Category: Uncategorized

The tax code has an upper limit beyond which taxation is limited when it should be increasing as exponentially as income and wealth increase.

The tax code in its current form is called a progressive tax code even though much income at higher levels is not taxed and there are gaps in taxation. Yes, there are marginal rates that seemingly apply to all but are those marginal tax rates fair and proportional? I don’t believe so. And, marginal tax rates only go up as high as 37% on $539,900 or more. So, taxes above 540k are capped at that rate, no matter how much higher the income is. That is NOT progressive taxation. It is taxation that contracts and plateaus as income for the small minority of upper income tax payers remains on an upward trajectory and is not taxed proportionally as income increases. There aren’t enough tax brackets or marginal rates in the current tax code that would account for a fair taxation of all income.

You claim the tax code benefits everyone when in fact upper incomes are taxed, proportionally, far less than lower incomes. You say that there is a sliding scale and that “the low income group” have deductions that offer it an advantage. What are those deductions? And what advantage are you talking about? Even though their tax rate is lower, even the poorest people have a marginal rate of 10% on the first $10,275 they earn as income. Is that fair? If it were you, would you be cool with 10% of your income of 10k being taken away as income tax? Would you think that’s fair?

There is a larger tax burden on the poor and middle class than there is on the wealthy. I do not know you. I don’t know anything about you except that you defend the current tax code as being fair. It doesn’t matter to me how rich or wealthy you are or where on the spectrum of wealth and income you are. And I may be having a discussion with someone who is a middle class person like me. My argument is not personally directed at you nor is it a critique of class or a judgement about how much money or wealth you have. My concern is about a tax code that I believe is unfair, inconsistent, unevenly applied, and strangely managed, and one that does not tax all of us fairly or in a way that makes sense.

How much money do people who have a lot of money need? If a person/family has enough wealth to ensure that not only will all of its basic needs be met for the rest of this lifetime, but also that their descendants, if they manage the estate well and there are not other misfortunes or turns of fate, may be able to live comfortably and without having to work for generations? How much money is it necessary for a person/family to amass and hoard? Beyond what point is it justifiable to continue to amass and hoard wealth?

The reason I ask these questions is because we live within a social contract. What responsibilities and obligations do people have when they live within a social contract? We pay for things we need as a society with taxes that we all pay. If everyone paid his or her fair share of taxes we’d all be better off and there would be enough money generated for us to be able to work on fixing all of our problems if only we had enough money to do so. We’d all be better off. Even those paying more taxes.

Since a leaked Supreme Court memo has indicated that it is likely that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court will rescind (gut) Roe v Wade, there are some things that Congress can do, IF THERE ARE ENOUGH DEMOCRATIC VOTES to get them done. Having enough democratic votes in Congress will mean that ENOUGH PEOPLE will have to vote in the midterm elections for enough democrats to make sure there are enough votes to get important things done legislatively.

Warning: Not all of the democratic candidates running in the midterm elections are legit. Beware in races where there is more than one democrat on the ballot. There are many millions of corporate dollars and other dark money dollars being spent on the midterm election to elect corporate and other special interest candidates who if elected will not represent the voting citizens but will represent corporate and other special interests. So, if there is more than one democrat on your ballot, make sure to check their endorsements. Try to find out who is financing their election campaigns. Look at their endorsements and past records of legislation or political work of all candidates. Take a good close look at each and every one of the candidates. Choose the one who you think will best represent you as a citizen and the community as a whole.

Now, back to the silver lining in what Congress could do if it had enough democratic votes to protect the reproductive rights of women, keep abortion safe and legal, and protect children from being born into poverty and other dire circumstances:

Congress could:

1. Codify Roe v Wade into law.

2. Create a program specifically to assist in providing funding for nutrition for all children living in poverty, provide health care for them, and ensure they have housing and the basic necessities of life. These are all of the things the most anti abortion zealots never address, the after the “save the baby” fetus is (forced to go to term) and is born and enters into a life of destitution. (Remember the Build Back Better Bill? It does a lot to address and mitigate childhood poverty. But it is stalled because of Manchin and Sinema, corporate democrats, and the entire republican senate caucus.)

