021: Listen Your Survival Guy is not “Mr. Peanut”
    • November 2021: Joe Biden is Weaponizing Your 401(k) Against You
    • October 2021: Time to Get Your Lazy Cash Off the Couch
    • September 2021: What’s Your Survival Guy Investing in Right Now?
    • August 2021: To Where Will You Flee?
    • July 2021: This Bubble’s Popped Baby
    • June 2021: Your Survival Guy’s Summer Job, Inflation & You
    • May 2021: You’re Telling Me Friends Ask You This Question
    • April 2021: Is There One Best Place in America for ‘Liberty Retirees?’
    • March 2021: America’s Growth Corridors
    • February 2021: Troops in D.C. & Your Authoritarian Virtual Panopticon
    • January 2021: Are You Ready for The Great Reset?
    • December 2020: Disaster Prep in Our Newport Bunker and Your Survival
    • November 2020: Election 2020 Edition: Stock Market is Predicting a Trump Win
    • October 2020: You Invest They Win, AGAIN
    • September 2020: Proud to be an American: Pro-Trump Parade Turns Rhode Island Red
    • August 2020: The Clock is Ticking: You Must Protect Your Family
    • July 2020: What Will Her Life Be Like Now?
    • June 2020: Your Survival Guy’s Home (and Money) Protection Plan
    • May 2020: Future Look at Covid-20, or the Next Deadly Virus
    • April 2020: Only Trump Saw the Risk in America’s Relationship with China
    • March 2020: Coronavirus Infects Stock Market
    • February 2020: Escape the City: Live Small, Cheap, and Safe in America
    • January 2020: Is Your Cash Safe? Probably not This Safe
    • December 2019
    • November 2019
    • October 2019
    • September 2019
    • August 2019
    • July 2019
    • June 2019
    • May 2019
    • April 2019
    • March 2019
    • February 2019
    • January 2019
    • December 2018
    • November 2018
    • October 2018
    • September 2018
    • August 2018
    • July 2018
    • June 2018
    • May 2018
    • April 2018
    • March 2018
    • February 2018
    • Welcome

Business Isn’t the Enemy, It’s the Answer

March 23, 2021 By E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy

By Andrey_Popov @ Shutterstock.com

You may remember when Ronald Reagan said, “The best social program is a productive job for anyone who’s willing to work.” He was right.

If there is anything America has learned from governors going wild and shutting down their states’ economies, there’s no bailout or stimulus that can provide for Americans as well as their own entrepreneurial spirit can.

One place in America where you can see the difference in the performance between government and the private sector is Newark, NJ.

For years then-Mayor Cory Booker and other politicians tried to engineer resuscitation efforts for the city via every level of government. None of them worked.

Then in 2007, Audible moved to town and things began to change. Andy Kessler, an avid student of market success (as you can see here, here, and here), explains the effects of Audible’s presence on Newark. He writes in The Wall Street Journal:

I met Don Katz soon after he founded audiobook company Audible in 1995—I even had one of their MobilePlayer devices. In 2007 Mr. Katz moved the 125-person company from the Willowbrook Mall in Wayne, N.J., to downtown Newark, and he did it without government-proffered incentives. Audible hires lots of area talent for readings, and the fastest train is 13 minutes from Manhattan. Though Amazon bought the company in 2008, Audible is still in Newark, now with 1,700 employees plus contractors, and it is helping turn things around.

Mr. Katz told me he’s always disdained companies and executives who “give money away but don’t apply the same inputs and outputs as they do with their business.” More spray and pray, they rarely measure effectiveness. That’s also true of government.

Instead, Mr. Katz strongly believes there are “scalable models that are good for business and good for society.” His favorite is “live local.” He began to pay employees $500 after tax for monthly rent if they moved into Newark. People called him crazy. He says he noticed “measurable productivity just from walking to work”—pre-Covid, anyway—plus, “young professionals want to be part of an urban recovery.”

Tech companies hire lots of coders, but how does that help current residents? Newark, whose population is half black and one-third Hispanic, needs jobs. So Mr. Katz set up the Audible Interns program. He decided to toss “nepotism internships” and instead require paid interns to be from Newark, to “give people a chance.” Many were without homes, some from the Covenant House, a residence for abused and neglected youth; Mr. Katz describes them as “in the vortex of single-parent, welfare existence.” These were not MIT engineers but “people without high school or college degrees for these really high-tech jobs. I wanted to expose them to the vocabulary of the workplace.” That was a big bet.

Audible looks for “gregarious and bright” versus credentialed and experienced. An Audible Scholars program offers aid and guaranteed jobs at summer breaks for those who go on to college. Mr. Katz says the model works: Graduates of the program now make up 10% of Audible’ employees. Most pick up the technology quickly and become productive, “more than paying for their cost of onboarding.”

To scale the model, in 2015 Mr. Katz started Newark Venture Partners, which has funded 93 companies—“little Audibles”—chosen from more than 8,000 that applied. Investors in the fund are mainly Audible and other corporations that provide coaching to entrepreneurs. Public money makes up less than 5% of the funding, Mr. Katz says. One interesting investment is MoCaFi, a Newark-based financial platform for underbanked communities. And yes, my tax plan for Mr. Booker was probably wrong—small, innovative companies don’t pay corporate taxes, at least not yet.

