The Rich People We Hate Avoid a Tax Increase

Obama's Tax Raid on the Rich Only Impacts the Working Rich

(c) 2012 by Tom King

Did anyone notice that the only "rich" people that got a tax increase were the working wealthy - the ones that actually draw a paycheck or make a profit.

The already rich, the hereditary rich and those who have already made their pile (all of whom heavily support President Obama) didn't get any kind of meaningful tax increase because capital gains only went up 5% and manipulating and hiding capital gains earnings is really the easiest kind of income to avoid paying taxes on when you have teams of tax accountants and lawyers.

So Warren Buffet didn't get a tax increase even though he asked for one.  George Soros didn't get a tax increase even though he asked for one. The Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the Chases, the Morgans and the Astors didn't get a tax increase.  Most of the rich people who supported President Obama's campaign heavily didn't get a tax increase.

Oh, what a surprise!

I'm just sayin'

Tom

It’s Like the Pot Chamber of Commerce….

Hemp grower "inspects" the product.

(c) 2013 by Tom King

Okay, I just don't get it. I have got so many people who have my email or are friends on Facebook, Linked-In and other places that keep sending me stuff about what a great plant cannabis is and 1000 reasons it should be legal…….and how it could restore our faltering economy, cure mental diseases, heart conditions, liver ailments and hemorrhoids not to mention solve the housing crisis, end hunger and bring on world peace. Oddly enough most of these guys used to send me stuff about how I just had to vote for Ron Paul in the last election.

What I don’t get is why these dear people are so worried about why I don’t support the legalization of marijuana.  What’s their interest in promoting marijuana agriculture?  Are these guys frustrated Ag school graduates with degrees in agriculture who can’t make a living farming soybeans and corn and who envision starting a commercial pot farm and making a ton of money?  They tell me legalizing hemp would end the economic crisis almost overnight.

Let me see if I’ve got this right.  Marijuana (or hemp – that seems to be the term they prefer in this context) is capable of being used for all sorts of wonderful products like:

1.      Rope

2.      Paper

3.      Textiles

4.      Engine grease

5.      Building materials

6.      Paints resins and shellac

7.      Cures mental illness, heart disease, ringworm, gout, pleurisy and hemorrhoids

8.      Fuel for cars

9.      High fiber food products

10.   And 25,000 other products

Industrial hemp is bred for oil and fiber content, unlike marijuana which is bred for high THC content, so industrial hemp won’t make you high unless you smoke six joints or so or refine the THC out of the industrial hemp and concentrate it which, who’s going to do that since hemp is so useful for other things.

So what I want to know is why all these people are promoting the legalization of industrial hemp. They assure me it has nothing to do with its smoke-ability or that it is virtually identical to the kind that makes you high so that you can’t tell a few pot plants from the hemp ones if you salted the high THC variety around the industrial hemp fields.  Besides, pot, they tell me, isn’t a hallucinogen and doesn’t impair your ability to drive, work at your job or get your butt off your Mom’s sofa and find a job.  The police and all those government scientists are just making that stuff up because they are protecting the evil corporations.

So these guys, many of whom who used to be serious slackers back when we went to school together, have, for the good of society and our economy, decided to devote their free time (when they are not drinking Red Bull and playing Nintendo or Xbox) to community economic development by sending out links to youtube videos about what a great thing it would be if we could grow lots and lots of hemp and even better if we could grow regular pot because psychology is wrong about what causes mental illness and if we'd just legalize pot and we could put evil Big Pharma out of business.

What unselfish civic-minded citizens they all are.  Really.  Like a little Pot Chamber of Commerce.

I know!  I could grow a couple of hundred plants in my backyard and make all the rope I need! 

How cool would that be?

Tom

It's Not Greed - It's How Business Survives the Pressure to Centralize

(c) 2012 by Tom King

A friend sent me this link to an article about the practice of medical systems buying up doctors' private practices.  http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/12/23/4505491/as-hospitals-buy-practices-billed.html

He wrote above the article:  "Pure Unadulterated Greed". 

The article started like this:

By Fred Schulte
Center for Public Integrity

After Vermont hospitals started buying up local doctors’ practices, state Sen. Kevin Mullin of Rutland began hearing complaints that some patients were paying much more for routine care.

 

I disagree. I don't think it's so much greed as it is the added cost of centralizing any bureaucracy. Nobody seems to understand that any time you add layers on top of any organization, that those layers cost money.  I don't think the medical systems are necessarily greedy any more than are the doctors who sell their practices.  I think it's just the good old capitalist, free market system's response to outside pressures on independent physicians.  For years we've been hearing that independent physician's practices are disappearing.  Where did people think they were going anyway?

There are very good reasons for doctors to sell their practices and very good reasons for hospitals to buy them. Spiraling regulatory requirements layered on willy nilly by the government and mounting medical malpractice lawsuits, driven by TV lawyers (the real parasites in my opinion) promising to win the sue 'em till they squeal lottery for anybody whose doctor visit didn't turn out the way they had imagined.

Let's face it, doctors want to practice medicine, not accounting, law or tag-you're-it with government regulators.  To doctors, selling their practices to large medical systems with teams of accountants and lawyers and compliance officers just makes good sense.

And yes, it drives up your doctor bills.  How else are they going to pay for all those new federal employees Obama just hired and all those commercials by all those ambulance chasing lawyers and all those tax accountants it takes nowadays to keep a medical practice going.  It's much easier for doctors to sell out and have the gigantic health care system protect them from all those bureaucratic predators and buying practices is a way for health care systems to pay for all the accountants, lawyers and compliance officers they need to run their hospitals. 

THAT's why I find centralizing or worse yet, governmentalizing any business sector to be a very BAD idea.  I don't like paying for people who basically sit in offices generating paperwork for each other, making things ever more complex and hard to do and charging us poor schmuck consumers for services I never asked for and personally find worse than useless.

Just my opinion.

Tom

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