Ryan: America You're Too Stupid

Not long after Mitt Romney told us that 47% of Americans are freeloading scumbags that he doesn't care about, we have another astonishing statement come out of their campaign, this time from Paul Ryan.

In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Ryan told us that their wonderful new tax plan designed to fix the economy and make America beautiful again would "take too long" to explain.  We the 53% of America that Mitt Romney cares about are expected to accept some vague promises to lower taxes and close tax loopholes and leave them to handle the details after the election.

It's really hard to know what to even say about this.

We have a multi millionaire who expects us to trust him simply because he is rich, not to ask how he dodged the draft, or how he got so rich, not to look at any more than two of his tax returns, not ask about his shady tax dodging foreign investments, not ask questions about the cult he is a member of, and apparently now not ask for any details of any plans he has to run America.

His campaign has essentially degenerated to blaming President Obama for not fixing the Republican created recession quickly enough, and asking us to simply have faith that he has some kind of magic formula that he's too busy to explain to us.

However it's really no mystery what their game plan is.  Screw the poor and middle class, relax laws that protect consumers, and give a boatload more money to the 1%.  Thanks, but no thanks.

Stealth Taxes in America

For a while the Republican talking point was that we as a nation needed to have an 'adult conversation' about the economy.  And ignoring for a moment the obvious and inherent patronizing tone to such as expression I do believe they were correct, at least in so far as a conversation needs to be had.  Clearly their idea of slashing taxes for rich people and corporations for a trickle down solution is a load of bollocks and has repeatedly been shown to be disastrous and ineffective, but I digress.

One of the byproducts of the ridiculous Grover Norquist tax pledge and Republican political cock blocking is that many cities are quite simply running out of money.  Some cities have taken drastic steps such as laying off cops or letting whole city areas go dark at night, devoid of street lights.

Then we have the evil traffic camera as another inventive way of raising revenue.  For years now the red light and speeding camera have been around.  And while I am not a fan I can see some logic to it, because motorists who repeatedly run red lights or drive too fast are increasing the risk of accident for themselves and other road users.

But a friend of mine recently got hit with something that was new to me.  It was a camera that took a video of someone who did not come to a perfect stop when performing a legal right on red turn.  And at this point, I have to call bullshit.  A recent study found that a typical motorist would have to drive ONE BILLION miles for a statistical likelihood of being involved in an accident that involved a non-perfect stop during a legal right on red turn.  In other words, this isn't a real issue of public safety, it is simply a money grab or stealth tax for no good reason other than to raise money.

There is a multi point reason why this is all so evil.  For one thing, it is very often a private company who runs these cameras.  So what you have is a legally enforced shakedown of the American people where both the government AND the private company have a vested interest in issuing as many tickets as they possibly can (with no interest in right or wrong, public safety, or making the world a better place.  Simply an interest in catching out as many people as possible to raise money.).  But unlike a tax, a significant portion of the money raised goes to the private company profiteering from this modern day shakedown.

Another reason this is such a bad idea is because it creates mistrust of the government and law enforcement.  Recipients of this bullshit scheme are likely to feel like their privacy has been violated, that they were issued an unjust ticket for a nonsense reason.  In short we are conditioning people to resent authority and believe that the local government is more interested in raising money, no matter how unreasonably, than protecting public safety

Sadly though, this is the byproduct of unending tax cuts and loopholes for the rich, coupled with spending government money on unnecessary nonsense like stealth battle ships, multi billion dollar planes, and a bloated trillion dollar a year military budget.

So getting back to our 'adult conversation' we need to make a choice to have everyone pay their fair share of tax, cut back on out of control spending in areas like defense, or we face the alternative of toll roads, random bullshit tickets, profiteering from raising government revenue, the laying off of police, fire fighters, teachers, and blackouts in our crumbling cities.

It is indeed unfortunate that the Republicans didn't really want a grown up conversation about tax and spending, but merely wanted to push their own agenda of big government handouts to the richest people who are doing just fine but are greedy for more.

Mitt Romney Tax Information - At Last

I've not been watching the Republican debates, because frankly I'd rather stab myself in the face, and because if I want to know what happened in them I can just watch the news where they will regurgitate the main points over and over ad nauseum for 24-48 hours after each debate.

However, I was aware of the issue where Mitt Romney acted shady about his taxes for a while and then made a quip about not earning much from his speaking engagements (over $350,000 a year if you're interested).

Well bowing to pressure from his opponent Newt Gingrich he apparently released his tax information today.  While he pays a healthy dollar amount on his vast fortune as his critics suspected his tax percentage is lower than many middle class Americans.

