"Vic Smith" wrote in message
...

It's because she understands that cutting expenses increases earnings.

Cutting expenses conserves capital and usually increases efficiency. I
think we're all knee-deep is serious semantic "horsesheet" because various
terms are getting mixed up and each has a very specific meaning with their
particular contexts. It's interesting that this kind of argument occurs in
lots of AHR threads where people think they are both talking about an
identical subject, but they're not.

Earnings has a very specific legal meaning as someone previously pointed out
about taxes. Our governments (FSL) have very precisely defined what
earnings are for the purposes of taxing the hell out of anything they even
remotely consider workings for wages. The word "wage" is also precisely
defined by laws, tax codes and common usage. In discussion about lawn
mowing and car repairing sense, earnings describes how much you were paid to
perform a service and wages are the rate at which you were paid to do it.

You just KNOW the Feds would like a piece of everyone's self-made wages from
mowing their own lawn. If you make bead earrings and SELL them to anyone,
they want (and GET) a cut. But they don't tax lawn mowing and home repairs
(actually, they do, but that's another story). Why? There aren't any
earnings there. Just savings. Not having to spend money *feels* like
earning it, but earning is a process that implies dollars coming from some
other economic entity. That's just definitional.

Just like the precise terms, neutral, ground and hot wires you have to
establish common meanings to have meaningful discussions. We all have made
some similar error in the past. Kurt has a list of mine. g

You wouldn't tell someone that it's OK to pull a neutral from the ground
because they're all connected at the panel. There are very serious although
subtle differences between the words "neutral" and "ground" as there are
between "earning" and "saving." DD and I reacted to the use of the word
'earning' to mean 'savings' the way most electricians here would react to "I
needed a neutral at a timer fan switch for the bathroom but there was none
so I connected the neutral wire to the shower pipe and it works fine now."

Well, maybe that's not quite an accurate analogy, but it certainly "struck
DD and me odd" to hear the words "earning/making" and "saving" used
interchangeably. Earning is what a businessman worries about the most. It
is the influx of dollars from somewhere and without it, the machine stops
and no amount of savings will restart it.

In this case it gets back to the question: could you have made more money
working at a job that pays for your skills in the time it took you to mow
your lawn? If so, you lost money by making inefficient use of your time.

There's no doubt that people SAVE money by mowing their own lawn. But using
the terms "make" or "earn" to refer to that saved money just isn't correct.
Just like saying "ground and neutral" are the same isn't right. Earning
adds to your net worth, saving conserves net worth.

--
Bobby G.