President Donald Dotard again showed why he's an asshole and deranged nitwit with unscripted comments on the Vegas shooting and Puerto Rico's continuing catastrophe. Let's take the last first given Dotard actually traveled to the island territory of the U.S. earlier today, This degenerate "piece of trash"- as one Puerto Rican called him - actually insinuated the Puerto Ricans didn't have it "that bad" since "thousands didn't die as in Katrina". WTF? What species of asshole is this fruitcake, anyway? True, "only seventeen died up to now" , but 3.5 million lives are still up in the air as they scratch for desperately needed resources including fuel, food and clean water. There is no guarantee up to now that hundreds more may not perish as the failure to deliver essential items continues.
Trump's implication, showing what a dunderhead he is, was that Puerto Ricans ought to be thankful their catastrophe wasn't as bad as Katrina in New Orleans. Says who? Though the deaths are (so far) fewer the elimination of support systems is just as bad or worse, especially given that Puerto Rico is an island that requires all essentials to enter from outside - air or ship. In addition, Puerto Rico's needy citizens are scattered over a vastly larger areas - over 1700 square miles - than Greater New Orleans. Dispatching supplies to the several hundred thousand people of N.O. therefore was vastly easier than getting them to the 3.5 MILLION of Puerto Rico. But evidently Dotard has no conception of the difference at all.
He lacks any inkling of the differences in magnitude between the areas of the respective locations or their populations. He has no conception that most of Puerto Rico - outside of San Juan and its beaches - comprises a rugged terrain that in conditions now, is relatively inaccessible (most bridges, roads washed away) That means extraordinary means must be employed to get supplies to those who need them including patients in hospitals. What means? Aircraft carriers based offshore enabling hundreds of choppers to make daily runs into the island's hinterlands. Nothing short of this will halt the loss of lives - but then it appears Dotard values white lives - like Stephen Paddock's - more than brown-skinned anyway.
Dotard was actually stupid enough to assert Puerto Ricans "didn't need flashlights any more" despite the fact 90 percent still don't have any power. His tossing of paper towels to a crowd in a hall was demeaning and reflected what a vicious piece of crap he really is, as Gen. Russell Honore also noted. The claim about denting the budget was also cruel and imbecilic, given Puerto Rico is every bit as American as Houston, Texas or Miami, Florida.
Then there was his daft, clueless remark on the Las Vegas massacre that took out 59 people and injured 527 - many saddled with neurological (head) injuries as bad as the one that affected Gabby Giffords. People who will now need to commit to years, decades of therapy and rehabilitation to become mobile - assuming they are able - or regain their speech.
Dotard said Tuesday that the quick response of law enforcement during the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history was “in many ways, a miracle.”. His full remarks, said as he departed the White House for a trip to Puerto Rico on Tuesday morning. were:
“Look, we have a tragedy. What happened is, in many ways, a miracle. The police department, they’ve done such an incredible job. And we’ll be talking about gun laws as time goes on. But I do have to say, how quickly the police department was able to get in was really very much of a miracle. They’ve done an amazing job.”
No, Dotard Dummy, it was law enforcement doing its job - which still required precious time to triangulate positions to identify where the shooter was. This entailed technology and expertise not any "miracle". Miracles are proclaimed for alleged supernatural events, and would have been the case if the suddenly mortally wounded had gotten up and walked away. They didn't.
Triangulating an active shooter position, by contrast, is no miracle, it's a process that has been developed over many decades by law enforcement. It enabled the SWAT team to eventually get to the shooter's room, but by then over fifty lay dead or dying and hundreds wounded - many seriously. That was NO miracle. But again, the depths of Dotard's ignorance knows no bounds so he can't process the difference. To him, not having ten thousand killed - out of the 22,000 - was a "miracle", like only 17 killed in Puerto Rico (so far) dead, was a "miracle" compared to Katrina's toll. The man is a blatant idiot.
In the Vegas massacre, it was late Sunday when Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old retiree who lives in the area, opened fire on an outdoor country music festival from the windows of a 32nd-floor hotel suite at the Mandalay Bay. For perhaps as long as 11 minutes, bullets rained down on the concertgoers and the panicked crowd rushed to escape. As Paddock fired round after round, gun smoke filled the hotel suite and set off a fire alarm, allowing a SWAT team to zero in on Paddock’s position in about 20 minutes. As officers closed in, Paddock killed himself.
The most damnable aspect? Despite the historic number of people killed, Trump has repeatedly stressed that the shooting could have been even worse. Well, if the NRA and Dotard's Repuke cronies had their way in passing a law allowing silencers, he's correct.
The National Rifle Association thinks Congress owes them more armor-piercing rounds and gun silencers on the streets, and most Republicans have shown they’re happy to do what they’re told, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) told Politico earlier this month. “I’ve been here since 2003, and passing these bills in the name of ‘helping sportsmen’ is one of the most cynical excuses I’ve ever heard.”
