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You find it curious that no matter how much you work, you always have less and less money at the end of the month. It’s outrageous! And you want to know where the money went! “Hey”, you shout. “Somebody is stealing my money!”
More probably, it is the wife and kids wasting my money on frivolities like, for example, going to a movie, when they have a perfectly good TV at home where they can watch movies for free, instead of costing me money.
Or they are eating in a restaurant, instead of coming home to eat food that is, admittedly, past its expiration date, but the loss of crispness, taste and nutrition are more than offset by the savings that add up when paying the much lower cost of this food, some of which is actually free if you dig it out of the dumpster out back.
I personally don’t eat it, of course, but it ought to be good enough for teenagers, and if they don’t like it, then they can get a job and buy their own food!
Justifiably incensed and angry about all of this financial foolishness, I am on my way out the door to yell at the wife and kids for being such wanton wastrels, foolishly buying whatever it is that they are buying that is wasting all my money, when I happened to see that the real reason my money is disappearing is revealed in an editorial in The Washington Times: “We Can’t Afford This Government.”
This was no doubt prompted by the announcement by Americans for Tax Reform that “the average American worked 231 days just to support government, which consumes 63.41 percent of national income.” Yow! The government consumes two-thirds of income! We’re freaking doomed!
Even more horrifically, the cost of government is getting monstrously, exponentially, catastrophically higher, as, “Just two years ago, Cost of Government Day fell an astonishing 34 days earlier,” which is a tax increase of 17.3% in two years! And now the Obama administration wants to raise taxes even more! We’re freaking doomed!
More Here..
More Waste: $50 Million Toward Providing Clean Cooking Stoves in Developing Countries
“the average American worked 231 days just to support government, which consumes 63.41 percent of national income.”
ReplyDeleteI call total BS. If any of you pay this much in taxes, I'd like to know what your total yearly income from all sources is.
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ReplyDelete9:17 that tax number is probably calculated by income taxes, state taxes, retail taxes, insurance taxes, corporate taxes, water tax, gas tax, heat tax, electricity tax and the list goes on. Perhaps if one calculated all these taxes combined we get a 63.41 income tax.
ReplyDeleteI did keep track of my taxes back in 1984 and did not get all of the taxes but most of them and it was around 43% of my total income and that was 26 years ago. So it is not hard to beleive the taxes are somewhere between 43% - 63% today.
ReplyDelete63% isn't high enough. Many of you here have clearly shown you are irresponsible with your money. You go and blow it on things like gold, guns, ammunition and computers and internet subscription services so you can try and persuade people to blow their money on gold, guns and ammunition.
ReplyDeleteThe headline about those cooking stoves is wrong. Most poor people in third-world countries use little cook stoves inside their tiny homes for all their meals. The smoke is terrible and causes tremendous disease and death. The new stoves cut down on most of the smoke and so many lives will be saved.
ReplyDeleteInstead of picking on this, pick on something more pertinent to the problems here.
It is pertinent from the stand point of same ole shit different day.
ReplyDeleteThis country is BROKE people ! BROKE !
Get it --- we're friggin' broke !
We go hop scotchin' all over the damn world spending money like it's water; we're broke; with our own citizens living under damn bridges and in cardboard boxes; won't extend unemp. comp and we're sending Pakistan money, India money, Israel money - hell man, we lost over 23,000 jobs in the gulf and what did we do next?
Why yes ! We GAVE Mexico 2.3 billion DOLLARS for exploratory drilling.
Where ?
Gulf of Mexico of course !
You literally cannot sit down and make this shit up - it has become that ludacris
5:41: We don't just send them money. We give them all our jobs. Then we turn around and fuck over the next generation in the US and load them up with debt and laugh like little school girls as these people struggle for jobs that aren't there.
ReplyDeleteThe American Dream is absolutely slaughtered and dead for anybody under 30 years old. The majority of these people will never have a family, will never own a home, will never be able to retire. There is no longer a middle class, these people are either going to be part of the very small upper class or part of the far larger halves of the lower class poverty level. The new class system will be like this:
Upper class: Pretty much same as always. Think of the Inner Circle in 1984.
