It happened. For the first time ever! Turns out, I'm going to owe Uncle Sam a few sheckles come April.
Oh, I wined. Oh, I looked up and down that damn 1040 form looking for something that may have hinted at a math error or a missed deduction, anything! Nothing. Nada. Nichevo.
Am I the least bit thrilled about this? NO!
Is it going to feel good to write that check in April? NO!
Am I mad as hell and not going to take it anymore? Not a bit.
For all the complaining we the people love to do about taxation, the US of A remains a relatively low tax country. Be that too, this probably comes at our fiscal peril. It's tough to pay for two wars, a stimulus package, bank bailouts, auto-maker bailouts, etc, etc, all on an economy that has 10% unemployment and has seemingly flat-lined. Thank goodness the poor countries of the world are willing to lend us money so we can indulge in these little excesses from time to time.
Do I think that we need to watch what we borrow money for? Absolutely. Much of the aforementioned pork makes me want to commit hari kari. I'm sure I could have a hey-day with the stimulus package if I really looked at it line by line, let alone all the money for defunct auto-makers who haven't rolled out a cutting edge vehicle since the 1970's. (I own a 2004 Chevy BTW, and I am currently examing my options for un-owning the POS and never buying another.) But one thing I don't do is look at my tax bill and think "Damn, I shouldn't have to pay this!"
The fact of the matter is this: Taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized country. Personally, I like public education even though I acknowledge that it isn't perfect. I like my local and state police officers giving tickets to bad drivers, although I know for sure that I don't deserve the ticket they may have given me. I like the highways I drive on, even though I wish there weren't so many damn cars on them. I like having the worlds most bad-ass military protecting me from harm, even though I wish we weren't paying them to hunt down a man with a dialysis machine connected to what must be the worlds longest extention cord running through the mountains of Afghanistan.
I wouldn't give up any of these things if it meant that I had to pay no taxes at all.
According to the Forbes "Tax Misery" index from April 2008, the lowest taxed countries in the world are:
1) Qatar (You know how wonderful those petro-states are!)
2) United Arab Emirates (FYI, if you Google the terms 'UAE' and 'bankrupt' you get 14.8 million hits, as opposed to the 2.4 million you get when you Google 'USA' and 'bankrupt'.)
3) Hong Kong (Hong Kong = China, and China = 3rd most taxed country in the world according to this same article. Does that strike anyone else as odd?)
4) Georgia (A miracle of post-Soviet economic reform, two significant parts of which would rather be part of Russia)
5) Macedonia (They're in NATO now, so we can officially forget about about the fact that they have one of the lowest levels of GDP per capita in Europe)
So, judging by Forbes title, I'm guessing that these 5 countries are the happiest in the world, right? I mean, they are the lowest taxed and all? Well, according to none other than Forbes, in an article released about a week after the first one I mentioned, they list the happiest nations in the world:
1) Denmark (Really, really, high taxes BTW....about 50 percent or so)
2) Switzerland (Like Denmark, not a Forbes Top 5, but pretty high taxes all the same)
3) Austria (See comment about Switzerland, but with a really hot Sound of Music-era Julie Andrews roaming the hill side)
4) Iceland (High taxes AND bankrupt...doesn't sound good to me but to each their own)
5) Finland (See Denmark, but colder)
I'm going to go out on a limb here and, based upon what I read, make an analytical assessment:
According to Forbes magazine, the "Tax Misery" index is a complete and utter misnomer because the some of the worlds highest taxed countries are also the happiest.
I have a theory. You see, in Denmark and Finland and Switzerland and Austria and probably even bankrupt Iceland, there are services that people get that in exchange for their taxes that, for all practical purposes, work about the way they were intended. People get decent, if not cutting edge healthcare. People work short days, and get 5 or 6 weeks of vacation....every year! People get educated, and while the system is more 'socialist' than ours, there is a bit of evidence to indicate that the end product is better. Something tells me that it is those things, NOT low taxes, that make a happy country.
Of course, in the United States, instead healthcare, lots of vacation time and an education that teaches you to think, we get a reanimated General Motors and Chrysler, a gluttonous AIG, and lots of talk about healthcare that we are told will cost an arm that no one really believes will work very well anyway.
Damn. When you put it that way, maybe I should be more upset about my tax bill.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Monday, February 8, 2010
All of the Super, None of the Bowl
As I sit down to write for the first time in several days, I think of the great things that have transpired since my last posting. A great friend spent the week visiting, we spent a day on the town with another friend of ours, and the now legendary Snowpocalypse (a.k.a, Snowmaggedon, a.k.a Keyser Snowze) dumped almost 3 feet of snow in my yard.
