There may come a time in the not-too-distant future when we don’t make things in this country anymore. This isn’t hype, this is basic economics. It is also two government policies at odds with each other. Policies that can and should change this year.

For decades our government has been pushing industries into using natural gas for their energy. Natural gas is a clean and efficient energy source, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by about 35 percent over other fossil fuels. Plenty of manufacturing industries switched over-the forest products industry relies on natural gas for nearly half of its purchased energy.

Additionally, millions of homes are now heated with natural gas; and thousands of fleet vehicles-buses and delivery trucks-run on natural gas. Demand for this clean energy source is way up.

There is, however, a problem.

All the while the government has been promoting the use of natural gas, driving up demand, they have been severely restricting the supply. Our government has put a ban on the exploration for natural gas-mostly in our coastal waters in the Southeast.

The area known as the Outer Continental Shelf, or OCS, off the Atlantic coast and in the Gulf of Mexico, has enough natural gas to heat 100 million homes for 60 years-or 20,000 factories for 30 years. But nobody is allowed to tap this resource. So practically every day the price of natural gas-with high demand and limited supply-goes up. In the future we will be importing more and more natural gas, likely from countries with hostile policies towards the United States but plentiful natural gas reserves.

As prices for natural gas skyrocket-they are currently more than three times their historic average-manufacturing industries are suffering. Pushed into natural gas by the government, we are now suffocating on the lack of supply. Energy, once just a cost of doing business, is now the third highest expense for the forest products industry, and may soon rival the traditional top expenses: raw materials and employees and all their benefits.

The high price of natural gas, artificially created by poorly designed government policies, is wiping out our competitive advantage. In the end, it is going to cost American jobs and that “Made in the U.S.A” tag may, in fact, become something for the history books.

Outsourcing food really scares me. Hopefully we will always be able to produce enough food to feed ourselves in America and products like medifast coupon code will still be available.

My organization recently decided to update its bookkeeping programs. Though it will probably improve efficiency in the long term, but presently, it puts me, as the office manager in an uncomfortable position.

Over the years, the firm have tried several bookkeeping programs, but finally settled on Quickbooks, which frankly speaking, I am very indifferent to, but have gotten so used to it in the last few years. We probably won’t know the fellow that took the decision to adopt a new bookkeeping program; nevertheless it was a wrong decision.

There was nothing wrong in the existing bookkeeping program, and setting up a new one was created new problems, that has was never envisaged. First, everything had to be recorded to the new bookkeeping programs, and for this task, the boss hired a computer expert, who also happened to be his son.

The task involved writing a macro that will convert all of the files from the old bookkeeping programs into the new one, and unfortunately, the project failed- just like everything the boss and his family do, on top of this is the problem of lack of compatibility between the QuickBooks and the new bookkeeping programs, which was a kind of general public access thing that was obviously produced by Linux nerds in their spare time. Though it is very stable and well coded, it is just not a user friendly interface.

Of course I bore the brunt of the whole thing, so I had to learn how to operate this graphics free, all text interface, before entering the old bookkeeping program data. Of course the new program is more stable, and perhaps faster, but the point is it is boring and takes a longer period to learn.

Even now that I have a full grasp of it, I still prefer one of the bookkeeping programs where I can click on a few icons and not bother about keyboard shortcuts.

I resent this new program because I will have to use it all day, so I think I deserve something pleasant to work and interact with.

But it seems no one is interested in that, as long as it is free, fast, and occupies less hard disk space, then it will do just fine.

Hey and if you are going to buy Quickbooks do the very American thing and use a coupon. You can get one here Quickbooks Coupons.