There are also some things that citizens can do:

Contact the Supreme Court and individual justices with calls, texts, and emails to tell them that you are furious that they want to desecrate the right of reproductive decision making. You can tell them that you stand in opposition to their hateful, hurtful decisions and unjust stripping away of human rights.

Another thing that ALL AMERICANS should consider doing is this:

Tell the Supreme Court that you do not support it or deem it to be valid and legitimate whenever it goes so against human rights, the constitution, and what the American people want and value. It might be time to delegitimize the Supreme Court with non-compliance by rescinding our consent, the consent of the American people, that we the people have always traditionally conferred on it. The Supreme Court is the valued and vaunted highest court in the land only as long as the American people confer power to it, respect it, and trust it. When the Supreme Court takes away our rights, it violates our trust and is not serving justice but undermining it. If the Supreme Court violates our trust, we can take away its legitimacy and not comply with its unjust actions, decisions and opinions.

It’s been a long time since we have done anything socially because of covid and now that we have been fully vaccinated and received two booster shots we felt it was okay to consider going for a short weekend excursion and taking in a public event. So, this weekend we went to the “Crab” Festival in Astoria, Oregon that was written up and suggested by the AAA magazine Via that we get every month.

We reserved a vacation rental through what didn’t used to be but seems to have become a behemoth vacation rental website. I used to rent my house as a vacation rental through that same website but I think since then it was bought by a large corporation and now if you need help with anything you have to go through a call center which is located somewhere else on Earth, I think in this case it’s the Philippines. It’s not as easy to use the website and this simple transaction was not a smooth easy, uncomplicated transaction. I eventually got the reservation all set up but not without a certain number of calls and email messages and frustration. The rental unit itself was a cute cozy cottage in a great location and exactly where we wanted to be. But it was hideously expensive for what it is. For that kind of money I would expect something like staying in a five star hotel. It is definitely NOT a spa resort with all the goodies. It’s a small, no frills cottage. When I was renting my very large house with some nice amenities and a dynamite panoramic view overlooking the south end of the Puget Sound with this same website, I wasn’t charging nearly as much as this property owner charged. Maybe I’m being overly reactive and negative. And, the cottage, as I said, was nice and suited our needs. But I just think it was too expensive for what it is.

It turned out that the “Crab” Festival of Astoria was not really at all about crab. Crab wasn’t even a second thought. Parking was very limited so we had to either pay $20 to park if we had tried to take the car there and park, or take the shuttle bus from downtown for $3 round trip. The bus ride was actually pretty nice even though it was in a school bus. The good thing was that the Fairgrounds where the event took place was less than a four mile trip from downtown. And there was a $25 per person entry fee into the “festival”. What the festival turned out to he was not the focus on Dungeness crab that we were led to believe that it is. Instead there were about 150 vendors selling all kinds of things other than crab. There were two vendors out of about 150 vendors who had food with crab in it. One had one crab item on the menu, a small, open faced sandwich of melted cheese with a dollop of crab on it. The line for this sandwich was the longest line in the entire festival and once you got your crab sandwich there was no seating for sitting down to eat it. You had to take it standing up, with a gazillion other people milling around and tightly packed together. The other was a crab “meal” that had either half of a cooked crab or a whole crab with a couple of very small sides. The lines to get what little food there was available were very long. And seating for sitting down to eat food once you got it was not in extremely short supply and most likely already occupied because of such a short supply of it. Even though we are still living in the midst of a pandemic that as far as I know has not been brought under tight control, almost none of the festival attendees wore masks and social distancing was non-existent in the packed-tight-as-sardines venue. So, even though most people who attended the crab festival, (no guarantee there,) may be vaccinated and boosted, I would not be at all surprised if after this event there is an associated spike in infections of covid within this cohort.

I wish I could have given this experience a better review. But it was what it was. Still, we took our dogs with us on this little excursion and the four of us did enjoy the walks we took and a stroll on the beach at Manzanita. The silver lining, I suppose, of having had this experience is knowing that from now on, if we want to have crab, it’s better just to buy some at the store and prepare and eat it at home. And also that these festivals usually are not what they are billed as being. Crab at the Astoria Crab Fest, at best, was not even an after thought. They really should rename the festival to reflect this reality and call it something else, something honest, like the “We sell all kinds of crap other than crab festival”.

