This is one of my wife’s favorite comic strips. Today’s strip is very appropriate of mention since it speaks about our need to EARN our living.
Monthly Archives: April 2009
Long Weekend
It’s been a busy weekend. My wife joined by Daughter, Son-in-law, his Mother and her husband in a garage sale Friday and Saturday. I had to work Friday and my wife is committed to our church’s Free Store on Saturdays.
Funny how plans can be upset. Friday night our TV quit. We inherited it from my Dad when he was in a nursing home. By our calculations it was purchased in 1985. Never a problem until it just quit. We don’t watch a lot of TV, spending most of our leisure time either ‘surfing or reading. We are, however, NCIS addicts.
So, I do a little research on the current state of TVs. We have an entertainment center and the largest TV it could accommodate is a 26″. Perusing the Wally World website, Micro-center and some other local spots, Wally World had the best deal. Come Saturday morning I made the trek to WW and picked one up. I was surprised to see that sales tax in our locale is now 8.75%! I haven’t bought any high dollar items (except for some firearms) in a number of years. If I remember correctly, the sales tax is now higher than the rate of my Kansas state income tax (based on a percentage of the federal tax paid.)
***
I was supposed to work at a local gun show Saturday. However, when I arrived, I discovered the water line had been severed by a backhoe and the local Fire Marshall had closed the site since the sprinkler system was toes-up. I was hoping to find some ammo. I did get 100rds of .45acp CCI Brass at WW when I picked up the TV so it wasn’t a total loss.
***
I just read an interesting editorial written by Andrew Lloyd Webber about the UK’s new 50% income tax on high earnings. According to the article, there is another 1.5% hike in National Insurance (health care?) plus a 13.3% tax for being self-employed for a total income tax rate of 64.8%. That figure does not include other personal, property and capital gains taxes. Here is a comment by ALW. The entire editorial can be found here.
The proposed top rate of income tax is not 50 per cent. It is 50 per cent plus 1.5 per cent national insurance paid by employees plus 13.3 per cent paid by employers. That’s not 50 per cent. Two years from now, Britain will have the highest tax rate on earned income of any developed country.
I write this article because I fear the inevitable exodus of the talent that can dig us out of the hole we find ourselves in. It is inevitable, given that other countries are bidding for entrepreneurs. The Government must modify its proposals.I give you this example. I have altered the details of the family I write about for obvious reasons. But the essentials are true.
Last Thursday I met with a thirtysomething guy. I absolutely depend on him in a highly technical area of theatrical production. For legal reasons he has to employ himself through his own company. Under the new tax regime, he will have to pay 13.3 per cent to employ himself before he pays himself anything. And then he will have to pay 51.5 per cent on what’s left.
This is a guy at the cutting edge of his profession who works all over the world. He is in demand in every major territory where entertainment is produced. He has a young wife and two children. Last Thursday he told me that he and his wife had decided that the UK was no longer where they wanted to live.
His wife thinks the State education system is inadequate. And she fears that a bankrupt Britain will increasingly be a worse place in which to live as the horror of our present financial mess hits us all in the solar plexus.
He says that he is young enough to set up shop somewhere else. The new tax rates were the final straw. These talented young people know they will make it impossible for them to educate their kids privately in the UK.
So Britain plc loses not just the 40 per cent he would have paid in personal taxes under the old regime – plus NI and everything else – but… Come on, I don’t need to explain the knock-on effect. It’s obviously huge and immensely damaging – that’s why I am writing this article quickly and probably with too much passion.
I suggest you read the editorial and then look at the comments from those living in the UK. Read those comments and understand why the British Empire is an empire no longer and sinking into a 3rd world morass of socialism and parasitism.
Caveat: My father was born in the UK (Newcastle) and I’ve always been an Anglophile. However, it saddens me what the British government has done and how far they’ve sunk bashing the productive members of their society, being a blood-sucking leech living off the earnings of the productive.
The UK has always suffered under the burden of class envy as now we see what that has created. BO and the democrats are creating that same parasitic class envy here in the US; pitting the successful against the lazy, unemployed, uneducated (and uneducatable) members who subsist on welfare and have NO desire to earn their own living.
UPDATE: Michelle Malkin joins in: Andrew Lloyd Webber: Going Galt in Britain?
Long Weekend
It’s been a busy weekend. My wife joined by Daughter, Son-in-law, his Mother and her husband in a garage sale Friday and Saturday. I had to work Friday and my wife is committed to our church’s Free Store on Saturdays.
