It’s too bad more people don’t have writer’s minds. Oh I’m in no way suggesting everyone should be a writer. All you have to do is visit that worthless cesspit called Amazon and you will know for a fact everybody has hurled something up there to sell, no matter how horrible it was.
What I’m talking about is the critical thinking and most importantly the trigger. That one phrase, sound or site which veers you down a “what’s wrong with this picture” path. The nightly tabloids trying to call themselves “news” programs are always searching for that sound bite which will be the shiny distracting object so you won’t see what’s really going on and so they won’t have to do anything remotely related to journalism.
I’m writing this on Monday, December 18, 2017 in the morning. It will release on the site Tuesday, December 19, 2017 shortly after midnight. The dates and times are important because the world could change by then.
During the evenings, when I tire from writing (either books or software) I like to watch a DVD and have a glass or more of Chardonnay. Some days my GameFly subscription doesn’t have a fresh movie sitting here and I don’t feel like making the drive into town to see what Casey’s has, so I cycle through some of the great movies and television shows in my north of 100 DVD collection. Lately I’ve been cycling through Sherlock.
One has to love the freedom television and movie writers have at the BBC. They are allowed and encouraged to write incredibly great drama with real dialog, not the strategically placed product marketing trash we get here in America.
Dr. Watson issued a trigger line in “The Hounds of Baskerville.” It has stuck with me since I first heard it in series 2. I heard it again last week. It is the title of this post. You see, speaking as someone who was born a Republican, I have to say, it applies to the Republican Tax Reform Bill.
That’s a Lot of Meat for a Vegetarian Restaurant
That’s an awful lot of free money for the Uber wealthy in a tax plan which is supposed to be helping the working middle class.
What about those of you who are not working thanks to Jamie Dimon and Mitt Romney? Don’t worry. The Republicans next bill will end all of the programs keeping you alive. That’s how they are going to pay for the Uber wealthy tax cuts, by deliberately killing you off.
By the time this post goes live, it will probably have slammed through and be on Trump’s desk. It is in no way a tax plan to help the working middle class, but it will pave the way for killing off the non-working population which is the Republican party’s owners ultimate goal.
While you’re pondering your demise at the hands of those who have bought and paid for the Republican Party, exercise the critical thinking portion of your brain and also ponder this.
Why, if both parties claim to hate them, did the tax reform not completely eliminate all of these PAC and SuperPAC and lobbyist “charity” classifications? Do you realize that many/most of the mega donors are able to fully deduct the money they pour into those things? They are “charitable contributions.” Even though we, the ordinary tax payer, got Ho Ho Hosed in this tax bill, eliminating this wanton criminal fraud could have at least let them make a legitimate claim about public good.
Do you realize California, New York and New Jersey are taxing you? It’s true. They are taxing every tax paying citizen in America. These three states, which aren’t even the least bit American are robbing from the Federal coffers forcing the rest of us to pay higher taxes. With the deduction for state and local taxes, they have created tax upon tax upon tax ever jacking up the amount they rob from the rest of us via this deduction. That is one deduction which really has to be eliminated so states with high living catastrophes cannot continue having the flyover states pay for their mismanagement. When the federal government doesn’t raise enough revenue to pay its bills, they raise the taxes on all of us poor working stiffs to cover what California, New York and New Jersey have dipped out of the Federal till.
The cap on the mortgage interest deduction really needs to be lower. I went to this site and ran a quick check on a $250K mortgage.
Since this is December, it started the payments in the last month of 2017. In most of America, the well managed and well run parts, $250K gets you a really nice working class home. Not a McMansion on a golf course and not a penthouse suite, but a really nice place to live. Working class really nice. Not coastal elitist nice. Also keep in mind a $250K home isn’t going to have a $250K mortgage. You have to put a chunk down, usually a minimum of 10%-20%.
The mortgage interest deduction has been the opiod addiction problem of the finance world. People run up massive credit card debt living well beyond their means, buying shit they don’t need then having to rent a storage locker to keep all of that unused stuff in. What do they do? They take out a home equity loan to pay off the credit cards so they can go right back to charging even more. You see, in most cases your credit card interest isn’t deductible, but if the home equity loan is structured correctly, it’s a mortgage. People who cannot find such a home equity loan go to one of those storefront mortgage places, kind of like car title loan places only they want the deed to the house. They issue a new mortgage which lets them pull money out and the mortgage interest deduction opiod addiction gets worse.
There is no reason for a dwelling to sell for north of a million dollars. When the interest deduction goes away, perhaps sanity and ethics will find their way into the world of real estate.