Without workers no work is done. There needs to be a reassessment of the value of the work that provides the products that create wealth. Business people who set up the mechanism of exchange and commerce, businesses, provide an essential and important central feature of commerce, the market. But their role is not more important than, nor does it have more value than the role of the people who actually do the physical work. The disproportionally large share of wealth that goes to business people and shareholders who do NOT do the physical work as compared to the far smaller share of the weath that goes to the workers is not just. There needs to be a reassessment of the distribution of wealth and a more equitable balance of the distribution of wealth should be achieved. At a minimum every human being has basic needs that must be met: housing, food, clean air and water, toilet facilities, clothes, health care, (preferably preventative and maintenance of good health as opposed to intensive, expensive acute care for advanced diseases), and education. These basic human needs are universal and they should be considered essential for all people. That is the only way to have an economically just society. There should be measures that could be used to modify or remove some of the things that create this huge income inequality that we have ended up with. CEO compensation, tax cuts, loopholes, tax havens, waivers and exemptions and a tax code that favor the rich, the supercharged power and influence over Congress and the the government that lobbying and dark money of billionaires has, the rapacious and predatory elements of capitalism, all of these are factors that contribute to social and economic inequality and wealth disparity not just here in the United States but globally. It’s a very involved, complex problem comprised of a multitude of issues. There are really no easy fixes. But the bare minimum should be that all people are paid sufficiently enough money for the work that they do for them to be able to provide for their basic needs and those of their families, without having to sacrifice having any of those basic needs being met.

To avoid the confrontations and struggles that often occur between business/management and workers, it would be really exciting and liberating and ultimately infinitely more satisfying if more Americans were to start their own employee-owned businesses and cooperatives and bypass altogether the larger, richer, and often heavy-handed and wrongfully, selfishly demanding big businesses that treat workers like shit. Americans could, and should, start building and growing their own local businesses and do themselves the big favor of controlling their own businesses and taking control over their own interests. It would free them up from being controlled by people who don’t work. The two greatest things about employee-owned businesses is that they can be set up any way that the owners, the workers themselves, want and agree to together as a group, but also that they are more economically just and fair with fairer pay and less economic inequality between the various jobs in the organization and the management, since it is composed of the worker employee owners of the businesses. They can set up the business so that all employees, management AND workers, all have nearly the same economic equity and earn salaries that are closer together and where everyone makes a good wage and all have the same benefits. This kind of a metamorphosis of the economy and the way that Americans live their lives would be very good for economy. We could definitely use more businesses like this.

One can believe in God (Faith), or not. Whatever God is in the minds of those who believe in him, how can they know God. God is everywhere. But “He” is unknowable. (For those who refer to him as He or Father or by any other male identifier, does that mean that God has male genitalia? Does the God of the entire universe, of all universes have the male sex organs between his two legs?) For as long as human beings have been talking about God, not a single person has ever proved the existence of God in any empirical or physical sense except for ascribing the nature and wonder of the universe to him/it, which is fine. But those are material physical things that we know have and can know because they are right here on our own planet and we know that they exist because they came to us through evolution of life on Earth. But even that doesn’t prove God’s existence. How can anyone know a thing, God, that as is always stated by “religious” people as being omniscient, omnipresent, omni EVERYTHING and ruler of the entire universe, exists without any concrete proof of it? Without any direct connection or direct communication with it? And how can the human mind, even if such a thing as God existed, actually fathom, know, or understand something as phenomenally vast that it controls all of our universe, which we as of yet only very partially know and understand, and if there are any other universes God probably controls them too, ever be able to comprehend such an entity of such vast scale? Even the most brilliant minds that have ever existed could never do it and it’s likely that no brilliant mind of the future could ever really know what God is if something like God exists, let alone have an intimate relationship with “him”. The human mind is amazing. But it’s just not THAT amazing.

