Fix the income tax system

I am absolutely terrified that almost everyone who reads this is going to misunderstand and then misinterpret what I am going to say.  I understand, no one wants to pay higher taxes because no one trusts the government to treat those tax revenues with respect and care and good stewardship.  The only way to control the government is to starve it.  Right now we are starving it to death.

So I will type slowly and can only ask you to read all the way through and think about how what I say will truly affect things before forming a reaction.

If we can’t scrap the income tax and replace it with something far better, then we need to fix it.  The income tax system consumes huge amounts of resources (government officials, lawyers, accountants, book keepers, individuals, software developers, etc, etc, etc) all for no particularly productive task.  We can’t package and sell, or even license, our system to other countries, it’s simply costing us money.  We have smart people doing unproductive labor, wasting their potential for creating wealth.  And it’s not bringing in enough money to meet our bare minimum acceptable needs.  And it is unfair.

1) Simplify the tax code.  Yep, I know, that’s like say “control government spending”.  Sounds good but until you present a feasible plan, it’s a bromide.  So the only thing to do is to get down to brass tacks, start with a blank sheet of paper, and hire the smartest most pragmatic people available to write a new tax code founded upon 18th Century values but suited to the 21st Century.

2) Establish a truly progressive system.  A family making $50K is in a different situation than a family making $250K.  And that $250K family is in a different situation from the $1M family.  The fortunate family at $1M is in a very different situation from a $10M family.  Yes, I know, those numbers are hard to read, they’re simply difficult to look at and digest.  But it’s critical for fairness and effectiveness to understand this: where the federal top income tax bracket ends is scarcely even the entry point of “wealthy”.  We need at least two new brackets, one at $1M/year and another at $10M/yr.

Under President Eisenhower in the 1950’s the top income tax bracket was 91% marginal rate.  But that rate only applied to those with an income THREE TIMES that of the highest paid baseball player.  Only the truly wealthy (eg; folks with enough money to not need medical insurance) paid that exorbitant rate.  The marginal rate was high, but the income bracket was also very high.

As long as we’re going to have an income tax, it needs to be progressive, and a top bracket at $250,000 a year makes that impossible.

3) Current income tax rates should stay in place for all existing brackets.  The new $1M/yr bracket will be taxed at a high rate for income above $1,000,000 per year.  The new $10M/yr bracket will be taxed at a very steep rate, perhaps the Eisenhowerian 91% for income ABOVE $10,000,000 per year.

This proposal fixes the problem where we have celebrities and CEOs raking in tens of millions of dollars a year and paying the same income tax rate as a working doctor, lawyer, or successful small businessperson.

Together with privatizing Social Security using the TSP model, this proposal can go a long way toward fixing our federal governments budget problems.

G’day all, and may God continue to bless America!

Privatize Social Security

I’m a convert, finally.  Any defined benefit plan that gives politicians the power to dispense increases to benefit their own re-election prospects is bound to fail.  We cannot, of course, throw people already on Social Security, or very close to being so, to the wolves.  The transition must be gradual and staged and the taxpayers are just going to have to bit the bullet until the transition is complete.

For an idea of what a privatized social security system could look like, just check the Thrift Saving Plan website.

It would be sketchy to hold Singapore up as a blueprint, but their system is “defined contribution” and it works well.

To get close to selling this, the first salvo has to be that “Anyone who is drawing social security retirement benefits as of January 1st, 2017 will see no change.”

Then the plan would have to be to transition people in stages, reducing the defined benefit and phasing in the defined contribution portion as the retirement horizon moves farther out.

G’night all, and may God continue to bless America!

A piece of pork, new to me

I read about a restaurant in Chicago that serves a piece of pork called the “pork shoulder blade steak” but what really got my attention is that they grill it.  Pardon my ignorance, but I would have sworn that would render pork shoulder meat almost unchewable.  I’ve cooked lots of pork shoulders, and generally figure on 16 hours in the smoker at 225 for a 7-9 pound shoulder.  Certainly not grilling material.

Subject: pork shoulder blade steak (henceforth “PSBS”):

I didn’t go to the store specifically to buy PSBS, but when I was browsing the meat department at Lucky, there they were.  Individually packaged at about 3/4 lb each, selling for $2.99/lb I figured it was time for a good fun cheap experiment.  So I bought a couple for our dinner.

