It is earlier than usual because old people do not sleep as much as regular humans do,
Boring BigMike stuff coming up be warned.
Don't let your political friends see this or they will come unglued, I hope.
In some estimations, there is an underground economy that exists apart from the traditional legalized and taxed economy. It is maintained and is understood better than the traditional economy by individual workers. Dollar for dollar it is as powerful as anything wall street has ever organized and only lacks the powers attributed to organization and accountability to outgrow its traditional brethren. Some conservative economists (those folks who guess for a living) value the underground economy in the trillions of annual dollars, with estimates ranging from 2.1 to 2.5 trillion dollars. That puts it in 11-12% of the nation's GDP range, which is a clever way of saying that it's worth a ton of money.
The definition of the underground economy refers to "economic transactions that are deemed illegal, either because the goods or services traded are unlawful in nature, or because transactions fail to comply with governmental reporting requirements." Definition of the underground economy
In 2018 alone the GDP of the United States of America was around $20.5 trillion dollars. For comparison, china's GDP for the same period was around $13.6 trillion.
According to the Investor site, investopedia.com, the term Gross Domestic Product is defined as
The definition of Gross Domestic Product is defined as "the total monetary or market value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country's borders in a specific time period. As a broad measure of overall domestic production, it functions as a comprehensive scorecard of a given country’s economic health." The way I understand the term that sounds about right to me.
Now I said all of that in order to give you a little background and in order to say this. Our society has begun a decline towards unsustainable funding of its future, I'm not talking about the way you see the politicians always blathering about how the aging of America is causing Social Security to run out of money, or how we are outspending in programs our ability to pay for them in terms of revenue (such as Medicare) or how entitlement programs cannot be funded into the future, although those things are a big concern. The real problem in my view stems from how we have arranged for our society to fund its growth and how we have arranged for it to fund the present. Our future and our present are based upon a ridiculous and faulty perception that our citizens will always do their part, will always pay their fair share, to create and enhance the standard of living in the United States. In my view, this has always been poppycock and has never been based on reality.
Reality-based decision making would encourage you to look at what actually happens when you are planning for the future. Instead, we look at a faulty data stream that we know is bad when we are planning everything. Every time a politician says that "Current projections show that we don't have enough money to ....", what he is really saying is that the bad situation that exists cannot be continued at the present rate because there isn't enough money in the coffers to do so. We created the reason its bad, we rely on the bad reason to fund the future, we know it isn't enough money, we've always known it wouldn't work in the long term and then when it doesn't work, we act all surprised that it doesn't and blame the other party.
To me, that is chutzpah and is the definition of legitimate theft.
OK, I know by now you are saying what the hell Mike, get to the point!!
OK. Here is the point.
Everything we do as a nation is based upon a taxation system that is founded upon the income tax in some manner, or it is called something else and you still have to pay it. This is a tax system designed to have the American taxpayer pay for itself by requiring its citizenry to allow the government to withhold a portion of the paycheck they earn to fund the government and its operations, such as the Military, Congress, programs, etc. A defined portion of every paycheck of every employee of every company goes to the government to make this happen. That system and similar systems for the business environment (which require payments of taxes based on income or profits depending upon how big your company is) funds virtually every single thing the government does on our behalf with things like federal taxes designed for specific purposes like a fuel tax to pay for road repairs and etc., being in the mix. At some level, it is all a tax on money that is earned.
For example, all of the National Parks in this country are staffed with park rangers and tourist guides and staff people that are in the hotels provided and people to clean up the parks and etc, The money that is required to operate those parks is allocated to the Park system by the Government in the budgeting process. The money that is given to the park system is taken from the General fund provided to them from the income stream derived from the payment of income and other taxes. Virtually everything we do as a nation is funded in this manner. The same systems exist in some form, in each State, County, and City governmental structure that fund services provided to the citizens in each of those areas. Police departments are funded from income streams provided by the collection of taxes. To be sure, there are literally a seemingly unending variety of ways they have discovered to tax and collect the funds in virtually every way imaginable, but the basic concept is you go to work, you pay your taxes, we collect garbage and make sure there is a fire department.
