American Manifesto Part Eight: Income Taxes part Two

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American Manifesto Part Eight: Income Taxes part Two

Who can afford Kids?

We should cap the additional funding received for additional children born at one additional child after a person applies for financial assistance and cap it at two total.  This can be tracked through links in the healthcare system.  I think it is morally wrong to value one person’s child over another.  Why does the entire middle class of America torment a decision to afford the luxury of having a child or two children because the additional financial impact on our family unit’s resources, when someone subsidizing their financial well being off of that same family have the benefit of a counter-intuitive financial correlation?  Children are $200,000 to get to eighteen luxury goods.  Men are electing vasectomies to turn into middle class eunuchs to afford retirement.  The middle class America offspring ratio is plummeting.

If you cannot handle abortion, then slap on a rubber or pay for your own kid.  If you cannot resist sexual urges tubal ligation should be mandated to continue subsidies on the first child and the second you are on your own.  If a woman is under eighteen, tubal ligation should be mandated to begin subsidy of the first child.  No one is forcing a tax subsidy, but hard choices need to be a mutual burden correlated with reality.

For under eighteen, non-high school graduates enrollment in a GED program or high school should be required to continue subsidy, with organized child care as part of the subsidy.  We have over a sixteen trillion dollar deficit that does not even count social security, Medicare or Medicaid except for current payments due.  The ark is full.  We spent the candy money on bombs.  If you want help, we need better rules that promote self-sufficiency.

This is misguided compassion.  We are trading one victim for another.  It is not a question of cruelty.  It is being honest and making a choice.  The reality of America is that the same hypocritical conservative politicians condemning a woman’s right to choose the option of abortion are blowing holes in the welfare system to feed the child the parents probably knew they could not afford to feed in the first place, but felt a human need to connect penis and vagina.  Nobody is perfect.  We need to converse as adults, not like embankments of judgmental puritans versus entitled freeloaders.  Those are fringes that we need to tell to go argue the fuck outside, so the adults can talk.  Science should trump religion.  Math should trump debt.

Under their breaths the Friedman-curmudgeon is barking under a bible-belt, “Psssp, it would be cheaper if we just helped the woman out with funding her abortion.”  An abortion costs about as much as a microwave.  A fully-subsidized lifetime welfare baby costs about as much as building a house.  But nobody has the balls to say that.  Nobody has the gumption to explain the macro-level sociological impact of our over-religious condemnation on the taxpayers.  We would rather bitch like Chicken Little from our beak and our egg-hole. 

The crass reality is taxpayer-funded voluntary abortions would be a fiscal bargain.  Taxpayer funded voluntary prophylactic shots, I.U.D’s, Plan B pills and vasectomies are reasonable win/win solution for people who wanted to fuck, but are defaulting to taxpayers for the consequences.  Nobody should make anybody get an abortion or a vasectomy, but if you want other people to pay for your offspring (man or woman) then yes guys should be required to get vasectomies too.  I would go so far is if a woman has a child and is requesting government assistance, a man who is denying paternity should be legally mandated to a paternity test.  If that child is an additional child under the equation described earlier for the mother, then the father should be required to get a vasectomy and the mother should be required to get tubal ligation before government funding should commence.  Both are reversible, having an abortion or a child is a choice.  A pre-birth arranged private adoption without taxpayer subsidization would also be an alternative to the surgeries.  

The taxpayer burden for the reality of the life decisions of those parents is floating around the room like a hot potato.  That potato should in each and every case be held by the parents, because they like as we discussed in the section on prisons, are the only party in the equation of manipulating the goal in the equal to increase self-sufficiency. 

Wearing a rubber makes infinitely more sense for other health reasons, but Generation X’s ability to talk about sex in an open manner is an asset our parent’s helped win for us.  We need to wield it to our collective benefit. 

Disproportionate population growth to the poor is an integral negative correlated variable to the world’s fiscal debt.  That may be a harsh taboo topic, but it is true.  People like and need to fuck.  It really is that simple.  All we can do is put the contraceptive options and education out there in a logical and efficient manner.  The first step is acknowledging our animalistic nature over cerebral elitism propagated through religion and tradition and own up to what we all do. 

Abortion and adoption are options for the parents facing an increased personal family cost without increased government subsidization of their personal revenue streams.  But when we treat the two choices like a Democrat-Republican war where one side has to win we miss the point at our own determent.

That reality should affect the couple’s conscious initial decision to conceive the child in the first place, just as it does for Americans not on governmental assistance.  If people want to have more kids, people should work to earn more financial resources to support their offspring.  That is basic universal family planning.  Designing a system to override this decision making process defies logical responsibility evolved by nature to ensure survival of the species.  On the flip side, a single-payer medical system needs to fund birth control pills, I.U.D.’s, abortion, adoption, and other realistic avenues to empower potential parents to practice this form of “preventative care.”  A universal system is needed to track the data as a control measure of vasectomies and tubal ligations and the reversal of those procedures. 

We can say, “Earn a living up to this logical point.  We are not going to remove assistance.  In fact we will pay you to participate in this system as long as you file with the IRS.  In some cases we may even pay you more for doing so than if you do not, as we will discuss later regarding potential food or housing contingent subsidies. 