Funny how plans can be upset. Friday night our TV quit. We inherited it from my Dad when he was in a nursing home. By our calculations it was purchased in 1985. Never a problem until it just quit. We don’t watch a lot of TV, spending most of our leisure time either ‘surfing or reading. We are, however, NCIS addicts.
So, I do a little research on the current state of TVs. We have an entertainment center and the largest TV it could accommodate is a 26″. Perusing the Wally World website, Micro-center and some other local spots, Wally World had the best deal. Come Saturday morning I made the trek to WW and picked one up. I was surprised to see that sales tax in our locale is now 8.75%! I haven’t bought any high dollar items (except for some firearms) in a number of years. If I remember correctly, the sales tax is now higher than the rate of my Kansas state income tax (based on a percentage of the federal tax paid.)
***
I was supposed to work at a local gun show Saturday. However, when I arrived, I discovered the water line had been severed by a backhoe and the local Fire Marshall had closed the site since the sprinkler system was toes-up. I was hoping to find some ammo. I did get 100rds of .45acp CCI Brass at WW when I picked up the TV so it wasn’t a total loss.
***
I just read an interesting editorial written by Andrew Lloyd Webber about the UK’s new 50% income tax on high earnings. According to the article, there is another 1.5% hike in National Insurance (health care?) plus a 13.3% tax for being self-employed for a total income tax rate of 64.8%. That figure does not include other personal, property and capital gains taxes. Here is a comment by ALW. The entire editorial can be found here.
The proposed top rate of income tax is not 50 per cent. It is 50 per cent plus 1.5 per cent national insurance paid by employees plus 13.3 per cent paid by employers. That’s not 50 per cent. Two years from now, Britain will have the highest tax rate on earned income of any developed country.
I write this article because I fear the inevitable exodus of the talent that can dig us out of the hole we find ourselves in. It is inevitable, given that other countries are bidding for entrepreneurs. The Government must modify its proposals.I give you this example. I have altered the details of the family I write about for obvious reasons. But the essentials are true.
Last Thursday I met with a thirtysomething guy. I absolutely depend on him in a highly technical area of theatrical production. For legal reasons he has to employ himself through his own company. Under the new tax regime, he will have to pay 13.3 per cent to employ himself before he pays himself anything. And then he will have to pay 51.5 per cent on what’s left.
This is a guy at the cutting edge of his profession who works all over the world. He is in demand in every major territory where entertainment is produced. He has a young wife and two children. Last Thursday he told me that he and his wife had decided that the UK was no longer where they wanted to live.
His wife thinks the State education system is inadequate. And she fears that a bankrupt Britain will increasingly be a worse place in which to live as the horror of our present financial mess hits us all in the solar plexus.
He says that he is young enough to set up shop somewhere else. The new tax rates were the final straw. These talented young people know they will make it impossible for them to educate their kids privately in the UK.
So Britain plc loses not just the 40 per cent he would have paid in personal taxes under the old regime – plus NI and everything else – but… Come on, I don’t need to explain the knock-on effect. It’s obviously huge and immensely damaging – that’s why I am writing this article quickly and probably with too much passion.
I suggest you read the editorial and then look at the comments from those living in the UK. Read those comments and understand why the British Empire is an empire no longer and sinking into a 3rd world morass of socialism and parasitism.
Caveat: My father was born in the UK (Newcastle) and I’ve always been an Anglophile. However, it saddens me what the British government has done and how far they’ve sunk bashing the productive members of their society, being a blood-sucking leech living off the earnings of the productive.
The UK has always suffered under the burden of class envy as now we see what that has created. BO and the democrats are creating that same parasitic class envy here in the US; pitting the successful against the lazy, unemployed, uneducated (and uneducatable) members who subsist on welfare and have NO desire to earn their own living.
UPDATE: Michelle Malkin joins in: Andrew Lloyd Webber: Going Galt in Britain?
Spring on the Farm
It’s been Spring for over a month and the average temperature is now in the 60’s. I’ve been reading Frank James blog how he’s waiting for his fields to dry out and it brought forth several memories of life on our farm when I was still living at home.
Our farm was relatively small as compared to the farms of some of our neighbors. Our largest field was nineteen acres and bordered a small four acre woodlot. We normally planted wheat, soybeans or corn in this field on a rotating basis.