Rather than pay 35% tax, he pays closer to 15% and has money 'invested' in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland, which he assures us is NOT a tax shelter.

But more disturbing than his $200+ million dollar fortune, his insane income of $42m a year, for me was the fact that per Mormon tradition he pays some 15% of his income to the Mormon cult church.  Yep, that's right, a guy who wants to have his finger on the nukes, and become leader of the free world, is so besotted with the cult leaders at his 'church' he gave them $7m between 2010 and 2011.

I'm all for religious freedom.  But when you feel compelled to give SEVEN MILLION DOLLARS to the church every couple of years, you have to wonder what kind of control they have over this man.  What decisions would they be guiding him in if he, Joseph Smith forbid, becomes president?

Romney has already shown himself to be a slick salesman.  He tells people exactly what they want to hear, moving his position with the changing wind of public opinion.  I for one don't believe a word out of his smarmy mouth, and I certainly don't trust anyone who feels the need to continually send millions of dollars to their church.

The last President would keep telling us that God had told him what to do.  And that was bad enough.  But what's going to happen when Mormon elders are dictating our path to their obedient servant and donor?  Pretty scary stuff.

Oh, and for those of you who don't think the Mormon Cult is in fact a cult, consider the opinion of hundreds of ex-Mormons who keep a great recovery site for those who escape the cult here.

Adam Carolla Rich Rant

Recently I was unfortunately subjected to a stream of douchebaggery from Adam Carolla, mouthpiece of the jocktards and thought I'd talk about the content of his rant.

In the nine minute rant Carolla begins by reminding us that 1% of Americans pay 50% of the taxes.  He then talks about the politics of envy, entitled millennials, and then defends the status quo and uses the whole rant to pat himself on the back for working hard, getting rich, and being better than 50% of Americans who are lazy assholes.  Nice.

The obvious counter to the first 'argument' is that while it may be true that the top 1% pay a lot of tax, the deck has been so stacked in this country these days that the bottom 50% of Americans control about 2% of the wealth.  So even if we took everything they had in the world, it would still be less than a 4% tax increase on the wealthy.

He moves on to talk about envy.  He uses the example of the 'good old days' when a man would be walking down the street with his son, and they would admire the Rolls Royce driving by owned by a CEO.  Claiming that now people are taught to hate and envy the Rolls Royce driver, not admire what they have achieved.

But there is glaring difference between the mythical good old days and today.  Back then, the man walking down the street with his son, could put in an honest days work at the car factory and come home and feed his wife and family.  (We'll ignore the issue of the woman being forced into domestic servitude owing to their gender, as that's a separate issue.)  They could probably live comfortably, and the CEO was probably earning just 10-30 times more money than the worker.

In this day and age, the CEO is making millions, probably 200-400 times what the worker is making.  Well I say worker, he has probably had his job outsourced to another country, but pretending he hasn't for a second, his income will almost certainly not be enough to live off requiring another family member to work, just to make a living wage.  Even if the CEO runs the company into the ground, has to take a government bail out with our tax dollars, he'll still make millions and when he retires he'll help himself to a golden handshake of millions more out of the worker's pension scheme.  Then the company will complain they can't afford to pay for worker's 'entitlements' and 'benefits' because some asshole executive just drained the fund designed to pay for all that stuff.

The CEO will have just enjoyed ten years of Bush tax cuts, helping to create an unprecedented gap between the rich and poor.  His team of lobbyists, lawyers and accountants will have ensured that the corporation will have paid nothing in taxes.  And when Obama talks about letting the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy expire, or suggest an extra tax on private jets, he'll scream about redistribution of wealth and class warfare.

About the only thing I can partially agree with Carolla on is the sadness of the millennials.  They have indeed been raised in the bizarre world where they have to be 'validated' all the time.  We worry about about their self esteem so much we have to constantly praise them for 'trying' even when their efforts suck.

For a time my wife did some contract work for a well known online university.  Often when she handed out a low grade, she'd get this indigent email from the student who would assure her that they had 'tried hard' and 'put a lot of effort' into their assignment.  The implication being that trying hard should be rewarded, even if the end result sucked.  A pretty stupid lesson that millennials have been taught from day one.

Finally Carolla tied his bullshit together by trying to make the right wing argument that anyone who works hard and tries hard can be successful, unless they suck in which case they should just shut up and accept being a loser.