The negative income tax paid should not be paid directly.  As mentioned earlier, the money could be entirely dedicated to either food or housing assistance electronically transferred to the provider.  Taxpayer’s deserve an effective use of our money through modern technology to control how dollars are dispersed to address survival needs of the poor, rather than “rent” money spent on Budweiser or a scratch-off ticket.

Food:     As discussed in part one, the primary needs of a human being that the government should be paying for are health and security.  In most cases the American people should not be paying for people’s food due to inherent flaws.  However, there is a huge need for that resource that should not be overlooked entirely.  

Any benefit we provide has to be focused towards the goal of temporal subsidization to prevent famine with a true path of transition.  We should not encourage what we have now which is a debit card to buy almost anything you want at Wal-Mart.  Look at famine in Somalia and look at America.  There is a tragic difference between famine and being limited to the store brand.  Our misguided reckless generosity of what is purchasable causes others Americans to starve.  Every tax dollar is connected.

We could merge or adapt the state food-stamp systems into a sliding-dollar value inside a negative federal income tax payment.  We can restrict what can be purchased with those debit cards to specific qualifying and labeled SKU codes in grocery stores on a national level contracted between the grocer, food suppliers, manufacturers, farmers, and the government based on pre-designated food categories based on the nutritional needs and food supplies to assist the government and the vendor.  

Computer database bar code and SKU technology could track thousands of consumer goods in the areas of produce, boxed goods, meat and other household goods which could restrict purchases to commodity-style goods to a public bid process on per weight price thresholds and nutritional minimums according to the contracts with the vendors and the government to allow the vendors to accept the food assistance debit-card payments. 

This database could be updated on a state or national level on a daily basis.  The places where prices are marked on grocery store shelves and the products themselves could be labeled with a standardized qualification tagging system.  This way food companies can create brands to market to these purchasers and at the same time the American taxpayer can institute a common-sense streamlined rotating menu of choices into the subsidization of other people’s food budgets.  

As mentioned earlier, school boards could facilitate lunch and breakfast programs by acquiring healthier foods at lower costs to students.  If we change current corn and soybean subsidies and consider seasonal fruit and vegetable subsidies for local production facilities as an integrated subcomponent then maybe broccoli could compete with nutritionally-void synthetic food.  The major reason being, the cost of the “fake-food” is paid by taxpayers through health care costs of the poor.  

Stores who chose not to integrate with this technology would no longer be able to participate in this type of program.  But every publically-traded food retail outlet from Wal-Mart, Target, Win Dixie to Kroger certainly would be on board to retain a portion of the massive profits they currently achieve off of the American taxpayer in currently operated welfare programs which function with much less forethought or restrictions other than alcohol, tobacco, or dog food. 

The products themselves may very well parallel current in-store brands and allow for the American taxpayer to be kind-hearted to those in need without being unfair to ourselves and potentially unfair to the children these benefits are intended to feed by restricting those dollars to healthier and cost effective choices.  This way we are not paying for candy, steaks or other higher cost items that are above the level of necessities on budgets subsidized by the American people.  

We could even offer a weekly meal-basket program of pre-assembled goods from national grocers for Americans to pick up either in store or at shelters or churches based on a digital use of their card to reduce costs to taxpayers, manage inventory of grocers and assist people without personal transportation.  

Some states have taken certain measures to restrict what can be purchased with these cards, but there needs to a consensus in the process to focus on value for the public dollar combined with nutritional value to the consumer and his or her family including how the food gets to the shelf.  These computer markets could also be adapted to seasonal food supplies in produce to take advantages of local surpluses at lower costs to get the American people the most value for our tax dollars and integrate with federal funding in the Department of Agriculture.

In a national system suppliers could interface available food with overages in internal inventories to balance out potentially soon to be spoiled food with daily demand.  Certainly freshness standards would need to comply with Food and Drug Administration laws, but a dynamic system could help ensure that when a hungry family goes to use their assistance card there is available food on the shelf of local retailers, which in some cases could be restricted to being purchased only with the government debit cards to match supply and demand in designated instances. 

The qualification for this process would now be coordinated through filing a federal tax return, and would link back to purchases only in certain zip codes coordinated with that filers’ address as a fraud mechanism.  We could implement a biometric fingerprint reader into the payment mechanism in the future if the technology were affordable or deemed warranted. 

We could even implement a wire transfer to debit card bonus system for participants partaking in locally organized once a week meals and cooking classes to teach participants how to cook and prepare foods that the program supports.  Community centers could integrate into the supply chain.  Seniors and AARP volunteers could teach younger Americans how to cook by incentivizing both ends of the equation with additional food supplies dispensed in the class.  We could give citizens more buying power for eating healthier.  We could also incentivize local farmers to integrate into the supply chains to fuel local produce supplies.

Simple collective actions utilizing free market principles in terms of the instruction end could dispense food and knowledge on the output end to spread the value of the tax dollars to more consumers.  The more America cooks and eats in our homes, the healthier we are, the lower our food costs are, and to a degree the family unit probably becomes more solidified.  McDonald’s hedges in the opposite direction. 