Smack in the middle of this field was a large, very large oak tree next to a well that contained clear, sweet water all year long. I suppose that a house stood there at some point in earlier years, but the only remains were the tree and the well.
Dad bought the farm in 1953 and we never had a clear understanding of the history of the place, who had lived there, when, nor of any structures that had stood on the property. There was ample evidence of habitation with many abandoned buildings, barns, old houses around us, but none on our farm.
It was Spring and Dad still worked days in the mines. That Spring, it was my job when I came home from school, to gas the tractor and begin prepping the fields for planting. I had finished discing a field where we had planted corn the previous year. Discing cut up the remaining stalks, turned the surface and readied the ground cover for plowing. Plowing turned under the vegetation and that vegetation provided nutrients for the coming crop.
On this day, I was to start plowing. The rains had been light for a couple of weeks and the ground had firmed enough to support the tractor and our 2-bottom plow. Like many teenagers, working on the farm after a full day of school was not my idea of a fun time.
I gassed the tractor and drove out to the field. Cutting straight farrows is almost an art form. You can start at the edges of the field and work your way to the center. This approach will leave a hump in the middle after a few years and will affect water drainage. Or, you can start in the middle of the field and plow a loop that shifts from one edge of the field until it reaches the initial farrow. If it’s done right, you’ll also reach the far edge of the field at the same time. That is much harder but it affects the topology and drainage of the field much less that the other method.
I drove to the spot were we’d previously marked for the center, took an eye-ball lock on a tree on the opposite end lowered the plow and started off. In road gear.
Tractors have multiple gears to provide power to the driving wheels as needed. The lower gears provided more power and were also slower. In road gear, the tractor would speed along at 25-35 miles an hour depending on the load. A tractor, even in road gear still provides much more power than a car or pickup. (We did have a neighbor that attached a plow to his WW2 era jeep and it worked well while his tractor was out of commission but that’s another story.)
With both eyes on the distant mark, I was tearing across the field at quite a clip. I was throwing dirt for several yards from the farrow. I’d do anything to get the job over. I started around 3:30 in the afternoon and by supper-time had about a third of the field plowed.
Everything was going well—until the plow hit the pipeline.
At some time past, a 6″ steel pipeline was laid across the field. No one knows who, nor what it carried. Dad later guessed that it was a private water line fed from the well in the field. In any case, I was tooling across the field in road gear, dirt clods and dust flying until I hit the pipeline and the tractor stopped dead. It stopped so suddenly, the engine died.
I was standing while steering the tractor. It was a common practice while moving over rough ground and allowed your knees to take up the shock of rugged surface. When the tractor hit, it stopped dead in place and I went flying. Over the steering wheel. Over the hood of the tractor. Over the freshly plowed ground from the previous circuit, flying through the air, not touching down until I’d traveled about twenty feet in front of the tractor. On landing, I did a little plowing of my own, scooping a farrow through the dirt for another yard after touchdown.
I had dirt on my face along with numerous scraps and scratches. Dirt in my hair. Dirt in my shirt, in my jeans, in my shorts. Dirt everywhere. After impact, I just laid there for a time while inhaling about a quart of dirt.
When I decided that I was still alive, I raised up to see Dad running across the field. He’d come out to call me in for supper and had seen the whole thing. “Are you all right?” he hollered.
I just nodded and probed with my tongue to see if I still had all my teeth.
Anyone who knew Dad also knew that he was a bit lacking of a sense of humor. He kept trying to ask if I was hurt while trying not to laugh at the same time. The two actions were not complimentary. Finally, he just gave up and laughed. He laughed so much he had to kneel down to keep from falling over.
Farmers have weird ideas on what is funny. I remembered how he laughed when I was charged by the sow and had jumped a 6′ 2×4 fence to get away. He also laughed when, during hay season, I missed a hay-bale thrown into the loft and had fallen out into 10″ of mud.
He told me, while I limped back to the house, how I’d traveled in a perfect parabolic arc over the front of the tractor, over the plowed ground and had plowed a rut into the fresh dirt. Later, he told our neighbor across the road, our neighbor down the road, and all his friends at the mine. Years later when I graduated from high-school, he told the same story to all our relatives.
But, I’m gonna get revenge. Someday, I’m going to tell the story about how Dad shot the car and blew out the windshield.
I’ll get even. Heh, heh!
(h/t to John Smith for the Ford Tractor photo.)
