Governor Inslee Plans to Fight Current Drought With...........TAXES

There's talk of taxing water bills and anything water-related with a 15% add-on tax in order to "fight" this further evidence of human-caused global warming.  The map above shows the counties that will be affected by the fight against the weather (mostly the sun). Note the "exempt" area - King County/Seattle. What a shock!

Interesting note about population distribution in Washington State. If you want to elect a governor, all the votes you need are to be had in King County. Seattle has solidly Democrat representation. We don't get a lot of Republican governors up here. So the 15% will be charged in the counties where the drought will be "fought". What will be done with the money is less clear. Fight a few fires maybe, but a 15% surcharge isn't exactly chump change.

Exempting Seattle/King county is a smart move. Don't want to make the people who got you elected when there's a recall petition floating around out there. But as another flim flam man once said, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."  I AM JAY. THE GREAT AND POWERFUL!

© 2021 by Tom King

 

 

Warren Buffet's Been Working on the Railroad

Here's Warren Buffet Singing "I've Been Working on the Railroad" on Chinese TV.  How appropriate is that?  Warren's buddy, President Obama just effectively canceled the Keystone Pipeline Project.  This means the Canadians will build a pipeline to the west coast and sell the oil to China - that or ship it south on the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railroad.  Wanna guess who owns it?


Warren Buffet's Berkshire-Hathaway group owns big old chunks of BN&SF Railroad - the railroad that will have to carry all that Canadian oil now that the Keystone Pipeline isn't happening. It only cost 126,000 direct and indirect jobs and adds to the cost of transporting oil to the US. 

No wonder the Warrenator doesn't mind paying a little higher tax rate. He just got the job of transporting all that Canadian crude at $2.50 a barrel (almost twice as expense as the pipeline's $1.50 a barrel cost). Doing the little, "Lets us filthy rich folk pay some more taxes!" shuffle-dance for Mr. Obama got him huge new profits. 


It's like the president's state of the union speech. It sounds good, but when you lift up the rock there's all sorts of nasty stuff under there - like Uncle Warren's Sweetheart Deal.

And guess who gets to pay for Uncle Warren's windfall?

Yep, you guessed it.. Back up to the pump Americans and bend over. Uncle Warren is definitely workin' on the railroad.

How is it that every time the Dems start wailing about not taxing the rich, the next thing they do is make some sort of shady deal that helps the filthy rich who donate to their campaigns make massive potfuls of money. They push through this big old bailout and the bankers and CEOs were suddenly getting solid gold parachutes, and all the while the little guys that owned stock or had accounts with them were getting stiffed, not to mention the taxpayers. When you've got people like Bernie Madoff as an "A-List" Democrat, it makes you kinda wonder just how sincere the folks who invented the tax loophole are about soaking their rich patrons.

I'm just sayin'

Tom

Fees and the Cashless Society - Signs of the End?

A friend complained that his bank practically forced him to go cashless and now charges him fees for the "convenience" (mostly theirs). Well, I got to looking at what I pay out in fees - not to the government, but to the companies I buy things and services from. It's bad enough to be taxed by the government, but when we tax each other almost as heavily, I think it's a very bad sign.

Have you ever stopped to take stock of how many hidden fees you are paying. Your cell phone bill alone will give you a stroke and don't even get me started on the electric bill.  Every time you turn around someone is charging you a little something extra just for trying to do what it is you need to do.

The French have a word for it - "lagniappe". It means "a little something extra".  Nowadays, it's being redefined as a little extra thing you give your customers, but don't kid yourself. The concept didn't start out as a treat for customers. At least that's not the way it was understood in the Cajun parishes of south Louisiana.  If you wanted to build something, buy real estate or do virtually anything in that part of the country that involved the County Judge or the local government, especially anything that required a license or building permit or certification, you knew that part of the fees you would pay was the "lagniappe" - the little something extra you left on the judge's desk or slipped the county clerk (sometimes you gave it to both). The lagniappe was simply a polite way of describing bribes and graft. You could fight it all you wanted, but it all boiled down to no lagniappe / no permit.