The debit card is used as a supplement, not as a sole source use of food.  What is poor in America compared to third world countries?  People deserve help in hard times.  All people deserve to eat.  There is a huge difference between restricting our assistance to efficient nutritional choices at a reasonable cost than an open system more susceptible to fraud.  With a more restricted system we can help more people with fewer dollars.  Nowhere in this equation do we include Coca Cola, fruit roll ups and frozen pizza’s, but somehow our government does.  Big Data controls provide less costly operational assurances. 

Global poverty focuses on basic necessities.  People are bending bones and pleading for fucking drinking water.  We are spoiled enough to demand free cell phones.  When Maslow’s base level of needs is met we are lucky enough to think on higher levels.  When humans have no water, no power and clenching a gun under our pillow we have no time for education.  America needs to reprioritize and recognize why people die trying to get into our country.  We need to shed the spoiled fatty layers that have accumulated from our forgetful indolence. 

Poverty in America is centered in the hopelessness of a void of productive purpose.  The majority of people want an avenue to make honest ends meet.  When a parent is working two minimum-wage jobs to try, that person should get more of our help to meet a threshold, not less.  Incentivize the system to help people sustain their lives; stay off of unemployment for having the real jobs America has to offer to our working poor, to work towards sustainable housing, and available adult education that can take place via the internet or digital classroom learning laboratories. 

By putting out those public dollars into mortgage down payments and educational accreditations on the front end to people who show a moderate, but not excessive W-2 income, we would be growing a self-sustaining taxpayer who will in essence repay what he or she has taken.  This taxpayer will be a net benefit over the course of his or her lifetime rather than a drain.  We could also forgive portions of college debt as described earlier on a lottery basis in targeted industries to address this issue.

This comes at the expense of the people who do not want to or have messed up their lives so badly that they have no feasible skills of productivity.  This also comes from taxing the wealthier members of our society more and eliminating tax loop holes and inefficient deductions.  Funds are not infinite.  No matter what program we do offer we can not help everybody.  

We do not now.  We have never done it.  We will always have people fall through the cracks.  At least this way we are offering a pathway to potential self-sufficiency where as now we offer dependency on the taxpayers to sustain a voting block. 

Housing

The Department of Housing and Urban Development or H.U.D. is a bureaucracy full of disorganization unclear about what the department wants to do and how it is going to get there, primarily because there is no one solution.  From my experiences with working with H.U.D. to try to assist lower level governmental and subsidized private entities in filing their reports, H.U.D. like a lot of federal bureaucracies changes its requirements frequently based on pipeline mandates.  Most levels refuse to provide a clear acknowledgement of what is permissible or what exactly is required, because nobody wants to claim the authority of the responsibility for being “wrong.”  

H.U.D. funds Section Eight housing which is supposed to inter mix people on governmental assistance with home owners.  H.U.D. funds massive housing projects.  H.U.D. funds privately-owned apartment complexes rented to “qualifying” individuals.  Is there a better way of providing housing for people, I am not sure.  I am not an expert.  Although sometimes, I think a straight up give-away housing lottery to people with lower to moderate incomes capable of paying the taxes and insurance would be more productive, to turn paycheck to paycheck lives into middle class Americans.

I think the concept of habitat for humanity is pretty effective at combining an individual’s sweat equity into subsidization.  Would it be out of the question for the government to transition people under H.U.D. willing to put in the required sweat equity into houses or apartments like this or improving, repairing, or maintaining designated homes or government facilities?  What if that sweat-equity purchased virtually lottery tickets in city-based housing lotteries?

Poor people in third world countries would probably be running to sign up for a way to assist in their own way out of homelessness.  In America we appear to wait for the keys to be handed to us in too many instances.  H.U.D. also funds a massive amount of housing assistance for seniors where sweat-equity would not be feasible.

Long run solutions should focus on building permanent homes for people rather than paying rent.  Temporal solutions to problems of permanence fly in the face of logic.  The current form of rental assistance is a perpetual temporal solution.  We like to say that housing assistance in America is transitional, but too often people are born, raised and die in public or publically-subsidized housing because the system never encourages a person to fend for himself or it severely drops a person when she needs the assistance the most for trying to transition by increasing her earnings.  Often public-housing projects are damned by the location and commerce of the non-tax integrated criminalized markets created by the idiotic drug war. 

America is currently a nation under foreclosure.  We have banks owning herds of “toxic asset” mortgages on homes that people could never afford often guaranteed by taxpayers through FNMA.  We have H.U.D. transitioning away from housing projects and into more diversified locations.  Most people just want a helping hand.  Like the prison system, we need to focus on the transition process for those that want to work towards self-sufficiency.   Maybe we do that more than I realize, but it doesn’t feel like it.

For those unwilling to work, but proven to be physically and mentally capable, by not making a case for themselves that is accepted by H.U.D., we should make total-subsidized housing temporary.  It may seem cold-hearted, but I can not really see how in that scenario it is not fair on a macro level given limited resources.  Tenements don’t work.  They are more of a necessary burden.  Maybe there is no escape, but discussing alternatives could help. 

