Guns & Money

 

Who chooses to keep their guns and bury their children?

There have been more students killed in schools in the United States this year than there have been soldiers killed in combat. How do our politicians deal with this fact?  Dan Patrick, the Lt. Governor of Texas deals with it by talking about everything but the guns that do the killing. He talks about Twitter, cartoons, video games and mental health but avoids any mention of gun control. He wants to arm teachers instead of taking guns away from those who shouldn’t have them. This moron thinks that altering start times or eliminating fire safety doors from schools will keep kids from getting killed.  He avoids the fact that all the other civilized nations never come close to our death rate despite having the same contributing elements. Why? They don’t have the guns. VOTE HIM OUT!

Fred Guttenberg, father of a murdered teen, followed Patrick on This Weekattacking the sleazy politician for his moronic statements. One of the ways to slow the deaths of our children is to hold gun owners accountable for what their guns do. In this latest massacre in Texas, holding the father of the kid who killed his classmates responsible for allowing access to the death weapons might at least put the fear of jail on the table as a result of careless gun ownership. Any action that helps keep our kids alive is worth pursuing.

As I write this I am watching a TV show called VICE in which a very dumb police chief is busy training teachers to use guns to protect students in their schools.  What this brain dead turkey doesn’t even bring up is that most people are not emotionally equipped to go up against an armed opponent.  This was first brought to light by Colonel S.L.A. Marshall in his post WWII book Men Against Fire, in which he surveyed combat veterans and came up with the startling figure that only 15% or 20% ever actually fired their weapons in combat. The armed cops in Parkland stayed under cover while the killer kept shooting students and teachers. These are guys who walk around all day brandishing their weapons and being officious, yet when it actually came time to use those weapons to achieve a positive result they ended up cowering behind a car. And these are cops who are paid to protect us, not teachers who are paid to educate our children.

My point is very simple. By the time the shooter is at the school, the office, or the church, it’s too late. The time to stop this guy was when he tried to get a weapon. If you don’t have a gun you can’t shoot a gun. I know this makes the NRA and the American weapons industry turn blue and faint but it’s the only reality that we should be considering.  And if you’re tired of me writing about this read something else, because I’m going to keep writing about it until this country changes. The NRA’s current slogan, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” is just as brain dead as their last one; “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”  They replaced the old one when people realized that people with guns kill people. They now have to replace the new one because intelligent people understand that what stops a bad guy with a gun is keeping him from getting one. That’s because once that bad guy gets his gun, no matter who else has a gun, somebody is going to get shot, usually an innocent bystander.  You don’t want it to be your kid.

Oliver North the criminal who opened our borders to the drug plague through his Iran/Contra manipulations is now on the stomp as President of the NRA, trying to sell the most incomprehensible bullshit as fact about why we shouldn’t pull guns out of most households in America. North accuses people like Mike Blumberg, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, serious Gun Control backers, of having agendas. Really? So what is Mike Blumberg’s or Bill Gate’s agenda other than keeping our kids alive. We already know what Ollie’s agenda is; making more money for the gun manufacturers, but what of those he accuses? As already stated, they want to keep your kids alive. Is that an agenda you don’t support? Ollie is just another greedy pig that has taken a high paid job, trying to make America less safe for you and your kids.  He has already established his moral character by his actions with Iran/Contra. We already know that he was willing, nay eager, to sell drugs to your kids to finance a political war in Honduras that had nothing to do with our national security. So where is his basis of truth? There is none. North is just another small time punk, scrambling for a living with one of the most totaling dishonest and immoral organizations ever to blight the American scene.

Oh, by the way. The answer to the question that leads off this article: Greedy pigs who put their entertainment above the lives of those kids.

*****

Donald Trump loves tax cuts. That’s because he thinks they belong in the win column and he’s had very few wins since he stole the White House. It’s also because he doesn’t recognize the fact that taxes are what pay for all the government programs he loves to brag about being responsible for. The reason he doesn’t understand this is that before he became president, if one of his companies went too deeply into debt he’d simply declare bankruptcy and screw all his creditors. He hasn’t yet figured out that the government can’t do that.

So when he signed off on a federal budget that will up the debt by a trillion bucks he never considered what that would mean. What he also never considered was how those budget figures were arrived at. That path to total figures is very important. If one examines it, one realizes that the government has been operating with bogus numbers in many categories for many years. Take a look at some figures published in the ultra conservative NY Post last week. The figures are based on taxes paid versus government income spent, per household in the US, per year. There’s just one problem. They’re completely fictitious. I say this because they’re using figures in their projections that have nothing to do with income tax revenue. These figures inflate the projections, giving the government a lot of disposable income they don’t have to account for. They also raise the deficit.

