Let’s Talk About Tax, Baby (Let’s Talk About You and Me)

As you may or may not know, tax is a big political topic right now.  It’s been pretty big for a while.  In fact, the entire fate of our economic prosperity apparently depends on extending tax cuts to Americans, which congress wants to make as suspenseful as possible by not passing just yet.  Romney is using the impeccable record of trickle-down economics by proposing large tax breaks on high earners, GOP is slamming Obama and other democrats on the passing of the Affordable Care Act, claiming it raises taxes on the middle class.  Angola is all like, “you ONLY pay as much as 35% income tax (they pay up to 60% on personal income, 35% corporate and 10% sales tax nationally) wtf are you all complaining about?”  It’s an all out tax warfare, with little tax soldiers lobbing tax grenades and stabbing each other with tax bayonets.  I think a lot of Americans have been pretty selfish and greedy about pouncing on any mention of increasing taxes, and this post explains why.

Obama has pushed this nation past an historical milestone by getting the Affordable Care Act signed into law and blessed by the Supreme Court.  There are 33 developed nations in the world.  The United States was the last nation to implement national health care.  The first nation to implement health care was Norway back in 1912; the last was Israel in 1995.

http://truecostblog.com/2009/08/09/countries-with-universal-healthcare-by-date/

Norway is doing pretty good economically, so it’s safe to say their health care system hasn’t destroyed the country yet.  The whole deal with the Supreme Court was ruling that the insurance mandate was not unconstitutional, but was in fact a tax.  Hearing this word put a lot of people into a frenzy.  No one wants to hear about more taxes.  Many Americans oppose the ACA simply because they hear their taxes will go up, and they really need to just calm the frank down.  Here’s a breakdown of how universal health care worked before the ACA:

·         You have insurance, you get sick, you go to the doctor, the doctor bills your insurance, the doctor gets paid, you or your employer continues to pay health insurance premiums, the insurance company gets paid, everyone is happy.

·         You don’t have insurance, you can’t go to the doctor because they require insurance.  The emergency room does not require insurance so you go there.  You are treated and the hospital sends you a bill.  You can’t pay the bill so it goes into collections.  The bill is either dramatically reduced or dropped.  The hospital gets little to no money so they use government subsidies to recoup these losses.  Who pays for these government subsidies?  The government.  Who pays the government?  The taxpayers!  So, in the past, the burden of the uninsured fell on all taxpayers.

This is what the ACA brings to the table:

·         Everyone is required to purchase health insurance.  If you are too poor to buy health insurance, you are exempt from a penalty, and receive medical services from Medicaid, which has been part of government assisted healthcare for quite some time.  If you would have trouble affording insurance, then you are eligible for subsidies from the government.  The government also creates insurance exchanges to create a competitive market for insurance, which reduces insurance premiums so more people can afford insurance.  Also – the number of insurance policies increase, which is an increase in demand for insurance policies, which reduces premiums.  If you are otherwise financially able to purchase health insurance, but choose not to, then you are subject to a tax up to 2.5% of your income – This s the tax that everyone is talking about.  The burden of the uninsured now falls more on the uninsured, rather than everyone.

·         There are other taxes too.  Medicare tax on the wealthy increase by 0.9%.  A 3.9% tax is imposed on unearned income for the wealthy – this is income from investments, not from salaries.  A tax is imposed on “luxury insurance plans”.  Plans that have premiums in excess of $10,200 per year, and include ridiculous coverage that no one needs, like eyeball massages or some crap.  Taxes on MSA’s go up – these are Medical Savings Account where instead of health insurance, you pay into an account that you use when you see the doctor – essentially a personally funded and managed health insurance plan.  If you withdraw money from an MSA for non medical reasons, you are taxed on it.  This tax went up from 10% to 20% (this prevents a loophole where people say they are electing for an MSA instead of health insurance, getting around the 2.5% maximum tax for not having insurance).