Contributing to building an individual’s future home and someone else’s house to live in governmental housing as a prerequisite to receive funding seems like a plausible mandatory prerequisite for capable Americans, particularly those also unemployed.  Child care could be provided and assisting with child care could be an alternative form of mandatory work-based assistance to facilitate the program.  

If we are not out interviewing for a job, training in a digital career development center, assisting with child care beyond our own child who otherwise would not be in school, or some other plausible alternative role then our ass better be picking up a hammer or a paint roller or America is not offering us housing assistance.  So many people are seeking that job, or paying off the debt for feckless training; at least participating in building a house is something to do.  But then again all the foreclosed homes are just sitting there empty.  Do we really need more homes?  The root issue is the available self-sustaining jobs for a lower-range IQ, non-college educated individuals.

I do not understand how America does not see that by fostering an unending system of dependency and victimization in our public assistance programs we are exacerbating the funds we could use to help the people who are asking for a hand up by continually to support those who are looking for a hand out.  Who is the true victim?  The problem is usurping the cycle of debt.  

One avenue of transition could be that after x number of months of fully-subsidized housing the American people would require someone to transition to depositing money to build up a down payment for a permanent house every month into a government security as a pre-tax payroll deduction.  The individual is not given a carte blanche to stay without working towards a path of self-sufficiency.   

One way to look at it is we have so many people who need help, and only so much money.  So we kick one family out that was not willing to abide by the set of rules over the given period of time and we put another family in that is.  If voters never hear about the second family and their problems who aren’t being helped and only focus on the family with the “eviction,” then we are classically narrow-sighted.  We have a seemingly unending line of need.

The users of this form of assistance obtain help with their permanent housing solution, but they are working.  Most of the people on government assistance work now.  Like Mos Def said, “Ends don’t meet where the arms can’t reach, mean streets even when its free it ain’t cheap, on going saga terminal diagnosis, basic survival requires super heroics.”  Quit judging.  Use math and facilitate minimum wage employment to help elevate Americans towards the middle class. 

If the government is paying for our education, healthcare, and part of our housing and food, we should be able to get a job and work towards owning our own house or apartment.  It may be a shit-job, but that down payment could go into a privately purchased home or to transitioning into a habitat for humanity type house that the government and the individual worked towards creating together.  Non profits could also be encouraged as volunteer teams.  

We help the people who want to help themselves.  We could also integrate a matching or direct payment by the government towards the fifteen to twenty percent equity threshold for a housing down payment.  This makes far more sense than an $8,000 first time home buyer credit because it correlates the size of the home to the income stream of the American taxpayer.  The program is not assisting someone to buy more house than what they can afford and perpetuating the current mortgage crisis. 

The way to fund the government’s contribution is to use that negative income tax payment.  If the person elects to participate, part of their negative income tax payment will be applied plus an additional amount.  If a negative income tax payment would have been $5,000. A participant may get $6,500 if we put the funds into the registered account for a down-payment with a qualified financial institution.  

We could start a penalty withdrawal system like on IRA’s or simply restrict withdrawals.  We can bid installers for building products and services like: siding, carpet, roofers, tile, plumbers, electricians and framers on a contract basis.  Volunteer teams can help a community member build a home.  That family is required to put in x hours on a neighbor’s home, remodeling some formerly foreclosed house or building a new one.  

The government could assist this coordinated effort by establishing a standardized system for building these types of homes, with set floor plans that are environmentally friendly, cost effective and utilize products made and manufactured in America.  The government could create standardized classes for live and digital instruction in its senior high school, junior college systems and trade schools on apprenticeships in these professions and offer class credit for participating on these products.  

Video conferencing and video teaching presentations could even be coordinated to assist students with step by step guided instruction on how to work on these exact models.  As discussed earlier in the education section, if we can shed ourselves of this ambiguous definition of what it means to be educated through a bachelor’s degree in fill in the blank in this country, we can embrace alternative work and life skills to support ourselves and provide our own daily bread.  If we had the Facebook of voting, as discussed under the section on democracy, as a forum portal to connect volunteering in communities, there would probably also be plenty of people who just want to learn simple construction skills or help if we had a digital infrastructure to link the power and energy of our interdependent humanity. 

The government could also contract with companies that already exist to have pre-built manufactured homes delivered in sections and brought to the lots purchased with the down payment money.  We could utilize private and governmental facilities.  

We could integrate ex-prison labor.  We can have prisoners assemble components for this process while in prison.  Wouldn’t it make sense for the American government to utilize prisoners willing to work towards a better life to work on skills to build houses at a cheaper labor cost for the American taxpayer to provide a home to reduce the housing assistance costs for the American taxpayer?  

There are complications by giving prisoners access to tools and other potential weapons inside prison, but reorganized specialized prisons, as discussed earlier, can coordinate search procedures for entering and exiting work areas, similar to airport security devices.  When we treat a prisoner like a human being rather than a rat and display morality to achieve a potentially untaught morality, moral and social reformation is possible.  At minimum we could conduct training for building these homes inside prisons to transition parolees into external facilities once paroled.  People want a purpose, especially men. 

