Lunch Today: 3/14/13

On my lunch hour from work, drove home, saw the street mower had

Plowed through my road ‘for sale by owner’ sign at the front of the neighborhood

Been a year, this is the third one  

Ate quick, sandwich in the fridge,

Head out on the highway to get a new one at Lowes

Interstate, low tire pressure light comes on, exit, parking lot of hardware big box

Unscrewing caps checking inflation numbers 

Guy on crutches moving towards me, over hear another guy say, “I don’t have any cash.”

Down on my knees, different voice sounds,
“I am a homeless vet, just got out of the hospital.", Shows me a bracelet.

"Been sleeping in the woods over there.  I can stay in the shelter cross the road for $16 a week.”

I give the man with the missing leg a twenty, the cash I got on me

He asks for an address to mail it back one day. 

I shake his hand and check my other tires, can’t find a low one

Digital diagnostic says deficient, physical check says ok

I stand up; walk into the Lowes, passing the pick-up truck fellas

Purchase my new sign to post  

Head to a craft store to buy a collage frame for my folks for some pictures

We took together with my brothers and their grandkids around the end of 2012

Got a job interview in the morning in New Orleans

Listened to Springsteen, ‘The Darkness on the Edge of Town’ back at work

An Idiot’s Guide to Bettering America

I have written ten items with as little explanation as possible to get the point across.  I have expanded on these matters in other writings.  However what is most relevant is not the specificity explained, but the consensus to recognize that economics guides these issues for a better functioning government.  Economics is a science of human motivation, of recognizing likely outcomes with imperfect decision makers wavering between interest for the self and the group.  These are the steps in order of priority that I feel will aid our richest nation on the planet from the current path of our county, which if we stopped to analyze given our wealth our resurrection is vastly more feasible than the powers that be would have us realize.  For they have the preponderance of power and wealth and the easiest path to maintain their allotment is to pit us against each other and make our problems appear as unsolvable as possible.  

1.      End the drug war, decriminalize marijuana, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, mushrooms and a slew of other substances and make them regulated taxable substances in raw material purchase programs with domestic farmers for some drugs and South and Central American governments for cocaine and a new Afghani government for opium.  Reprioritize public safety budgets and treat addiction as a disease inside health budgets.   

2.      Single-payer health care for all United States citizens.  End all private health insurance companies and premiums.  Replace with a health care tax based on income and fluctuating deductibles and per service copays based on current income for anyone under sixty and historical adjusted gross income for anyone over sixty.  Allow the system to negotiate drug prices and medical device costs as a whole to compete with the globe as the market, not our own country.  Implement a digital infrastructure over the web for every citizen to see up-front copays per service by location based on their AGI grade, along with the total cost to the tax payer owned system.   

3.      Switch all government retirement to Defined Contribution and reverse and ban defined benefit retirement for any government employee past or present.  Transition by reviewing the average return on investment per year per plan and allocate the employer contribution portion invested to participants based on quarters of service actually worked for the taxpayers.  Employee contributions are returned at what the employee contributed at the United States one year Treasury-bill rate per year invested.  If the system is at a loss the market risk goes back to the participant, not the taxpayer to make the system commensurate with the majority of private citizens results of market risk.  If there are excess funds after this allocation, the amount will be split based on quarters of service.  All retirements will move forward as defined contribution and more closely link current salaries with the competitive market place. 

4.      Cap all Federal and State wide campaign spending on elections for television and radio based on per capita census data.  Require candidate number to be used in pool to allocate funds requiring candidate approval prior to air on public airwaves.  

5.      Ban on ex-federal office politicians, staff, and aids from lobbying in Washington D.C. for ten years after serving public.  No federal politician or politician’s spouse including supreme court justices can own direct stock in any publically traded company or any private company that has a federal contract.  All stock would have to be liquidated or converted to a government bond or U.S. Treasuries.  If you don’t like it don’t run.  All 401k plans would be required to have an all U.S. security investment option included.  Limit congressional salaries and benefits to term only.  Cap congressional salaries at eighty percent of the median income in the district they represent based on digital IRS data.  

