Category: Gummint

“Sin” Taxes

Gummint, Nannies

It is a truism that as any government becomes larger and larger, its reach extends yet deeper and deeper into our private lives, and it becomes greedier and greedier for money to feed its bloated bulk, the only kind of creativity it produces is finding novel ways to tax us.

The idea, therefore, of a bloated, obscenely-large government lecturing us about the “sins” of obesity would be savagely ironic — not that any government would ever acknowledge that, being by definition bereft of a sense of humor.

So Gummint imposes a “sin” tax on us, for our own good.  Liquor and tobacco were the earliest manifestations of this theft, and as society becomes more and more prosperous, it also becomes less and less fearful of starvation — and now, of course, “obesity” is the latest “danger” we need to be protected from — and as something becomes more expensive, people will always use less and less of it, what better than to make it expensive through taxation, thus feeding government coffers while “protecting” us.

Listen, as a Fat Bastard myself, I know that fatties (I’m sorry, “heavy people”) have health issues and are sometimes exposed to deadly consequences for their obesity.

So what?

Well, of course, if someone else is paying for the consequences of your “gluttony” and overindulgence — in this case, that would be taxpayers, through a nationalized health service —  then the rationale for “sin” taxes is an easy one.

And right on cue, a fat-ass at the head of a fat-ass government is planning to shaft everybody.

‘Sin tax’ on sugary fizzy drinks could be extended to chocolates with adverts for sugary treats banned and health warnings slapped on alcohol bottles in anti-obesity plans being considered by Boris Johnson

And like Saul on the road to Damascus:

It came as Mr Johnson today launched the Government’s new anti-obesity drive., admitting he was ‘too fat’ when he was hospitalised with coronavirus.  He said that since his recovery from the deadly illness he has focused on getting fitter by going on morning runs.

Of course, this is being done because Gummint really, really cares about our health:

The Prime Minister’s comments came as Health Secretary Matt Hancock said if overweight adults were to lose five pounds in weight it could save the NHS £100 million.

Or it could not.  In fact, that’s an utterly bullshit statistic, and I would love to see how this incompetent prick came up with the number.  (Five pounds’ loss in someone who weighs, say, three hundred pounds, achieves precisely fuck all — and lest we forget, it’s the 300-lb+ category of fatties which has the highest mortality rate.)

As much as I love visiting the place, I am so glad I don’t live in Britishland.  Finally, as all arguments can be bolstered and/or improved by pitchurs, here’s something to ponder.  If being fat is so damn bad, why is this trend growing?

Anyway, I think everyone’s got the point by now.  It’s time for my morning breakfast of buttered Belgian waffles with syrup, followed by a refreshing pint or so of gin.

Someone else can live an austere life of self-denial and good health.  I’d rather enjoy mine, as David Hockney suggests.

Quote Of The Day

Gummint, QOTD

From CanuckiFriend Fred Z, in Comments:

“The Government of the USA is the best in the world and it’s so shitty it has to be watched every second of every day and thwacked in the gonads as often as possible.”

The only better government I can think of at the moment doesn’t exist anymore:  Hong Kong’s of the 1950s-60s, where income tax was capped at 5%, zero business or cap gains taxes, there was no welfare, “security net” or mandatory retirement contribution, and the government collected no statistics on its population whatsoever.  Now compare that to what Fred’s talking about.

I think I’ll have another gin with my breakfast.

Replacement Time

Gummint, Law and Order, The Gun Thing

This just goes to show how ignorant some people are:

It seems that residents wanting to defend their homes from a mob are no longer allowed to exercise their Second Amendment rights in the city of St. Louis. On Friday, KSDK reported that local prosecutor Kim Gardner got a search warrant for the McCloskey home. And based on the court order, police seized the rifle used by Mark McCloskey, the St. Louis resident who used the weapon to defend his home from a group of protesters who threatened to kill him and his wife. They also seized the handgun Patricia McCloskey used, which was being held by their former attorney.

The ignorant people, in this case, would be this loathsome prosecutor Gardner and the people who “advise” her.

If I’d been in this situation (assuming I only had one gun, which I do, following that terrible canoeing accident on the Brazos or maybe Colorado rivers), I would have replacement guns in the house about, oh, half an hour after the cops left.  Only this time, I’d hide the some of spares where the cops would need a pneumatic drill to get access to them.  Or not.

So from this unhappy situation we should deduce the following:

  1. Never have just one gun per person in the house
  2. Hide a couple of backup guns — not just inside your own house, but in those of a couple trusted friends
  3. Don’t forget to do the same with the ammo for the guns.