Silencers mounted on Paddock's assorted weapons, which we now know were equipped with bump firing stocks to fire faster (using the recoil capacity to shoot hundreds of rounds per minute) would have likely claimed twice as many lives. The reason is no one would have known where the shots originated from until many more had been shot. So perhaps Dotard has contemplated signing into law the NRA- pushed provision to allow silencers on automatic weapons .
THAT would confer some basic "sense" on his comment: He'd know that had he signed a bill allowing silencers into law then yes, what actually transpired Sunday night in Vegas would have been a comparative "miracle" since the silencers would have killed more than twice as many, and probably injured thousands.
Thanks for telegraphing your intent, Dotard, you malicious freak bastard. As one of the Puerto Ricans put it who was asked by a reporter what she thought of your arrival, you ARE a pierce of trash. Toxic trash.
In the words of Gen. Russell Honore (Ret.) who oversaw the rebuilding of N.O. after Katrina:
"The mayor (of San Juan) is living on a cot and I hope the president has a good day at golf."
In a CNN interview Gen. Honore was even more blunt:
"You don't give a damn about poor people. You don't give a damn about people of color. And the S.O.B. that rides around in Air Force One is denying services needed by the people of Puerto Rico".
My sentiments exactly, General, especially the S.O.B. part! And let's bear in mind who the S.O.B. is pandering to.
Showing posts with label Hurricane Katrina. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hurricane Katrina. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Friday, April 15, 2016
Talking Sense About The Tax Code - And Why Cutting Government Is Idiotic
The Wall Street Journal Review section of two weekends ago featured a lot of ideas about revamping the income tax code, very few of which made any sense. All one beheld was the smell of desperation to find excuses to escape the nation's fiscal responsibilities, usually by making the tax code simpler, say by replacing the multi-layered progressive income tax with a VAT (value added tax) . This, we are informed, is just a "consumption tax on goods and services that is used by almost all of the world's richest market democracies". Well, yeah, and if you visit those market democracies you will quickly see why most of their citizens are not enamored of it.
The one thing the first author (Reihan Salam) at least got right, is that the population has grown too much to talk of shrinking or cutting government. In fact, the current U.S. population is nearly THREE times the size of the population when the income tax arrived (under the 16th amendment) in 1913. At that time a mere 338,000 returns were filed compared to over 145 million today.
As populations grow, it ought to be obvious that their needs also grow, including demands for supporting infarstructure - whether for schools, highways, health care (including vaccinations for TB, smallpox etc.), or federal assistance in case of disasters. While it is very easy (and stupid) for some - like hardcore Libertarians- to take individualism to preposterous heights, say after a major hurricane hits, the truth is they'd also be begging for gov't help if their lives, homes were in ruins. This is especially so where whole cities have lost critical services, including water and electricity, as New Orleans did in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Thus, "the federal government spends far more today than it did in Woodrow Wilson's day.... so we have little choice but to raise more revenue than we did back then."
But it is also true to say we wouldn't need as much extra revenue if we kept our noses clean as opposed to butting into other nations' affairs when they don't specifically concern us. For example, Viet Nam was a civil war between North and South Viet Nam that didn't concern us. Most Americans with any sense knew it at the time and that the much ballyhooed "domino theory" of communist takeover was bollocks. LBJ even had to invent a pretext for war by confabulating the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a basis. We ended up with over 50,000 killed and blowing over $269b in tax money that could have been used to fund many other more constructive projects. And what happened at the end? Viet Nam is one of the 19 odd nations that stand to benefit when the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal is finally approved.
Money wasted!
The same can be said of the $3 trillion pissed into oblivion on account of Gee Dumbya Bush launching the Iraq invasion and war. An even worse aspect is that he didn't even increase taxes to pay for it! He told people after 9/11 to "go out and shop".
Now, what about replacing the income tax with a VAT? This is not really a sensible plan. For one thing, this tax strikes at consumption, on which nearly 75% of our GDP depends. Thus, if you tax consumption as hard as Salam suggests (to essentially replace 120 million of today's 145 million income tax returns) the impact will be that people will spend much less than they are now. (Of course, I am all in favor of people spending less, but not that much less that it leads to a recession - affecting job creation).
The second problem is that those "further down the scale" will be clobbered because much less income will remain after paying the VAT than for the wealthy spenders. A 10% VAT will leave a billionaire with $9b to spend, while for a $20,000 WalMart store clerk only $18,000 will be left- so he or she is even closer to the margins. Even Salam agrees some kind of "offset" is needed to help those lower down the income scale and that a "truly effective VAT would be highly regressive".
Thus we come to the third problem which is how to implement workable offsets. Assorted solutions have been offered that are deleterious in the end. One such, from Columbia Law School Prof. Michael J. Graetz (ibid.) is "a large payroll tax break for all workers earning $40,000 or less"
The key problem with this is that it is payroll taxes that support Social Security - which is already being hammered with 10,000 a day enrolling in the system. Do we really really want to help lower wage workers by cutting payroll taxes- so they can buy more without penalty today - but be left penurious in their old age from S.S. cuts? That seems not to be a solution that makes any rational sense.