Other forms of labor similar to manufacturing-type activities currently occur in some of our nation’s prisons.  It is imperative that these prisoners are not treated as surrogate slaves, by showing them a bridge between how participation in these programs can lead to shortened sentences and most importantly life and work skills to gainful employment once outside of prison walls.  A restricted mortgage-down payment account for a family is one way to do that, even for lifers to help relatives.  We are providing compensation with a check and balance.

We can also use some of the millions of foreclosed homes as part of this equation before building.  The massive over inventory could integrate former home owners and the working poor to match subsidized mortgage down payment programs to transition these vacant homes back into occupied and tax integrated America.

One additional potential program could be a housing lottery coordinated with the FNMA housing assets held by the government, which working participants in habitat-for-humanity-type remodeling, restoration and building programs described earlier would be automatically placed in based on their sweat equity and having a moderate earned W-2 income to validate an ability to pay taxes and insurance.  There is no way every worker in the habitat-for-humanity-type program would be promised a home.  That would be infeasible.  However a lottery and the allure of potential pseudo-celebrity may encourage more broad-based participation.   The government could air a reality show on the announcements like “Extreme Makeover Home Addition” where America can see the faces of those looking for a hand-up.  The taxpayers can profit off the commercial advertising to assist in funding the program. 

We as taxpayers are spending millions to pay other people’s rent and utility bills.  Why not take dollars out of that process and establish a program of transition.  That, or quit buying bombers.  It would be like relieving the pressure on a tub of trapped energy.  There would a huge number of people in this country who would relish the opportunity to stand on their own feet and own their own home.  Others lack the inertia to be anything but renters for life, but at least we can focus our dollars as prudent parents.

We are not building $300,000 homes or fancy houses.  We can build well-built but very standardized homes that are owned.  The homes would be owned by people that were given the time to transition from nothing into something.  This will help shift the section-eight dollars into mortgage payments paid by new taxpayers.  

The government does not want to own houses or apartments.  Let the individual Americans applying for these types of programs find the property integrated with normal neighborhoods for this type of endeavor.  Some will be mixed in other neighborhoods, but a lot probably will end up aggregated near cheaper land.  The American people want their fellow man to value his or her existence.  A man with nothing to lose is dangerous to us all. 

These neighborhoods will probably be poor.  Traditional American home buyers probably may not want to live in these neighborhoods because of crime and property value concerns.  There is the potential to replicate former housing projects concentrating problems on a statistical sociological level that have proven to be detrimental based on magnetism towards the lowest common denominator.  However they are also concentrations of community.  The required work ethic is an entry barrier that has the power to usurp the lethargy of indolence.

Everyone that lives in such a preplanned neighborhood had to be connected with the home owner who put in sweat-equity and worked that path to transitioning.  We could put restrictions on the sale of the homes that a portion of the dollars have to go back to the government or the computed present value of the tax dollars go back to the government, to where a former assistance recipient only retains a fair portion of the value of the home upon exiting.  

This keeps people from using the houses to make quick dollars at the expense of the nature of the neighborhood.  The value of such a neighborhood is that people are working to be able to get into it, and like the appeal of public schools want that threshold of assurance for investing into it.  If we allow people to conduct private sales and profit off taxpayers, then we are doing so at the cost of this intangible asset of social good that taxpayers have invested. 

If we divide the negative income tax payment into portions for digital wire transfer only food assistance and housing assistance, combined with a universal healthcare system, we can revolutionize social security, welfare, Medicaid, and Medicare into workable and fundable paradigms.  

There is still the issue of the disability portion of social security.  That may be integrated into some form of the healthcare system flowed through the tax system.  We want people to elevate themselves and their standard of living to a viable threshold to contribute their daily work and add to America’s contributing tax base.  

If we hold people on the outskirts trapped in labels of dependency ingrained with messages of victimization we will only serve the politicians that get power from those individual voters by maintaining the voter’s financial dependency on the government. Voters who attribute their daily bread to the work of their representative rather than their own efforts are malignant.  

If we do not change our mentality of vengeful judgment on poor people in this country; that the poor do not want a hand up and are selfish and lazy, we will never develop the sort of compassionate structure of assistance system that resembles the efforts of a wise parent with a defined set of boundaries for America’s surrogate children.  

No parent should let her child run wild in a grocery store throwing tantrums and demanding candy or Doritos for dinner.  No parent should allow his kid to skip homework and watch “reality TV”.  Good parents establish boundaries to provide a sense of order to assist a child’s learning.  Every child eventually must be left to grow and subject to the consequences of his or her adult choices. 

If some people are asking other citizens to take on the role of parent, to provide their daily bread and home, why shouldn’t we use programs and methods of the wise parent?  We need to be compassionate, but structured so that our children can eventually stand on their own.  Isn’t that what we are all called to do?

Changes in our internal revenue system to accommodate a negative income tax system would create a fundamental paradigm shift where we would need to recompute and reconsider the revenue projections to the government for every allowable deduction and tax credit on individual income taxes.  Fundamentally our progressive tax rates are too low on the bottom, too high in the middle and too low on the top.  That is a simple and long over due major component of the solution. 