I also managed to mark an important anniversary: 10 years since I have sat down and watched an entire football game.
Granted, I have attended a handful of social events that have been football-centric, to include three Superbowl parties in which I left at halftime. However, the last game I watched from start to finish involved the Tampa Bay Buccaneers beating the Oakland Raiders in Superbowl Something or Other.
My revelation: I don't miss it one bit.
Really though, it's not just football. I haven't had a TV that gets channels since July 2000.
Revelation #2: I miss that even less.
I have watched TV several times in the last decade. Everytime my wife and I stay in a hotel, she checks the guide for her beloved HGTV. If not that, then my daughter will turn on Animal Planet or Discovery Channel. On the rare occasion when I have a voice, it's the History Channel (last summer I saw a great show about the history of cheese!) And don't get me started on movies, because I love to watch a good movie. However, TV that involves 500 channels, sucks $100 a months out of my pocket and stuffs commercials into my retina for 8 hours a day, well lets just say that is not a lifestyle choice in my house.
And I have been all the happier for it.
Jump back to that last Superbowl that I watched in January 2000. At that time, and for a number of reasons that I will not go into, I was at a point where my life made me want to cry. In hindsight, it seems pretty sad for a healthy 24 year old man with a brand new degree from the University of Wisconsin who had all of his limbs and wasn't entirely unattractive to feel that way, but it was true.
I am not blaming the TV. I had a number of reasons for feeling that way, and I spent the better part of the next 4 years trying to fix them. But TV was a pretty easy escape at the time, and for a man whose life felt devoid and fruitless, it only made matters worse when a day off was spent doing nothing but staring at a glowing screen and wishing my life was as easy as it was for the characters on "Friends".
Giving up TV was not a conscious choice 10 years ago, it just wasn't feasible. I made an effort to run from my problems only to learn an important lesson: no matter where I go, I always find myself there. So, I tackled the root of my problems (i.e., me) and joined the Army. Call it "group therapy." Needless to say, Army life wasn't conducive to TV.
Sometime in 2004 I got back home from a 16 month trip to the desert. I was married by then, and my wife and I embarked on a month long trip across country. And every night, we would check in our hotel, turn on the TV, and it would hit me: TV is awful. The programming is so absurd and removed from anything that I have ever experienced it's almost insulting. And the commercials somehow managed to be even worse. What's more, those all too familiar feelings of wasting away that lost me sometime after my enlistment, managed to seep back in a bit. I told my wife then that I didn't want to have cable in our house when we got one and, miraculously, she was quite amenable to that.
Don't get the wrong idea about me. I have a TV. I even have a DVD player, and I visit Redbox for one or two movies a week, in addition to the ones already owned. I love movies as both an artform and a great source of entertainment. They also have a distinct advantage over TV: 1) No commercials, and 2) when it's over, I don't channel surf looking for something else to watch. As a result, I can say that I spend about 4 to 10 hours a week in front of the television. No commercials. No surfing.
I entered the last decade as an emotional basketcase. No direction, no ideas, and no hope for bettering myself. Somehow, I've emerged from it confident, capable, and most importantly, happy. Is this because I ditched TV? No, I have alot of things to thank for that. However, I can't help but think of the things I do since I gave it up. I find that I tend to spend my time in ways that, to me, are much more fruitful. I play my guitar more. I write more. More importantly, the time I spend with my family just feels better. We talk, eat our meals together, play games. Yeah, sometimes we even watch movies together. I wish I could say that American Idol has nothing on any of that, but to be honest, I have never watched it, so I really don't know.
I can't stress enough how much I look forward to not watching the Superbowl next year too.
I also managed to mark an important anniversary: 10 years since I have sat down and watched an entire football game.
Granted, I have attended a handful of social events that have been football-centric, to include three Superbowl parties in which I left at halftime. However, the last game I watched from start to finish involved the Tampa Bay Buccaneers beating the Oakland Raiders in Superbowl Something or Other.
My revelation: I don't miss it one bit.
Really though, it's not just football. I haven't had a TV that gets channels since July 2000.
Revelation #2: I miss that even less.
I have watched TV several times in the last decade. Everytime my wife and I stay in a hotel, she checks the guide for her beloved HGTV. If not that, then my daughter will turn on Animal Planet or Discovery Channel. On the rare occasion when I have a voice, it's the History Channel (last summer I saw a great show about the history of cheese!) And don't get me started on movies, because I love to watch a good movie. However, TV that involves 500 channels, sucks $100 a months out of my pocket and stuffs commercials into my retina for 8 hours a day, well lets just say that is not a lifestyle choice in my house.
