Little Thing<\/u>: Mechanical pencils — wow, they’re back, and they’ve really gotten better! They’ve been around since the 50’s, but they were always clunky and nerdy, with thick leads that wrote like an unsharpened wooden pencil. Now they’re light and comfortable and the leads are thin and they don’t break when you press down. You used to have to twist the tip to adjust the point, but now you just click the top. I’m using a Pentel 0.7mm Champ and some Icy’s. It’s nice to see that an old idea can be brought back and finally made to work right.<\/p>\n
Big Thing<\/u>: The Bush Tax-Cut<\/b>. OK, here we go again, Republican voter candy… Let’s chop down the overgrown government forest and put the money back into the average family’s pocket. Yea, fine, but there are a lot of things that need doing by the government these days, like rebuilding our highways (have you driven an Interstate lately? Unless you’re in one of the many slow-down work zones, you’re cannon fodder for an armada of haul-ass double-trailer rigs barreling along at 80 with drivers zonked on uppers, trying to fight off the ZZZs). Or fixing our schools. Or properly training teachers how to teach. Or figuring out how to have homeland security while preserving our personal dignity and Constitutional rights at the same time. Or getting ready for all the medical bills that the Baby Boom generation are going to incur as they reach their Golden Years. Oh, yes, and being the policeman to the world, with all the aircraft carriers and stealth drones and anti-missles and helicopters and laser-guided anti-tank munitions that takes.<\/p>\n
But hey, I can understand why the average Jane and Joe will fight any tax increase idea tooth and nail, and will welcome any tax cut. That’s because, over the past 30 years, average real income has hardly gone up at all; average income after inflation has increased about one-third a percent every year. At the same time, the after-inflation gross national product of the USA has increased on average about 3 percent each year. OK, so where is all this wealth going, if not into the pockets of the average family? Who is pocketing the difference? Well, there was an article in the October 20, 2002 New York Times Magazine by Paul Krugman that gave a rather clear answer. Over the past three decades, the rich have become filthy rich<\/b> (and darn, I wasn’t one of them!). When you look at the winners in terms of real income increases over the past 30 years, the top 10% of families clearly did much better than the rest (and, of course, the bottom 10% got poorer). But then, if you look at the top 1%, they did tremendously better. And if you look at the top 0.1%, they did stupendously better.<\/p>\n
And now comes our President, with a tax cut that promises to benefit the average family around $300 per year (per the Brookings Institution). But, with its carefully crafted provisions to cut taxes on stock dividends and capital gains, the family in the top 10% is going to benefit more than that. And the family in the top 1% saves over $20,000 per year. This tax cut is clearly a gift to the rich (now gee, why would Mr. Bush want to help them? It isn’t because he and his family are rich too, is it?). But it gets the support of the middle class, as it throws some scraps at them. Too bad that the middle class isn’t asking what the ultimate consequences of this little gift to them (and big gift to the mansion set) are going to be. For one thing, there will be an increased federal deficit, causing higher interest rates, which will increase mortgage rates for average homebuyers. For another, there will be cut-backs in school aid, Medicare, highway maintenance, and high-cost, non-intrusive security measures. Not that the rich care; they have Gulfstreams and don’t need to drive the Interstates; they send their kids to private academies, so they don’t care about break-downs in the public schools; they can pay for their own doctors when they get old, and won’t need to wrangle over HMO restrictions; and again, with their Gulfstreams, they don’t need to go thru airport security with the masses.<\/p>\n
Oh well, just a little liberal rant. There are so may conservative rants out there in Blog-land, I thought I’d try to balance things out just a bit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Little Thing: Mechanical pencils — wow, they’re back, and they’ve really gotten better! They’ve been around since the 50’s, but they were always clunky and nerdy, with thick leads that wrote like an unsharpened wooden pencil. Now they’re light and comfortable and the leads are thin and they don’t break when you press down. You […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,7,29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=754"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5838,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754\/revisions\/5838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}