The Sequester: Send in the (ass) Clowns

Sooooo...are you shitting me?  Really?  We have an economy that is limping along.  You can call it a recovery but that is generous.  What it is not is in recession but we are... bouncing along the bottom.  In this tenuous thing we have Washington ass clowns (who we in both parties elected) and they are going to tank this economy.  By not having a budget, by not having tax reform, with having manufactured clients several times a year, not having entitlement reform... we are barely making it.  Now they want to heard us off the cliff.

I don’t think we can sugar coat it.  We will look back on this failure as the beginning of the end for this economy.  Only one thing can happen when you cut 85 billion out of defense and entitlements, there is only one thing that can happen.  Job losses, smaller take home pay, less spending.  NOTHING ELSE CAN HAPPEN!  Arguably at this point allowing the sequester to occur accomplishes two major things, one of which is an ideological goal of the Republican party (smaller government or even better for the crazies, collapse of government) and will dump us into a recession or worse, that we will not crawl out of here by the 2014 mid term elections and they think allow a scenario to blame the Republicans.

I don’t know if they are right or they are wrong.  I do no that we have a failure of leadership at the very top.  When will our President speak the truth with love and call for joint suffering, joint sacrifice in order to save the countries economy to give our kids a chance.  When are the Republicans going to join and agree that there need to be more revenues in order to make this happen?  When will Simpson Bowles be embraced, not as an answer but only what it is, a seriously good start.  These people need to be brought to heel.  They need to:
1. If they cannot agree on a “grand bargain” than they need to just cancel the sequester.  DO NOT JUST DELAY IT creating another cliff down the road.
2. Fix tax code temporarily raising marginal rates and closing ALL loopholes including perhaps the mortgage interest loophole (classic government picking winners and losers) and eliminate EVERY corporate tax break and give us a much lower corporate rate.
3. Medicaide, medicare AND social security need to have their ages where appropriate indexed up for age before benefits can start.  Then they also need to be means tested.  If I have 5 million in my retirment account, even though I have paid into the system, I am going to need to give up some of the benefits I have paid in.
4. Healthcare... jeez...I don’t have any ideas about health care.  Explain to people that in the last 6 months of our lives. Accoding to CNN “One out of every four Medicare dollars, more than $125 billion, is spent on services for the 5% of beneficiaries in their last year of life.”  Mind boggling.

Still, do the first three.  I will be sending Clair Mc Caskill, Roy Blunt.  You should write these people too.  It is time for us to demand that the people we have elected.... govern.  That they not make things immediately worse.
ROY BLUNT ( Republican ) (202) 224-5721
260 RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510
CLAIRE MCCASKILL ( Democrat ) (202) 224-6154
506 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510House Of Representatives Currently Representing Webster Groves, MO
1ST STATE CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT
WM LACY CLAY ( Democrat ) (202) 225-2406
2418 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington DC 20515-2501
2ND STATE CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT
ANN WAGNER ( Republican ) (202) 225-1621
435 Cannon House Office Building, Washington DC 20515-4312
3RD STATE CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT
BLAINE LUETKEMEYER ( Republican ) (202) 225-2956
2440 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington DC 20515-2509

In the mean time I am watching Sunday morning TV and seeing the Republicans and Democrats try and set the stage for who to blame and we need to send a very clear message that we the people are going to blame them both.  And blame them hard.  It will not effect everyone at once but it will immediately effect markets, credit ratings and public confidence.  There are bozos on this bus.

Social Engineering, Taxation and What We Need To Try

OK....or as I like to say...sooooooo.... our country is a little bit of a mess right now. we are totally polarized between the tea party people on one side and the lefties. commies socialists or I guess Glen beck calls them "progressives" who are even to the left of our President. There are people to his left. Just like their are people to Romney's right. And everyone is angry. Our economy is in shambles with a jobless recovery that cannot drive any true growth. It is like we have forgotten how to grow an economy without another bubble like the tech bubble and the real estate bubble which drove our recent spate of high life style and over borrowing.

When I say over borrowing I mean you. Even if you were one of the careful, smart, responsible ones who did not borrow more then you could afford and who are continuing to mke payments on your houses and cars... you borrowed too much. You borrowed too much through the government who borrowed on your behalf and you benefitted from it because the economy boomed while everyone built and built and built and bought and bought and bought with all that cheap money. Now we have massive debt, a stagnant economy and even I cannot really tell you with a straight face that Barrack's policies can be doing anything but making it worse. In the best possible light the policies are preserving a stagnant status quo.

So what do we do? One answer is to let the beast die. Stop government spending. Stop consumption altogether and let the economy crash. And it will crash. All those businesses hoarding cash because they are afraid are going to really be afraid when the government stops buying. 21 million employed by the government, wait until those people get unemployed. It seems like a bad answer but that is what the tea party people are demanding. Smaller government, less services, especially for those who are not paying for them. i still do not understand where that falls in with their Christian majority but that is neither here nor there. And when your talking about creating jobs... you are going to throw a couple hundred thousand government workers into the mix when you start to cut all those budgets. be careful what you wish for.

I have another way to shock the economy. Throw the tax code in the trash. 17,036 pages. Longer then a Harry Potter book. What is in all those pages? Well I am certain there is some good stuff but mainly what is in there are tax breaks, and tax incentives encouraging certain types of behavior that Congress at one point or another found advisable. When did our country of rugged individualists and Federalists decide that Washington should incentivize businesses and individuals, through the tax code? When did they decide it was their job to incentivize us at all. I have no problem with paying taxes. I pay a lot of them. I hear a lot of small business owners bitching about their taxes but most of them I know do not pay all that much and sometimes none at all. In this economy they might not pay any because of no profits yet still they bitch. Well, lets fix that.

It does not have to be a flat tax but there is a lot to recommend the egalitarian nature of it. I know they regressive but low wage earners should pay taxes too. They enjoy the benefits and shared suffering is a unifying thing but it does not have to be that answer. It could be anything. It could be a soak the rich plan. It could be a national sales tax plan. It could be a tax the hell out of the middle class plan. Tax businesses until they break plan. the main thing and my only requirement is that it is a simple plan. Why isn't all income taxed equally? Why is capital gains income different then earned income. I earn my capital gains income by risking my money. Why should Warren Buffet not pay millions or perhaps even billions in taxes. Why should I be able to preserve wealth for my children? Dead people should be the easiest people to tax and their heirs have rarely done anything to "earn" or "deserve" the money anyway. And DO NOT tell me about how this damages and forces the break up of family farms. I know it has happened. I have never seen any evidence that it could not have been avoided with some better estate planning.

Bottom line. Abandon the tax code. Burn it. No more incentives. No more breaks. no more loop holes. No more social engineering from Washington. Tea Party People...are you with me on this?