Super-Rich to Middle Class — No More Free Ride You Lazy Bums

Politics and Culture, ,

Today’s guest blog post has been submitted by a “friend” writing under the nom de plume, Mr. Richie Moneybags Rich:

Once upon a time, back in the 1920’s, there was a lot of new stuff, telephones, movies. A small group of people Everyone was getting cars.  Good times.  Then the stock-market crashed.  Party over for widows, orphans, unemployed all those bums who hadn’t sufficiently diversified their portfolios or got swindled carried away buying on margin.  There are always winners and losers, and generally people get what they inherit deserve.

Then that brash, traitor, FDR got elected and declared class-warfare started the New Deal.  Suddenly it was freebies for everyone!  Even the elderly, people who hadn’t worked in years, could get in social security.  Immigrants?  Give us your poor,except not too many Jews etc.

To be fair, if he’d done nothing, the commies might have stepped in, but surely the Pinkertons could have dealt with that!   Did he have to take things that far?   Granted, roads needed to be built, and dams needed to be constructed, but couldn’t he just have handed out nice big juicy contracts to my grandfather’s company negotiated with the private sector?  We all know how much more efficient private industry is when it comes to building things and it was, after all,  the slaves job-creators who built this country.

Truman tried to continue down the road to creating a stable middle-class socialism with his crazy health-care schemes, but fortunately, Congress could be bought off see his plan could have been designed by the Rosenbergs themselves..  Then that damn LBJ came in and got that garbage Medicare signed, and gave us the Great Society.  What’s so great about paying someone else’s bills?

The rich have gotten fed up with all those give aways.  Like  Alan Simpson said, social security is “a milk cow with 310 million tits.”  Who needs it?  Not people making millions every year off their investments and paying less than 1% 14% in taxes, that’s for sure.  Ditto public education.  I mean really, what kind of concerned parent would send his child to a public school in the first place?  Why should I pay for someone else’s child to get a sub-standard education?  Besides, do you know what they teach in those places? It’s all science evolution and global warming, not to mention their stand on the War of Northern Aggression. Plus, that means I’m paying the salary for some strangers’ kids’ teachers, and we all know how high on the hog those lazy-asses live.  If you’re going to resent somebody, it’s those gosh darn teachers, police, and firefighters municipal workers  that you should look to. And don’t even get me started on Pell grants and low interest student loans.  Sheesh, get a job!

And that’s not all.   Even public transportation is supported through taxes!  Public transportation!  As though I’d be caught dead on bus.  Amirite?  Bastards even get “special” lanes.

And of course there’s Romneycare the Affordable Care Act Obamacare!  Naturally, people are outraged to be paying for equitable healthcare for women some slut’s contraception, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Do you have any idea how much it costs when sick people with no insurance just “show up” in an emergency room?  How could someone be so irresponsible to choose feeding your child and paying rent over preventive care not to plan for emergencies?  Really, there should be a law! Why not just allow people inadequate vouchers  to benefit companies I have stock in or pay out of pocket sell their homes?  Some total loon nice lady politician out West had a plan for bartering for healthcare and just got derided for it by every news outlet except Fox the lamestream media.  And if they can’t possibly refuse to pay for medical care, why treat them at all? If they’d rather die let them do it and decrease the surplus population.  I mean it’s not like you can just walk into a supermarket, say “I’m hungry” and get a bunch of free food unless of course you’re on food stamps, IMHO.

To top it off, these “middle income” slackers get tax breaks!  Mortgage deductions.  What’s that about?  Sure if they lose it, so do I, but I’m willing to find other shelters make the sacrifice.  Deductions for college savings.  Since when did college become something minorities, women, the poor, not our kind of people everyone should have the opportunity is forced to go to?  What kind of elitist b.s is that?  It’s not like you can’t get a minimum wage or lower off-the-books job without a degree.