An Evaluation: Ayn Rand’s "Atlas Shrugged"
As I’ve said in earlier posts and comments on various blogs, I’ve been reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Well, I’ve finally finished it—all 1,089 pages of it.
The book is about the struggle of “producers”, those who create and produces ideas, goods and services—for their profit, versus the “looters” and “moochers”, those who would take the earnings from the producers because it is their “right” to subsist on the efforts of others.
It is a classic depiction of our current welfare state. It illustrates a government run by oligarchy for the “public good”, regardless whether the public want it, and where corruption is official policy. Here is a partial plot summary from wiki. “Atlas Shrugged portrays fascism, socialism and communism – any form of state intervention in society – as systemically and fatally flawed.”
The novel is prophetic, depicting a future that may not be far away. In Atlas Shrugged, those who produce are taxed to provide for others because the needs of the public (“moochers”) overrides the needs of those whose earnings are taken by the government. Sycophantic corporations who cannot make profits subsist by “bailouts” while those corporations and individuals who do not subscribe to the welfare state go bankrupt or are severely constrained. The “good ol’ boy” networks support those who cannot at the the expense of those who can.
Who does this remind you of? Citibank? GM and Chrysler? Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae? Pelosi, Reid, Dodd, Rangle, Geithner, Obama?
As the economic and political environment deteriorates, the producers “go on strike” and begin to quit, retire or disappear.
This sorta reminds me of the recent Tea Parties—a revolt, not on taxes, but on spending! The left doesn’t or won’t understand our position. They call us racists, but many blacks attended the Tea Parties as well as Hispanics, Asians and whites. They say, “We won , live with it!” They think that contrary views are unpatriotic and treasonable, but when they opposed Bush and provided aid and comfort to our nation’s enemies, they were being patriotic and expressing their 1st Amendment rights.
I would hope that our increasing protests prevent the future of the country depicted in Atlas Shrugged. The Tea Parties are just the early signs that will give birth to a conservative opposition to the democrats in their race to Marxism. We want liberty from big uncaring government trying to force our square pegs into their round holes. We want liberty from confiscatory taxes to support those unwilling to support themselves. We want liberty from those who creep into our country to steal the fruit of our labor and earnings. We want liberty from those who think they have a right to take without achieving, that their need outweighs ours. We want liberty to work, to achieve, to create, to produce without constraint from a parasitic government.
We want Liberty!
And that is what scares those in government; those who can’t achieve, create, produce without stealing from those who can.
The coming months will be interesting.
UPDATE: Apparently some folks are already “going John Galt.” Here’s a report on the effect. (h/t to Instapundit.)
Cartoon of the Day: Glenn McCoy / Gary Varvel
Sometimes these cartoons are just so, so…right!
9th US Appellate Court says 2nd Amendment applies to the States
The question whether the 2nd Amendment applies to the states has been answered—at least to those states in the 9th US Judicial District. The 9th Appellate Court court, in the case of NORDYKE v. COUNTY OF ALAMEDA; COUNTY OF ALAMEDA BOARD OF SUPERVISORS has determined that the 2nd Amendment is Incorporated, i.e., that the 2nd Amendment applies to the States as well as to the Federal government.
The Nordykes lost their suit against the County of Alameda. But, in that process an important tenet was established that can and will lead to further steps to preserve our Right to Bear Arms, our Right of Self-defense, but also out future liberty.
The excerpts below are from the ruling. The entire document can be found here.
[12] We therefore conclude that the right to keep and bear arms is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” Colonial revolutionaries, the Founders, and a host of commentators and lawmakers living during the first one hundred years of the Republic all insisted on the fundamental nature of the right. It has long been regarded as the “true palladium of liberty.” Colonists relied on it to assert and to win their independence, and the victorious Union sought to prevent a recalcitrant South from abridging it less than a century later. The crucial role this deeply rooted right has played in our birth and history compels us to recognize that it is indeed fundamental, that it is necessary to the Anglo-American conception of ordered liberty that we have inherited.17 We are therefore persuaded that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Second Amendment and applies it against the states and local governments.18
Below is the judgement of the suit.
V
For the foregoing reasons, we AFFIRM the district court’s grant of summary judgment to the County on the Nordykes’ First Amendment and equal protection claims and, although we conclude that the Second Amendment is indeed incorporated against the states, we AFFIRM the district court’s refusal to grant the Nordykes leave to amend their complaint to add a Second Amendment claim in this case.
H/t to David Hardy.