No, it’s not April Fool’s Day.  Here me out.

I have come to the realization that one of the things wrong with our country is that we have too few taxes.  Having one or two huge taxes like Social Security withholding and income tax means that, to the average taxpayer, it all goes to this amorphous blob called “The Government”.  What I want is for the government to chop these monolithic taxes into smaller bites so that the people know where their money is going.  I want a separate tax for every government activity.  I also want taxpayers to know, on a paycheck to paycheck basis, how much they’re kicking into the pot.

For example, your paystub should look something like this:

Of course, this is just an example.  An complete list of each and every tax that would be pulled from your paycheck would be a lot longer.  I would also want sections for the state and federal taxes, with the same detail.

Why would I want this?  I want this because when the average voter and taxpayer looks at her paystub and sees all the things our government is doing and how much that is costing them personally, I believe that when someone says “Why are we sending troops to Outer Jerkholistan?” or “Why are we paying for another Department of Education study to see if piping in the sound of sperm whales mating helps children learn to read?”, they’ll understand.  Saying “We’re going to take a couple hundred dollars out of your check for stuff.  Don’t bother asking what that stuff is.” gives politicians and bureaucrats a lot of cover to waste a lot of money.  If I’m seeing line items in my paycheck going up, I’ll want to know why.

Want a real shocker?  I believe we need higher taxes in our country.

Put away the pitchforks and hear me out on this one too.

Currently, when the government wants to do something, from building roads and schools to sending troops overseas, there is no fiscal restraint on that decision.  Someone at the Treasury Department adds a couple of zeroes to the federal debt, sells a few more bonds, and the money to do things magically appears.  I want to hamstring that ability.

I want the federal budget to be run without deficits.  I think a lot of us do.  We’ve gotten nowhere in the past half century or so when it comes to actually cutting spending.  We nibble around at the edges and use cuts as a way to either reward political allies or punish our foes, but nothing really gets done in the end.

I want that to stop.  I want the government to be honest with the American people about how much it costs to do our business.

When the President wants to send troops overseas on his latest pet foreign policy project, or spend billions of dollars on new fighters, bombers, submarines, tanks, rifles, or whatever, I want someone to stand up on the floor of the Congress and say “This is going to cost $500 billion a year.  This bill contains the tax to pay for that. Voting is now open.”.  The same goes when a Congresscritter wants a new bridge to nowhere built in their district or wants to expand welfare spending to include anyone making less than 10 times the poverty level.

When we stop masking government spending in meaningless deficit numbers and start forcing them to come to us directly and say “We want to do this, so you need to start paying up.”, people will take a good hard look at what they want, what they need, and what they’re willing to pay for.

My guess is that once we start forcing the American taxpayer to pay cash on the barrelhead for not only those things they like, but also those things they don’t like, then the number and size of those things will come under a lot more scrutiny, as will the politicians who keep piling things on the bill.  In the end, I think that forcing us to pay attention will force the government to become smaller, leaner, and less expensive.

I’m always torn on whether to read the agitprop that lands in my inbox from the White House, but it’s usually good for a laugh.  I got this today.  My comments are in bold.

Good afternoon,

Howdy

I am a staunch Republican, a self-proclaimed Fox News addict, and I didn’t vote for the President. And I’m here to tell you that Obamacare works. I’m living proof.

Sure, Obamacare works, so long as someone else is paying for it.  

I’m a chemotherapy patient, and was previously paying $428 a month for my health coverage. I was not thrilled when it was cancelled.

I’m a chronic auto-immune disease patient, who takes some really nifty-neato medications that cost an arm and a leg.  But since they help to make sure I can keep using my arms and legs, I pay for them.  I also make sure I keep my job and the good health insurance that comes from a lifetime of busting my ass.  I’d be annoyed if that got cancelled, but I’d find some way to keep my self-respect and not go on the public dole if that happened.

Interesting that you don’t say why your health insurance was cancelled.  Did you have a minimum-coverage plan that was made illegal by the ACA?   Maybe your employer decided that it was cheaper to just pay the find, I’m sorry, tax and quit offering it?

Then I submitted an application at HealthCare.gov. I looked at my options. And I signed up for a plan for $62 a month.

Great.  How much bread did you steal from the mouths of my children to get your premium down that low, if you don’t mind me asking?

It’s the best health care I have ever had.

Dude, if you had shitty healthcare for $428 a month, you should have done something about that years ago.  Like, you know, changing jobs or buying your own.  Just saying.

So right now, here’s what I want to tell anyone who still needs health insurance, or knows someone who does:

Sign up. Follow the instructions on the website. Apply, and look at your options. You still have time, and take it from me: This is something you want to do.