Plus there’s even a deduction for state taxes.  Why should you get a tax break because you live in a state where you can still find a job with union protection that offers better schools and services?  That’s your choice, not mine, buddy.

You can see how all this is patently unfair to those of us who inherited worked hard  to get our money.  As a job creator in Thailand and China who has saved for a rainy day in the Cayman Islands, I deeply resent paying for programs I personally don’t need and will never use.

I mean, it’s not like I get to deduct for my recreational activities like that horse I took to the Olympics.

What makes it worse is all this petty emphasis on “percentages.”  They don’t tell you what it really means.  Here’s what it comes down to —  if you are supporting a family and I can’t imagine how on a taxable income of $50,000 a year, you’re going to pay about $7,274 in federal income tax.  That’s 14.5% of your income, not counting what they take out of your paycheck for social security.  And what do you get for it?  All those goodies I mentioned earlier.  But I don’t need any of that.  You, the middle class, are in effect taking money out of my pocket to get services I’ll never use.  What if you won 100 million dollars in the lottery tomorrow?  Is that what it would take for you to have a little bit of empathy?

Meantime, do you have any idea of what I pay to support your “lifestyle”? No, and I pay people good money to keep it that way.  Let’s say, I’m paying the same percentage as you, .085% 14.5% on a taxable  income of a modest  50 7 million a year.  I’d be paying over a million dollars in taxes if I paid taxes. Can you even imagine what a million dollars looks like? Believe me, it’s very pretty, and in the right denominations can be packed in a carry-on bag if heaven forbid you ever fly commercial. I’m already paying 140 times as much as you are.  140 times!  I mean what’s “progressive” about a system where one person pays 140 times what someone else pays?

Sure, some people might argue that a strong middle class creates a stronger market like what happened in America after World War II or all that growth during the Clinton years, and that America is falling behind because we don’t have a first rate educational system and they’d be right, but those are the type of  Democrats and anyone even slightly left of Ronald Reagan latte-drinking elitists  that forget that America isn’t exceptional because of our entitlements, but rather America  is exceptional because we have  a very high rate of income inequality compared to other developed countries our Constitution.

The Death Trip — The Story of an Ending and Why I’m Giving It Away

writing/blogging/publishing related

Just looking at the most recent Goodreads review of my novella, The Death Trip, the reviewer deals directly with the ending, which readers either seem to love or hate. She vigorously defended it, coming close to but carefully skirting, spoiler territory.

Some readers think the open-ended ending is clever, while others are convinced I simply ran out of steam. Few are neutral. In a sense, both are right.

The Death Trip was written as my first entry in The International 3-Day Novel Competition. The contest could more accurately be entitled The Three Day Novella Contest because I don’t know think most people get past 40,000 words. (I’ve done it three times and never got past 30k). As its name implies, you write a novel (or something close to one) in three days. You are allowed to write an “outline” beforehand although each time I entered, I wound up not really following anything I’d prepared. In the case of The Death Trip, I’d had a concept floating in my brain for some time, and wrote up a character list a few days before the contest started.

This is what I knew when I started the writing: The story would involve a Philip K Dick-like hallucinatory process, by which terminally ill people would be put into a dream-like state where they could experience an entire life — maybe one that turned out better, the road not taken, or even the future they weren’t going to get. The process would be so appealing that people who weren’t ill would want to experience it recreationally, like the old joke about people dying to get in to cemeteries.

I wanted to have a character, inspired by the then recently deceased disability activist, Harriet MacBryde Johnson, who I was sure, based on her writings, would have been appalled by such a process. While I always found Ms. MacBryde Johnson’s writing thought provoking, I didn’t always agree with her positions. As I wrote the story, I found myself creating characters with different viewpoints as well as a protagonist, Chuck, who hasn’t fully developed an opinion.