I gave them no special preparation whatsoever, no pounding, no marinating, nothing.  Light sprinkle of Kosher salt (how ironic…) and a light dusting of BBQ dry rub I had left over.  I set my WPG (Weber Propane Grill) to medium heat with my GrillGrates in place.  Medium heat was showing around 400F on the WPG thermometer.  Having no idea how to cook them, but looking at the thickness, I gave them 5 minutes on each side.

Boy, did I guess right!  When my wife and I sat down to dinner, we were literally stunned, and that’s no exaggeration.  This was some of the most delectable, savory, luscious, almost decadent grilled meat we have ever had.  And we’ve had some darned fine grilled and BBQd meat!

If you don’t have access to a WPG with GrillGrates, you could probably use a cast iron skillet or the broiler, I’m sure either would turn out a fine PSBS.  On the grill, if you have the misfortune to lack GrillGrates, you will be fighting flareups.  From about minute 7 onward, I could see the flames reflected in the WPG drip pan, but the GrillGrates protected the meat from singing and soot.

There’s a place for grilled prime beef or lamb and we’re not going to abandon the traditional cuts.  This newfound PSBS, though, gives us an entirely different alternative: cheap, quick, easy, no stress (no having to shoot for just exactly the right internal temperature, etc).  And it’s cheap!!!  Less than $5 worth of meat fed us both very nicely.  I hope this post will encourage you to give this cut of meat a try.  If you enjoy good food that includes grilled meat, and you don’t already know about this cut, I think it will open a new experience for you.

G’day all, and may God continue to bless America!

Why there’s a Tea Party

It’s a simple case, really.  Zoe Lofgren (D-Ca) and Steven Colbert.  They had their good fun of making a spectacle and mockery of the legislative oversight process.  HaHah! HaHah!  Except it was at taxpayer expense, and further diminished respect for the sobriety of the federal government, and it was a lurid example of pathetic little elected mediocrity squealing like little children when they get to rub shoulders with “celebrity”.

Why should any American agree to pay taxes to fund a stunt like this?  I’d like to have my money back.  Maybe Zoe didn’t realize that she was spending my money to stage that spectacle, or maybe she just didn’t care.  But when there are elected federal officials doing things like that, I will resist every tax increase, every fee increase, every trick or whatever kind that would result in the federal government getting more of my money to pi$$ away on absurdities.

And by the way, Colbert is neither funny nor clever.  She should have gotten Jon Stewart.  At least he makes intelligent people laugh, even while they are disagreeing with him (because intelligent people do disagree with him more times than not).  But at least he’s funny.

G’day all, and may God continue to bless America!

Today’s thoughts on fixing the economy

Arianna Huffington has written a book, and then posted a piece on her website about fixing America.  That is one really, really nice thing about being successful and famous and rich, having your own high profile website.  Almost as good as being invited to appear on opinion talk shows.  But of course, she gets those invitations, too <sigh>.  She thinks she knows what’s wrong with the economy, and how to fix it.  I disagree, so I’m going to explain my position here.

Every revenue stream in this Nation traces back to Joe and Jane Consumer making a decision on how to spend their income.  Progressives will say, “Ah Hah!  But their is government deficit spending!”  Well, hold the “Ah Hah!”, government deficit spending simply time-shifts consumer spending (taxation) into the future, as in, to our children and grandchildren.  The only true and sustainable source of wealth in this Nation is consumer spending (*).  And consumer spending is sick.

Consumer spending is sick for two reasons.  One, consumers who are able to spend lack confidence.  Two, the rest of the consumers lack the ability to spend due to their employment situation, bad personal business decisions, or occasionally some unavoidable misfortune.  Consumers lack confidence or the ability to spend, and until that is fixed, all the rest is just bandaids and patches and stopgaps and workarounds.

Creating a “better business environment” can’t do any more than creating a “better government environment” until there is demand from consumers for the goods produced.  Maybe you are in wholesale and sell to other businesses.  Well, at one point someone is going to have to do some retail business to support the whole infrastructure, and that right there is consumer spending.

