Day: August 14, 2018

Closing Thought–14Aug18

Recently the Congress and Our Dear Leader passed and signed into law the large tax cuts for the rich……and now they are talking about another round of tax cuts for those same rich people……

And what if the “Blue Wave” is successful……will the tale told by Dear Leader about the raising of taxes come true?

Whatever happened to the notion that rich people should pay their fair share of the cost for their country’s public programs?

Progressive income taxes―designed to fund government services and facilities—go back centuries, and are based on the idea that taxes should be levied most heavily on people with the ability to pay them.  In the United States, the federal government introduced its first income tax in 1861, to cover the costs of the Civil War. Although new federal income tax legislation in the 1890s was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, the resulting public controversy led, in 1913, to passage of the sixteenth amendment to the Constitution, firmly establishing the legality of an income tax.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/08/01/lets-tax-the-rich/

Personally I have NO problem with everyone paying the same amount of taxes or the elimination of some of the beneficial deductions of the wealthy…..not to worry these people will pay the taxes and still find a way to turn a profit……then let us do the right thing and we all pay the same amount of taxes….so yeah…tax the goddamn rich!

I have given my solutions for true tax reform and not just a few tax cuts….unlike most bloggers I do not just bitch about something I also offer what I think is a better plan…..(please check out my solutions and see if they are not a better way to tax the people)

https://gulfsouthfreepress.wordpress.com/2017/09/01/tax-reform-2017-edition/

After all there is still “Taxation Without Representation”…….and I have written about this situation as well……https://lobotero.com/2011/05/12/no-taxation-without-representation/

So I Have Written!

Turn The Page!

Did He Or Didn’t He?

This Omarosa thing is just about as silly as anything can get…..but the reaction of Our Dear Leader is even sillier……Omarosa has said that Trump used the “N” word and of course the president said he did not……

The long-rumored “Trump Tapes,” alleged Apprentice outtakes in which the host uses the n-word, are in the news again—and President Trump is insisting that they don’t exist. Trump tweeted Monday night that Apprentice executive producer Mark Burnett had called him “to say that there are NO TAPES of the Apprentice where I used such a terrible and disgusting word as attributed by Wacky and Deranged Omarosa.” He was using his new nickname for former Apprentice contestant Omarosa Manigault Newman, who says she heard a tape in which Trump used the slur multiple times during filming. “I don’t have that word in my vocabulary, and never have,” Trump said in his tweet. “She made it up.”

Tom Arnold, who has previously claimed to have the tapes, tweeted Monday night that Trump and Burnett are lying, the Hollywood Reporter notes. “Apprentice Employees gave statements about @realdonaldtrump saying multiple ‘n’ words on the set of @ApprenticeNBC & 100 other horrible things,” Arnold said. “I spoke to 2 Executive Producers & Mark Burnett in person. They all said Trump’s a liar & there is #TrumpTapes.” Trump administration official Lynne Patton issued a statement Monday night saying she spoke to former Apprentice producer Bill Pruitt and he firmly denied ever playing the damning tape to Omarosa, reports Business Insider. The tape “is a figment of her imagination and merely a destructive tool of manipulation applied only when it best serves her interests,” she said.

Maybe he did not use the insulting word but in the same vain he attacks from a sexist point of view…by calling this woman a dog…..

Omarosa Manigault Newman’s book on life at the White House is officially out on Tuesday, and President Trump already has a preemptive strike: “When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out,” he tweeted. “Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!” It’s a continuation of an attack he started Monday, when he referred to his former ally as “wacky” and “vicious, but not smart.”

Time notes that Trump has frequently used “dog” as an insult, pointing to a New Republic article from three years ago that was rounding up examples even then. Victims ranged from Glenn Beck (He got “fired like a dog” by Fox) to Arianna Huffington (“She is a dog who wrongfully comments on me.”)

Why do so many Americans support this bully and his bullshit insults of people?  This is just another chapter in the life of a president that resort to bullying instead of reason thought and debate.

Sensationalism at its best!

Children dying in the Middle East from airstrikes and this is the “Big” story of the day….this is pathetic on so many levels.

Turn The Page!

Go The Way Of The Do-Do

Jump aboard the “Way Back Machine”….the days of the Cold War…..there was the US and allies, the Soviet Union and allies and the Third World…..after WW2 the allies set up NATO to confront the Soviet Union and its allies of the Warsaw Pact…..by now the NATO has been in the news long enough for most Americans to know what it is and what it is suppose to accomplish…..but what about the Warsaw Pact…….and of course I will assist you in your hunt for the answer…..

The Warsaw Pact is the name commonly given to the treaty between Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union, which was signed in Poland in 1955 and was officially called ‘The Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance’. Although this rather cute title sounds more like the agreement which you and your friend have about sending cards to each other on Valentine’s Day, it was actually a military treaty, which bound its signatories to come to the aid of the others, should any one of them be the victim of foreign aggression.

Nominally the Warsaw Pact was a response to a similar treaty made by the Western Allies in 1949 (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO) as well as the re-militarization of West Germany in 1954, both of which posed a potential threat to the Eastern countries. Although it was stressed by all that the Warsaw Treaty was based on total equality of each nation and mutual non-interference in one another’s internal affairs, the Pact quickly became a powerful political tool for the Soviet Union to hold sway over its allies and harness the powers of their combined military.

For those that cannot read or are too lazy…..