Bottom Line Finances

The wealthy in this country manipulate tax loopholes to circumvent true tax rates. The public accounting industry has helped them do it.  It is a game.  If we eliminated many of the loopholes and lowered the actual rates, the net effective collection rates would be higher particularly on the top two percent.  However, the top rates need to increase as a significant component of solving America’s debt crisis.

The bottom end tax rates net too low because of excessive irresponsible poorly-targeted entitlement programs to the lowest tax brackets as well as the plague of refund-now high interest loans that misappropriate much of the earned income tax credits the American taxpayers award to the lowest brackets.  The actual tax rate paid does not need to increase, but the credits and entitlements need to be adjusted, which is in effect increasing the net tax rate on the bracket.  

The net effect of a negative income tax system would be to simplify rather than convolute the system, because the spending effects currently externalized from the revenue collection mechanism for social assistance would be internalized into to it.  The level of bureaucracy would be inherently reduced because we would not be requiring a person to qualify for healthcare and the participation in the housing assistance system would be election-based strictly on a person’s income, which is monitored through one system.  This is part of the problem of having state-based welfare systems, or any unnecessary duplication of government.  Technology reduces the need for federal and state levels to be disaggregated in the facilitation of common services, because physical location is less pertinent. 

We have trouble seeing what we spend as a country on disaggregated programs and have trouble expecting progress because our politicians cry poor claiming there is never enough money to solve anything.  Maybe we can solve more with less money, better technology, math, and a heart.

Our Forty Year Cycle and Military Spending

America is a nation of extremes in wealth on the bottom and the top rung.  We are approaching the anus of a forty year cycle: 1980 to 2000 to 2020.  In short: 1980’s start of massive debt.  Corporate America dropped pensions for 401ks.  1990’s to 2000’s, corn-fed America’s 401k’s boomed Wall Street and the dot.com bubble.  2001 to 2010, military spending and reminiscent Reagan tax cuts prompted the 2008 crash.  2020, every Boomer born in 1950 will be 70, to start the run of 401k withdrawals without IRS penalty and basic retired living expenses.  Underfunded government defined benefit retirement systems will crash, prompting a governmental legal battle to switch like corporations did in the 1980’s.  Too many sellers, not enough buyers and 2019 may be 1929.  The iceberg has already ripped our hull.

The escalating aggregation of wealth into the upper-two percent of income earners has proliferated exponentially since the terms of Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s.  Reagan by trade was an actor, a one time big business spokesman for General Electric who traversed the political path from a Democrat leading an actor’s union to a McCarthy-era informer to sniff out communists.  Reagan fought the evil empire Soviets in an arms race to see which country could flop down the biggest phallic symbol on the negotiating table to stare down the other side.  Stupendous nuclear units and star-wars-style missiles in the sky that could shoot up incomings Atari-missile-command-style tend to do that, especially on a credit card.

Reagan inherited a flawed Jimmy Carter government; with an Iranian hostage crisis that wound itself up during his inauguration speech and a campaign for tax reform when Gen Exers were phasing through learning how to walk and start kindergarten.  Reagan took a Jodie Foster-obsessed hand gun fan’s bullet for a whirlwind of sympathy to implement a wave of budgeting reform, which is treated like the Holy Grail of the modern tea-party movement, making Reagan the Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed of the “conservatives.”  

What more could a Republican want in a leader, prayers for his safety, hand guns and tax cuts?  Reagan cut some of the highest end tax rates in the range of seventy percent, trimmed them down in the thirties, cut the budgets everywhere, but national defense.  Reagan spouted this mantra of self-sufficiency, but did it by exploding the deficit in a liability growth curve followed by every Republican and Democratic president that followed him regardless of the additional political actions.

When is our military big enough?  How many times can politicians use the same tired argument, that if we cut defense then safety is immediately compromised?  The debate plays games with the idea of security as that global good mentioned earlier.  Either one is or is not safe.  

How do we know when we are less safe, only by being attacked?  What role have our military’s actions played to prevent another 911?  How have politicians exploited 911 to balloon military spending and a flood of unrelated, but rationalized political decisions based on a single Tuesday in September?  These are answers highly subject to manipulation due to the absolute indefensible political trauma of being the politician who cut the military then got the next terrorist hit, which may not have been preventable by the military directly anyway.  

The basic point of the voodoo economics is that a conservative, supposedly budget-focused politician spends more and taxes less, but often ignores math.  We unilaterally berate one side for hand-outs to the bottom rung and give a carte blanche to the Americana of military spending.  The two sides are interrelated.  

Invading countries is massively expensive.  So is fighting the second American civil war on drugs with today’s fiscal budget.  Although I am a proponent of science, I think the reasons humans obsess over the space program is our fear of dying on an obsolete planet and our insecure narcissistic lust for immortality.  Throwing money in a rocket to land on Mars is only detrimental to our actual fiscal predicament and a childish insult to man’s inner self.  This is all the more dangerous in our current fiscal state.