And I have been all the happier for it.
Jump back to that last Superbowl that I watched in January 2000. At that time, and for a number of reasons that I will not go into, I was at a point where my life made me want to cry. In hindsight, it seems pretty sad for a healthy 24 year old man with a brand new degree from the University of Wisconsin who had all of his limbs and wasn't entirely unattractive to feel that way, but it was true.
I am not blaming the TV. I had a number of reasons for feeling that way, and I spent the better part of the next 4 years trying to fix them. But TV was a pretty easy escape at the time, and for a man whose life felt devoid and fruitless, it only made matters worse when a day off was spent doing nothing but staring at a glowing screen and wishing my life was as easy as it was for the characters on "Friends".
Giving up TV was not a conscious choice 10 years ago, it just wasn't feasible. I made an effort to run from my problems only to learn an important lesson: no matter where I go, I always find myself there. So, I tackled the root of my problems (i.e., me) and joined the Army. Call it "group therapy." Needless to say, Army life wasn't conducive to TV.
Sometime in 2004 I got back home from a 16 month trip to the desert. I was married by then, and my wife and I embarked on a month long trip across country. And every night, we would check in our hotel, turn on the TV, and it would hit me: TV is awful. The programming is so absurd and removed from anything that I have ever experienced it's almost insulting. And the commercials somehow managed to be even worse. What's more, those all too familiar feelings of wasting away that lost me sometime after my enlistment, managed to seep back in a bit. I told my wife then that I didn't want to have cable in our house when we got one and, miraculously, she was quite amenable to that.
Don't get the wrong idea about me. I have a TV. I even have a DVD player, and I visit Redbox for one or two movies a week, in addition to the ones already owned. I love movies as both an artform and a great source of entertainment. They also have a distinct advantage over TV: 1) No commercials, and 2) when it's over, I don't channel surf looking for something else to watch. As a result, I can say that I spend about 4 to 10 hours a week in front of the television. No commercials. No surfing.
I entered the last decade as an emotional basketcase. No direction, no ideas, and no hope for bettering myself. Somehow, I've emerged from it confident, capable, and most importantly, happy. Is this because I ditched TV? No, I have alot of things to thank for that. However, I can't help but think of the things I do since I gave it up. I find that I tend to spend my time in ways that, to me, are much more fruitful. I play my guitar more. I write more. More importantly, the time I spend with my family just feels better. We talk, eat our meals together, play games. Yeah, sometimes we even watch movies together. I wish I could say that American Idol has nothing on any of that, but to be honest, I have never watched it, so I really don't know.
I can't stress enough how much I look forward to not watching the Superbowl next year too.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Food Fight?
It appears Whole Foods has decided to take a unique approach to promoting a healthy lifestyle among it's employees: Weigh less? Pay less!
To save you from the advert, I'll sum up the video: Whole Foods employees will receive a discount of 22 to 30 percent based upon their Body Mass Index. The goal: improve employee health and cut down company medical care costs. The problem: Some people think its discriminatory against the obese.
To be honest, I don't recall having ever seen an obese person in Whole Foods. I guess that's besides the point.
As a bleeding heart liberal-tarian, I feel compelled to say that I am against discrimination of any sort, but I have to admit, I have some caveats to that. My caveats are this: what ever it is you are or are doing shouldn't impact others or society in any way. Once your way of life starts to impose on somebody else, a little discrimination may be in order for you.
I can hear the birds chirping, "But, obesity doesn't harm anybody but the person who is obese."
I beg to differ.
First off, I will grant that for some people, obesity is beyond their control. I know that. I am aware. However, for the vast majority of people who are obese, it is not the result of any medical condition, but the culmination of countless lifestyle choices. Most of these choices concern a lifestyle of limited activity combined with unhealthy eating habits. I'm sure most of you are adults, and you live in a free country, and I not only support your right to eat portion sizes bigger than your head, but also your right to put syrup on french fries, mayonaisse on twinkies, and to deep-fry Coca-cola. Heck, I even devoted several years of military service to protect your right to do those things.
Now, do you have health insurance? If your employed full-time, chances are you do. If not, chances are good you that you wish you were. I recently filled out some employer sponsored health care forms and I was asked about a handful of things: Do you smoke? What is your medical history? Your family's medical history? Etc. Etc. Alot of questions are asked, but the absence of a few questions is what interests me the most. Like these: What did you have for dinner last night? What is your Body Mass Index? How many calories do you consume, on average, a day? How much exercise do you get during the day?
