Showing posts with label taxes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label taxes. Show all posts

Friday, May 7, 2021

I Call Bullshit!

Image by underworth from Pixabay 

This is: A weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids and my great-grandkids — the Stickies — to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.

Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — A Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating intersectional triggering. Viewing with a tablet or a monitor is highly recommended for maximum enjoyment.  
Erratically Appearing Hallucinatory Guest Star: Dana — A Gentlereader 

"I was kind of secretly hoping one of my kids would go out and make a million bucks. So when they put me in a home, at least I'll have a window with a view." 
                                                                                                -Joe Biden


Dear (eventual) Grandstickies and Great-Grandstickies (and Gentlereaders),

[I am shock-ed and appalled. A true gentleperson would not use the word bullshit in a missive that will be read by the general public, particularly in the title — not to mention his grandkids.]

Forgive me my delicate little flower, henceforth I'll use B.S., Dana. But sometimes, a full-throated I call bull... B.S. is called for. I call B.S. on Uncle Joe's call to spend trillions on top of the trillions already spent by him and the Donald.  

[Wait-wait-wait. I don't recall you sending back your share of the latest tranche of the Money for Mobs program. Any number of reputable charities would've been happy to put that money to work for ya.]

I'm tempted to say I needed it because I really needed it. Of course, the reality of my claim is between me, God, and the IRS. But I'm certain that almost all of the people who didn't need it also kept it, and I don't blame them. 

 [That doesn't make any sense.]     

Sure it does. Without congressional term limits, we're doomed. Well, I'm probably (hopefully?) not since I'm pushing 70 and according to The Social Security Administration I'm likely to be deleted when I turn 84.7. 

I wonder if I were to have a sex change operation and became a full-fledged (well...) female if I'd live to see my 87.0th birthday...

[Did you stop taking your meds again?]

To paraphrase a Shakespeare misquote, read on Macduff.


Uncle Joe  with the help of no shortage of lefty pseudo-journalists of the purple press   ran as a traditional, moderate, steady as she goes center-left Depublican. 

The Donald, they told us, was the creepy uncle, the racist, xenophobic old letch kept at a careful distance by all the women and girls at family reunions. Uncle Joe was just a lovable, harmless old hair sniffer prone to occasionally blurting out embarrassing remarks. 

"If you have a problem figurin' out if you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black!"

[Maybe you misunderstood. Maybe...] 

From a Chris Cillizza piece at CNN (.com) posted just after (11.17.20) the election:

"Biden told everyone — the left included — exactly what sort of president he would be. One who believed Trump was an anomaly, that Republicans were good people who could be dealt with in a post-Trump era and that deal-making and centrist politics were the right way forward."

And then the Depublicans used a parliamentary trick to pass the stimulus bill without a single Republicrat vote.

The Republicrats, the same Republicrats that gleefully ran up the deficit when the Donald was in charge, went ape... poop crazy. 

Thus my use of the world-famous quote," Without congressional term limits, we're doomed." -Me Clearly, both the Blue team and the Red teams are suffering from an epidemic of constipation.

This brings me to spending/printing/borrowing trillions and trillions (please pronounce like you're Carl Sagan). 


Call it what you will, stimulus/democratic socialism/socialism/whateverism, as George Will has pointed out, "The political class is more united by class interest than it is divided by ideology. And the class interest is to give the American people a dollar's worth of government and charge them 80 cents for it."   

That's how you buy a political career with other people's money. 

As best I can tell (for some reason the Goog makes it hard to get a straight answer) approximately 24,000,000 people in America are working for a government entity in some form or fashion.

This means that one out of every 14 people has a government job. But this column is about the people at the top, the ones with real power. It's not about your average low-level government employee, most of whom are just like you and me. 

It's not even about the teacher's unions, the primary source of institutional racism in America (HT: Scott Adams) so I probably shouldn't have mentioned it.

[Then what exactly is your...]

Sorry... It's quite simple really. 


There aren't nearly enough rich people/evil corporations to fund Uncle Joe's dreams.

And corporations — large, small, evil, and otherwise — get their money from us, their customers. 

They employ us and are usually owned by us, their shareholders, because The Fedrl Gummit has made it impossible to grow a nest egg the safe, boring, old-fashioned way — savings accounts and compound interest. 

The European social democracies that the progressives like to point to are funded by high taxes on everyone at every level of exchange. If that's what we really want, fine, let's do it.  

BIG BUT.

To pretend that utopia can be financed by the 1% (who paid 38.5% of all income taxes last year) without the bottom 90% (who paid 29.9% of last year's income taxes) kicking in a lot more dough is bullshit. 

[Gasp!]    

Incidentally, the phrase "over ten years" is also complete B.S. since the US doesn't have ten-year budgets (the Swamp can't even pass a one-year budget anymore) and even if he lives long enough, Uncle Joe will be gone in less than eight years even though he'll only be 86. 


Speaking of bushwa:
Uncle Joe, recently giving a speech to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Amtrak (the heavily taxpayer-subsidized gummit railroad that loses money every year) told a heartwarming story about his relationship with an Amtrak conductor, and taking the train home to visit his sick mom around 2014 or 2015 when he was the vice president.  