Jesus was a traveler. He was a world citizen. He was a universalist because he saw all of humanity as one. He was teacher. He had no material wealth. He was humble. He lived, traveled, and worked hand to mouth, depending on the kindness of friends, people who loved him, and total strangers. Jesus was a teacher. His message, the very essence of his teachings was love. How to love. How to grow love. And how to use love to change the world, to make it a better place. Jesus tried to teach us how to create heaven on Earth. Buddha taught the world how to work through suffering to achieve nirvana and much of it had to do with love which is what attracted Jesus to study Buddha’s message and to combine Buddha’s wisdom and insights into his own. I don’t think of Jesus as being defiant as much as a person who simply chose to do what is right instead of going along with the norm. I don’t think of him as being an anarchist. He simply did the right things by living his life the way he did it. His life was a model for how to be, for how to live, for how to be true to self but also how to be a citizen of the larger community and the world and for how to help the community become inclusive, loving, and caring, nurturing, self sustaining, and thriving. That is how Jesus was non compliant and why he was a threat to not just his own ethnic community but to all religious orthodoxies that veered from the very simple path that is moral and religious in the deepest sense and not at all publicly flashy and ostentatious or collective in the sense of being patriarchal or hierarchical in any way at all.

We need a federal law like the Fairness Doctrine which was not a law but a 1949 Act of the FCC that President Ronald Reagan had repealed as a gift to Rupert Murdoch when Reagan was president. A law that would not be subject to the same vulnerability as was the Fairness Doctrine Act.

Until the Fairness Doctrine was repealed by Reagan, it made the media serve the public interest by requiring that all content disseminated by the media, both radio and television, broadly serve the public interest and be “fair and balanced”. It was not a law, however, and it was subject to political attack and vulnerable to an easy presidentially-initiated repeal.

Congress could write a law that would prevent media publication and dissemination of lies and distortions that cannot be verified as factual. That COULD become a new norm for all media, radio, television, cable, etc. Conspiracy theories, political spin, and smears could be proscribed by law as being detrimental to the general health and well being of the country as a whole and therefore be prohibited as content for public consumption. The media would have to work within parameters that would no longer allow for the dissemination of lies, smears, conspiracy theories, and partisan political spin that is not based on factual information. The media needs to get back to disseminating factual information and not simply allowing for anything and everything to be published with no regard for the consequences of doing so. The media won’t voluntarily do this on its own volition. There needs to be a law.

The Fairness Doctrine required that both sides of any given issue be presented but that was probably never a realistically achievable requirement. There should always be the opportunity for presenting opposing viewpoints for issues. That should be written into the law. But having a requirement for ensuring that opposing views must be aired is onerous, not workable, and should not be a requirement of any new law. If one side of an issue is presented, the information should be verifiable factual and all other non-verifiably factual material should not be permitted and it should be excluded. Likewise, the opposing viewpoint(s) should also have the opportunity and air time or print space or cable slot to present its case as well, as long as it is delivering verifiably factual information. The law should make sure that both sides of an issue can be stated, rebutted and published and disseminated via the media as long as their information is verifiably factual.

That’s what American media has been missing for a very very long time: any kind of a requirement that what is published and disseminated by the media is actually factual. That’s where media has gone so wrong. If we had a reformed media that had to work within such parameters, how would Fox News, Newsmax, and OAN work within such parameters? If we had a law that required truth and verifiable facts from the media it would be a very different media landscape and I think it would provide the country a safer, less chaotic, less political, less inflammatory, less divisive political and informational environment.

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I saw a post today in which an interviewer on a street somewhere in the United States asked several young Americans to locate North Korea on a map that he held up for them. None of them could correctly identify it. I don’t know why but I find this very disturbing.

This site is mainly for me. I want to record observations, express my feelings, explore the reality around me, and put it into words. I do this to try to make sense of it. I’m not confused. But I do see and hear a lot of contradictions and hypocrisy. People, culture, and society have a lot of faults and imperfections. But they also have a lot of inspirational and noble elements as well. I think there is a battle taking place for the direction of humanity right now. To reduce it to a simplistic and kind of cliche term, I kind of think that humanity is trying to determine what path it will follow, whether it will continue on a dark, evil, selfish path, or, will it steer itself onto a more open, transparent path where people care for each other and become less adversarial? I think a lot rides on that question.

I’ll be writing about all kinds of topics that I think in aggregate all contribute to why things are the way they are. I hope that if I do have any readers it may open up a dialogue. I would encourage anyone who wants to do so to comment. But, please, keep it civil.