The three-day experience is a pretty intense one. With only a few hours left on the clock, I knew I had to wind the story down. I was not going to get around to actually taking one of the main characters into a “death trip” and telling that story. I’m no philosopher, but the construct of characters with different positions and then taking those positions to their logical conclusions, owed as much to Plato, or my memory of reading the dialogues as a college sophomore, as it did to any storyteller I can think of, Dick included. I never lost control of the story, but at the same time, I was allowing it to develop, enjoying the show, and a few hours before the deadline, I “got” how it would end.

Some have referred to Chuck as a “loser” or at least a not especially admirable character.  I had purposely  avoided making him seem heroic. I thought of him as a kind of every man, and I didn’t want to make a decision for him, nor did I want to make it obvious to a reader what he would choose. I wanted to present him with two clear choices and end it there, which at a few minutes before midnight, is what I did.

As for the contest, that first year, I didn’t even make the short list, but I did go back to the story later to make revisions and I put it on Kindle and Smashwords as my e-book beta. Because I was hoping to develop a readership prior to publishing Loisaida, a full-length novel, I decided it made sense to make the novella free on Smashwords. Amazon demanded a set price, so I charged the minimum, 99 cents.

A few months later Amazon matched the free price. Back then, they paid the writers the minimum royalty when they did that — a policy they’ve now wisely changed — so I actually got paid for the freebies. When they began charging again,  I matched the price on Smashwords and its affiliated outlets. Then last year, as sales slowed to less than a trickle, I “freed” it again on Smashwords, and Amazon soon “matched” the giveaway. Even though I knew Amazon would no longer pay me for free books, my feeling was that I was making so little on the story that it would  be worth giving it away to get more readers. Unfortunately, so far it hasn’t helped much in generating sales for the novel, but seeing the occasional reader-review on Amazon, Smashwords, Goodreads, etc. whether good or bad, always makes me feel connected to readers, and is especially rewarding when those readers comment on how the story exceeded their expectations for a “freebie.”

More in the Annals of Retroactivity

Politics and Culture, ,

In explaining why his boss’s name appeared on SEC-filed documents as the chair and chief executive of Bain Capital up until 2002 even though Romney claims to have left the company in 1999, top Romney adviser, Ed Gillespie, stated there was no discrepancy because Romney had retired “retroactively” in 1999.

In other news, Arianna Huffington now claims she was never actually a political conservative, but has been retroactively progressive her entire life.

Rupert Murdoch insists that his media empire has been innocent of all wiretapping charges retroactively over the last ten years (or whenever the statute of limitations is).

And Bill Clinton has announced that he has been faithful to his wife retroactively for the entire term of their marriage, beginning in 1975.

It’s ON

Politics and Culture

I loved watching Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.  It was a thing of beauty.  I’m neither a chess fan nor a tennis fan, but I get how people could make comparisons to those kinds of games of strategy, even to boxing, where Ali’s rope-a-dope overcame the brute strength of his opponents.

Despite some significant accomplishments, many of us have been disappointed with Obama for appearing too ready to compromise with people who are blatantly trying to destroy him, even if it means dragging the country down with him.  But now Barry’s back in campaign mode.  His mojo has returned (along with the two Davids (Plouffe and Axelrod).  Now if only we could do something to make sure a mass amount of voters in swing states won’t discover they’ve been knocked off the rolls on election day.

Meantime, enjoy this:

Romney’s Rovian Strategy

Politics and Culture, , , ,

Regarding, Romney’s speech to the NAACP on Tuesday, Nancy Pelosi told Bloomberg Television, “It was a calculated move on his part to get booed at the NAACP convention.”

She wasn’t the only one to see it that way.  Many pundits have by now made this assertion as well. It’s hardly a tinfoil hat theory, but rather stating the obvious.

Breaking it down for the more gullible, here’s the scam:

Romney knows he’s not going to get more than the smallest fraction of the black vote.  Yet, going to the NAACP, the nation’s oldest, and most respected civil rights organization, is what one is expected to do. So how do you make it pay?