But most of this crap stems from the ego of a celebrity who believes that the millions they have earned in the entertainment industry is because they are special.  Many really buy into this fallacy that they are just so talented that they deserve what the industry has given them.  This could not be further from the truth though.  For most celebrities, there has been one salient moment when they happened to meet a person with the power to change their lives.  They may have worked hard to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right skills, but it still came down to chance.

The person who made Carolla famous might have hated tall people, or people with curly hair, or sexist assholes, or he might have gone out drinking the night before and decided to stay home.

So just because you win the fame lottery, doesn't mean you are special, or magical, or better than the person who cleans your hotel room, or loads your bags on the plane.  It just means you got lucky.

If there is one thing that annoys me it is hearing some asshole like this ranting about why he shouldn't pay any more tax, and why the poor need to get some skin in the game.  Most of the poor are working their asses off holding down two, three or more jobs down just to exist.  Don't tell me they are not working hard.  Don't give me this shit about welfare queens.

We've tried the Republican model now for a decade.  That's how long the Bush tax cuts have been in place. And what do we have to show for trickle down economics?  Hmm.  The second biggest recession in US history?  The brink of collapse for what was the largest auto maker in the world?  The major banks and insurance companies of the US getting ready to file for bankruptcy?  9% unemployment?  A massive debt and deficit?  A stagnant housing market and falling housing prices.

If the Republican concept of low taxes on the 'job creators' worked so well, where is the evidence of this plan working?  And yet ask a Republican what the answer is, and they talk about keeping the tax cuts, adding new tax cuts for corporations who are (despite paying little to no tax) 'afraid' to hire more people because of our 'high' taxes in America?  Are you fucking shitting me?

I'm sorry Adam Carolla, but your rant about the rich was just a self serving pat on the back for your fame and fortune.  Occupy Wall Street have a very reasonable point which is that government policy has allowed a tiny handful of people to become filthy rich, not pay their fair share, and take billions in government contracts and handouts.  Meanwhile other nasty Republican policies have hurt and killed ordinary hard working Americans who never got that lucky break like you did.  But I guess it serves those 'losers' right eh?

Stupid Americans

I read with interest this evening that 53% of Americans want the tax cuts of George Bush to continue, even if this means giving a tax break to people making more than $250,000 a year.

My question is simply this:  How can anyone reconcile our current economic reality with the belief that we should continue to cut taxes?  I mean, sure, no one likes paying taxes, but we want to educate our kids, have police arrest the bad guys, have troops stationed in 150+ countries around the world, spend stupid amounts of money on defense, and at some point pay back communist China all the money George Bush borrowed for his stupid wars.  And all this costs money, and that money needs to be raised from taxes.

When I watch the news these days a few things are beginning to scare me.  Not so scared I get a bunker survival kit and an assault rifle, but still I feel like I am watching the American political system disintigrate before my very eyes.

The Tea Party are becoming a potent political force in America, managing to push some really useless candidates into politics on the platform of smaller government and lower taxes.  Yet the reality is they are almost universally supporting Republicans who were part of the machine that increased the size and scope of the government almost exponentially under George Bush.

At the same time they seem to be campaigning for the millionaire and billionaire tax cuts that benefit about 1% of Americans.  Their logic being that if we keep giving these rich assholes money, eventually it will 'trickle down' to ordinary people.  There's no actual logic or evidence to support this concept, but it is still presented as a good idea.

All that said, I'd like to say something to Americans that no politician seems to want to fess up and say:  George Bush spent all our money.  And when he was done spending a bunch of money we didn't have and increasing the size of our government, he borrowed money from communist China to further his goals.  Now at some point we need to pay off our debt.  So we have to make some hard choices.  We need to increase taxes, or radically decrease spending, which in real terms means slashing pensions for old people or significantly scaling back the military and our ability to invade countries at whim and stay there for years.

I just want to know when the majority of Americans will understand this simple reality and stop talking about tax cuts and evil Obamacare and other nonsense.

The elephant in the room here in America is our stupidly big defense budget, and our love of the idea that we can have our cake and eat it too.  If we are going to station our troops in 150+ countries, wage war, have thousands of nuclear weapons, build special border fences to keep out the immigrants, and actively oppose gay marriage and abortion all while prosecuting the pointless and futile war on drugs, we have to RAISE taxes for everyone; especially the wealthy.

Sadly though, no one seems to want to talk about it.  The GOP just spout stupid sound bites about efficiency, spending cuts, and fiscal responsibility.  But they won't have the intellectual honesty to be real with us and tell us that the only way out of our hole is to raise taxes.  And worse, they won't admit it is their irresponsible and failed policies that left us needing this discussion in the first place.