“Total recall”; cryptocurrencies; catching up

Total recall was a movie title and title to part of a song; however, it will be no recall for the 2018 elections and ten years from now.

The Republicans were smart. They front loaded what little bit they were giving to the middle class in the tax reform bill so by 2018 they are hoping what little bit the middle class might get will be hitting so the Republicans can claim a victory for the middle class and win. And this will probably work for two reasons. One people have short memories and if things feel better they will go with it and two the Democrats are clueless and won’t have an answer. They don’t have one now. And I doubt they will come up with one in less than a year. So instead of a total recall of our Congress right now so we can either repeal this disaster before the worst hits in a few years or just achieve better governance in general, we have a total recall of our sensibilities and our way of life. And so many things can go wrong in ten years, no one will remember why things are so bad. And the Republicans will destroy social security to salvage what they have left. Just one final thought, social security is your money. Will you recall in ten years?

And then you have AT&T trying to buy the President’s approval of their merger by going very public with one-time bonuses to the “workers” so he can brag on his plan working already when in reality the layoffs are also beginning. Yeah, the rich know how to play the game.  And don’t get me started on AT&T’s customer service.

Most people are confused by cryptocurrencies. And I think some of the confusion is because it is called a currency, but trades like a commodity. People understand trading pounds for dollars or yen for dollars or pesos for dollars, but buying or trading cryptocurrency like a commodity makes it hard to think of using it to buy goods. And add in the idea you can get rich off cryptocurrency, well the verbiage deflates the notion that it is a currency. I do not know if it will take hold as a real currency, but right now it does look like the Ponzi scheme some people call it.

Things have been crazy around here. First there was new carpet, so we had to move everything around, then we had to have the new carpet fixed, not once, but twice so I got tired of boxes everywhere and it is still not 100% perfect. We have been beat down.

And the better 9/10ths had surgery so I have the joy and privilege of trying to figure out how to take care of her for 6 weeks. We just finished week one. Poor lady.

And our future daughter in law was attacked by a dog right before Christmas. The better half with all her gear and I spent the day with them in the emergency room. Now my son and her are trying to work in her not working for awhile into their budget and school time.  The dog and/or owner are being elusive, so they need to get that resolved so they aren’t stuck with the medical bills. There is a police report and animal control are actively looking for the dog so hopefully this will get resolved. Too much for them and it doesn’t help they carry a bit of pride and don’t like asking for help. Poor child picks that up from me.

Things could be worse and overall I am well, just stressing whether or not I need to move so, haven’t had much time to write, yet the world keeps revolving and I keep being revolted.

I hope your Christmas or Hanukkah, or Holidays went well and if I don’t get a chance to sit down for a moment again wishing you a blessed and joyous New Year. Cheers!

Vote no for the new tax reform bill

I hope your holidays are going well.

I am lobbying for your support to contact your Representatives and Senators to vote no next week on the tax reform bill. Here is a link for you to get started:  www.usa.gov/elected-officials

Make it a simple statement, write in your reasoning; general or specific, heck even tell them it isn't their job to make Donald Trump happy, please contact them and let them know you want them to vote no.

We must not let corporations run our democracy into extinction. Our Constitution is still the best document man has written for the betterment of mankind.

On a side note to emphasize this point: I  had a co worker today that had a bad experience with corporations and possible identity theft. That person now has to spend their entire weekend combing over their credit report making sure nothing untowards has happened. And the immediate case where a fake account was created using their information, the company made it very difficult to erase the account. That is absurd. And this is just one example of probably many you already have experienced or seen yourself.

So start writing your Senator and Representative this weekend, lets give our Republic a flying chance to survive the onslaught of corporate and power hungry maniacs over our lives. The tax vote is just another nail in democracy's coffin unless we show we care.

Cheers

Real tax reform for our country

Remember democracy and our Republic are participatory endeavors, not spectator sports.

The Republicans managed to get another version of their tax relief for the uber rich passed through the Senate. Remember you can continue to write or contact your Senator or Representative and let them know your opinion and stress to them this isn’t the tax reform this country needs. Vote No.