6.      Make environmental fines thirty-percent of all reported revenues in America for that company in any calendar year violation occurs with a twenty year look back and make the clean air and water act apply to fracking.  This will internalize environmental health to all energy companies and allow the private sector to lead our mutual health.  Prioritize renewable energy on government buildings including solar and wind farms to act as manufacturing center hubs in each state.  Transition sewerage and water treatment systems to implement solar to fuel lift and treatment stations and pumps to save taxpayer’s long term electricity costs.   Link local farmers with a digital infrastructure to facilitate purchase club memberships for produce and other healthy foods.  Make DNA ownership of a seed illegal.  

7.      End religion’s non-profit deduction status.  Only organizations with a public purpose can offer a citizen a tax deduction.  Religious organizations can still provide tax deductions to operate assistance programs for housing, food, domestic abuse, medical, psychological counseling, but tracking service requirements are required as they are with other nonprofits and donations have to be designated and tracked on 990’s.  Donations to build a house of worship building or a religious leader’s salary will no longer be tax deductible.   

8.      Cap military spending to a percentage less than one hundred percent of the combined top five other global military budgets. End drone attacks, which breed more people who want to kill Americans than they eliminate.   

9.      Expand school choice vouchers and nonprofit charter schools with parental choice with an addendum that all textbooks outside of any religion class be subject to approval by a national review board that the books do not contain explicit religious information or education.  Prayers in private schools receiving voucher funding are allowed before or during class, but not in lesson plans, particularly science.  

10.  Invest in digital infrastructures for data sharing and security in the areas of: education, health care, utility billing, fire protection, police protection, youth recreation leagues, music, dining, nonprofit services, food assistance, volunteering, housing assistance, job training, and local farming etc.  Create a governmental website like facebook which shares all this information as a hub or a group of linked spurs off a hub on a national level to link to a person’s zip code.  This will facilitate the evolution of the digital classroom and doctor’s office with a platform that fosters ingenuity and lower’s access costs to taxpayers.

Please Share if you concur or comment to add your thoughts.

Two Life Lessons from an Idiot

This is documentation for me.

You may be reading it by the election of your volition,

Which is lesson number one, the power of choice

There are two forces or systems of laws in our universe worth noting

Physics or what some will call nature and

Existential volition or what some will call free will

This basically forms two base camps living and non-living  

Which squadron one ends up with at the moment is for the most part irrelevant,

As if driven deeper you are on both, have been on both and will continue to be on both

Whether one chooses to acknowledge it or not, but that is not the lesson for today  

How long a person is living in this iteration is typically correlated with their ability

To erode their level of ignorance, however the two are not necessarily commensurate,

As one of the first grand insults students are afforded is that something older, more complex,

Is by default higher in obtained wisdom than a less complex or younger being  

The revolution of youth is a vastly underrated asset compared to the complacency of age

Complacency leads to a living-death where one ceases to pierce the callus of learning

Subsisting in what assumes to be a comfortable truth, when it should be obvious to most

That one could spend every potential second of a human life and still be vastly short of time  

To experience, encounter and absorb the diminishment of ignorance of even a small percentage

Of the humans who have come before us, let alone create a novel thought, for most originality

Is just the dusted doppelganger of a dead man’s progeny of another dead woman absent the advertising or notoriety to be dubbed theft or duplication. 

So in the second lesson is in reading, absorbing, searching and sculpting the existential choice

To search, it is not all together relevant where to start searching with the exception that once a detour like religion or political fascism, or totalitarian doctrine pulls one further away from the balance between the laws of physics and the laws of existential volition one becomes lost. 

This exploration can feel like learning only to be later found that circumstances reverse themselves through an individual choosing that these quests require a commensurate amount of un-learning.  This in some ways brings one not back to the point of origin, but happily can allow one to exponentially catch up with a velocity of absorption only afforded by the certitude correcting such paths in life creates.   

This is the economics of mistakes and why some of life’s greatest flaws and disasters turn into molding the most remarkable humans. 

Perfunctory Pleasantries

I do not understand why people want to stall their conversations

Between strangers with prefaced inquiries of how are you doing; how is it going?