These are the major taxes of the ACA.  I can’t remember if I wrote an article on the ACA outlining the major changes and how they affect citizens or not.  Maybe I’ll do that next.  The point of this whole outline is that the ACA expands coverage to all Americans, prevents insurers from denying health insurance to individuals with existing conditions, and shifts the burden of the uninsured from all taxpayers to just the uninsured, and the highest earners of our country.  Good for 95% of the country, bad for the rest – and not really all that bad.  In a little bit, I’ll explain why the wealthy sounds ridiculous when they adamantly refuse to pay higher taxes, such as the ones imposed by the ACA, even if it radically transforms the health care industry for the better of the nation.

Then there’s the Bush Era tax breaks set to expire this year.  If they expire, tax rates go up for pretty much all earners.  The bottom tax rate of 10% goes up to 15% and all brackets above that increase anywhere from 3% to 4.6%.  Obama and his team want to extend the tax cuts to the middle class, but not the wealthy.  This would only increase tax rates in the top two tax brackets.  Republicans are pissed about this, but I’m not sure why.  Obama wants to eliminate tax cuts for the rich, which is presented by Republicans as a tax increase… tomato, tomato.  Wait, that only works if you actually say tomato.  Okay, phonetically then: TomAYto, TomAHto.  What is the benefit of keeping tax cuts for the wealthiest tax brackets?  The GOP (that’s The Grand ‘Ole Party, or Republicans) says it will hurt small business.  Well, that’s kind of a moot point because taxes are only increased on individual income of $200,000 for a single person or $250,000 for a family.  The small business owner earns as much as $105,757 per year – and this is for someone with about 10 years experience in the industry.  By region this goes up to $125,185 per year, and skilled small business owners earn as much as $104,762.  These are high end figures, not average ones.  So the definition of a small business does not include salaries of more than $125k a year.  Their business income is different.  No increases are expected by either candidate for the corporate tax.  So saving the small businesses can’t be it, they don’t earn enough to be affected by the tax increases.  Then it’s about jobs – if you make companies pay more in tax, they won’t be able to hire workers.  I might be misunderstanding something here, but the tax increases apply to personal income, not corporate income.  The corporate income tax rate has been about 35% for the last 25 years.  It only seems that wealthy people just don’t want to pay extra taxes.

Now in comes Romney with his economic plan.  His plan has not only proven that it gives extreme tax cuts to the wealthy, but it has also proven to be impossible to implement.  Furthermore, the tax cuts to the wealthy are paid for by eliminating tax cuts to the middle class.  Under his plan, earners of $1 million or more get tax breaks – an average tax cut of $175,000.  These tax cuts are paid for by effectively increasing tax on 95% of earners by 1.2%, or about $500 a year.  This should work, of course, because the average American simply makes too much.  In all, the shift in tax burden is to the tune of $86 billion from people earning $200,000 or more, to people making less than that.  How his team came up with this plan without knowing the burden they are placing on the middle and poor class is impossible.

Romney is implementing the time tested strategy of trickle-down economics.  I HATE trickle-down economics.  Not only do I believe it doesn’t work, at all, but I also believe it has contributed to the extreme income inequality we have today.  Trickle-Down Economics, or ass-backwards stupid talk as I like to call it, has been around for awhile, but really took off under Reagan and his whole Reaganomics thingy.  Now, here’s the thing about Reaganomics and why people thought the trickle-down theory worked.  We had a period of prosperity under Reagan, but we also significantly increased government discretionary spending.  There is another instance of economic prosperity associated with an increase in discretionary spending – and that was when we came out of the Great Depression.  Another problem I have with trickle-down economics is that it tries to manipulate the supply side of economics to create jobs.  The theory is that we give corporations and high earners tax breaks.  The wealthy will now use this extra income to invest in companies, and the companies will use the combination of investments, increased income after taxes and looser regulations to increase production.  The only problem is you actually need demand in order to justify production.  No company produces as much of a product simply because they have the means.  Trickle-down economics may have worked for a few years, when the middle class, lower class and upper class weren’t too far apart, and the consumers were able to buy luxury and commodity goods.  TDE (I’ve decided to shorten trickle-down economics to TDE) destroyed itself by giving the wealthy more money, increasing the middle class and lower class, reducing the upper class, increasing income inequality and eventually disabling the consumers’ ability to purchase goods.  Now we want to continue TDE – we will give more money to the wealthy to invest, but they don’t want to invest in a company that can’t grow.  Companies will be given more money to create jobs and grow, but they can’t because there isn’t sufficient consumer demand.  So what happens if the wealthy and large corporations are given more money but don’t use it to create jobs?  That money certainly doesn’t go back to the general population.