The total list is based on $32,946, cost per household of federal expenditures.

Social Security & Medicare                          12,401

Disaster Relief                                                    328

International Affairs                                           371

Highways/Mass Transit                                     487

Health research/Regulation                               533

Education                                                              537

Justice Administration                                         546

Fed. Employee Retirement Benefits                 1,098

Veterans Benefits                                                1,390

Interest on Debt                                                   2,434

Defense                                                               5,046

Anti-Poverty Programs                                       6,112

Miscellaneous                                                      1,761

Total: $32,946 per household. But it’s all a lie because the largest figure on that list; $12,401 is for Social Security and Medicare, which do not come from income taxes and shouldn’t appear in any budget estimate. That figure comes from payroll taxes. It is 15% of your salary split evenly by employer and employee and it was never intended to pay even one cent toward Medicare or anything else except Social Security. It is, in fact, illegal to use SS money to pay for anything except SS and that has been written in stone since the program’s inception. Unfortunately that hasn’t kept administrations from illegally borrowing and stealing from it. And now we are doing it without deception, to pay for part of Medicare, which though absolutely necessary would never have been approved by congress if the money to pay for it, hadn’t been found someplace other than income tax revenues. That’s how the cowardly thieves in our congress work.

A percentage of Medicare costs come out of the SS money. The rest of those costs are paid by those enrolled. But that still enables the lying Republicans to call the SS package an entitlement when they rant about all the entitlements that waste money on the poor and needy. SS isn’t an entitlement. It’s a bank account contributed to by those that will later retrieve retirement funds from it. As such it should be inviolate but that never occurred to the crooked politicians who have been looting it for years. If SS had never been touched, the fears of it running out would be completely unfounded.

But the important thing to understand is this, the current budget, because it is padded with many phony costs just like the SS & Medicare cons will run a trillion dollar deficit this year and that’s the big problem. It’s the big problem because when the country can’t cover its expenses it has to borrow money to do so.

Take a look at the number listed under Interest.  It’s the fourth highest number after Defense, anti-poverty and Federal retirement costs and we get nothing for it. That’s right, all the other items on this list provide some goods or services for our people, all except Interest. At least if you’re an individual you get to write off your interest costs against your taxes If you’re the government you get zip!

The current interest figure of  $2,434 per household is based on the current deficit of $440 billion. Next year when the deficit balloons to over a trillion it will be over $5,000 per household and no one gets to deduct any of it. It’s just money over the falls. Now, the Republican’s, because they lie a lot, will tell you that we will grow our way out of this problem by adding to our GDP but the reality, according to all the non-partisan interested parties, is that we won’t even come close. Of all the major countries that report on this we are the only one that has a rising deficit. All the others are reducing their deficits.

So what does all this mean to you?  Simply put it’s going to hurt, because the more money we waste on interest the less we have to spend in areas that do us good. For every dollar we have to pay out in interest, we have a dollar less to spend on education, infrastructure, healthcare, research or the environment.

When Trump announces he is cutting the availability of food stamps its either because he doesn’t care about your kid eating or because he doesn’t have the money to pay for the food. Probably both. In any case if that food stamp money goes for interest, it directly hurts you. You get nothing for it, even though you paid taxes to create the pool from which it came.

The new tax bill that the GOP spends most of its time lauding has created 13% additional wealth for the 99% of poor and middle class people in the country and 87% additional wealth for the 1% that are already too rich to need the extra money. You can’t think that’s good for you and your family.

So what’s the answer? The answer for those who have enough guts to face up to it is paying enough taxes to cover our costs of running the nation. But before we even think about that, it also means getting rid of the already existing debt and the crushing interest payments that are associated with it. The easiest way to achieve that is with a tax increase aimed at those who benefited from the tax reduction we just got.

The problem is that this will never happen because there isn’t a congressman in Washington with the stones to vote a huge tax increase and even if there were, most of them are so rich that it would hurt them directly so that would be the end of that idea.

In the near future I will be publishing a platform that the Democrats need to emulate if they want to bash the GOP in the 2018 & 2020 elections. It might be a smart move on the part of anyone, Democrat, Republican or Independent to check it out and only vote for candidates that endorse it. It won’t be popular with a lot of lobbyists or the filthy rich or any number of others who don’t subscribe to the idea that life should be at least acceptable for all people, but if you aren’t terminally selfish or religiously fanatic you might find it makes sense.