This second list of questions are every bit as important to your overall health as the first, if not more. Your body is built on what you put into it, and runs off of the fuel you give it. If your diet is high in sugar, refined carbohydrates, salt, preservatives, and whatever the hell it is those fast food restaurants put in their meat, you are setting yourself up for health problems.
How does that infringe upon me? Well, because insurance companies don't ask you those questions that I pointed out, I can't get a 15% percent "I'll just have a salad" discount, even though I made a responsible choice for my body. My healthcare costs are higher because of the poor choices made by obese people.
Think of it this way: If you are obese, lifting a cheesburger up to your lips is no different than smoking.
With the national health care debate raging, it shocks me how much actual health is not discussed. Maybe health care costs wouldn't be rising so quickly if the food most Americans ate wasn't processed, salted and sugared for taste, preserved, wrapped in a box, and given a shelf life of several weeks to several months. Maybe health care costs would be lower if exercise bikes were as plentiful at my work place as candy and soda machines were.
I am in favor of national medical coverage...in theory. It's the implementation and cost that bothers me. Maybe if we focused on the 'health' and less on the 'care', we could eliminate alot of the costs assocaited with poor lifestyle choices, and concentrate our efforts on legitmate health problems. That is a plan for national medical coverage that I can support.
To save you from the advert, I'll sum up the video: Whole Foods employees will receive a discount of 22 to 30 percent based upon their Body Mass Index. The goal: improve employee health and cut down company medical care costs. The problem: Some people think its discriminatory against the obese.
To be honest, I don't recall having ever seen an obese person in Whole Foods. I guess that's besides the point.
As a bleeding heart liberal-tarian, I feel compelled to say that I am against discrimination of any sort, but I have to admit, I have some caveats to that. My caveats are this: what ever it is you are or are doing shouldn't impact others or society in any way. Once your way of life starts to impose on somebody else, a little discrimination may be in order for you.
I can hear the birds chirping, "But, obesity doesn't harm anybody but the person who is obese."
I beg to differ.
First off, I will grant that for some people, obesity is beyond their control. I know that. I am aware. However, for the vast majority of people who are obese, it is not the result of any medical condition, but the culmination of countless lifestyle choices. Most of these choices concern a lifestyle of limited activity combined with unhealthy eating habits. I'm sure most of you are adults, and you live in a free country, and I not only support your right to eat portion sizes bigger than your head, but also your right to put syrup on french fries, mayonaisse on twinkies, and to deep-fry Coca-cola. Heck, I even devoted several years of military service to protect your right to do those things.
Now, do you have health insurance? If your employed full-time, chances are you do. If not, chances are good you that you wish you were. I recently filled out some employer sponsored health care forms and I was asked about a handful of things: Do you smoke? What is your medical history? Your family's medical history? Etc. Etc. Alot of questions are asked, but the absence of a few questions is what interests me the most. Like these: What did you have for dinner last night? What is your Body Mass Index? How many calories do you consume, on average, a day? How much exercise do you get during the day?
This second list of questions are every bit as important to your overall health as the first, if not more. Your body is built on what you put into it, and runs off of the fuel you give it. If your diet is high in sugar, refined carbohydrates, salt, preservatives, and whatever the hell it is those fast food restaurants put in their meat, you are setting yourself up for health problems.
How does that infringe upon me? Well, because insurance companies don't ask you those questions that I pointed out, I can't get a 15% percent "I'll just have a salad" discount, even though I made a responsible choice for my body. My healthcare costs are higher because of the poor choices made by obese people.
Think of it this way: If you are obese, lifting a cheesburger up to your lips is no different than smoking.
With the national health care debate raging, it shocks me how much actual health is not discussed. Maybe health care costs wouldn't be rising so quickly if the food most Americans ate wasn't processed, salted and sugared for taste, preserved, wrapped in a box, and given a shelf life of several weeks to several months. Maybe health care costs would be lower if exercise bikes were as plentiful at my work place as candy and soda machines were.