“Good, fine” and then proceed

Maybe it is casual manners, it is a dance of connections, which  

I have rarely seen the point in participating

The whole structure of faux-concern befuddles my linkage to actual concern

As the contemplation of a lack of connection between people on the periphery

Are not aware that there is no strip for a true response to land  

Yes, my daughter just had an abortion.  Yes, I went to church last night and had an epiphany.

Yes, I took a twenty dollar bill and bought eighteen items off the dollar menu at McDonalds

This afternoon and I started eating them at the counter and then ran off to my car and gorged until vomiting in the parking lot, Yes, I inject insulin for type-two diabetes I caused 

Yes, I like to think about world peace and then do nothing, but shop at Wal-Mart

Yes, I am thinking about blowing my head off as soon as I find the gumption

Yes, I am bored out of my mind,  

Yes I have never enjoyed life more.  I am truly happy, with

Just me not a partner, or a stranger but just who I am in exponential existential enlightenment

My glow is truly amazing, can’t you see it?  I am on fire.   

Yes I do want to buy your product so you will silence your plea, because I am a people pleaser and I fear saying no to people because my father was an alcoholic and would rage if he did not get his way like an infantile tyrant and my mother, brother and I saw fit to sweep every true feeling I have ever had in life under a proverbial rug that I am now granting to you as I nod in an exaggerated manner so that I may present a charade of concern for your narrative  

Yes I was raised by racists in a generation where I know family members of mine have participated in the beating of black people like you only in my mind I am not saying black and I know you just walked up to me to ask for directions, but inside I am somewhat afraid in that if I was not at work right now I would have sped up and avoided this conversation entirely, but you asked me how I was doing and then asked for more, so I think it is three blocks that way, but in the back of my mind I know I would have thought about locking the door if you did the same to my home and definitely would not have opened it, but yes I am doing fine.  

Yes I believe in Jesus and I am glad you seemed to enjoy the fish on my SUV.  Yes I raise my daughter’s daughter because she cannot sustain employment and smokes methamphetamines often enough that we should talk, but we don’t, but I am talking to you now.  Yes, I have stolen from the grocery store when I did not need to just to see if I could get away with it.  Yes I had a few pregnancy scares with men in my twenties and with my husband.   

Yes, the weather is lovely.  Yes the president is the devil.  Yes, thank God for the president.  Yes, I read Fifty Shades of Gray.  Yes, I read Either/Or.   Yes, the light was yellow officer.  Yes I think that does make you look fat.  Yes, I would like to get a pizza delivered.  Yes, I do not have time to visit the nursing home. Yes, the latest I can stay is three days.  

The maze, the mirage and the discharge in the asking of questions that are not questions

The wandering responses that are not responses float and abuse the stoic soldiers of wishing to communicate honestly and sometimes the greatest candor is silence; that I do not want to know how you are doing, because I do not know you or want you to know me and if I were to ask if I were you I would be insulted and thusly I feel sorry for all the wandering strangers  

Who ask me on the phone or to the face of how I am doing unprepared or un-wanting of an actual response, but as a Tourette’s tic, a must do, before functional discourse can transpire  

If you ask you should be prepared for an answer;

If you ask you should be prepared for an answer;

For I will tell you and want the same in return

Drugs and the Decalogue

I was trying to wrap my brain around the global drug war again

My mind landed on the ten commandments of Moses

I thought of a magical mountain where tablets were conveniently crafted

In lightning to stone in a language understood by heathens 

Fornicating and contracting syphilis by inserting penises in golden calves

Burning bushes and lying about it to their spouses and children

The gilded trinkets jangled from body parts screaming for skin to be covered

Women to be blanketed as too big an enticement  

Rules were sent from the heavens and carried by Charlton Hesston in minds of Americans

As is most of the logic transported through fervent witnesses who believe  

Someone-feared will attempt to pry the book from their cold-dead hands  

Raised in torment at Amalek steady and perpetuating prosperity

As long as, as long as, as long as we keep the standards raised

A law is a law is a law is a law as long as we hold it up

For what, to better or to control? 

Does the law create more harm than it prevents?

Does the commandment toil the world more than aid?  

The Decalogue: one I am the one, listen only to me.

Two, idolatry distracts from me, back to me .