Slight problem. His mom died in 2010 and the conductor retired in 1993. 

Why would a dude with FU-level wealth and the most powerful job on the planet continue to tell dubious boring old man stories (I'm an expert on this topic...)? Mansplaining? Toxic masculinity? Perhaps some other problem?

Poppa loves you,
Have an OK day


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    Friday, November 20, 2020

    Your Tax Dollars At Work

                                                   Image by Liselotte Brunner from Pixabay 


    This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids and my great-grandkids — the Stickies — to advise them and haunt them after they become grups or I'm deleted.

    Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — A Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating intersectional triggering. Viewing on a decently sized computer monitor recommended for maximum enjoyment.

    Note: If ya click on an Amazon ad, thus opening a portal to Amazon, and buy anything, Lord Bezos will toss me a few pence in my direction and you won't have to feel guilty about enjoying my work  well, hopefully  for free. Win/Win.

    About 


    Glossary 


    Erratically Appearing Hallucinatory Guest Star: Dana — A Gentlerreader

    "Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery." 
                                                                                              -Calvin Coolidge 


    Dear (eventual) Grandstickies and Great-Grandstickies (and Gentlereaders),

    According to Merriam-Webster...

    Boondoggle: a wasteful or impractical project or activity often involving graft. 

    California's train to nowhere — full disclosure, the preceding and following italicized phrases have been used by all sorts of writers in the know whose articles have preceded this one  is the very definition of a boondoggle.  

    The nation that built a transcontinental railroad (6 years) and landed a man (twelve of 'em in fact) on the moon (8 years) can't build a railroad from here to there in California.


    What follows is the Crank's Digest version of the story. The full story would require a column of at least 10,000 words. I'm a rabid reader and current events freak but even I wouldn't be interested in reading such a column, much less writing one. 

    I suspect the only thing it would be good for is as a sleep aid. 

    [Wait-wait-wait. Why are you writing about the train to nowhere at all? Is that still a thing? If I remember correctly Governor Moonbeam was the one that got the ball, if not an actual train rolling, back in, lemme think, musta been...]

    It's still a thing. Apparently, it's harder to kill than Covid in a New York nursing home. 

    Jerry Brown, who ran California for two consecutive terms, twice, and an extremely fortunate man in that he was romantically linked to Linda Ronstadt back in the day  ironically considered to be a fiscal conservative at the time  signed legislation authorizing the money to study building a high-speed rail system in the Sunshine State in 1982. 

    California's been trying to build a local railroad for 38 years. 

    They've been at it for so long there's a Wikipedia entry entitled History of California High-Speed Rail. It's a very long entry. 

    [You're using the word entitled incorrectly, it should be titled. I would've thought that...]

    I'm fully aware of that but I'm invoking my poetic license. If I were king and/or the Earth was less hostile to gentlepersons...

    [Gimme a break.]  

    If the Peoples Republic of California should actually manage to complete the latest drastically dumb downed-version of The Never-Ending Public Works Project (currently scheduled for 2029) I propose it should be called the Jerry Brown Sorta/Kinda High-Speed Railroad.

    Here's hoping Mr. Brown, who would be 91 years old, is still around and gets to pound in the last (gold foil-wrapped) spike at the opening ceremony — assuming he could lift a sledgehammer). 

    [Perhaps they could use a Nerf-spike and a Nerfhammer. Um, listen, you've been at this for a while now, and, well, what happened to a Cranky's Digest version of this dispiriting tale of American wussification.]

    Having just reread the Wikipedia entry referenced above and reviewed my other exhaustive research I'm so dispirited I've decided to wrap this baby up and inventory the liquor cabinet. 

    [You don't have a liquor cabinet...]

    Yes, but I do have a poetic license, remember?


    It depends on who you ask but as best as I can tell The Fedrl Gummit and the gummit of California have, so far, spent more than $6,000,000,000. 

    Former President Obama pledged to contribute $3,500,000,000 of other people's money as part of his efforts to blunt the effects of the Great Recession, but the Donald issued a stop payment order on the last billion or so and has asked for a 2.5 billion refund given that no track has actually been laid.
     
    California's legislature has gone to war with the state gummit agency that refuses to stop spending other people's money on a railroad that has laid no track

    While there's no use crying over spent money, I'd like to propose that The Fedrl Gummit hold a lottery and give away the billion bucks. Print the name of each state on a ping-pong ball, put 'em all in a big red, white, and blue sack and have Miss Ms. America...

    [Do we still have a Miss Ms. America?] 

    And have him/her/them reach in and pull out a winner. The winning state will divvy up the money equally among its citizens in lieu of the stimulus checks that we've been mentally spending for months now that have yet to leave the Swamp.

    "The checks are in the mail! Or at least they will be if Orange Hitler stops screwing around and gets out of my our way." Nancy Pelosi 

    [Fake news! You made that up!]

    Yeah, but it's still true.

    Poppa loves you,
    Have an OK day

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