http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/11/16/newsweek-fighting-for-survival-drifts-towards-irrelevancy/ I used to subscribe to Newsweek. From the time I was a teenager into my 30s I was a subscriber. I liked their news coverage. If I wanted in depth detail accounts of world events, Newsweek was fantastic about it. Then something happened after George W Bush got elected. They started to drift ever further to the left. More and more of their content became editorial (i.e. left wing ran...
Great article today at Town Hall. “4 reasons the American Dream will be over unless we act” Great quote: "In 1985, just 16.5% of filers paid no income tax." Today, " roughly 120 million Americans – 40 percent of the U.S. population – are outside of the federal income tax system." Meanwhile, the top 50% of income earners pay 97% percent of the income taxes. "In 1945, 41.9 workers supported each (Social Security recipient), while today o...
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2009/10/court-upholds-.html I’d say this is a good call by the court even if I think the law itself to be foolish for California (talk about incenting people to leave).
One of the things I’ve noticed is that people say they want transparency in things but in action, they really don’t seem to want it. For example, politically, I’m a conservative (more of a libertarian). I am not particularly “into” politics but I do follow it pretty closely and will debate any issue even if I have to switch sides in order to debate it. But other people take it seriously. Very seriously. When someone links to one of my blogs, it shows up on my article (coo...
“Any human being, who accepts help from another, knows that good will is the giver’s only motive and that good will is the payment he owes in return.” –Hank Rearden It has been my experience whether it be at the nation-state level or on a personal level that good will distributed freely is often returned with disdain and contempt.
My father in law is the most easy going guy you’d ever meet. He’s gentle. Kind. Thoughtful. But don’t mistake those attributes as weakness. He simply picks his battles because in the apocalypse, this is one guy you’d want to have your back. Politics sometimes is like this. People will rail against "the rich" or corporations and assume wrongly think they have leverage when they don't. This is typically seen with the American left who gleefully hope for higher taxes...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204731804574387021307651050.html Hilarious article in which a doctor turns the table on lawyers when it comes to “reform”.
Anyone who regularly reads my blogs knows that my views on the world are all over the place. Not a week has gone by over the past decade or so that someone hasn’t contacted us saying they will never purchase something from my employer because I, being said employer’s CEO, offended them with something I said. I have no doubt that over the years, my blogs, comments, writings, what have you have cost our company thousands of dollars because I take those people at their word. So why...
Let’s say one day the public voted in politicians who vowed for the top 1% of income earners to have 100% of their income paid in as taxes. Would this be slavery? Those people could move to another country. Those people aren’t in chains. So would this be oppressive? I think we could agree it would be counterproductive to the economy but that’s not the question. Would it be slavery or oppressive? What do you think?
Everyone’s Hitler these days. And everyone is looking for comparison to Hitler. In this article , I said that Obama creeps me out. He creeps me out because he seems to encourage the cult of personality much the same as Adolph Hitler did. That doesn’t make Obama Hitler, but it should send up a flag that people are supporting a set of policies but rather are supporting a man and I find that dangerous. It creeps me out when any political leader tries to ass...
I wrote this almost 3 years ago: https://forums.joeuser.com/144168/ “What happens if the earth starts cooling?” Of course, we have since found since then that yep, the earth’s mean temperature is starting to go down again despite all the claims of the global warming zealots who claimed it would be a steady rise. I wonder how long it will take for the whole “climate change” zealotry to start to die out? I imagine the comments area will contain tons of people who disagre...
The current system has its flaws but it does something profoundly right: Most people who have health insurance are paying for their own individual health insurance either directly or indirectly through their employer. They are paying into the system for what they get back. Obama supporters dream of a different system where taxes pay for health insurance instead. The problem with that is that nearly half the population pay no net federal income taxes. People get this and the...
Right now we have N people with insurance and Y doctors. Obama’s plan would be N+40 million with the same number of doctors. That doesn’t sound like a good deal to me. The counter argument is always that we’re already paying for those 40 million people. Well, if that is truly the case, then problem solved we don’t need to provide them with health insurance. But in reality, no, those 40 million uninsured don’t have even remotely the same access as those with health insu...