Three, I am always listening, if you curse me others will notice and persecute you.

Four, tithe on the seventh day, I am entitled to your resources.

Five, honor your parents, they did this, so you should do this, don’t break the chain.

Six, No murder, this is the first one not really about me, but I guess I have to throw you a bone.

Seven, sex with other people’s partners is frowned upon, it leads to instability and people blaming me and stopping the tithing so don’t mess with my gang.

Eight, No stealing, don’t take other people’s stuff, because it is really all my stuff and when you steal it you are less likely to tithe it back .

Nine, No bearing false witness, no making shit up that sounds crazy, I have the monopoly.

Ten, No coveting, no wanting, I am all you need, I make you happy, giving me everything is joy.

The capsule sits on the counter asking, what was morality before the law?

Murder, lying, and stealing are inherently bad

Some people’s parents are assholes and should not be honored for fornicating you into the world

The rest sound like rants from an insecure ideologue fascist demanding compliance  

I keep coming back to, did anyone ever need the book, the mythical tablets, the word

To know morality?  I cannot fathom a people who would

Out of the ten, seven are clearly fraught with self-serving manipulation

I see the death industries of cocaine, marijuana, and heroin 

The murders, the beatings, the rapes, the lies, and the thefts outnumber the overdoses

And ruined dreams over the blessed dreams of the fearful who never tried because of a law

Ohhh, the prohibition hidden to know one the deterrents of having to go to a Blue Cross

For your Adderall instead of methamphetamines

Addiction and counseling, rehabilitation and hospitals, science and religion are still at war

The drugs are no different; I see the putrid glaze of religion all over the conservative paradox

The party of self-responsibility of individual freedoms and choice are the browbeaters of the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments to post in our Southern court rooms for jurisprudence   

That a mandate for morality is somehow morality,

That this pill is corporately sanctioned, this pill is from the Earth and uncontrollable,

That this morality is etched in stone by lightning, this morality is universal to the self

There is no monopoly on salvation or goodness or knowing or peace  

So that when assumptions are made to such we divest our ration that a man or woman

Is capable of choosing, to kill or not, to steal or not, to lie or not without penalty

To inject poison into our veins so that we make laws against suicide

To comply with the will of a book projecting such an eternal commitment in a world

Where no perpetuator of such a law could be set to trial.

So we are a planet of convicts with no jury, no judge and a wasteland of disorder

Created out of laws taunting man’s volition to inflict crimes against himself

For what is inhalation of cocaine in such a context, but skipping worship?

Who is harmed, who is victim, who is perpetrator?  

What profits but the legislator, the arbiter, to convert such acts of the self to the self

Into crimes of societal ignominy and imprisonment

Woman, cover your breasts or you invite rape.  Sir, you cannot marry him.

Use the other water fountain, the other bench.  Pay the poll tax.  

Oh such lines of the Decalogue extended into the mountains of thought-crimes

Turned physical morphing our prisons over time with the tablets of pulverizing

Our volition to place such stones upon the mantle of our mind.

I can think of nothing more disgusting, whoever thought of this must have been on drugs. 

Nation of Saplings

Having a novel in my head is the closest parallel

My male body may have to pregnancy

I have felt the sympathy weight of my partner bearing

The consequence of my sperm to egg  

The life where there was not such life and return to dormancy

Life exiting and being documenting for the swallowed pride

For the inability of interface, cause and effect dancing

The mind wanders into feckless forests  

The thoughts for this book in my mind

Become vagabonds in such ways

Their limbs and organs are forming in scattered allocation

This body has a pancreas, this forty percent of its epidermis  

Others have scars and nubile flection to perform acrobatic gymnastics

Of character and historical pertinence, the universe is on a trampoline

Bouncing to become either a platform of unforgettable friends

Or cursed vagabonds never to materialize into the clearing of known  

For others to see their faces the way they may have attempted to introduce

Themselves to me and oh how I was so entangled with the job hunting

The pressure drop of the work-away day listening to financial statements and tax returns

Banging on my door for entry and reconciliation  

The novel world is crying for existence from embryo to soul-bound

Fingernails scraping for entry into the spine-paper and digital download

The anchors of being an incomplete man and harboring a nation of ghosts

So that lungs and souls may employ a graveyard of all the children I could have known  