So, that’s kind of what I want to do with this website. I have been posting like this on Facebook but somehow do not feel satisfied with that experience. I don’t really like the idea of my reaching into my mind and putting into words what I am thinking about various issues and then giving it to FB to do what it will. I don’t know what FB does with information that is posted or how it determines who sees what. But, at least on this site, if there are any interested readers, it will be because they have come to it with an open mind and may also be interested in trying to make sense of what surrounds us and is presented as reality. A lot of the posts on FB, its associated sponsored pages, and its shady accounts and ad buys make it a tool for a lot of interests that have their own agenda. I don’t trust that model or forum because it really is mainly a business model and not aimed at helping to clarify truth which I think is important. So, I am breaking away from FB as a place where I express my thoughts. They will henceforth be found here. I feel liberated!

Plus, I’m interested in what I will be able to do here creatively. I am going to attempt to insert photos and graphic and maybe use other types of visuals and media to make the content more interesting and connect it to the world more. Yes, you will probably see some pictures of my dogs. They are cute and very lovable. But, hopefully I will find a way to bring other beautiful images into this too.

Does what I do affect you? Do the decisions that I make for myself have any affect on your life? I am talking about personal decisions. Decisions like whether or not I get married or have children. Or whether I have a car or take the local bus.  Or whether I want a salad or a vegetable side dish.

Do these kinds of decisions, most of them of not any real import generally, which we all make every day, have any affect on other people in any way?

Do you make your own little decisions like this a thousand times a day without anyone supervising you and/or approving or opposing your doing so? How do you feel about making your own little decisions for yourself throughout the day without anyone’s assistance or supervision or approval or opposition? Isn’t that just the normal way we function on a daily basis?

But what about the bigger decisions we all make that do affect other people and how we as individuals  behave in culture and society? Big questions that when answered determine what we value both individually and collectively? We are all individuals. But we also are a part of a larger group, whether or not we participate with that larger group.

Some of the bigger decisions we make as individuals that I have specifically in mind are:

Do I support my country making war on another country?

Do I support the use of force against non violent protest?

Do I support laws being made that restrict human rights?

Another big issue in a democracy is, do I have any right to have a say in how the taxes I pay are spent? Do I have any right in the decision making process that determines how the money that I pay in taxes that are automatically deducted or that I pay voluntarily at tax time are spent? Our government, Congress specifically, decides how this money is spent. But does Congress ever base its spending priorities on what the majority of Americans want? Does Congress ever bother to ask the American people how the majority of people think tax money should be spent?

Americans pay taxes. If you look at rates and levels of taxes Americans pay compared to other countries I believe the amount of money Americans pay in taxes is somewhere in the mid range. And, there are very large differences in the amounts of taxes that are paid by different economic groups of people in the United States. It’s a grossly unbalanced tax code.

Why is there such a lopsided tax code in the United States with the very rich and large corporations, the groups with the most money, paying the least taxes while the middle class and poor pay disproportionately more? Interest groups are represented in Washington DC by 10s of thousands of paid lobbyists who daily seek to have their agendas advanced by the members of Congress. Daily lobbying and fund raising is the order of business in Washington DC. Members of Congress meet regularly with lobbyists and “donors”, that is, wealthy people who “contribute” to political campaigns of “our” elected representatives. Much of the legislation that comes out of Washington DC is bought and paid for by these special interest groups and wealthy donors while simultaneously what regular people may want and/or need is not solicited and is sometimes suppressed and overridden by line items of the special interest groups and big donors. So, a very small minority of the population has a much more immense political sway in Washington DC while the majority of Americans are not given an audience and their needs are often not addressed or met by Congress.

Some people say things like, “Oh, well, that’s the way it is in Washington. You can’t change that. That’s just the way our political system works.”

But is that really true? One of the large questions that I could have included in the list above is: Do I support the way things are now, the current political status quo as it now exists in Washington DC? Or, are there any improvements that could be made in the way our American democracy works so that the majority of Americans can have their needs be determined and decisions about spending tax dollars can be based on majority needs and wishes?

I don’t think this is pie-in-the-sky thinking if we truly have a fully functional democracy in these United States.

Liberty, to me, is having a right to have a say in how government works and what it does.

What do you think?