The real threat to the United States security comes through information.  We are in a war of intelligence.  We gather, use, and find groups of individuals powered through a combination of small technology and the random fear of a group of men more concerned with watching the world burn than taking over a piece of land.  We must recognize the shift in our enemies to every state on this globe and take advantages of the budget savings this change creates by the infrastructure and physical assets no longer applicable or efficient at mitigating or eliminating the risks the threat presents.

We can not use a stealth bomber to stop this kind of enemy.  We can not get a tank to roll over a government building in his country, because he may not even be aligned with that government.  So why is our funding centered on having bigger and better ways to put a firecracker under the ass of a frog, instead of putting a knife on the throat of the right man with the wrong ideas?  How do Halliburton and Lockheed Martin come into the equation? 

For financial and tactical reasons we should continue to funnel our resources into a knowledge-based military, rather than one focused on the number of ships, planes and tanks we can accumulate.  Knowledge is the most valuable asset in combating transient hidden terrorists.  No one has the capability of invading America, except for China and maybe Russia and how many bullets do we fire at either of those countries?  How man terrorists do our drones birth?

Wars are different now.  The global economy transcends motivations for invasion, because of digital exigencies and the proliferation of international trade.  Invading countries presents a domestic destruction of our taxpayer wallets even if the war is fought on foreign soil.  The costs exceed the social goods we argue against because they are competing with a universal good black-hole like public safety.  

How much do we have to pay to get one more unit of safety?  When are we safe?  We either are or are not safe.  We should not kid ourselves that the more we spend the safer we are if the method we use is not addressing the information-based risks nor have a reasonable threshold to curtail the definition of enough.  

National Defense is a fear-based economy.  The reason we go to war is because if we do not use our military, funding fear will appear all the more irrational.  The difference between that which we believe we are protecting ourselves from and that which we are actually protected is an improvable variance.  This measure of security is exploited in a measure of our tax dollars exponentially higher than the average person can comprehend.  The expanse of this differential is directly correlated to the fear in our nation.  

China is economically interdependent with America.  We have an ally in Japan, allies throughout Europe.  China has the capability of invasion or World War paired with countries like North Korea, Iran and Venezuela.  If World War Three happened we are not the only country on Earth.  We would have political capital to cash in and economic strings to pull.  China has a greater chance of civil war to defend itself from itself rather than focusing on destroying the United States.  The economic reality is military spending since the Reagan administration has gone up and up and up over the last forty years and is the number one employer by far on a federal level. 

What the military does is valuable and skill-oriented.  The information-based military is real and dynamic.  For as much rightly fully-deserved shit as the world and our country gave George W Bush for invading Iraq to finish off what his dad started under the guise of creating this shining light democracy in the face of a totalitarian despot regime for Halliburton, whether by coincidence, default or possible inspiration, Middle Eastern repressed people are uprising.  

Humans are aggregating to abolish their disempowerment by the weapon of Facebook and social media to congregate, report, and shine light on the roaches that disenfranchise their economic freedoms.  If W would have just left Sadaam alone a similar “overthrow” as in Egypt or Libya may have taken place in Iraq.  

In my opinion it probably would have, because the uprising or changes in technological paradigms allow global communication to usurp the restricting power of totalitarian regimes from using ignorance in the populace as a weapon against itself.  Facebook and cell phones transcend Syria, Iran, Yemen, Iraq and to a degree trump the United States military from controlling or enacting the overflow of foreign governments via a machismo American Global Frank-Drebin police squad.

The Iraqi invasion could be construed as an extremely expensive spark.  If free people prevail through out the Middle East by indirect correlated results which partially include our invasion, then maybe that could be a tangential argument that America saved money in the long run by not having to fight countries later if similar trends continue.  However, I think that argument is arrogant and negates the power of the Middle Eastern people as the true power conduits of change.  The true hero may actually be Mart Zuckerberg and Facebook.

Humanity trumps machine guns.  Yet some of us still rabble-rabble for war in lines of Republican caucus debate.  Hitler-Hiroshima: what we rebuke and say we would never do, we are but mirrors.  Iran, Neda: whose country is more claustrophobic?  Iranians pantomime traditions outside home and compromise inside.  Americans vomit fear.  Trust is not an issue.  It doesn’t exist.  We are all in the same closet.

There are watchdog groups that have researched where we can cut our military and still be “safe” and improve it.  You can look at something like the CATO institute, which has more of a libertarian slant.  I am not an expert on the military and will not pretend to be one, but certainly the blanket argument regarding the political rhetoric involved in cutting or supporting effective military spending should not be relegated to calling that politician a clone of Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan depending on their affiliation nor done with a fist-pumping flag or a refusal to consider math. 

At minimum we need to shift to defined contribution retirement in the military.  How can our government pay unprecedented unemployment and claim if we switched retirement packages we could not retain veterans without it?  What a more easily vesting retirement system would do, like in education, is retain the technology-savvy younger portion of the military by making it easier to shed dinosaurs.

Tax Law Changes

We need to raise taxes on the top end of Americans, primarily by taking away deductions.  On top of the negative income tax theory reforms for the bottom end there has to be a revised tax on top earners, particularly those who receive the majority of their income outside a W-2.  The current system is just too capable of being manipulated. 