And if we don’t pass their plan, what are the options? Actually, there are thousands. And in that spirit, I have pieced together some of my ideas on this blog and other places into a rough draft to post here. This is a start for you to discuss and either support or develop something better. There are many points to this plan, yet in no particular order of importance. It is a plan and some of the plan is designed with the idea to incorporate it into other policy to address other issues facing this country. To regular readers some of this will be familiar. Plus, we can add more flexibility into plans to allow for changing economic conditions so like the Republican plan we have certain triggers in place to adjust based on debt levels or surpluses.

First raise the corporate a small amount, maybe make it 45%, not to increase taxes on them, rather to get their attention to the more important part of the plan which is to give deductions for reinvestment in their companies, raise wages, increase training and retraining, maybe add deductions for better benefits etc... the goal is for the corporations to actually follow through on what the current tax reform bill says it is going to do. These changes put the horse before the cart instead of relying on some vague notion that they will invest with tax cuts. Even some CEOs say this cut will not encourage them to make the changes the Republicans say they will. At least the corporations are honest, if unfortunately, the Republicans aren’t.

Currently the level where you stop having social security wages withheld is $127,200.00 or also referenced as the social security cap. Nothing for social security is withheld for earnings above this amount.  So, let’s decrease the percent withheld by 15-20% for federal taxes up to this same amount. I am not talking about a straight reduction where your tax rate goes from 25% to 15% for example, more 15% less than 25% if that is your rate. The math comes to current tax bracket of 25% times .20 (20% reduction) = a new tax bracket of 20% for federal. Wait there is more, of the amount reduced which equates to a 5% lower bracket 2.5% gets added to the employees share of social security wages and the other portion of the reduction is what ends up back in the employees’ pockets. For now, you contribute 6.2% of your wages and your employer contributes 6.2% of your wages from their pocket. To help your employer they would not have their portion increased and stay at 6.2%. These numbers are hypothetical, yet want to give a simplistic example to help explain.  Numerically let’s say you earn $50,000 and are taxed at 25%, with reform now 20%. At 25% you are paying $12,500, yet at 20% you pay $10,000. The $2500 difference is split in half, so your social security withholding is added $1250 and your take home is $1250.  None of these numbers are based on anyone’s true levels with deductions etc... yet I hope you get the idea of how it will work. And of course, these numbers are not written into stone. They can be adjusted to better fit will tax brackets. The employer is not charged anymore than the 6.2% so no extra burden on them. This puts back money in your pocket and is part of a plan to continue to fund social security for all.  The income tax deduction is spread more evenly throughout all income levels because everyone’s taxes are reduced up to the $127,200 amount. Above this limit all current tax brackets apply to everything earned above this amount. Everyone receives approximately the same benefit.

Now you can adjust brackets a bit for different income levels if needed.

The two proposals above help with reinvesting in the working and middle class.

To help savings and to encourage more investment in corporations, we decrease the long-term capital gains rates for investors under certain incomes so they can comfortably invest in stock and mutual funds outside of retirement plans. We also allow more retirement savings. We increase the capital gains on short term trading especially for institutional and block trading. This encourages investments in corporations, not algorithms.

And for the Estate tax, the Republicans are saying we need to eliminate it, so it doesn’t hurt small businesses. How about we completely exempt certain small businesses from the Estate tax calculation? For example, the 2018 estimate for estate tax is 5.6 million for single payer and 11.2 million for couples. And bear with me since what can be considered a small business, and what we can exempt may be up for some debate. I am open to discussion on how we define this, however, for a quick simple example lets try this. The entire is estate for the single person is $8,000,000. The business is worth $4 million so you subtract out the 4 million for the business leaving a taxable amount of $4 million and now it is under the limit so no Estate tax. Very simple example, however, you can see how the business is protected, but if there is other significant wealth it would be taxed. For example, change the Estate to $10 million subtract the $4 million which leaves you 6 million extra and part of the Estate is taxable.

Defining what is a small business will be tricky, however, for discussion purposes we can keep it straightforward. A business that is privately owned, employs at least five people, is passing to family members or other partners, will remain in business and keeps people employed, it can be registered in a few ways, yet privately held. It must remain in business for original owners as a small business; so, some caveats could be written in if sold within a certain amount of time, if closed, but not for going out of business (may need to be proven that it is a non-viable business anymore to avoid taxation) The upper dollar value could exceed the tax exemption limit if it meets all the other criteria that will be determined. This paragraph is more for a starting point on this discussion rather than an actual proposed policy. 