All of this jargon comes down to the fact that the wealthy just don’t want to pay more taxes.  I’ve researched the tax rates for the last 100 years – my conclusion is if a wealthy person travelled from 1945 and heard a wealthy person today whine about his tax rate going from 35% to 39.6%, he would open hand slap him across the face and ask him what his privileged ass was complaining about.  The average tax rate for the top income tax bracket in the last 100 years is 59%.  We had our highest tax rate on the wealthy appear in 1945 – 94%.  The average tax rate between 1945 and 1965 was 88%.  I remember watching an episode of the twilight zone where a couple finds a magic lamp and is granted 4 wishes.  One of their wishes is for $1 million, which they started to give away to their friends.  Then an agent from the IRS walked into their store and told them they owed income tax on that $1 million to the tune of about $920,000.  I was like “what, no way, that’s way too much, our tax rate is only 35%”.  The discovery I made is we pay the lowest taxes we have ever had in the better part of 80 years.  With the exception of five years under Reagan and Bush Sr., the last time the wealthy had tax rates lower than they do now was back in 1931, coincidently just before the stock market crash.  This goes the same for corporate taxes too.  We had a period of economic prosperity from 1961 to 1968, in which corporate taxes and taxes on the wealthy were at their highest (average of 50% corporate and 79% top tax bracket), payroll tax was at its lowest and income tax for the lowest bracket was fairly modest at an average of 17% over that time frame.  How was it that we had high taxes on the wealthy and corporations, low taxes on the consumers, yet still managed a period of economic prosperity, in which our GDP grew at an average rate of 7.7%?  According to TDE, this is impossible, or at least not the way to do things at all.

I am not suggesting we raise taxes on the wealthy to astronomical rates again, or on corporations.  We have been reducing tax rates on the wealthy, while increasing the amount of national income the wealthy controls over the last 30 years.  This has eventually led to extreme budget deficits – the government has mandatory spending, which is money they must spend by law, and then there’s discretionary spending, which neither democrat or republican wants to reduce.  Since we have significantly reduced the tax liability of the wealthy, which happens to control most of the nation’s income, the government has less money to spend, yet needs to maintain a level of spending, which is why we sell debt to China and other countries, and create a deficit in the trillions.  Why do democrats want to “spend our way out of debt”?  Because increasing discretionary spending in the past worked, but it worked because we still had a larger amount of tax income from the wealthiest individuals, and the middle class had more money as well.

In closing, the main argument I hear from the rich is that they shouldn’t have to pay more because they work harder and were more successful.  What they don’t realize is that people aren’t successful because they don’t try; they aren’t successful because they don’t have the chance. Taxes MUST be raised on the wealthy because they own more and more of the nation’s income each year.  It’s time for them to take responsibility for the power they have over the middle and lower class, and to take a cue from history.

TL;DR

Wealthy people need to stop whining about paying more in taxes.  They have more of the national income than ever before, and they have the lowest tax rate in the last 80 years.  Also, trickle-down economics is stupid and doesn't work.

Other Sources on tax rates and GDP:

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts

http://www.measuringworth.com/usgdp/

Super PAC Squad!

I read an article about GOP Political Action Committees, or PACs, spending over $1 billion to influence the upcoming election.  This is ridiculous, I thought, so I started looking into PACs and found a fine website called OpenSecrets.org that had some pretty interesting statistics.

Of the 218 PACs that have raised money, 97 support Republicans where only 59 support Democrats.   The rest are independent.  Of the 25 PACs that have raised over $1 million, 12 are conservative and 9 are liberal.  Of the 4 PACs that have raised over $10 million, 4 are conservative to 1 liberal.  In total, conservative PACs have raised over $161 million to the liberal PACs meager $45 million.  Of the money raised, conservative PACs have already spent over $97 million compared to $12 million spent from liberal PACs.

