tax lies spiraling to random mumblings

ugh. when i contemplate the lies that go behind the perpetuation of the idea that a flat tax rate is the “fair” thing to do, it makes me ill. it assumes that there is no minimum cost of living. it assumes that people aren’t abusing tax shelters. it assumes that the earnings from investments should be taxed the same way as earning from a job. it assumes that people will always be stuck in the same economic bracket, that people are permanently tied to their “class”, with the poor always benefitting and the rich always paying for the poor, which is completely backwards of the real situation.

the other day, i did a quick calculation to see how much i can save in taxes if i put away $13K a year into something legit, like 401(k), and not even some bogus tax shelter. i save almost 14% on the taxes i *should* pay on my full wages, according to a flat tax rate calculation. yet, if a person makes $13K a year, they must pay taxes on all of it, as they clearly won’t have enough to put away into a tax-deductable account, on top of barely making ends meet. that means that if you have money, you can have even more money for no additional work. wow, flat taxes seem really fair, don’t they. $13K a year is what they would make if they earned roughly $6.50 an hour. that’s higher than the national minimum wage. could you pay rent at the crappiest place with that money?

as a person in a pretty damn high tax bracket, i am completely willing and able to pay my full taxes and be happy about the fact and not be an ass about how the government is taking my money. well, maybe not for this administration, as they are clearly masters of squandering the nation’s hard earned money. but the general point is that i feel like i was able to get to where i am and become a highly functional contributing member of society because of the “breaks” given to me. so i’m paying back society for that now. taxes are part and parcel of the bigger picture where we try to move forward as a society. we can’t pay for useful programs without resources.

because my family was poor, even though my parents worked like dogs, i got free school lunches. because my family was poor, i got grants and low-interest school loans. because my family was poor and i worked hard, i got a small scholarship during high school to help pay for bus tokens. growing up, it was deeply and painfully embarrassing to get called up to get my lunch tickets because it branded me as poor. people used to make fun of me and say that i picked my clothes out of the garbage, which stung because a lot of the clothes we wore were in fact donations.

i know how important it is to give people a chance. just because someone is poor and from a bad neighborhood and maybe doesn’t talk quite right, whether it’s a foreign accent with broken english, or ghetto-ized slang, or a red-neck accent, it doesn’t mean that they don’t want to make something of themselves. it doesn’t mean they should be dismissed as ignorant and backwards. and it doesn’t mean that they are just sucking on the nation’s wealth with no ability or willingness to pay it back.

there are at least two potential ways they can go: they can be minimum wage earners (or less) all their lives and never make anything of themselves and make a minimal contribution to the nation’s wealth/economy, or they can get some financial breaks to go to school and become a part of the middle or upper economic class, contributing more to the nation in terms of money and a political voice, providing well for the forward progress of the next generation. it’s an extreme oversimplification of the situation, but that is the divide i see between myself and some people i went to grade school with. it is the divide i see between me and some of my family members.

a flat tax rate means that if the total money brought in by taxes is not enough, then taxes have to be raised for everyone, which hurts the poorest the most in an immediate sense. a person of means, or even a person of no means, may think this is fair because they are paying the same relative amounts. again, i assert that this mentality might make sense if you assume that the poor and rich are different people, but not if you think of them as different phases of the same people’s lives, with upward mobility. it’s only when you rule out upward mobility that it could seem fair.

i think it’s fairer for me to have gotten tax (and other) breaks for a few years while i was struggling, so that i can move on to a more stable economic class and more than make up for it with decades of hard-work. does that seem unfair? it is, in essence, a loan i took against my future. and i am giving back with ample interest. and i’m happy about it, because without that, i wouldn’t ever be where i am.

i protest that i am just a thinking person and not an economist, and admit that i’m definitely dealing on a microeconomic scale with no sense of a macro impact. but i see the way america worked for me, and i see how it might be able to work for others, if only given the chance or hope for chance.

eta: the other thing is that if a well-off person says, “i never borrowed from the county, so why should i always be paying for it?” here is some news for you: if you’ve always been wealthy, you didn’t earn it*, so stop grumbling about your “hard work”.

* by “it”, i mean the base wealth difference between you and a truly poor person when you started out in life.

red versus blue

when people show you this map of the states:

refer them to this map instead:

As described in this page:

The cartogram was made using the diffusion method of Gastner and Newman, which is described in detail in this article. Population data were taken from the 2000 US Census. Iowa and New Mexico, which at the time of writing were officially undeclared, we have assumed to have a Republican majority — all indications are that this will be the final declaration once recounts are complete.

[snip]

The answer seems to be that the amount of red on the map is skewed because there are a lot of counties in which only a slim majority voted Republican. One possible way to allow for this, suggested by Robert Vanderbei at Princeton University, is to use not just two colors on the map, red and blue, but instead to use red, blue, and shades of purple to indicate percentages of voters.

punt

i should be working on my novel. instead, i downloaded FeedReader, a rss/atom feed client. i like it because it looks sort of like an email client, which means that i can disguise my lunchtime websurfing a little better. 😀

but i’m starting my right after hitting post.

more consumerism, quelle surprise

i’ve been thinking about getting this book: What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. i’ve heard it recommended in a few blogs and on AirAmerica Radio.

kos, you are a little late

click link above. he quotes from an article that discusses the pulling apart of a religious marriage from a government-sanctioned union. eat this, sucka: my ideal solution to gay marriage.

p.s. i love dailykos.

pet topics

my view of the democratic party is that we stand for the underdog and for public service, that the country isn’t better until everyone is doing better, not just you, not just me. we stand against corporate interests and for environmentally-friendly policies and for equality in the eyes of the law. we stand for the under-educated (so, no, we shouldn’t just write off people in the mid-west and mining towns as rednecks and be done with it; whether they know it or not, we stand for them too), the abused, the jobless, the homeless. we stand for a society were people can make informed decisions to improve their lives, where people can go to school if they work hard. i hate that the republicans have pushed us into a place where we largely have to position things in an “us versus them” mentality. “they” can’t see that “we” are working for them too, that when we improve things for “us”, that it’s not just the supporters of the democratic party that win, but everyone.

it seems simple enough to understand. sigh.

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christians, even evangelical christians, do NOT equal Republican/Bush supporters. white christians, yes. black christians, no. asian christians, no. i think also latino christians, no, but i’m not too sure (i know support has waned, at the very least). let’s not unfairly stick them under the same umbrella, because it’s not fair to, say, the black ministers that organized their congregations to march for civil rights to classify them in the same way as the people who used the bible against them to claim that blacks were inferior beings. some use religion as an excuse for bigotry, but some learn the right lessons of tolerance and non-judgment.

when you don’t have government representation, you look to community leaders, and many communities center around church activities. minority communities, which are heavily democratic and underrepresented, often have this type of leadership. let’s not alienate the people in the fight with us against this administration.

i should look up stats to support my assertion about minority christian groups.

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someone brought into work an atari system and three games. heh. i used to think “atari” was “artari”. i think i still accidentally say that a lot of the time.

i caved

i am giving in to the lobbying parties. i learned it by watching you, government! here you go: https://inciteariot.helava.com/feedme.xml.

2006

the time to start working for a democratic majority in 2006 is now.

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2006 reminds me of 2.006, which was the number for the thermo II class that i failed. let’s hope there is no curse.

the pain of loss

it’s not unbearable. but it’s hard. it’s really hard.

looking hopeful

Check out Zogby (click on post heading). His final prediction before the returns is Bush: 213, Kerry: 311, with Nevada (5) and Colorado (9) too close to call.