"Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny." -- unknown

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results - Albert Einstein

voting and irs
August 19, 2004 - 1:11 pm

bush is an asshat who claims to be both a republican and conservative, but i kinda doubt he fits the traditional definition of either.

kerry is an asshat who claims to be whatever he thinks people will support at a given moment. i rather thought of him as the anti-war candidate, but he's come out and said, knowing what what "knew" then, he'd have gone to war with iraq - just in a different and more sensitive way. he's talked about the need to redo our military to make us more flexible and whatnot.. only to condem bush for doing just that - bring the soldiers home from mostly europe over a ten year period is a step towards doing just that.

i'm not so sure we need massive military bases in places germany. granted, we need staging areas - but if we are indeed going to start playing better with the rest of the world, we should, in turn, be able to use their bases for staging - no?

the whole swift boat thing annoys me. it's bad pool to run the ad - the book is dirty pool since it doesn't even bother to interview anyone who was on kerry's boat. how on earth could that be considered reasonable journalism i can't begin to understand.

of course, kerry is now bitching that bush should condem the ads.. but did kerry condem the ads that compared bush to hitler on moveon.org? not that i recall.. kudoos if he did though.

so.. again.. kerry is an asshat. he didn't condem moveon.org and yet wants bush to condem these swift boat fellows.

of course, with election rules as they are now, neither canidate can contact either independent group. sadly, i think the end result of all this bullshite is that rules will be passed such that only ads explicitly sponsered by the parties will be able to be shown.

more rules. more regulations. probably not a good thing - less freedom regarding independent news. of course, with only people like moveon.org and the swifties putting out pure shit, i guess it's good.

it's kind of sad really. i don't think either bush or kerry needs to run a single ad - the country seems to have already made up it's mind regarding things. last i heard kerry was up on electorial votes, but the polls show them as something like 48/45 - which is a dead heat once you add in the margin of error.

what's really, really sad is that people are talking about basically protectionist economic policies.. perhaps need more economists to run for government and less lawyers. unless you really do like the idea of paying more things.

then there's the interesting idea of getting rid of the IRS. something i bet everyone claps at. the idea is to switch to a national sales tax and scrape an income tax. that would mean any money you don't spend (i.e. money you save), doesn't get taxed. you can invest it and claim dividends and sell stock and all that fun stuff tax free. of course, to fund the government, there'd be a pretty damn heft sales tax.

a sales tax of something like 30% (as a rough number i've heard tossed around, no one seems to be sure what number would be realistic). so to buy anything, you'd have to add 30% to the price.

that doesn't sound so spiffy.

it would really screw lower and middle income people as they tend to spend more of the money they make on buying things they need. high income folks get to enjoy all the benifits of investing. sure, low and middle folks will be induced to save, which is great. still, the lower you go on the income scale, more the likely you are to spend 90% to 100% of your money buying things.. so they will be paying a shit load of tax. a rich person who makes like 200,000 a year, might only pay sales tax on something like 50% to 60% of his/her income.

so, to fix this you could say staple items like milk, bread, and basic clothing arn't taxed. normal goods like cloths not considered "staples" (i.e. designer clothes or leather jackets) would get taxed at the 30% rate. luxury goods (i.e. cars over $30,000 or yachts) would get taxed at something like 35% or 40% - some kind of layered sales tax system. this could shift some of the tax burden to the rich.

then, there's the argument, should the rich really pay a higher % of their money in taxes - aren't all citizens supposed to be equal? why should the rich be punished for having more money?

you're response to that probably indicates if you're a conservative or a liberal.

the issues gets even more muddled when you think about how badly the old in our society would be screwed with this tax. all thier lives, they've paid the income tax and now they are going to get hammered with a sales tax while they are on fixed incomes.

oh, and.. the more goods you decide to reduce/remove the sales tax from - the higher and higher it has to go on the other items. so if you tax off the tax on presictiption drugs to help the elderly, you need to raise the tax on everything else.

pretty soon, you'll get a tax code just as fucked up as the one we have now.

perhaps the best thing to do would be to keep the income tax since everyone is familiar with it and strip out all the loopholes and exemptions. a simple code is a fair code. every citizen should be able to understand our tax laws without going to see a cpa.

oh, that's another problem. get rid of the IRS and/or simplify the tax laws and thousands of highly educated, specalized folks just lost thier jobs. what to do about that?

see, the issue isn't so simple as clapping at the possible demise of the IRS. on the other hand, perhaps it should be.

perhaps the motto of what's best for the majority should win.. and, as much as it might suck, those who get screwed, get screwed.

eh. of course, my thoughts on all this don't matter all that much. i'm probably missing key points and don't have a strong enough grasp on things.

might as well plug the site now.. even though i think it's on my template: www.lp.org - at least food for thought. not to mention it has the world's smallest political quiz and it's pretty damn accurate.

anyway. i'm going to go and cancel my renters insurance. sad that i don't have the 100 bucks to pay for a years worth of coverage.