Among the largest donors to PACs is Harold Simmons, who donated over $11 million, most of it to American Crossroads, a conservative PAC.  He lives in Texas and is worth over $9 billion.  He buys and sells companies.  Sheldon and Miriam Adelson donated $20 million to Winning Our Future, another conservative PAC.  Their net wealth is over $21 billion which comes from casinos and resorts.  Only one of the 11 people listed are considered liberal – Jeffrey Katzenberg.  Jeff contributed $2 million to Priorities USA Action and is worth around $1 billion.  He is CEO of DreamWorks and former Chairman of Disney Films.

The following will outline what industries is spending money to influence the election of a certain political party.  I would assume they do this because that particular candidate has policies that benefit them – mostly or entirely monetarily. 

-Electrical Utility companies seem to favor Democrats, as do Miscellaneous energy companies (no doubt renewable energies for the most part) and environmental companies.  Most contributions go to Republicans, though, with mining (coal) and oil & gas being the largest donors.  73% of all oil and gas contributions went to conservative PACs.

-Unsurprisingly, Commercial banks gave more money to conservative PACs

-Intriguing – the healthcare industry contributes more money to liberal PACs.

-Human Rights, Environmental, Pro-Israel and Women’s Issues organizations give most of their money to liberal PACs.  Gun Rights organizations give 74% of their money to conservative PACs.  Gun Control organizations, however, give 100% of their donations to liberal PACs (only $6,600… but still!)

-Labor unions favor Democrats – 93% of donations from the Labor sector went to liberal PACs.

-The Education sector gives primarily to liberal PACs, as do Non-Profit organizations.

What to learn from all of this?  Most billionaires spend money to get a Republican elected as president.  The highest earning companies in the US – oil companies – spend a lot of money to get a Republican in office.  Big business and billionaires want Republicans whereas social sectors of our country want Democrats.  I guess this is nothing new, but people should be aware of who they support, and who else is supporting the same candidate.

An Atheist, a Theist and a Deist Walk Into a Bar...

I may be ostracized by this, by anyone who is religious that happens to read my rantings, but I feel the need to defend Atheists.  There has been an argument by many a theist that Atheists are preaching untruths, that life as we know it was spontaneously created without spiritual meaning; that the life we live is not simply a test, rather merely an existence.  Life exists because it must, if you will.  The theist, of course, challenges that there must be a deity responsible for existence, that life is too intricately built to have happened by accident; everything is intelligently designed by a creator.

I just realized something.  If I outline my understanding of the basic beliefs of the theist, and the atheist, it would look like this:

The Atheist: Life exists simply because it must, and was created from nothing in a random event.  The world as we know it is the result of billions of years of evolution and adaptation.  Science and logic is the foundation of this ideology.

The Theist: Life exists as the result of a creator.  There is a larger purpose for our life that is defined by the maker’s will.  Our life on Earth is devoted to praising the creator for all he has given us.  Religious faith is the foundation of this ideology.

That sounds innocent enough, right?  I mean, sure they believe in two completely different reasons why we are here.  So why has the conflict become so tense between the theist and the atheist?  I believe the problem lies on both sides of the fence.

In my more immature, cynical thoughts, I have corralled both the theist and the atheist into a realm of ridiculousness.  The theist, I had thought, was afraid of change, afraid of the fact that if there was no creator then we were responsible for our own existence, and that there is no purpose to our life.  Morals are outlined by the creator to ensure the world exists as he wants it to exist.  The atheist, I might have once believed, were mostly a group of bitter ex girlfriends and boyfriends, or battered souls from a more traumatizing experience that left them re-examining their beliefs and eventually disowning the god they once trusted.  I am reminded of an internet quote fortified by a picture of Earth and the Galaxy, a MEME if you will, about the two:

Atheists believe this all happened by chance.  Christians KNOW a wizard did it.

The MEME (is that supposed to be in all caps? I don’t know) singles out Christians, but it really applies to any theist.  Yes I admit these thoughts of mine were a tad bit ignorant.  I think most thoughts are created with a little bit of ignorance, which is why I study, and ponder on these thoughts until I can come to a logical and fair understanding.

So, why can’t theists and atheists live in peace with each other?  I believe that the theist think that atheism attacks their religion whereas the atheist think the theist forces religion on the unwilling.  Both are true, but not entirely… make sense?  There are some theists that believe the atheist is a threat to the continuity of their religion.  There are some atheists that believe religion is a threat to the continuity of society.