One way to do that is mandate electronic wire transfers over paper checks through banking industry reforms for contract labor, deductible expenses, and employee compensation.  Entities can use credit cards, pay pal, any bank, but mandating a digital system integrated with banks, Visa, Master Card, AmEx and Discover to enable and track deductions on corporations and partnerships as well as cash-compensated industries is the key to a new IRS.  Tax auditors should be able to use software that uploads the data from a business’s credit cards and banks to validate the majority of expenses remotely through the bank and credit card websites during a modern-audit process.  This would allow a massive number of digital audits and vastly reduce fraud.  The excuse that I am too poor to have a bank account to wire my paycheck is archaic. 

The government should replace the fifty-percent only deduction on meals and entertainment with a zero percent for a simplicity’s-sake threshold on all corporations and partnerships.  The IRS should work with every major publically traded manufacturer in this country to develop a linked corporate accounting mechanism to assist IRS auditors to integrate a database to link the credit card payments with what was purchased at Wal-Mart, Target or other major retailers to correlate those purchases with a business to prevent people with S corps and LLC’s in America from harboring vast amounts of personal expenses against non-W-2 income.  The technology is there and we can capture a large portion of revenue in what amounts to tax fraud and higher taxes paid by every W-2 American taxpayer.  An LLC is not a license to deduct your entire Sam’s Club bill from your federal tax expense.  

The credit card purchase linking is not possible without improved data pipelines, massive data centers and analysis tools on an unprecedented scale based on the exponential power of what is possible to do with a microchip.  Is this possible soon, probably not, but it benefits us to envision it as a goal.

An addendum could be made that all non-individual checking accounts buying goods at major retailers will require a digital trail that links the data of the SKU’s of what was purchased back to the checking account for the federally deposit insured bank to link for digital IRS audits and preparation of the entities tax return.  This would apply for entities like Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot and major grocers based on total revenues of the retailer.  

Another move could be to move charitable contributions to a pre AGI deduction and remove all itemized deductions and allow only standard deductions.  This would simplify many of the games we play with our taxes.  State property and income taxes would also be completely independent of consideration of federal taxes paid. 

There is a significant middle-ground between today’s top rates of thirty-six percent and the seventy percent rates of Carter.  Wealth can not trickle down when it hardens like a stalactite on the ceiling of established economic patterns.  Changes in tax rates are supposed to stimulate the economy.  The top wage earners will only stimulate the economy based on additional cash flows due to reduced tax rates when the tax rates have not remained constant across shifts in market and profit paradigm cycles. 

Markets generally move based on paradigm shifting innovations, not governmental tax rates or interest rates.  Markets move when the technology allows for something new to sell, build, or use.  Billionaires do not hold off on making money off new innovations because of tax rates.  That sort of logic would allow advantages of to-market time frames to be trumped by competitors willing to accept lower profits in the uncertain interim.  Did Apple hold off on bringing the iPod to market based on the tax rate?  Would GM keep the Chevy Volt off the assembly line?

Economies have a cyclical macro-level nature.  By effectively making tax rates on the wealthiest people a solidified known froth with permanence to be able to preserve that wealth the trickle down dollars dissipate.  There is a reduced penalty for hording wealth through income streams permeating from investment-based and financial-packaged wealth creation mechanisms.  True economic stimulus is in the creation and dispensing of consumable goods.  Economic stimulus in today’s historically low Federal Reserve manipulated interest rates is like trying to get a geriatric nonagenarian to squirt a few drops of urine compared to a twenty-one year old frat-boy on a Friday night.  There is nothing left to stimulate.  We have to let the economy eat the backlog rather than fixating on daily Dow Jones blips.  Besides the Fed is just a dog and pony show to hide the sixteen trillion we don’t want to explode to twenty-five.

Consumer spending drives the majority of the economy.  America has too much of its wealth in financial mechanisms in banks, securities trading, pharmaceutical companies, computer-based systems, and our own government while outsourcing our food production, textiles, electronics, building materials, and vehicles.  The later are the goods that the average consumer needs to survive, the former are predominately exchange transactions that create a profit opportunity without a wage chain that integrates middle-class America.  This dichotomy in free market decision trees on a macro-level created higher profits in the short run, which have been retained at the top-end of America, expanded our debt, deteriorated the middle-class, and left us vulnerable like a top-heavy tree with a tooth-pick-sized midrange of a trunk. 

 

If we are going to get out of debt, raising the top-end tax rates to a more reasonable level has to be a component of the solution, but not the solution.  We have to perceive the problem in reality and not in absolutes.  We are facing inevitable governmental bankruptcies related to this flaw.  The mismanaged fear of this flaw has manifested itself in the tea party movement compelling working class Americans to correlate economic and social freedom with raising any tax as an intransigent constraint.  In reality, a fluid combination of moving towards governmental IRA’s and 403b’s and increased taxes and reduced taxes in practical areas should trump ideology with math.

We have a finite federal budget, primarily spent on entitlement programs of Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, National Defense and interest on our national debt.  All of this is our money.  We need to reduce our spending, but without purposeful replacement paradigms centered on honesty and ideas that recognize and address our interdependence all we have are complaints.