Lower class working: They have income but they don't have any disposable income and have very poor living standards. Generally this class will live in apartments renting with strangers and eat low quality food while scraping by at shitty dead end jobs they are overqualified for, and struggling to pay their student loans and other debts. This is the Outer Circle from 1984, they're in the Party sort of, but they're more just the bitch of the upper classes, taught that they are better than the other lower class.
Lower class benefits: The smarter, non-working lower class. They have free healthcare, food stamps for food, government housing, etc. They are better off than the previous class in name and theory, in reality they are kind of free and are better off. They are the proles.
1984 was just off by a few decades. We're just about there though.
"Big Capitalist" government was made necessary for the redistribution and circulation of wealth and job creation in the US by the development of a militarized ponzi services based economy.
ReplyDeleteIts not as if most whining Americans actually still work in a society of industrial wealth producers ,being taxed on production of wealth .Most do not even pay taxes.
They live in a consumers of wealth economy, driven by the dollar hegemony provided foreign credit .
The government circulates lots of wealth to stimulate the economy by selling treasury bills and by spending on jobs and wars .
On fuel stoves .
Small gas bottle stoves are common now in many Third World cities.
Coal dust patty /bricks are still common in much of China. Cow dung was a traditional source of fuel in India and much of the third world when people lived close to the land.
So,many of the poor people living in the huge third world capitalist slum cities, are not all dependent now on wood or coal stoves .
For one ,the forest has often already been depleted , the timber exported and the land converted into capitalist farming monoculture crops for export.
Without any means of production being available for making a living in the cities except maybe the few existing from collecting garbage , some of this garbage may be used for fuel fires by the extreme poor.
So it is hard to find natural wood fuels. Especially in many areas of Africa after a couple of centuries of slave and resources plunder as well as capitalist farming, first by the open colonialists and now by the neo-colonial multi-nationals. The process of developing large scale capitalist farming requires the de-population of the countryside. That is the way capitalist farming develops its productivity.
Why today very few Americans are required to work the land.
There is then a contradiction between development of the land for capitalist farming and rents and the interests of people being thrown off the land and forced to live in the cities, if industrial development is restricted in the neo-colonies by IMF ,World Bank and by the dumping of subsidized grains from countries like America and The European Union as “Aid.”
The Chinese were Farmers for forty centuries .
But , the old agricultural economies of the world have lost their natural balances and as in China being fast ecologicaly degraded.
Clean water is big problem for 700 million Chinese people living in the countryside now,water has to be boiled and food cooked. As much of the land and the old village commune system has been very damaged and polluted after only 30 years of wild capitalist development for profit at any cost.
Economic development of large scale capitalist industry in the cities once provided work for many people In the first world US.
But, as America is still being de-industrialized and in economic depression after the collapse of their ponzi dollar hegemony economic system , the US cities are becoming overpopulated too, with tens of millions of jobless and millions of Debt Peons are
losing their housing .
So growing numbers of people are living in this capitalist system created poverty and only survive by living on food stamp handouts too .
Their Third World like future appears bleak, even if the government proclaims money printing for an endlessly expected ‘recovery” of the Great Ponzi economy.
Charitably minded people and millionaire socialist “lefties” ,like Clinton ,may soon be distributing these fuel stoves to the growing tent cities of growing third world America.
But, again I point to the need for actual cash too for fuel refills, as well as food stamps!
But hard headed ,‘realist” Malthusian eugenic style capitalists, are calling for an end to these ‘socialist” humanitarian “handouts” as it conflicts with their religion of “ pure” ideal capitalism run by the Invisible Hand of Greed and the Idol of the Golden Calf of credit/usury .
Excellent comment, 2:10. There's not a word with which I disagree. It's an accurate assessment of the situation.
ReplyDelete