If only I commit the time to write, for there is no exception for putting in the work

The stretching of the imagination to craft a scene, a character out of the grayness

To bleed a green or a blue or any passionate hue of gray other than the precipitation-fog

Love knows such hardships; writers build and demolish our own prisons  

So forgive me if I am distant, you see the fear is in me too

What if I do not complete this journey for my life is not the only one which will drown,

But this nation of saplings that is so ever hungry to see the sun 

A Letter to a Demographic

Dear (probably middle-class Republican, probably white person, possibly frustrated with the United States Government and unsure as exactly why, but there is something about makers and takers or us and them floating about,)

As a white man in his early thirties venturing into the twenty-five percent federal tax bracket in 2012 and still there, with even more leeway to avoid higher federal taxes for me and probably you in 2013, despite the apocalyptic re-election of Barrack Obama, I am writing this letter to reach out to you with math and a bit of macroeconomic reality.  

Now I know this letter does not contain religion, a firearm, or persecuting an ethnic group so you… Oh what that’s not your priority?  Your priority is just making ends meet and fairness and feeding, housing, and clothing your family and maybe the occasional trip to the movies, night out, or gassing up the truck to quest on one of our many interstate highways?  Yeah, that’s most people.  That is most Republicans and Democrats, that is, for the most part, the whole 99 percent contingent you may have been told or felt were a bunch of takers asking for a hand out.  

Somewhere along the way life communicated Milton Friedman free-market ways that if you work hard you get ahead, if you are entrepreneurial and take the risk then you have wagered and earned the rewards that come with accepting that risk that others have not.  If one studies hard in school and earns a degree, one will find gainful respectful employment.  Others not breaching such intellectual thresholds may toil in menial tasks for less pay commensurate with their level of effort.  The system is not fair, but the only fair variable is effort.   

There is a culture of self-responsibility and what I earn is mine and others expecting a hand out are the cause of the problem.  The virus of entitlement is the opponent and often a registration with the ideology of the Republican Party is the proposed inoculant.  Does this sound in any way familiar?  Then this letter may be for you.  

Minimum wage in America is currently $7.25 an hour or about $50 for eight hours  after taxes or $250 a week.  Making those numbers compute to self-sustainability is at the heart of understanding how entitlement fits into our macroeconomic debate.  It is near impossible to fund food, housing, healthcare, clothing and basic living expenses on minimum wage or near minimum wage employment in America.  

America's dysfunctional laws over health care and the drug war keep poor people in an almost inescapable cycle that turns people towards prisons and the welfare system rather than faces the functional realities of why a lowly educated worker is driven away from self-sustainability.  The solution cannot be for everyone to just work for a better job.   

The employers of so much of the working poor are profiteering.  In other words, people are making profit and keeping a larger differential again and again, because the system is piloted by the entities they own.  A tiny minority of humans hoards and does not re-circulate a preponderance of the financial resources.  The number of billionaires is at an all-time high.   

We are suffocating not only the buying power of our country, but creating a massive gluttony of expenses born by taxpayers to fill that gap between the poor, the lower middle class, and more and more the middle class being unable to feed, house, and clothe our families.   

The key factors in macroeconomic health are the circulation of the wealth of an economy and its size.  America's economy has enormous girth, but it is a fat man having a heart attack. The blood is not flowing, because the wealth is trapped by high-income individuals putting dollars in investment accounts and to a significant degree in investment accounts outside the United States.  The top-percentage of humans has so much cash they will try to convince the rest of America what is against their self-interest in order to keep it.  See the Koch Brothers has example Tweedle A and Tweedle B. 

In the recent presidential election, the majority of rationale of the campaign was over one number, the top individual marginal tax rate.  Sure we discuss the military, budgeting, discrimination, the environment, energy policy, and a slew of other real issues.  These are even discussed by a number of Republican candidates who may even feel strongly about them.  However the reality is when you and your brother have approximately $68 billion between the two of you, financing anything you can, even a hundred million dollars, is pocket change compared to that rate increasing.  