Here’s my advice to those who need insurance, or knows someone who does:  Grow a sense of shame and quit trying to suckle from the great whore on the Potomac.  Get off your ass and provide for yourself.  Or don’t.  Your choice.  Just quit forcing the rest of us to provide for you.

I wrote a letter to President Obama this past February to tell him about my experience with the Health Insurance Marketplace. I hoped he’d read it, and he did.

Good for you.  I wonder if he read that letter I sent him last spring telling him that I didn’t want him in my gun safe any more than he wanted me in his bedroom?  

I may not be a supporter of the President. But now, I get mad when I see Obamacare dragged through the mud on television.

I get mad when I look at the almost 40% of my paycheck that is taken out to pay for the leeches that either work for the government or have figured out that Uncle Sugar will keep them drawing breath so long as they keep voting the way they want them to or at least pen spam for the Politburo.

And even though I regularly tune in to conservative pundits, I’d like to tell them they’re getting it wrong. Obamacare works.

If it works so well, why does every date slip in the President’s project plan?  If I delayed things the way he did, I’d be shown the door.  Successful plans tend to get implemented on time, or at least close to being on time.

So one more time: If you still need health insurance, you have just three days to get it. Do what I did. Go to HealthCare.gov, submit an application, and pick a plan that works for you.

Or, you can get off your ass, quit being a parasite, and take care of your own damned self.

It just might change your life.

Yeah, providing for your own needs without making the rest of us pay for it might change your life, too.  Seriously, I hope your chemo goes well, and you wallow in shame in having to go to Obama with hat in hand to get it.

Mark D. Bearden, Ph.D.
Monroe, North Carolina

I received the following email this afternoon.  I’m honored that His Excellency, President Obama, would take the time to reach out to little old me to explain his new initiative to make McDonalds hamburgers and ammunition at Walmart more expensive.

My remarks are in italics.  And yes, I know this got very, very long.  I just couldn’t find the bottom of this particular cesspool.

The White House

Washington

Hello everyone,

Howdy, Mr. President.  It’s nice to hear from you.

Earlier today, I signed an Executive Order to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 for federal contract workers.

How nice of you to do that.  I really appreciate you unilaterally doing things like that.  Nothing like going above and beyond the requirements of a signed contract.  How much of your own paycheck are you giving up to make this happen?

It’s the right thing to do. But what’s more, companies have found that when their employees earn more, they’re more motivated, they work harder, and they stick around longer. You should expect the same of your federal government.

Companies have found that what motivates people who make minimum wage is the chance to get the heck off the bottom rung of the economic ladder and quit making minimum wage.   You’d know this if you’d ever had to struggle.  By that, I mean ‘hold down a low-paying job in order to put food in your mouth’.  I’d really love to know how you managed to not starve while you were in college.  My guess your job didn’t involve brooms or deep fryers.

The bottom line is this: We are a nation that believes in rewarding honest work with honest wages. And America deserves a raise.

Sure we do.  Why don’t you give us one by cutting or eliminating income taxes?  What?  That’s not what you’re talking about?  How rude of me to suggest that you quit taking a good chunk of each and every mouthful of food that goes on my children’s plates.  Sorry.

The order I signed today will help folks across the country. But it’s not enough.

Right now, there’s a bill in Congress that would raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour for all Americans. It would lift wages for more than 28 million current workers, and would move millions of Americans out of poverty. That means businesses would have customers with more money to spend.

Raising the minimum wage would grow the economy for everyone.

Especially for people who figure out a way to make the same amount of food, wash the same number of dishes, or clean the same number of buildings with fewer people.

You don’t need to believe me: Believe the 600 economists — including seven Nobel Prize winners — who wrote both houses of Congress last month to remind them that the bill before them will have little or no negative effect on jobs.

Since you’re a Nobel laureate yourself, and we all know how much respect I got for the Nobel prize system when you got that, this means a lot to me.  

When I stood before both chambers of Congress and said that I intended for 2014 to be a year of action, that wasn’t just a nice line in a speech. It was an acknowledgment that we’ve got to restore opportunity for everyone in America — the idea that no matter who you are, or how you started out, you can get ahead here if you’re responsible and willing to work for it. That’s what this “year of action” is all about.

Funny, everyone I know who started out at minimum wage, busted their tail, and kept their nose clean seems to be doing OK at the moment.  It’s like the minimum wage wasn’t a hinderance to them getting ahead.  It’s almost like making crappy wages was a stimulus to do something that made more money.