What remains taxable in the estate is large amounts of cash and standing investments such as stock holdings or other investments. There is much more that should be taxable. It would need to be defined in the code. Hopefully this adjustment to the estate tax allows for small businesses to pass on to the next generation, continue to grow, provide income and resources for the same next generation, and keep people employed. Money that is only invested in wealth hording would be the primary target of the Estate tax. You must be very specific or it wouldn’t surprise me to see the lawyers for ExxonMobil or whomever attempt to classify family holdings of large blocks of stock a small business.

As with everything, you can improve on it and I hope you do. I just ask you keep the philosophy of primarily benefiting the working and middle class, yet some benefits fall to all including poor, upper middle class and rich too.

This is not a complete plan, however, I think these ideas better address tax reform for the benefit of the whole country.

On a different note, I like the idea of welfare and unemployment becoming workfare because people need to stand on their own. Not everyone can work, however for the ones that can the programs need to retrain people or help young people receive an employable education. This is a start and a discussion for another day. The current system is failing those it is supposed to help.

Remember to contact your Representative and Senator. This link gives you a start.

https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials 

I hope you think about this for a bit and have a great evening.

The blog’s busy work slowly coming about

You may or may not have noticed or read previously that I am working on a “reference page” or some type of distant cousin to a table of contents. I work on this occasionally (very occasionally). I started from the beginning and working forward. I am in the middle of 2012 right now and the election is about to get into full swing so many of my comments I am re reading (most for the first time) are about politics etc…

In case you are curious you can access this page on the blogger or blogspot webpage. It is not available on Tumblr or Wordpress platforms as of yet. I will add it once completed.

I knew I had the problem of titles and that many times you had to read the post to understand why the title. And this makes it difficult for any reader that wants to find a previous post based on remembering what was said versus how the title applies to the post. At this point I am not changing the way I title my posts, however, I may come back to my reference page and on some of the posts be more specific about the exact nature of the post. Right now everything under the reference page is listed by original title. Yes, the problem not solved, but one step at a time.

In case you ever want to try and find something though, there are categories and dates attached to each post added to this page.

Other than the above our entire Congress needs to be recalled for that absolute middle class dragon slayer of a tax reform bill that just passed the Senate. I did write both Texas Senators asking them to vote no. I just wish a couple million more had and maybe we can get them to listen.  Yes yes they have to have a committee to reconcile both versions. So I will still keep writing them to vote no until they create a more middle class friendly and beneficial bill.

“Long live the Constitution, the Constitution is dying”

The patients are running the asylum.

“It is maddening…..

Maddening I tell you”

Congress has been using tax payer money to pay off some of their own sex scandals.  And Congressmen are as bad as Hollywood.

Congress is working hard to pass tax reform that by any stretch of the imagination should never have been proposed since it only benefits a minute percentage of the population.

The men (and I do not have to be politically correct and say people since it is the men) we trust to give us the news and information cannot for the life of themselves keep their pants on.  And yes “men” meaning very plural.

Our President is still brushing off serious sexual allegations himself somewhat quietly now, but they still are out there. And he randomly tweets an accusation that a newsperson critical of him may have committed murder offering absolutely no viable reason to pursue a 16 year old case except “investigate”

Nowadays it seems conspiracy theorists have more credibility than Walter Cronkite ever did.

This is mainly stuff from the last couple of weeks.

And the moderates, moderate conservatives, and real conservatives sit idly by with the worst case of apathy imaginable all the while watching this country burn down, and yet they are the ones with the most to lose. They lose everything... family, values, lifestyle, way of life, country, freedoms, rights, integrity, opportunity, respect  ...  if these nutjobs keep manipulating and twisting the truth to the point that a figure 8 is a straight line; we will burn; maybe not overnight, but the embers are very hot right now. Why are they so scared to deal with the truth?

“It is maddening I tell you, maddening”

Ya’ll have a great day now ya hear