Lions and Eagles

Last night I went to a Q&A session with a couple of members of the school board for parents and members of the community. (I'm both.) Very nice event. Very glad I went out, and it was very encouraging to see the good turnout in the room. Steve Brown did a fine job of moderating, offering up questions gathered from parents via Facebook, and live audience had a number of questions as well. I have a few reactions to their questions.

This is for all my theatre friends in the Atlanta/Fulton County area. Now if you know me, you know that I love theatre. I have been onstage, backstage, in the box office, on a theatre board, and many, many times just in the audience. I married a beautiful actress that I met while doing Shakespeare, and many of my dearest friends are theatre folk. I've been excited to support community theatre, professional theatre, educational theatre, puppetry, dance, and more. This is about the news that the Fulton County Arts Council almost lost their funding from the county recently. At the recent County Commission meeting, it came down to a decision between supporting the actors or new beds for the women's prison, and it looks like some of those ladies are just going to have to sleep on the floor for a bit. So, if you're a woman in Fulton County, try not to go to jail, okay? You know that I love and support the arts. At the same time, my wife and I have been listening to a lot ...

Part three of this November's voting guide, now we tackle the ballot questions! Two Constitutional Amendments, one Tax! Unless I decide to wade into the Presidential race at some point later on, this will be the last of it. Please read on....

A Facebook poster made this comment on a discussion about "health care as a human right": Rights are something that emerge over time, but only after a fight of one kind or another. Consider the right to vote, for example. We have expanded that right over time, at least in modern industrialized countries. With regard to healthcare, the argument is whether we as a society are ready to acknowledge (or grant if you prefer) that right for every person. We can certainly afford it. It is only a matter of priorities. I was inspired to give this reply: Judith: You and I have different concepts of what rights are and where they come from. I'm not saying this to pass judgement, just to point out that we are going to come to different conclusions from our different starting points. I underst and that you believe rights are something created or granted by society, or government. From my perspective, rights are something transcendent, something intrinsic to what it me...

Big businesses are just going to take unfair advantage of the new tax code. How do we know Warren Buffet and Wall Street won't just cheat the new system? There will always be people who are trying to game the system. But trying to cheat the system right now is like trying to cheat at a game of Monopoly with real $5000 dollar bills: The stakes are high, and the game is complicated enough that a clever player just might get away with it. Switch to the 9-9-9 plan, and you've lowered the stakes, and made the rules as simple as tic-tac-toe. Sure, you just know someone is going to try to cheat, but it's harder to see how they'll get away with it. You just want to help the rich, and step on the poor. Cut that out, we're trying to have a reasonable conversation here. Nobody sane wants a tax code that helps the rich at the expense of the poor. But that doesn't mean that the only other choice is a system that punishes success. Let's have a simple tax code with a ...

Since I wrote my first article , I've had some questions and concerns posed to me about my example. I like questions and concerns! It gives me a reason to do more writing! My friend John wrote to me: Another problem lies in the sales tax structures of the various states. An erroneous assumption in your calculations is that Georgia does not charge state sales tax on groceries. Only local sales taxes are charged on groceries and I believe pharmaceuticals. Florida has no sales tax charged whatsoever on groceries or prescription drugs. Varying state tax structures, to me, infinitely complicate the whole picture of whether 999 is good or bad when integrated into the existing taxes that will not go away. Here's the good news: Unlike Obamacare, we don't have to pass this bill to know what's in it. We can research, we can calculate, and we can prove whether this undertaking is really complicated beyond measure. My first task will be to research existing sales tax struc...

Test 2: But what about that 9% income tax? Won't that hurt poor people who aren't paying income tax now? One concern raised is that the flat 9% income tax will hurt people who aren't taxed right now. Let's try those numbers out, again keeping the assumptions of the tax calculator intact. Let's take a household of 4 (same as mine), earning and spending at the poverty level. That is, every dollar they earn in a year, they have to spend. Just to make it worst-case-scenario, let's say that everything they buy is new, so everything they buy is taxed. Most sensible families at the real poverty level are buying used wherever they can, which means the tax doesn't touch everything they buy, but let's take this worst case just for the sake of argument. The latest data I have says that in 2005, this family would have earned (and spent) $25,660. Let's say that this family lives in a state with 0% sales tax, just to keep that part of the math simple. Finally,...

By now, most everyone's heard about Herman Cain's 999 Tax Plan. Some love it, some love to bash it. But who can you trust? It seems everyone's got something to gain. A lot of the negative statements about it have come from other candidates who see it as a great target, or from tax lobbying institutes who depend on the complication of the existing system to justify their existence. But then, even though I like Cain, I don't want to risk trusting his math blindly, without checking it out myself. I mean, sure, he's got a degree in math, another in computer science, and he used to calculate rocket trajectories for the Navy, but he could be wrong this time, right? So, here's a little experiment. I ran across a 999 Tax Calculator  web site, not affiliated with or funded by the Cain Campaign, which lets you plug in numbers and see the effect of the new tax plan on prices. The best part is, you can see the calculations and check them for yourself. Will the poor pay mo...

Heard on the radio this morning: Police officers unhappy with their pay and benefits may go on "ticket strike" by cutting down on number of traffic tickets issued, cutting into municipal revenue. When your employer is strapped for revenue, and can't pay what you want as a result, how does it make sense to protest using an action that will leave them even more strapped for revenue? As a government, how does it make any sense to pass a law, then build your budget on the expectation that people will break that law, giving you income from fines? How does that fit with the idea that we are supposed to be a free society? I'm just saying....

Two things I ran across yesterday are spinning in my head. First, I ran across this link . Duquesne University Economics Professor Antony Davies compares the national debt to a household income. Here's a video from that page: Watch that. Listen twice to what he says at the end. If you take all of the debt, all of the unfunded promises that have been made in Social Security, Medicare, and so on... If you take all of that, and add it up, it outstrips the   economic output of the entire planet. That's right. Our government has promised to pay more money than exists, more money than can possibly exist. In the world. Let that sink in. When I learn this, I think: Ouch. We are screwed. Now, on to the next thing. An old college "sister" of my wife is in Wisconsin taking part in the protests at the state capital. She posted that the state budget shouldn't be balanced on the backs of state workers. I asked whose back it should be balanced on. She replied, i...