When the pandemic hit, Newark went into survival mode. Mr. Katz quickly set up Newark Working Kitchens to help save restaurants. Using much of Audible’s $10 million in suddenly unused food-and-travel budget, the group hired local restaurants to make 200 meals a day each and then used Audible vans, volunteers and logistics code to deliver meals to the homeless, public schools and homes without food. It worked so well—750,000 meals and counting—that the program just received $2 million from the New Jersey Economic Development Authority. Public funding for a proven private program: That’s a smart model.

Big government programs often fail. San Francisco is spending $16.1 million on “safe sleeping villages” containing a total of 262 tents for the homeless. That’s $61,000 each, approaching the median individual income in San Francisco, yet they still live in tents. One company can’t turn around a city, but maybe Don Katz and Audible can be a model for private companies to change the trajectory of other pass-through cities.

Newark isn’t in a growth corridor and will be weighed down by the big-government tendencies of the cities and state surrounding it. But Audible’s effect on the city is great evidence of the power of the private sector to make change in people’s lives.

Instead of letting businesses like Audible flourish, President Joe Biden and Democrats like Governor Andrew Cuomo want to raise taxes on their citizens. Places like New Jersey, and Cuomo’s New York already punish businesses with some of the highest taxes in the country. New York residents could be paying as much as 63% in taxes on their marginal dollars under Democrats’ new plans.

All those new taxes are going to kill any hope for businesses to make an impact on their communities themselves, as they save any extra money they have in order to pay for the demands of their local bureaucracies.

Despite those high taxes, businesses like Audible do what they can to change the world around them for the better.

Action Line: Many of you are small business owners. Tell me how your business has made an impact on your community. I want to hear from you. Email me at ejsmith@yoursurvivalguy.com.

The following two tabs change content below.
  • Bio
  • Latest Posts
My Twitter profileMy Facebook profileMy Instagram profile

E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy

E.J. Smith is Founder of YourSurvivalGuy.com, Managing Director at Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd., a Managing Editor of Richardcyoung.com, and Editor-in-Chief of Youngresearch.com. His focus at all times is on preparing clients and readers for “Times Like These.” E.J. graduated from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with a B.S. in finance and investments. In 1995, E.J. began his investment career at Fidelity Investments in Boston before joining Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. in 1998. E.J. has trained at Sig Sauer Academy in Epping, NH. His first drum set was a 5-piece Slingerland with Zildjians. He grew-up worshiping Neil Peart (RIP) of the band Rush, and loves the song Tom Sawyer—the name of his family’s boat, a Grady-White Canyon 306. He grew up in Mattapoisett, MA, an idyllic small town on the water near Cape Cod. He spends time in Newport, RI and Bartlett, NH—both as far away from Wall Street as one could mentally get. The Newport office is on a quiet, tree lined street not far from the harbor and the log cabin in Bartlett, NH, the “Live Free or Die” state, sits on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. He enjoys spending time in Key West and Paris. Please get in touch with E.J. at ejsmith@yoursurvivalguy.com To sign up for my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter, click here.
My Twitter profileMy Facebook profileMy Instagram profile

Latest posts by E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy (see all)

  • Warren Miller: If You Don’t Do It This Year, You’ll Be… - January 30, 2023
  • Your Investment Focus Is the Foundation for Success - January 30, 2023
  • CATO: Global Freedom Is in Sharp Decline - January 27, 2023
  • TIME FOR A GONDOLA? Little Cottonwood Canyon Jammed with Traffic - January 27, 2023
  • Biden Administration Destroying Retiree Fiduciary Protections - January 27, 2023

If you enjoyed this post, email it to a friend:

  • Email
  • Print
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • WhatsApp

Related Posts

Money 101

Trending

  • 4 Life Changing Words for Your Survival Guy: “You Should Try This”
  • Invest with Peace of Mind and Comfort
  • LOSING POWER: Your Survival Guy's Nightmare Scenario
  • Welcome to Hotel California, Where You Can Never Leave
  • The Importance of a Balanced Portfolio
  • Your Survival Guy's 2022 Super States
  • Stocks Go Up and Down: Get Paid Along the Way
  • The World Economic Forum's Record of Destruction
  • Don't Let Your Lazy Cash Eat all Your Food
  • America's Super States and Stocks that Respect YOU

Must Reads

  • Why Investors Should Forget Prices and Focus on Income
  • Slow and Steady Wins the Race: Most People Can’t Handle Making Money This Way
  • BLACKROCK’S BITCOIN-ESG PARADOX: You Can’t Have It All
  • Why You Can’t Afford to Miss the Boat
  • Here’s Why You Need a 15-Year Retirement Investment Plan
  • BIDEN-FLATION: Here’s Why Prices Are Up At Your Favorite Restaurant
  • Your Survival Guy Prefers Bombardier’s Global Express 7500
  • INTRUSIVE GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE: Does This Make You Feel Safer?
  • Investment Advice: Sticking with the Four-Year-Olds
  • Bad Guy with a Gun STOPPED by Good Woman with a Gun
Only if You’re Serious
Crazed Hoarding Is not Preparing
How to Save Rainwater Effectively
Your Survival Guy in Paris
Your Survival Guy's Fishing Stories
Financial Independence, Retire Early
Money 101
Pandemic Creates Virtual Panopticon
Emergency Water Storage
Find Freedom in America
Second Amendment
How Can You Save Money for Your Grandchild
Great Reset
See Who's Missing the Boat
Richard  Young Reports
How You Can Save Money for Your Grandchild
Why Fidelity is Number One
The Best States for Survival
You Invest, They Win
Escape the City
Why Vanguard is Too Big for YOU
Island Life

Copyright © 2023 | Terms & Conditions

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.