You use it to excite the base.  That’s Rovian politics and the Southern strategy.

Romney stood up and said what he “believes” in, showing the right-wing of his party he’s not afraid to say something that won’t be popular (to people who wouldn’t vote for him anyway).  But beyond that, referencing the Affordable Healthcare Act in particular was important.

Since the Supreme Court ruled that mandates are constitutional, the popularity of health care reform has risen.  The more people learn about what’s in the Act, the more they like it.   Immediately after the ruling, Republicans tried to portray mandates as a “tax” on the middle-class.  But that’s a hard sell. Most voters already have  some form of health insurance and won’t be subject to mandates.  Those who are ineligible for Medicare, Medicaid or employer health insurance welcome the low-cost options which the Act will bring them.  Everyone is  excited by the idea that they won’t be dropped because of pre-existing conditions,  face “caps” on needed services, or have to drop their children when they turn eighteen.

The Affordable Healthcare Act is the biggest legislative success of Obama’s first term.  As the Act becomes more popular, so does Obama.  Making his biggest success into a liability is necessary.   One way to do it is through a strong visual showing a group of prominent black people booing Romney for deriding “Obamacare.”  The term itself implies not an act of Congress, reflecting the will of the American people, but rather something imposed on them by a usurper (and one with a funny “foreign” name).   Adding the audio-visual of a group of NAACP members  booing Romney for being against “Obamacare” reinforces the message that this government “giveaway” will take something away from hard working whites, something that black people want.  It portrays Romney as standing up for the beleaguered white taxpayer who is sick of supporting “entitlement programs.”  It references Reagan’s “welfare queens” as well as  his challenging  Gorbachev to tear down the wall.

That the Affordable Healthcare Act is so misunderstood may seem truly shocking to people who live in countries like England or Canada (or most of the developed world for that matter) where health care is understood to be a basic human right.  However, the idea that this legislation was a threat to “ordinary” Americans has been a major part of the strategy against it and has been exploited ruthlessly, with false claims that it would lead to taking away Medicare, the very successful single-payer system of health insurance for elderly Americans.

The NAACP gig offered Romney a chance to face down a group  (the blacks) and show white southerners and teabaggers that he was one of them, despite his elitist background, magical underwear and flip-flops on issues most near and dear to them.

In case he didn’t rile the NAACP crowd enough with his reference to Obamacare, he also managed to say other things designed to not exactly endear him.  He specifically referenced his defense of “traditional marriage.”  While much has been made of the opposition to gay rights by some black churches, the NAACP has come out strongly for marriage equality, and then there was his reference to his “kitchen cabinet” in Massachusetts which  included  African Americans.  The mostly older crowd he addressed remember too well the history of blacks in the kitchen, and of white politicians meeting with black leaders on the down-low.

More evidence that this was staged came when it was spin time.  At a fundraiser later that same day, Romney quipped, “. . . if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy — more free stuff.”  This is a line that he’s used before when talking about contraception as part of health care and even student loan reforms.  While the Republicans scream class warfare whenever the conversation turns to ending the millionaire tax cuts started by President Bush, they never miss an opportunity to imply that cuts to program that benefit the majority of Americans — healthcare, student loans, education, even essential services, are necessary, and anyone who implies differently is looking for a “giveaway” or “free stuff.”  Deregulation of corporations (which are “people too, my friend”) and tax breaks for the ultra-rich must be retained at all costs if we are to be truly “free.”

Will this strategy work to defeat Obama?  The scary thing is maybe it only has to come close.  Coupled with a massive effort to disenfranchise likely democratic voters in swing states, and unlimited campaign spending, Romney has a good shot at winning, no matter what the polls say. And that’s without even taking into account the possibility of actual fraud via faulty recording by electronic voting machines that leave no paper trail.  While a Romney “victory” might look suspicious if the polls show a 10-point Obama lead, they won’t if it’s close.  In a land of paperless ballots, close may be good enough.