And since that speech, I have taken actions on my own to make it easier for folks to save for retirement, help working Americans get the skills that good jobs demand, and assist millions of Americans who have been looking for work for several months. I’ve announced a major new commitment toward connecting our schools to 21st-century technology.

Right, because people couldn’t get an IRA, or get into a college or a tech school, or bust their ass to find a job before your speech.  And I hate to tell you this, Mr. President, but the only use I’ve seen most of the high schoolers I know put high-speed internet to is to download pictures of naked people, play games in class, or text their BFF’s about how much chemistry sucks.  A fractional T1 and some new iThingies aren’t going to make sure our children get a good education.  Right now, I’ll trade the ability to circumvent a proxy so they can get to pr0n for basic literacy and math skills, which we were able to impart upon our children way before Jobs and Wozniak started their little produce company.

That action continues today, and in the months to come.

Oh, praise Cthulhu.  It’s only been 5 years since you first mouthed the words to the oath of office, and we’re finally going to see some action out of your office. 

Take a look at what we’ve done already and what’s to come.

DB Note – That’s a link to a webpage detailing the things that the Grand Exalted Grand PooBah has done since the State of the Union address.  Here are the highlights:

Raising the Minimum Wage – I’ve already had my say about this, so I won’t beat this particular dead horse anymore.  I’ll leave that in your more than capable hands.

Helping Americans Retire With Dignity – Like I said above, nothing’s been keeping the American people from buying into a private retirement plan if that’s what they want to do.  All this does is funnel more of those sweet, sweet taxpayer dollars into the general federal budget.

Building 21st Century Workplaces – I was surprised by this one.  I honestly thought it might be a proposal to use federal funds to modernize failing industries, or subsidize the cost of bringing high-speed data links to rural businesses.  Imagine my shock when it talked about how the government is going to work toward “Revamping workplace policies in areas such as discrimination, flexibility, and paid leave will make our workplaces more inclusive to working families and ensure America’s global economic competitiveness in the coming decades.”  Seriously?  We’re going to waste cycles trying to make it easier for people to have a flexible schedule PTO?   Don’t you people have anything better to do with your time?

Investing in High-Tech Manufacturing – Did the President get dropped on his head as a baby or something?  Didn’t we just go through five years of the government ‘investing’ in places like Solyndra and Fisker?  We should have taken all of that money and set it on fire.  We would have at least gotten some light and heat out of it.  

Training America’s Workers – I’m sorry, I thought that was what my federal tax dollars that go to the Department of Education went toward, or at least my local property and sales taxes did, for like my entire adult life.  You inbred, twinkle-toed, half-wit excuses for public servants have royally screwed up the best public education system the world had ever known, and now you want to do more?  I wouldn’t trust you jokers to teach wild dogs to eat raw meat, much less teach Billy Ray or Laquisha how to use a plasma torch.

Helping the Long-Term Unemployed – How about we help the long-term unemployed by not doing things we know will discourage employers from hiring new people, like forcing them to pay a huge amount for health insurance or raising the minimum wage?  How about you all get the heck out of the way and let business owners make better profits, thereby giving them an incentive to expand capacity and hire more people?

Expanding Apprenticeships – Wow, you finally said something that makes sense.  Of course, you can have all the slots in tech schools and apprenticeship programs you want.  They won’t mean diddly over squat so long as you keep making noises about how no-one ever makes it in life without a degree in underwater upside-down race baiting or whatever it was that you ‘studied’.  Quit making it easy for Little Johnny to go hang out and play XBox with his friends for four years while racking up $50,000 in debt, and maybe he’ll discover that he has a talent for wiring houses or fixing cars because doing so will keep him off the streets.

Increasing Fuel Efficiency – Right, because trying to squeeze another drop out of that particular dried out husk of a lemon is going to make it more likely for the American auto industry to hire more people.  Apparently you never heard of the law of diminishing returns, nor did you ever learn that industry loves efficiency, and would have developed and bought  large fuel-efficient trucks if that could be done economically.  Of course, I’m sure this is going to cost me and my great-great-grandchildren money as you translate “incentivize” to mean “subsidize”.

Cutting Carbon Pollution – And here we go with the “cut carbon emissions, because they’re icky and magic fairy money will fall from heaven”.  Quit conflating your economic and fiscal policies with your fixation on a single environmental issue.  If your goal is to make Americans better off financially, quit trying to shove higher costs for energy, food, and transportation down our throats.

Connecting Our Classrooms – Because little Johnny and little Susie need the opportunity to get on FaceBook during English class that much quicker.  See my above comment about basic literacy.

Increasing College Opportunity – Well, which is it?  Are you going to encourage more people to get what for most of them will be useless degrees, or are you going to encourage them to go into apprenticeship programs?  