Seems simple right?
Except there is a very fundamental basic issue at play, a flaw in the system, a flaw that is inherent in the system, that we knew about from the beginning, that has existed the whole time and that flaw is not everybody plays fair in the system and not everyone pays their fair share of taxes.
NO! You say with a look of horror? Not us? We wouldn't cheat the system, would we?
Well, consider this. Even when considering those who allegedly pay their share, some economists estimate that virtually 100% of people that participate in the income tax system cheat the system in some way, even if they do it unintentionally. The size of the US tax code, it's regulation, and revenue rulings that are used as guidance, with all of the annotated case law are over 70,000 pages long. when you only consider the actual Internal Revenue Code itself with no additional resources it is over 2,600 pages of regulations to follow. Even when computerized you are bound to occasionally make a mistake.
So here is the issue briefly.
- Legally, over 44% of all Americans pay no Federal income tax. " The large percentage of people who don’t owe or pay federal income tax is a feature, not a bug, of the revenue code,” according to the Tax Policy Center.
- “By design, the federal income tax always has excluded a significant fraction of households through a combination of personal exemptions, the standard deduction, zero bracket amounts, and more recently, tax credits.”
- Illegally, there could be as much as 2 trillion dollars per year paid in black market transactions that are outside the taxation system.
So in other words, people who work for cash or companies who pay in cash with no tax withholding still consume governmental services yet contribute exactly nothing to their funding. The politicians want you to believe that this is a problem limited to a few small groups of people like illegal aliens, however, studies show that this issue crosses all race and socio-economic boundaries. Some studies have also directly proven that you are more likely to commit this type of crime if you are a typical American citizen earning over $100,000 dollars per year than anyone else. These are the folks who hire the undocumented workers to work for them on an informal basis and may even be quasi-legal in their approach. They may even provide a 1099 form indicating the staffer was an independent contractor. Thousands of tax lawsuits filed by the government against such people later have pretty much proven the myth of who is held accountable for breaking the law in these cases. Most of the time, when the government proves the only reason they used an employee on an informal basis was to avoid the payment of employment taxes and their intent was to avoid the issue of taxes, guess who ends up paying the fines and the fees for everyone?
So my argument is that a system of taxation that is based on earnings reported to the government is outdated and it doesn't work and never has. The tax code is so full of holes and exemptions that like I said before, 44% of people that earn a living don't pay taxes. There are so many loopholes and tax credits and other tax reduction schemes used by large corporations that thousands of large corporations do not pay any taxes at all.
It just doesn't work, it is a leaky ship and we are all sinking.
If I could fix it here is what I would do.
First - I would eliminate the income tax entirely and close the IRS and eliminate them entirely. They do us no good and only complicate the matter and if they had any solutions they would have already done something about it long ago. The IRS is useless.
Second - I would eliminate every form of taxation and tax reduction scheme that exists in every form. All estate taxes, inheritance taxes, tax loopholes, tax enterprise zones every single tax goes out the window.
Third - In the place of the first two I would institute a national sales tax and allow no loopholes to be legislated or created. The single exception of allowing voters to approve adjustments to the tax rate. I do not know what the rate should be but whatever it is it applies to everyone equally.
Here is what this would accomplish.
The primary reason the underground economy exists is to escape record keeping and taxes. If we institute a national sales tax then every purchase made by every person wherever their income is derived pays their share of taxes. You couldn't escape it. Everyone buys milk, everyone buys fuel for their cars, everyone buys green beans, everyone pays tax. If being filthy rich didn't matter anymore it would cease to be used as a weapon on the underclass of America. By forcing every purchase to be a taxed transaction, virtually 100% of our enforcement efforts would go towards the people who collected the taxes and didn't forward the tax collected to the government. If we could require that taxes be electronically transmitted immediately with every transaction then the issue becomes one of compliance not enforcement, theoretically. I know organized crime would try to figure out some way to be the man in the middle and steal some of that money but the point is still valid.