I defend atheists because their intent is not the destruction of religion, rather the acceptability of a world without religion.  They are simply providing and alternative lifestyle to those that feel they do not need religion to be moral citizens.  Furthermore, they are advocates of a society with the freedom of religion, as well as a freedom from religion.  Our society is one such system where we are protected from religious governance.  The atheist goal, I believe, is to provide an option for those that wish to have faith without religion, and accept science and logic as a means to existence as an alternative.

What theists believe atheist are, is in fact, the antitheist.  The antitheist is one who strictly believes one or all religions are wrong, and should not exist in society.  It may be said that most religions have an antitheist nature towards other religions.  It almost seems that religion could work better if each one of them didn’t require an army to amass in some sort of afterlife super battle between good and evil – this way no one religion would feel the need to recruit the non believers and sculpt a world in their Gods image.

I’m not atheist, nor am I a theist (weird how one space separates the two).  Yet I have faith in the supernatural and am open to the possibility that there may be a deity that created us all.  Faith is accepting a miracle that we do not yet understand, science is the ability to understand.  Just because we may have a good understanding that the universe was created from nothing, doesn’t mean there wasn’t something theological behind the theory.  Some dude named Einstein said this:

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Apparently some people thought he was smart.  I would change ‘religion’ to ‘faith’, though, as I do not believe religion is necessary for faith.  So it should be written:

Science without faith is lame, faith without science is blind.

Simply living within a world with such mystery and miracles does not satisfy our thirst for knowledge as an advanced race with the ability of reason.  I remember reading this somewhere, and wholeheartedly agree with it:

Living in a world without understanding its mysteries is like spending your whole life in a library without opening a book.

I do not believe that the common perception of god is correct.  That god is omnipotent and omniscient.  I believe that if there is a god, then this God makes mistakes.  Applying this theory to most perceptions of god is simple: god is omniscient, yet mankind is made in the image of god.  Mankind is fallible, therefore god is fallible.  God is therefore not omniscient.  The smartest man (or woman) in the world could be omniscient in the eyes of everyone else, because he (or she!) knows more than anyone else in existence.  This does not prove that he (or she) does not make mistakes.

To me real intelligent design is a progression of elaborate events, or miracles that we may not understand.  If you believe in a god that created an organism with the ability to evolve and adapt to the random changes in an environment, that seems more miraculous than creating a species without the ability to do so – even if that was not the natural intent of said god.  At any rate, I believe in these things but I don’t base my life around it more than I do logic, reason and morality.  Truth is I could care less what or where it is we came from.

Frack!

There’s an old public enemy committing a new public crime.  With the recent earthquake in the Midwest, more and more people are hearing a new term: Fracking.  Well, it’s new to them, anyway.  The process of “Fracking”, or Hydraulic Fracturing, was first used to harvest and sell natural gas in 1949.  I wasn’t really surprised to see that Halliburton was the first company to extract and sell natural gas using this method.  What I was surprised, or at least slightly more surprised, to read is that Halliburton is behind a dangerous loophole that was formed from sketchy legislation in the last decade that allows some of the most dangerous chemicals to be used in the process.

Fracking is the slang term used for fracturing shale to release natural gas.  Oil companies drill into the earth and pump millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals to create enough pressure to blast apart shale.  Natural gas is released in this processed and collected by the oil company.  Inevitably, some of the chemicals cannot be contained and work their way into the ground water.  The recent earthquake in northern Ohio is suspected to be the result of Fracking, in which the hydraulic pressure triggered the movement of tectonic plates.  This may be the first time a natural disaster was caused by humans!

It seems a little off that oil companies are allowed to pump all of those chemicals straight into the ground.  Well, I suppose if they can do it legally there isn’t any harm that can come from it, right?  The EPA should have a pretty strong chokehold on oil companies, especially in our “green movement”.  It turns out, and this may be shocking to some, that Former President Bush, with the help of Former Vice Villain Cheney, passed an energy bill in congress that exempts natural gas drilling from the Safe Drinking Water Act!  The SDWA (I’m assuming that is the short version) protects Americans from deadly natural and man-made chemicals.  I know, I never would have expected that an owner of one of the biggest oil companies, that pioneered natural gas fracking (which directly affects the quality of surrounding drinking water), would try to pass legislation that protects said companies from scrutinizing and restricting their processes by banning some of the deadly chemicals they use in those processes.