Redesigning High Schools – Again, see my earlier comments about literacy.  You know what works for education?  Let’s try a classroom of students that know that if they don’t learn what’s put before them, they run a pretty good chance of starving to death in the cold because they can’t get a job.  Let’s try a classroom where the teacher is not only allowed, but encouraged to cause pain in the life of some jackass who wants to test his manhood by being a little shit?  How about we stop spending a good third of their time learning about sensitivity, down-trodden people, and the evils of capitalistic caucasian males and force the little darlings to learn their multiplication tables again?

DB Note:  At this point, exhausted just thinking about the damage that this guy can do in such a short amount of time, we get to the end of the web site and return to the email.

Thank you,

President Barack Obama

No, thank you, Mr. President.  That was cathartic.  Say hello to the wife and kids for me.

In the latest shoe to drop from Edward Snowden, we find out that the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, have been reaping personal information, including relationship status and sexual preferences, from the data collected by such common smart phone apps as Google Maps and Angry Birds.  Additionally, the metadata from photographs is being strip mined by the agencies.  Once again, NSA is pinky swearing that they don’t use the data from ordinary Americans unless they’re part of an active investigation, and I imagine that GCHQ is making the same noises through its much abused mouthpiece.

Apart from the “If you’re not going to be using it, why are you collecting and storing it?” question, this brings up the topics of data hygiene and data control.

Data hygiene basically means that you don’t leave your data lying around for others to pick up.  Remember, anything you put on the Internet is available to anyone who cares enough to find it.  Apparently, the same can be said about electronics such as computers, tablets, and smart phones.  If you don’t want others to have and abuse your data, don’t put it out there for them.  Why things like whose slot A you want to mate with your tab B are on an easily lost gadget is beyond me.  But if you’ve been putting such things on your cell phone, congratulations, now the government knows about it, for whatever reason they can find to justify its collection.

TL;DR – Quit putting things you wouldn’t want anyone and everyone knowing on your cell phone.

Next, we have data control.  Do you know what all of those wonderful apps on your iThingie are doing?  Is that game reading your address book and sending it to its corporate masters for marketing?  Is the mapping software grabbing your location requests and your calendars so that developers can find a way to suggest directions to a meeting before you realize you need them?  Did you actually read what you agreed to when you installed and updated it?  Someone could probably make a good living out of investigating what the top 1000 apps on iTunes or Google Play are actually doing and comparing that to their stated purpose.   It would definitely be a job that lasts a long time.

The exploitation of mapping software is particularly insidious.  Look at it this way:  Let’s say that an authoritarian administration wanted to know who was attending meetings of an opposition party.  They find some low-level fleeb to figure out where the meetings are being held, then mine the data from mapping apps to find out who requested directions to and from those locations for the hour or so before the meeting and the hour or so after.  Now you have a pretty accurate list of people who have at least an interest in opposing the government.  You’ll notice that I didn’t say a liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, nor did I say Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street in this scenario.  Both sides of the political equation can and will abuse access to such data, and doing so will make their efforts to find, fix, and flatten their opposition a lot easier.

It’s time we demand that the government stop gathering this data without a very specific warrant with a heck of a lot of oversight.  It’s also time we demand that app vendors stop gathering the data, too, or we should stop using their products.

My Congressman put up a post on his FaceBook page* asking his constituents what they wanted from Congress in 2014.  Here are a few of my thoughts:

1. Passage of the “Firearms Owners Freedom Act” (I know, snowball’s chance)
2. Passage of the “I Am Not Your Baby Daddy, So Get A Damn Job Act”, which would encourage the chronically impoverished to make better life choices because the rest of us aren’t going to keep footing the bill generation after generation.
3. The “National Security Agency Mission Definition Act”, which would make it crystal clear that military organizations, even ones like the NSA, are not tools to be used against the American people.  It would move domestic surveillance over to the FBI, and dissolve the FISA courts.  If they need to watch the communications of a U.S. person, then they need a warrant, and they can get one in a court that’s accountable and public.
4. A House resolution stating that if the President wants to use military force anywhere in the world and it’s not an emergency of national survival, then he needs to come to Congress for a declaration of war.  Not an “Authorization to use force”, but an Honest to God, kill people and break shit, declaration of war.  If it’s not that important, it’s not worth our time, treasure, and blood.
5. The “Put Up or Shut Up Act” – In which the Congress withdraws all Federal subsidies of private, for-profit companies, be they industrial, energy,  transportation, or whatever.  If a business has an idea good enough to make a product or provide a service that the market wants, then let them get investors and convince consumers to purchase it.

That’s my list.  What do you all think?