All purchases are taxed, no matter the source of your money so even if you are a prostitute working a street corner in New York City, every time you purchased a new package of condoms you would be contributing to the upkeep of American Society. No one could escape paying their fair share of taxes, so even if you were filthy rich and bought a new swimming pool, you pay a tax, Cab driver buying a pack of cigarettes? Pay the tax and so forth.
The bug in the batter is the politician. The politicians as he exists today has to change or nothing will ever change as there is no incentive to ever make anything happen.
He will have to give up having his grubby finger in the till screaming and kicking and over his dead body. The next thing we need that goes along with this proposal is Term limits. If you do away with the professional politician then those horrible people like Mitch McConnel and Nancy Pelosi and every other politician type who got rich off the back of the American public goes away in 8-10 years. Every single one of them becomes a past member of the society of professional thieves. Once we have eliminated the politician as the source of our problem, we begin the serious work of eliminating the lobbyist, where the retired politicians go to ply their trade. If we eliminate the lobbyist by federalizing the election cycle, we eliminate graft from campaigning. This eliminates the so-called attack ad because there is no need for it any longer. Politicians would be forced to run on their records and on their ideas, instead of on the funding provided by all the dirty money they can spend. This is accomplished by eliminating the never-ending cycle of fundraising, leading to elections, leading to fundraising. We make the election cycle a pre-determined period of time (for example 6 months) and here is a radical concept, the government pays the tab. Running for the Office of the President? Here is what you get, no more and you can not spend any money raised by any other means. Rich people no longer get special access and the politician is no longer under the control of and beholden to the cash flow spigot controlled by some ultra-rich fat cat who only wants to be richer as his only motivations.
So to summarize -
Eliminate the Taxation of Income
Eliminate the IRS
Institute a National Sales Tax
Create Term Limits for every elected political position
Eliminate the Professional Politician, eliminate the Lobbyist.
Federalize the Election Cycle, standardize the campaign season, eliminate dark money altogether
Put The American People back in Charge of America.
Enough of this permanent underclass bullshit.
- San Francisco says that police will stop responding to non-criminal calls, those types of calls will include neighbor disputes, reports about homeless people, school discipline interventions and etc. Instead they will be replaced by trained but unarmed professionals.
My only comment on this is that they also should buy a bunch of radios and a ton of body bags. - Ben Shapiro called the Seattle neighborhood takeovers "beyond parody", he also said they were a bunch of stupid communists. He said their attempts to send a message turned into a "raucous comedy" almost immediately. He also said that anarchy is usually a pretext for tyranny, chaos is usually a pretext for terrible people taking over.
I think he is right. - The city of Savannah Georgia is offering to pay the moving expenses of people to move there and take up residence with a limit of around $2000. It is limited to tech professionals and has some stipulations but it is a start in the right direction of trying to attract talented people to the area. They want to create a seeming technology corridor for that area.
Hey, at least they're giving it a shot. - Tesla Motors has announced that it is manufacturing a cheaper lithium iron phosphate battery for its model 3 that is made in China. These batteries don't use cobalt, which is very expensive and this practice is being expanded towards all of their production. This could make the Tesla semi-truck affordable and maybe a good investment.
Maybe. I don't know. - Science Schmience. CO2 levels just were measured at 417 parts per million, which is the highest level recorded in human history and the highest ever found in the record in the past 3,000,000 years but yeah, there's no such thing as global warming.
Who needs science?
Man, we are a bunch of Dumbasses.
Please say a prayer for and send my friend PJ prayers and some love this morning. She and her family are going to need it. Peace.
BigMike
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