South Louisiana isn't the only place where this is going on today.  There is a whole class of inividuals out there who make their living collecting extra charges and fees - someone for virtually everything you do. Want to file your taxes, better pay a CPA to look over them.  Want to buy a house, better pay a lawyer to look over the papers.  Want to file your incorporation papers, give your lawyer several thousand dollars and he'll pull some paperwork out of a drawer. Actually, these days he'll likely tell his secretary to type your name onto a computer and it will spit out the paperwork you need. Go to the hospital and they'll charge you the same fee whether they give you pure oxygen or just pump ordinary air into your courp tent. The medical industry makes a science out of charging inscrutable fees for things you can't pronounce, much less understand what they are. There's a fee for everything these days. These fee-charging people remind me of sharks circling the edges of a pod of whales and slipping in to nip off hunks of blubber whenever they take a notion, hoping the big fat fellas don't miss it too much.

These fees are a pernicious form of taxation. Here we have, not the government taxing us, but us taxing each other. We've got private businesses like banks, hospitals, utility companies and, heaven help us, even retail business adding charge after charge to our bills.  Charges like credit card fees are common enough, but stores now charge restocking fees if you return something because it doesn't fit.  In other words, you pay them to put whatever you returned back on the shelf.

To add insult to injury, we're being pressed more and more to convert to credit and debit cards, automatic payments and automatic bank transfers - features of the so called cashless society. What's good about that for the fee sharks is that the fees are deducted out of sight. Unless you're one of those folks who love to wade through pages of account statements, the fee collecters count on your not noticing the $2 account maintenance stimulation fee that pays to keep the staff coffee pot in latte and espresso mix.

It's bad enough when the government taxes us, but when we start taxing each other it's the end of the world.

Just slap a 666 on my forehead and call me Beastie boy!

Next thing you know we'll have little kids with lemonade stands charging us an "ice replacement fee", "a cup recycling charge" and an automatic 15% gratuity for parties of more than 2 people.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

Tom

Selling Walton's Mountain.......The Return of the Death Tax

It's baaaaaaaaaack!

As of January 1, the death tax is once again the law of the land. Even Whoopi Goldberg is mad and weirdly enough, I agree with her.

The Death Tax taxes property that the dead guy has already paid taxes on.

The new tax takes 35% of everything on any estate worth more than five million dollars. Most profitable family farms are worth more than that.  Thirty five percent is a crippling hit on a business that depends for profitability on having paid off the land that your great granddaddy homesteaded 120 years ago. The cost of the death tax is like forcing the family agri-business to buy back more than a third of its land every time a grandpa dies.

It's not just the taxes.  Just filing the required tax report to pay the death tax can easily cost $25,000 or more and produces a stack of paperwork almost a foot deep that you have to hire federal bureaucrats to read and review so....... 

Tax accounts preparing the tax forms are expensive. With the taxes, preparation fees, attorney fees, loan fees and interest, the business generally has to borrow money to pay the taxes.

The cost to collect the tax can be a hefty 60% of the tax actually collected. In some cases the costs to the government actually add up to more than the taxes collected.

 It doesn't take much to make a business worth five million dollars and it doesn't take much of a sudden financial hit to bring down such a business, putting employers and owners out of work and ending the company's ability to pay any more taxes. (Does no one read the story about the goose that laid the golden eggs?).

Bear in mind that the family business also gets absolutely nothing for an expenditure of millions of dollars. Imagine the Walton's having to pay 35-50% of the value of Walton's Mountain when Grandpa died.  Do you figure John and Olivia could have kept the family lumber business going if the fed made them suddenly shell out more than 1.75 million bucks (assuming the mountain and the sawmill and house was worth only five million)?

The death tax is definitely a wealth killer which should make Democrats very happy. It's also a job killer, a tax-payer killer and an economy killer. Wonder if that makes them happy too?

Do the the people who came up with this idea despise "the wealthy so much that they don't care about the consequences of this turkey.

The whole death tax thing works out to be downright unfair to working families. Whoopi Goldberg is a lot like a family business. It's a business that supports Whoopi, her kid, her agent, her business manager, and and an assistant or so at the very least. She dies and more than half of it gets eaten up to pay the tax bill, which may be why Whoopi is mad about it and popped off at Joy Behar the other day on TV.  I think she's planning to leave some money behind for her daughter Alexandrea. Funny how having a kid, that you actually love, can make a conservative out of you  - at least where your kid is concerned.

Just one man's opinion.

Tom King