Reality check on current tax rates between 2012 and 2013, if you are an average middle class single American making say $60,000 a year, when you apply the ordinary income tax rates your tax bill before exemptions and deductions went down from $11,030 to $10,929.  If you made $100,000 you taxes went from $21,460 to $21,293. 

The greatest change was that for single people making over $400,000 a year and married filing jointly making over $450,000 per year the rate went from 35% to 78%.  So yeah, 'they' don’t get to keep most of what they make after 'they' have made $400,000, but that’s closer to fair, sort of right? 

Oh, I’m sorry my math was wrong.  That four-letter dirty word math, I keep forgetting math and facts.  The rate went from 35% to 39.6%.  Four point six percent increase, that’s it.  That’s what you may have been told is socialism or the horrid inducement for employers to conduct mass layoffs and post “out of business” signs.  How will the corporations survive?  (Also corporate tax rates have not changed as of yet.) 

When you visualize a welfare king or queen, think of a CEO.  Think of soybean subsidies for Monsanto in the farm bill.  Think of taxpayer subsidized loans through Fannie Mae that bail out Citi Bank to reduce the one thing banks are supposed to be responsible for, the risk on the mortgages they profit from.  No, Citi Bank splits mortgages into 66 silver pieces in investment accounts sells it all over, gets insured by ING, and doesn't care what the home owner makes, because the taxpayers are on the hook.  Is that every loan, no, but that form of welfare is real welfare.  

Think of medical device companies and pharmaceutical companies piggy-backing off research done at public universities and the NIH and charging taxpayers a 3,000 percent mark-up for drugs and healthcare devices. That's welfare.  

The percentage of poor people getting month-to-month assistance is pennies in comparison.  Give a man an opportunity to work and he will.  Give him a minimum wage job in America and he is forced to grasp at straws to pick up the difference between what puts food in his family's mouth and a roof over his head. There are way more people in that boat than lazy assholes who simply do not want to work.   

Think of what drives you to get up to your job in the morning after you are tired from family duties.  Now think of a guy making $7.25 an hour or maybe $12 or something that makes it hard to make ends meet.  Then think about that four point six percent and what that represents.  Think about the total dollars in our economy and where they are kept.   

Here is my take on trickle-down economics.  Imagine a cave with stalactites of currency trapped on the ceiling guarded by a colony of bats.  The blind mammals go out and in the cave at will.  Sure there are a lot of bats, but in comparison to the ground, its like one bat for every ten thousand insects or some high multiple, but you get my point.

The floor is covered in bat guano and a few stalagmites.  The insects feed off the guano and the water dripping down from the ceiling.  Occasionally the stone of the Earth crawls upward through deposits from above and a similar mineral comes down to form a column to support the cave’s structurally integrity.  We use the strength of labor and owner to make sure the whole place does not crash down.

But mostly it’s a sea of insects crawling hungering for whatever happens to drop and a bunch of rock that stays flat.  We have to make sure the environment is right for the stones to meet; otherwise, humans will act like entirely different life forms when in fact our mutual environment makes us interdependent for survival.  

What is a poor person supposed to do for health care, for food, for a home, for transporation on $1,000 a month?  Should the government dictate the minimum of what poor people make; well you can tax wealthier people more and you can raise the minimum wage to a more reasonable amount as a start.  You can also look at stuff like the earned income credit, Medicaid and other programs as alternate versions of minimum wage to manipulate.

Every economic fact and indicator points towards the majority of corporations employing minimum-wage individuals have profit to spare and the idea of raising prices to pick up the difference is an empty threat, because while a company can control its own prices, it rarely can control an entire market.  (See Wal Mart, McDonalds, Target, Walgreeens, Appleebees, ADM, Home Depot, etc.)

A maximum federal tax rate that goes from 36% to 39.6% does not create socialism.  Other major changes would be the decriminalization of most drugs, moving to a single payer health care system and incentivizing local farming by overhauling the infrastructure of how food ends up in our grocery stores and how it is subsidized.  Those are middle class issues whether the Republicrats and Democrans want us to realize they are or not.   

When a man is taught to vote against his own self-interests, he is inviting his own extinction.  

Peace