Lastly, it may be more a matter of perception than anything else that makes Americans believe they are overtaxed. As Salam himself observes, "most income tax filers don't actually pay that much in income tax". Why the misperception? Well, because of the endless stream of misinformation and disinformation spouted by the likes of FAUX News and Lush Limbaugh. As Hitler once said: "If you repeat a lie often enough the people will believe it."
The WSJ piece goes on to note (ibid.):'
"The Tax Policy Center estimates that roughly 45.3 percent of tax returns won't actually owe any federal income tax this year. Many will pay a negative tax rate based on their eligibility for various tax credits."
This despite the fact the federal gov't is revenue deprived (for all its assorted commitments) by nearly a trillion dollars.
But make no mistake, while a VAT may indeed impede congress' ability to "micromanage the economy through the tax code", it is still not the answer.
The one thing the first author (Reihan Salam) at least got right, is that the population has grown too much to talk of shrinking or cutting government. In fact, the current U.S. population is nearly THREE times the size of the population when the income tax arrived (under the 16th amendment) in 1913. At that time a mere 338,000 returns were filed compared to over 145 million today.
As populations grow, it ought to be obvious that their needs also grow, including demands for supporting infarstructure - whether for schools, highways, health care (including vaccinations for TB, smallpox etc.), or federal assistance in case of disasters. While it is very easy (and stupid) for some - like hardcore Libertarians- to take individualism to preposterous heights, say after a major hurricane hits, the truth is they'd also be begging for gov't help if their lives, homes were in ruins. This is especially so where whole cities have lost critical services, including water and electricity, as New Orleans did in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Thus, "the federal government spends far more today than it did in Woodrow Wilson's day.... so we have little choice but to raise more revenue than we did back then."
But it is also true to say we wouldn't need as much extra revenue if we kept our noses clean as opposed to butting into other nations' affairs when they don't specifically concern us. For example, Viet Nam was a civil war between North and South Viet Nam that didn't concern us. Most Americans with any sense knew it at the time and that the much ballyhooed "domino theory" of communist takeover was bollocks. LBJ even had to invent a pretext for war by confabulating the Gulf of Tonkin incident as a basis. We ended up with over 50,000 killed and blowing over $269b in tax money that could have been used to fund many other more constructive projects. And what happened at the end? Viet Nam is one of the 19 odd nations that stand to benefit when the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal is finally approved.
Money wasted!
The same can be said of the $3 trillion pissed into oblivion on account of Gee Dumbya Bush launching the Iraq invasion and war. An even worse aspect is that he didn't even increase taxes to pay for it! He told people after 9/11 to "go out and shop".
Now, what about replacing the income tax with a VAT? This is not really a sensible plan. For one thing, this tax strikes at consumption, on which nearly 75% of our GDP depends. Thus, if you tax consumption as hard as Salam suggests (to essentially replace 120 million of today's 145 million income tax returns) the impact will be that people will spend much less than they are now. (Of course, I am all in favor of people spending less, but not that much less that it leads to a recession - affecting job creation).
The second problem is that those "further down the scale" will be clobbered because much less income will remain after paying the VAT than for the wealthy spenders. A 10% VAT will leave a billionaire with $9b to spend, while for a $20,000 WalMart store clerk only $18,000 will be left- so he or she is even closer to the margins. Even Salam agrees some kind of "offset" is needed to help those lower down the income scale and that a "truly effective VAT would be highly regressive".
Thus we come to the third problem which is how to implement workable offsets. Assorted solutions have been offered that are deleterious in the end. One such, from Columbia Law School Prof. Michael J. Graetz (ibid.) is "a large payroll tax break for all workers earning $40,000 or less"
The key problem with this is that it is payroll taxes that support Social Security - which is already being hammered with 10,000 a day enrolling in the system. Do we really really want to help lower wage workers by cutting payroll taxes- so they can buy more without penalty today - but be left penurious in their old age from S.S. cuts? That seems not to be a solution that makes any rational sense.
Lastly, it may be more a matter of perception than anything else that makes Americans believe they are overtaxed. As Salam himself observes, "most income tax filers don't actually pay that much in income tax". Why the misperception? Well, because of the endless stream of misinformation and disinformation spouted by the likes of FAUX News and Lush Limbaugh. As Hitler once said: "If you repeat a lie often enough the people will believe it."
The WSJ piece goes on to note (ibid.):'
"The Tax Policy Center estimates that roughly 45.3 percent of tax returns won't actually owe any federal income tax this year. Many will pay a negative tax rate based on their eligibility for various tax credits."
This despite the fact the federal gov't is revenue deprived (for all its assorted commitments) by nearly a trillion dollars.
But make no mistake, while a VAT may indeed impede congress' ability to "micromanage the economy through the tax code", it is still not the answer.
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