Well now with that outta the way……still in the “Way Back Machine” we visit the 1990’s and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact as the countries within the pact start declaring their independence for their Soviet overlords……

Now recently Our Dear Leader met with our allies within NATO and cake away after insulting and bullying the member nations…..

There are some of us that see what Trump did as a good thing…that is if he holds to the line he has started Tweeting about…..is it possible that NATO could go the way of the Warsaw Pact?

The outcome of the July 11-12 NATO meeting in Brussels got lost amid the media’s obsession with President Donald Trump’s bombast, but the “Summit Declaration” makes for sober reading. The media reported that the 28-page document “upgraded military readiness,” and was “harshly critical of Russia,” but there wasn’t much detail beyond that.

But details matter, because that’s where the devil hides.

One such detail is NATO’s “Readiness Initiative” that will beef up naval, air, and ground forces in “the eastern portion of the Alliance.” NATO is moving to base troops in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and Poland. Since Georgia and Ukraine have been invited to join the Alliance, some of those forces could end up deployed on Moscow’s western and southern borders.

https://original.antiwar.com/hallinan/2018/07/30/its-time-for-nato-to-go-the-way-of-the-warsaw-pact/

At one point I agree that it is time for NATO to go the way of the Do-Do…..because as more and more nations join NATO the chances of the US having to fight in numerous wars over the numerous ones we are fighting today expands further and further…..

There was a time when this organization made sense…I do not see it does these days.

https://lobotero.com/2016/12/05/the-uselessness-of-nato/

So I Have Written!

Turn The page!

Who Pays For War?

I am antiwar basically because there is NO shared experience….about 1% of the population fights these wars ….what kind of war asks for no sacrifice?

War taxes, like conscription, used to be synonymous with war. In addition to generating revenue, taxes also created an accountability linkage between leaders and their conduct of war. As Charles Tilly put it in his observations on fiscal sociology, taxation “constitutes the largest intervention of governments in their subjects’ private life.” Centuries earlier, Adam Smith recognized this when he worried that leaders might sidestep war taxes — which he favored as an equitable and financially sound way to finance wars — out of concern for “offending the people, who, by so great and so sudden an increase of taxes, would soon be disgusted with the war.” It was exactly that possibility of disgust, however, that provided accountability. If leaders of democratic political systems had to introduce taxes to pay for wars, they would think twice about the wars they started and keep them shorter and less costly.

https://warontherocks.com/2018/05/just-put-it-on-our-tab-21st-century-war-financing-and-the-decline-of-democracy/

Our many wars are costing in the trillions of dollars…..and we are reducing taxes annually…..and we seem to be starting new wars annually….when will we reach the limits of war to costs?

Overseas, the United States is engaged in real wars in which bombs are dropped, missiles are launched, and people (generally not Americans) are killed, wounded, uprooted, and displaced. Yet here at home, there’s nothing real about those wars.  Here, it’s phony war all the way. In the last 17 years of “forever war,” this nation hasn’t for one second been mobilized. Taxes are being cut instead of raised.  Wartime rationing is a faint memory from the World War II era.  No one is being required to sacrifice a thing.

Now, ask yourself a simple question: What sort of war requires no sacrifice?  What sort of war requires that almost no one in the country waging it take the slightest notice of it?

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/03/15/fog-americas-phony-war

I have tried to make people understand how much war cost the American taxpayer and what we can do o change the dynamic…..when I speak to people they seem to glaze over when I quote the numbers to them…..

estimates issued by the Pentagon, the Costs of War Project has, for instance, come up with a comprehensive estimate of what the war on terror has actually cost this country since 2001: $5.6 trillion. It’s an almost unfathomably large number. Imagine, though, if we had invested such funds in more cancer research or the rebuilding of America’s infrastructure.

That $5.6 trillion includes the costs of caring for post-9/11 veterans as well as spending to prevent terrorist attacks on U.S. soil (“homeland security”). That figure and its annual updates do make the news in places like the Wall Street Journal and the Atlantic magazine and are regularly cited by reporters. Even President Trump, we suspect, has absorbed and, in his typical fashion, inflated our work in his comment at the end of last year that the U.S. has “foolishly spent $7 trillion in the Middle East” (which just months earlier, more in line with our estimate, he had at $6 trillion).

(informed comment)

Few can imagine that amount….most get lost when the total reaches a million….if we are spending trillions that could be used elsewhere what can we do to finance these wars without end?

I have tried to explain how we could have our social programs and wars at the same time….a war tax.

I mentioned a tax and now eyes roll and people get their hackles up because they do not want more taxes they want less.  Good for them but if you want to be the muscle of the rest of the world something has got to be done.  (I got that covered)

https://legationes.wordpress.com/2015/11/20/if-there-must-be-war-pay-for-it/

Wait there is more…..

https://lobotero.com/2015/12/31/if-you-want-war-then-pay-for-it-part-deux/

Finally someone is seeing what needs to be done to finance these wars without end…..

A maverick lawmaker on the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday boosted a modest proposal made years ago by then-Sen. Charles Rangel: a dedicated “war tax” that would draw attention to military spending and force Americans to confront the cost of defense.

Rep. Walter Jones, a North Carolina Republican, is perhaps best known for his advocacy on behalf of troops and military families, despite staunch opposition to recent wars, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/02/16/americas-anti-war-pro-soldier-congressman-resurrects-idea-war-tax.html

You can be as patriotic as you like….but if a war must be fought then it needs a forward looking plan to pay for it.