I can’t sit here and provide the solution to fixing consumer spending.  For one thing, I have to take a break to do some work around the house to show my wife I’m not abandoning her.  And for another thing, I don’t know the answer.  But I will say that the answer includes:

- figuring how to unwind housing, and maybe that includes having the government do a “cash for clunkers” for housing (ie; rip down somewhere around 1 million unoccupied homes, and NO, you can’t give them to homeless people, that does NOT solve the problem);

- trade policy, perhaps trade and corporate tax policy combined, to create an environment where companies doing business in American profit from creating dependable, skilled, good paying jobs for American consumers.  If you’re in manufacturing, you’ve watched good work go overseas because of trade (and tax) policy that has encouraged that.  When you fix consumer spending your manufacturing work will return;

- tax policy so that Americans making more than $1,000,000 dollars per year pay steep taxes on income over a million, and Americans making over $10,000,000 a year pay confiscatory taxes on income over ten million.  I don’t believe in “fairness” as a government economic policy, but Progressives do.  So put up, or shut up, give us $1 million and $10 million brackets and rates.   It is far beyond absurd that a corporate CEO or entertainer making $50,000,000 is paying the same income tax rate as a surgeon or airline pilot making 1% or less of that;

- fix federal entitlement and benefits so that they do not crush the Nation (and I understand that may include cutting my benefits, just make it transparent and fair and use the result to do what’s right);

- create the military we need for the 21st Century and build it at a cost not more than half of what we now spend;

- and a bunch of other smart cool stuff I can’t think of and wouldn’t have time to write about, anyway.

G’day all, and may God continue to bless America!

(*) Also excepting finding a giant flawless diamond in your back yard.

Just feeling this way

And I don’t exactly know why … “just becuz” …

G’night all, and may God continue to bless America!

A thought of substance

From Professor Thomas Sowell, “Greed for power is more dangerous than greed for money and has shed far more blood in the process.”

It’s a great mystery to me why Professor Sowell gets so little attention in the mass media, except, I guess, that when I’ve seen him appear on TV, he’s is undramatic and  self-effacing.

Please check this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell

Reading what he has written is a bit like listening to Mozart or drinking Chateau Margaux … I don’t really understand it, but I know it epitomizes the highest achievement of mankind.

G’night all, and may God continue to bless America!

No longer just opinion

An interview with President Clinton yields this:

“00:02:20
How to train more people to take jobs more quickly.

00:02:24
You know, the last economic report unemployment rate showed that posted job openings are going up twice as fast as job hires in America.

00:02:34
That’s not happened coming out of a recession in my lifetime.”

Here’s what I consider to be fact.  If you subsidize a certain behavior, you will get more of it.  Somewhere between 10% and 20% of the folks in this country are having employment problems.  So we extend unemployment benefits from 26 weeks to 52 weeks and now to 99 weeks.

I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that many unemployed folks don’t seriously look for work until that last few weeks of their unemployment benefit.  President Clinton did the research and provided factual substance to support that.  What is it going to take for Progressives to wake up to reality?  Even with the best of intentions, making people dependent on assistance makes them less capable.

We’ve trained people to stay on unemployment as long as possible.  Now we have to train them to take jobs more quickly.  I have an idea.  How about if we just roll back the unemployment benefit extension?  President Clinton is a very smart guy, he knows all this.  I do believe that if his wife wasn’t considering a run for President, that he would speak this obvious truth himself.  The other day, Hillary had the courage to say that our federal budget cesspool is placing our future at risk.  Perhaps a bold stand on self-sufficiency in regards to employment will come next.

This is just one more example of how the Progressive world view and policies of Lynn Woolsey, Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reed leads to poverty, unhappiness, and ultimately failure.  They will continue to deny all responsibility for this mess until the end of time, and they will continue to claim that their policies didn’t work because we didn’t pursue them energetically enough.  Enough is enough, reasonable people can now see the wreckage what Progressive politics has wrought on our country.  The best thing you can do for your country is to reflexively vote against any Progressive candidate.

Long term thinking

Nobody knows if more Progressive government spending is going to jump start the economy, or whether Tea Party controlling federal spending and debt is going to get the economy going again.  This is reading tea leaves, nobody has an authoritative answer.  So let’s look at what we can know with authority.  What happens if the Progressive approach or the Tea Party approach fails?  Because either, or both, may fail.

If the Progressive approach fails, we have the same unemployment we have now, with piles and piles of more debt.  If the Tea Party approach fails, we have the same unemployment we have now, we significantly less debt.  So in case of failure, the Progressive approach gives a worse result and the Tea Party approach gives a better result.  Smart investors would always take the course with equal upside and less downside, which pretty well sums up the difference between Tea Partiers and Progressives.

G’day all, and may God continue to bless America!

The answer to everything, Part VII+I

Housekeeping: I messed up the numbering on my last to “Answer to everything” posts, so I’m making up on this one, it’s both VII and VII, so to speak.  Three topics today, and the company is waiting for dinner so this is going to be quick.