I am in favor of national medical coverage...in theory. It's the implementation and cost that bothers me. Maybe if we focused on the 'health' and less on the 'care', we could eliminate alot of the costs assocaited with poor lifestyle choices, and concentrate our efforts on legitmate health problems. That is a plan for national medical coverage that I can support.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Hormone Therapy
OK, I admit it. I'm a man. Put the word 'sex' in a title, and I'll probably look at it. You can check out the most recent example, an article on CNN.com entitled "Inventor Unveils $7,000 Talking Sex Robot" (http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/01/sex.robot/index.html?hpt=T2)
Have you read it yet? I have. Twice already. It is forcing me to hold that precarious balance between the knee jerk laugh reaction "How lame!" with the ever-present hump-it-all man instinct that makes me wonder if it's worth it.
I don't know. I'm a very happily married man and completely uneducated in the going rates, but I would imagine $7,000 would buy you alot of prostitutes. Maybe if you can get a nice used one from under 2...
Seriously, I'm kidding. I won't even buy a used car for crying out loud. But, what gets me most about Roxxxy is that one of our best and brightest (okay, that's an assumption, but stay with me here) dedicated a significant part of his life creating her and her Sybil-inspired personalities Frigid Farrah and Wild Wendy (I'm assuming the existence of Loose Lucy, Kinky Katy, and Missionary Mary as well, although the article doesn't talk about them).
Flashback to the Stanley Kubrick film 2001. (For some of you, this may require an acid flashback, which I'm sure must of made that movie a whole lot better.) In 1969, when that movie was made, people saw the dawn of the 21st century as a time of interplanetary travel, space stations, people going for nice little strolls on the moon, and computers capable of homicide.
Sorry. Not in this reality. Instead, ten years into the century and we are cutting NASA's budget so we can install body scanners in airports. The last time we went to the moon? About the same time that crappy movie was made.
So what's my point? Simply put, we sure haven't come that far in 40 years. Oh sure, I can put my entire music collection onto a computer the size of a credit card. I can get on my computer and type up this rant so anywhere between 4 and 4 million people can click a button and read it. I can even access damn near any TV show I can dream of with a few clicks of a mouse.
No trips to the moon for me though, I'm afraid.
No solar energy. At least not enough worth mentioning.
No car that gets 250 mpg and runs on urine.
When I hear people talk about how America is loosing it's competitive edge, it's not because of immigrants, or unions, or taxes, or Barack Obama. It's because we have quit aiming for the stars and have content ourselves to aim for the genitalia. Scientific exploration with no commercial value? There's no money in that. But invent a pill that turns a 90 year old penis into a chiseling tool and you got yourself a fortune.
And seriously, who needs Roxxy anyway. Amsterdam is awesome this time of year.
Have you read it yet? I have. Twice already. It is forcing me to hold that precarious balance between the knee jerk laugh reaction "How lame!" with the ever-present hump-it-all man instinct that makes me wonder if it's worth it.
I don't know. I'm a very happily married man and completely uneducated in the going rates, but I would imagine $7,000 would buy you alot of prostitutes. Maybe if you can get a nice used one from under 2...
Seriously, I'm kidding. I won't even buy a used car for crying out loud. But, what gets me most about Roxxxy is that one of our best and brightest (okay, that's an assumption, but stay with me here) dedicated a significant part of his life creating her and her Sybil-inspired personalities Frigid Farrah and Wild Wendy (I'm assuming the existence of Loose Lucy, Kinky Katy, and Missionary Mary as well, although the article doesn't talk about them).
Flashback to the Stanley Kubrick film 2001. (For some of you, this may require an acid flashback, which I'm sure must of made that movie a whole lot better.) In 1969, when that movie was made, people saw the dawn of the 21st century as a time of interplanetary travel, space stations, people going for nice little strolls on the moon, and computers capable of homicide.
Sorry. Not in this reality. Instead, ten years into the century and we are cutting NASA's budget so we can install body scanners in airports. The last time we went to the moon? About the same time that crappy movie was made.
So what's my point? Simply put, we sure haven't come that far in 40 years. Oh sure, I can put my entire music collection onto a computer the size of a credit card. I can get on my computer and type up this rant so anywhere between 4 and 4 million people can click a button and read it. I can even access damn near any TV show I can dream of with a few clicks of a mouse.
No trips to the moon for me though, I'm afraid.
No solar energy. At least not enough worth mentioning.
No car that gets 250 mpg and runs on urine.
When I hear people talk about how America is loosing it's competitive edge, it's not because of immigrants, or unions, or taxes, or Barack Obama. It's because we have quit aiming for the stars and have content ourselves to aim for the genitalia. Scientific exploration with no commercial value? There's no money in that. But invent a pill that turns a 90 year old penis into a chiseling tool and you got yourself a fortune.
And seriously, who needs Roxxy anyway. Amsterdam is awesome this time of year.
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