If you haven’t made such arrangements already, do it now.

Government Told To Fuck Off

Gummint

There are times when one should feel sorry for the apparatchiks of our beloved federal- and state governments, because few people are taking them seriously anymore.

Okay, that was a joke;  1) nobody loves them except the Swampies themselves, and 2) there’s no reason to feel sorry for them because, in the manner of idiots everywhere, their problems are self-inflicted by poor choices.  Here’s one (of many).

After  having clamped down on our freedoms with the excuse of OMG The Chinkvirus, many local gummints outlawed all private firework displays for July 4th.  Result:  the skies lit up like it was WWIII — even (or especially) in liberal havens like Los Angeles.

Now, amidst breathless shrieking from the Jackals Of The Press (never missing any excuse to foretell doom ‘n gloom because headlines / clickbait), Gummint is threatening to enforce another lockdown, Just In Case And If It Saves Just One Life It’s Worth It, Seriously.  Here’s my own prophecy of America’s likely response to said coming lockdowns:

As a rule, we Murkins are a law-abiding lot (excepting Leftist assholes, always), but the laws have to make sense before we follow them — and indeed, the (un-Constitutional) regulations and such laid down by Leftist fuckwits like CalifornicateGov Newsom, MichigaNazi Witmer and ILGov Fatboi all had one thing in common:  they fucked up the economy for very little tangible benefit.

Add to that the propensity of the aforementioned and their minions to be the lickspittles of lawless mobs like Pantifa and BaconLettuceTomato, and it’s small wonder that ordinary Americans looked at all this carnage and Wokedom, and said in unison:  “Fuck that shit.”  Then they went out and let off fireworks, and cheered our President’s stirring July 4th speech to the echoes.

Even here in Texas, where we kinda-sorta don’t mind TexGov Abbott, we still don’t trust our local bureaucrats much (it’s in our state constitution: the most restrictive social compact in the world).  I note with interest that local entities are going softly-softly on the lockdown business, mostly because 1) while the infection rate seems to be climbing, the death toll is dropping and b) I suspect that most Texans are going to ignore any Chinkvirus: Round Two Everybody Panic, other than doing what makes the most sense:  wearing PPE masks, sanitizing common areas and not sneezing all over other people in public.

We could have prevented most of the infection uptick, I suspect, by shooting all the Pantifa Commies and rioting looters  as soon as they started with their reindeer games in the streets, then hosing down their twitching corpses with hydrochloric acid  bleach, but no doubt someone would have had a problem with this.

Or we could have just nuked all those Democrat-controlled cities (quit that cheering) at the very beginning, but some might call this remedy too extreme as well.

Just nobody on this Internet back porch.

Just Plain Incompetence

Bad News, Gummint, Marxists

One of the common features of socialist leaders is  incompetence, and one of the best examples is Has-Been POTUS Obama, whose cool demeanor was actually a cover for just that — an inability to make decisions (other than those dictated by Marxist doctrine, of course).  Bad leaders don’t just make bad decisions;  bad leaders, frozen by fear and incompetence, make no decisions.

But the very best example is NYFC Mayor De Blasio who, faced with “popular” demands to “defund the police” has actually done so, even when faced with skyrocketing violence.

Commonsense, of course, is almost a tautology in this regard:  when crime is soaring, that’s precisely the wrong time to reduce police funding and manpower, but as De Blasio firmly believes that the NYPD is the problem — and has always done so — it makes perfect sense (to him) to reduce police effectiveness, whether by funding or by demoralization (which, paradoxically, he has done to perfection).

The fool still has eighteen months in power before he’s term-limited out of office, and even then, the list of replacements, such as it is, seems to indicate that his successor will be of the same ilk.

As anyone with a brain can see where this is heading, and there’s no Rudy Giuliani to ride to the rescue.  New York is sunk, and will become no different from all the other third-World socialist armpits around the world.

Given NYFC’s malevolent influence on the rest of the country (gun control, failed social policies, out-of-control welfare spending, the aforementioned crime wave and the New York Times) has been a cancer on American society for too long, and prudence would suggest that the federal government steps aside completely and lets it implode just as Detroit, Chicago and the other cities have done.  The denizens of the Big Apple have voted themselves democratically [sic]  into this situation and, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken’s Seventh Maxim, they deserve to get their comeuppance, good and hard.

Sadly, all the bad things about New York are just as prevalent in Washington D.C., a fact which De Blasio and all the other mayoral Marxists are counting on for their salvation.