Simplicity vs simple

During the Reagan Administration, a media pundit who intended to criticize President Reagan said, “For every complicated problem, there’s a simple answer.  That’s wrong.”  As far as I can tell, there are two types of simplicity, that of simpletons and that of geniuses.  It’s hard to tell the difference without some background on what’s going on.  But making the complex simple is an act of genius.  Failing to grasp the complexities is the act of a simpleton.

What you are vs who you are

By “what you are” I refer to what has come to be known as “identity” categories: race, ethnicity, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation.  By “who you are” I refer to your life’s accomplishments.  If “what you are” is central to your identity and world view, you are in for a very long and difficult and confusing and disappointing life experience.  Very few people care at all, and hardly anyone cares as much as you think they do.  That is for a simple reason: we do nothing to earn what we are, so where is the justification (and obsession?) with that which a person hasn’t earned?  It’s fine for a person who places identity at the top to insist on being respected for being born <fill in the blank>, but that will only return an even less favorable result.

The number one success factor in America is fluency in standard English.  The ability to speak and understand, read and write standard English is overwhelmingly more important than formal education in achieving success in America.  Any parent who does not give this gift to their children is negligent.  If you don’t believe it, or don’t like it, just ignore my advice.  In the meantime, Jews ($105K/yr), Hindus ($100K/yr, and probably the best spoken Americans of any identifiable group), and Asians ($85K/yr) where family values insist on educational achievement, including fluency in standard English, will continue to thrive.

Why the anger?

More people in this country than normal are more angry than usual, and now I understand why.  It’s the media.  The media gets special protection in the Constitution so they can perform their function of being the independent inquisitor of government, the people’s eye, ear, and voice in keeping the government on track.  Since 2008, with the exception of Fox News, the media has become a PR agency for the government and special interests.  The media had no problem doing their job when George Bush (or any other Republican, for that matter) was President.  Now, they seem to have lost their teeth.

No wonder the average working American is angry.  Nobody is speaking for them, and the media spends their Constitutional privilege in lecturing and cajoling, selling the Administration’s programs and defending the indefensible.  When the media gets back to tough minded journalism and leaves tingling legs behind, the anger level in America will drop precipitously.

G’day all, and may God continue to bless America!

The answer to everything, Part VI

Warning: this is a rant I’ve been building toward for a while now.  If you agree to read onward, you will be subjected to relentless ideology and bludgeoned by my personal views.  I apologize, but I cannot retract.  This is the threat to America and it has been so obfuscated that someone has to pull the sheet off Progressivism.  I would be pleased and honored if you would join me in this voyage.

Today I’m going to spill most of the story on modern Progressivism in America and why it is so dangerous to our Constitution and our national fabric.  I differentiate modern Progressivism from whatever movements, however historically fascinating they may be, that predate the Chicago Democratic Convention riots of 1968.  What we have today in the Nancy Pelosi, Lynn Woolsey, Barbara Boxer Progressive movement may have some slender roots that go back farther, but there’s no meaningful gain to be had in turning this into an archaeological expedition.

I also don’t care about prepared positions and manifestos.  Any group can hire any public relations agency to cook up whatever policy statements they want, that suit their needs (and perhaps conceal their true intent).  I am only interested in the words that come from the mouths of individual Progressives, the actions of individual Progressives.  Pragmatic, practical, “show me”, when I trust what I hear and see in the real world I’m not easily fooled.

First, an analysis of the membership of that sub-demographic who refer to themselves as Progressives.  There are three groups.  First, the needy, those who feel incompetent to provide for themselves and therefore desire more from the government than they are willing or able to pay into the government.  Second group is the smallest of the three, but the most ruthless, and those are the power elites who see the Progressive movement, and pandering to the needs of the needy, and the guilt of the guilt-wracked, as their power base and avenue to that which they cannot otherwise earn: the ability to reshape things for the sake of exercising that raw power.  Third is the group I’ve already alluded to: the guilt-wracked.  This is perhaps the largest group in the Progressive movement, these folks in normal times would be traditional working class Democrats.  But fashion, media, glamorous images (Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie), a lingering desire to hang with the cool kids,  the smarter and better educated kids, whatever.  This group allows themselves to be duped by the Progressive power elites (Ooooh, that Hillary, she is one smart and strong woman!  I’m with her!!!).  Now we know what we’re talking about.

There is a struggle on the face of the Earth that probably goes back to prehistory, but we can certainly pick up a written record with the Greco-Persian War(s).  Progressives understand this, they understand the weak points of the side they are on, so they seek to change the vocabulary and the discussion.  This struggle has very, very little to do with religion.  It has to do with culture.  To the extent that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are involved, it is only peripheral and surface.  The struggle between Greece and Persia, continued to this day, vastly predates Christianity and Islam, so thinking this struggle is ‘about’ religion is at best a falsehood that is convenient to the Progressive agenda of redefining our words and derailing the discussion.