What chemicals could these be?  And are they really that toxic?  Well, yes… yes is the answer to that question.  A study was recently completed by the Committee on Energy and Commerce to acquire the type of chemicals used in Fracking directly from the oil companies, and found a disturbing list of nasty crap that may seep into the water table.  Astonishingly, the oil companies were open to providing some of the chemicals they used.  However, they were not obligated to give the names of the chemicals for anything they deemed a “trade secret”.  Some of the companies said they simply did not know what chemicals they were using, because they acquired the chemicals from a third party vendor that labeled them as trade secrets.  So some of these oil companies don’t even know what they are pumping into the ground.  IT doesn't matter though - they could legally pump whatever they want as long as it is for natural gas drilling, thanks to Bush and Cheney.  The committee found that there are as many as 750 different types of chemicals used in the process.  Of the 750 chemicals, 29 are known carcinogens.  These are the type of chemicals that cause cancer, abnormal growths, and other deadly diseases.  Some of these carcinogens are Benzene, Lead, Diesel, Formaldehyde and Sulfuric Acid.  A large product of the Fracking process is Methane as well, and there have been some reports of flammable drinking water due to a build-up of methane in the water table near some of these Fracking wells.

So, once again, big oil has ignorantly placed the lives of the consumers in jeopardy in order to maximize profit.  If natural gas drilling were susceptible to the same rules as harvesting any other energy, or any other process that directly or indirectly affects drinking water, they would not be able to use any carcinogenic or any other potentially lethal chemical in their process.  They would be forced to find another method of extraction, which is undoubtedly possible.  Instead, they relish in the loopholes of the system, knowing (or even worse in some cases not knowing) what chemicals they are pumping into the drinking water.  Largely unethical, extremely dangerous yet disturbingly tolerated.  The question is how long will it take before we acknowledge that the risks are just too, well, risky and hold natural gas drilling to the same standards of all other drilling.  Probably quite a while, unfortunately.  It’s like big oil has some sort of advantage over us.  As if we actually need natural gas to continue functioning as a society.  They could really take advantage of that situation is they ever became aware of it!  Anyway, you can read more about it here:

http://8020vision.com/2011/04/17/congress-releases-report-on-toxic-chemicals-used-in-fracking/

TL;DR  Big oil is a fracking mess.  They fracking take advantage of every unethical loophole and constantly fracking extort the consumer at every fracking turn.  Now they are fracking fracking so they can maximize profits, and in return they are spilling fracking carcinogens directly into the drinking water.  And guess what?  Everyone fracking knows it!  What the frack!

The Right to Marry: A Constitutional Value

Looking back at the social development of our country you might think we have made a lot of progress. There is no slavery, laws are in place to protect minorities in the workplace, and all adults of US citizenship have the right to vote.  After the Declaration of Independence was signed and “all men” were created equal, it seemed the separation of the federal government and the states had an easy enough time dissolving this ideal utopia.  One of the most important qualities of our Nation is the ability to vote for who makes decisions for you.  However, after declaring independence, only white men that owned property had the right to vote.  Then it seemed our social equality declined when in 1790, the Naturalization Act barred Asian Americans from voting.  In 1812, the true nature of politics as a means of reshaping the federal government that has already been established was born when a Massachusetts governor redrew district lines to favor Republican-dominated areas (something that happens still today).  It wasn’t until 1869 when the Fifteenth Amendment gave African Americans the right to vote.  It was still a very shaky ride, with different states introducing different legislature that kept mostly ethnic minorities from being able to vote.  Women were finally given the right to vote in 1920, but it wasn’t until 1964 when a Civil Rights Act was passed making it illegal to discriminate on voting rights.  It wasn’t until 1971 when all persons over the age of 18 were allowed to vote.  You can find the very confusing and fact filed timeline of voters rights here:

http://www.aclu.org/voting-rights/voting-rights-act-timeline

The point of outlining the right to vote from the time our country was formed, is that it took 195 years in order to give all adult citizens of the US the right to vote.  Under a nation that was supposedly founded for all men to be equal, this timeline of voter rights seems quite unproductive and unconstitutional.