Americans Second

Bad News, Business, Gummint, Two-Minute Hate

Looks like the fix is in again:

U.S. employers keep roughly 600,000 foreign H-1B visa workers in jobs throughout the United States, according to an unprecedented report released by the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency.
The total number of resident H-1B workers has successfully been kept secret for decades, mainly because Fortune 500 companies do not want voters to recognize the massive outsourcing of jobs for themselves and their college graduate children.

Based on personal observation, I think that about a quarter of the above number live within a square mile of my apartment, but that’s a topic for another time.

Whenever people show faith in the powers of “the market”, I want to kick them in the balls.  Here’s why.

In the normal course of events, “the market” can and should address the problem of shortages by creating a price increase — in this case, if there are apparently not enough Americans to fill the skilled positions needed in Corporate America, the pressure is put on salaries so that existing skilled workers can change industries to take advantage of the higher wages, or (in the longer term) prospective employees can adjust their training from, say, a university-centric Women’s Studies major into an IT profession.

But that would Cost The Companies Money;  and gawd forbid that costs rise, affect the balance sheet and, most importantly of all, jeopardize executive management bonuses.  So said companies lobby the government saying, “Oh we need  skilled workers, and these lazy idle Murkins don’t wanna do the jobs so please pretty please O Benificent Government, can we import furriners to save us from going out of business?”

Whereupon Congress, whose members are all either stupid, unpatriotic or else beholden to Corporate America for campaign contributions (I know:  massive overlap) will turn around and say, “Sure thing.  Get these H-1Bs from anywhere you like — say, India or China — and just add a zero to your next contribution, will you?”

The fact that these foreign workers stay a while then go back to their home countries taking their expertise with them, is, of course, irrelevant.  (I should point out that I myself was one of the above H-1B workers back in the 1980s, except that I had skills which my sponsoring company did not possess at all, AND I was coming over as a senior executive to implement a brand new business model which I had created back in the Old Country and made successful.  Also, I stayed and became a U.S. citizen, and the rest you know.)

So “the market” works fine, mostly — except where the sticky and incompetent fingers of Gummint get placed firmly on the scale of surplus : scarcity, and the results are what we see now.

There’s another part of the article which engendered a scowl from me:

The USCIS report admits that “no unique identifier exists for all H-1B petitions in the USCIS electronic [system of record, so] we use a methodology of statistical inference.”

For those not familiar with bureaucrat-speak, “statistical inference” means “we took a wild-ass guess”.  Or, to be more polite:

For years, [DHS] has deliberately not stored [visa worker] information into their databases. They only enter selected information into the computers. That was deliberate so that no one could know what is going on. We have sent in all kinds of [Freedom of Information Act] requests, and often the response is “we don’t keep track of that.”

And to make matters still worse:

“Close to a quarter of the records — dealing with workers who often make $100,000 a year or more — there is no Social Security number.”

In other words, we let them in, and allow a situation where people don’t necessarily have to pay taxes.  How charming.  But it gets worse (and I’ve added emphasis):

The failure to track legitimate H-1B documents and workers — or to punish groups for using fake H-1B documents — is routine. For many years, business advocates have kept legislators in the dark by splitting and subdividing oversight of the visa-worker economy between the Departments of State, Homeland Security, and Labor, he said.
This fragmentation has helped to minimize awareness of the scale among journalists and the public. For example, very few reporters describe the scale of the H-1B population to their readers, and most rely on talking points from business advocates who say the program brings in 65,000 or 85,000 “high skilled” workers each year when companies cannot find U.S. workers.
In reality, up to 85,000 H-1B visas are given out to companies each year, while roughly 15,000 are provided to non-profit groups, including hospitals, research centers, government agencies, and hospitals.

Now let’s add a little “China is asshole” to the mix:

The new USCIS report does not estimate the number of fake H-1B documents in circulation despite myriad cases of fraudulent work permits and made-in-China green cards.

And in India, procurement of green cards is an entire industry, catering to U.S. corporations — I’ve seen it in action at first hand.

Several years back, I posited the situation where if one won a large foreign lottery (e.g. Euromillions), whether it would be better to bring the earnings back to the U.S. and pay the 40% tax, or just to vanish into a European tax haven like Monaco with the (untaxed) millions.  My conclusion was that I wouldn’t do that, because I am of course a loyal American citizen.  As I read stuff like the above, however, I’m starting to think that “loyal American citizen” is rapidly approaching the status of “sucker”.

Change my mind.