Greece and Persian went to war.  Greece was the original western society, the original democracy, the original bastion of the individual.  Persia was the eastern society, an autocratic and theocratic government, and a collective society where all individuals served the will of the state.  This cultural difference defines the struggle between Conservatism and Progressivism.

To make this work, Progressives must deny the proposition this nation is founded upon, which is that our rights come from the Creator.  If our rights come from an extra-governmental agent (the Creator), then the theocratic and autocratic authority of government is short circuited, the Progressive can no longer abridge existing right (Second Amendment) or create new rights (health care).  So Progressives must figure a way to deny the origin of our rights.  So they state that our rights come from the Constitution.

No matter how much Progressives wish this were true, they remain wrong.  The Constitution only protects our rights.  Over and over again, the Constitution says “the government shall make no law abridging…”.

- The Constitution does not say “the people have the right to freedom of speech.
- The Constitution does say “Congress shall make no law …  abridging the freedom of speech”

This difference may seem small, but it is overwhelmingly important.  Without stating where those rights come from, the Constitution protects them.  So the question is, where do our individual rights come from?  And for that, we must look to the Declaration of Independence, where the Founders (who were way smarter than you, me, or Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Lynn Woolsey, Barbara Boxeror any other living politician) stated, “All men are endowed by their Creator…”.

Our rights as individuals come from the Creator.  Only the Creator can revoke or create human rights.  The job of government is to govern with the consent of the governed, and to not infringe on our unalienable rights.  So maybe you’re thinking that’s just my opinion.  Fair enough.  But there’s a great big fly in that particular Progressive ointment.

If, as Progressives argue, our rights come from our laws, and are not unalienable and from our Creator, there’s an inevitable corollary.  That is that people in other countries don’t have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, freedom of religion, speech, peaceable assembly, unreasonable search and seizure, etc.  They would only have those human rights if their government passed and enforced laws to make it so.  That is unconscionable.

Do Progressives support the idea that Ghanian mothers and El Salvadoran children don’t have these rights because they don’t have the good fortune to live under the U.S. Constitution?  That’s just a smoldering pile of elitist arrogance.  Everyone on Earth, everywhere,  has the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, and protected by our Constitution.  The issue is whether those other governments respect those natural rights of all people, or whether they choose to persecute and control their people.

So in pursuit of their eastern civilization, auto/theocratic, collectivist goal, the Progressives must repudiate the foundations of this Nation.  If the Progressive power elites are to accomplish their objective, they must pander to the needy with promises of miraculous “free stuff”.  And they must continue to reinforce the guilt of the guilt-wracked with appeals to racism, bigotry, hatred, and the general social unacceptability of western, democratic, individual cultures.

I mentioned earlier that religion is at best peripheral and surface to this struggle.  It is, easily discerned by the fact that the Greeks where not Judeo-Christian and the Persians were not Islamic, yet they had exactly the same relationship that we see between East and West today.  But for the Progressive power elite, Islam is a handy foil to be used to keep Conservatives off balance.  The Progressive power elites are using Islam to keep Conservatives on the defense, make the outsider appeal to the needy genre of Progressives, and maintain guilt among the guilt-wracked genre of Progressives.

How do I know this?  This insider knowledge has come to me by spending time on that refuge of the Progressive hive mind, the Huffington Post.  Progressives outnumber normal people there by 10 or 20 to 1.  Everything I’ve written here comes from direct observation and interaction with self-proclaimed Progressives in their own element.  I’ve added the historic element, I don’t know how many rank-and-file Progressives know that much history.  But I couldn’t resist because history provides the answers we just can’t get from today’s media deluge.

There’s more to be said on the errors of Progressivism, but this is the core.  Progressives believe in collectivism, that the government has the power and the resources and dispenses rights and benefits to the people as they see fit, and that there is no authority above government (Stalin asked “How many divisions does the Pope have?” – - -‘nuff said).  I don’t blame or bear any malice toward the needy and the guilt-wracked Progressive.  Their only sin is that of allowing themselves to be used.  But the Progressive power elites: Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, Lynn Woolsey and the rest are a threat to the structure of our Nation.  Leaving them in office is like ignoring termites in your house.  That is the threat that Progressivism poses to the United States of America.

G’day all, and may God continue to bless America!