This article, however, is not about voter rights.  I simply outline the lack of recognition of all men being seen as equal in our nation by showing how long it took to finally recognize one of the basic rights of our nation allowable to all adult citizens.  Now we look back and find it silly that most people did not have the right to vote, or have the right to be free men, or have the right to work, or have the right to be recognized as a married couple… OK, so we are still struggling with that last one.  This leads me to the main topic of discussion: Why can we accept our shortcomings in our society when it comes to exclusion of rights on a basis of race, sex and religion, yet we still cannot allow two people to marry based on the fact that a marriage is a religious union between and man and a wife?  The logic behind why gay couples should have the right to marry is evidently astounding, while the logic behind why they shouldn’t have that right is incredibly ignorant.

This country was founded and established by a group of men with various religious backgrounds.  Many of these men considered themselves Deists, which acknowledge a higher power without confining them to the boundaries of a religion.  The Declaration of Independence and Constitution were written to absolve this nation from religious persecution, and allow any citizen to believe and practice what they want, without governing the entire country under a particular faith.  So why is it that the federal government and most state governments choose to fight the seemingly simple logic of allowing same sex marriages?  The argument is that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman.  I have no problem with this argument.  If it says in your religious texts that only a man and a woman may marry, then that is perfectly acceptable to me.  My argument is why state and federal governments recognize religious sanctity in their definition of a married couple.  To do such is unconstitutional, and treats gay couples as non citizens of a country they are obviously, in most cases, citizens of.

Many argue that it makes no difference if you are considered married or not.  This way of thinking is largely ignorant.  A very quick and simple search on the legality and benefit of a recognized “Marriage” in the United States yields very positive arguments for allowing same sex marriages.  In fact, I typed in “Benefits of Marriage” in the all Powerful Wizard of Google and found the first website to include all I needed to know to corroborate my theory on the benefits of marriage:

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/marriage-rights-benefits-30190.html

Here are some interesting facts about how a marriage affects two people legally and financially:

Married Couples:

·         Inherit their spouses estate

·         Receive an exemption from estate and gift taxes from property left to you by your spouse

·         Receive social security, medicare and disability benefits for spouses

·         Receive veterans and military benefits for spouses

·         Can obtain insurance through your spouse’s employer

·         Can receive wages, workers compensation and retirement plan benefits for a deceased spouse

·         Can take leave from your employer if your spouse is ill, or if a family member of a spouse dies

·         Can make medical decisions on behalf of your spouse when they are unable to

·         Can file for joint adoption or foster care rights

·         Receive equitable division of property upon divorce

·         Can Live in neighborhoods zoned for “Family Only” (Didn’t even know they zoned that!)

·         Receive family rates for home, auto, health and other types of insurance

·         Receive tuition discounts

This means that same sex couples that cannot marry also cannot receive these benefits – many of which are federal benefits.  An important fact to recognize is that none of the benefits under federal law will apply to you if you are in a Civil Unions or Domestic Partnership.  So you MUST get married in order to receive most of these benefits.

I find it incredibly disturbing that our society can face these facts but still oppose a same sex union that is recognized by the government under the same conditions as a religious marriage.  It’s so simple it makes me want to vomit diarrhea from my ears.  In fact, I find it outright evil that many people would still oppose a marriage even if it was not tied to a religious denomination.  If we as a society stopped fighting events that have no effect or meaning in our lives and started collaborating positively on issues that affect and matter to EVERYONE (health care, fair wages, civil benefits…) we would be a lot healthier – not to mention sane.

Exploiting Faith

This is a big one.  Where to start, where to start… I suppose I should explain that this article will probably upset a lot of people, if said people were to actually read this.  I try to approach all aspects of life with morality, common sense and logic.  Religion is no exception.  I believe that faith and religion are very separate ideas.  You can have faith without religion.  My aim here isn’t to convince any one person that their faith is wrong, nor their religion.  I am also not trying to target any one religion; however, I am more familiar with the Christian based religions so it may seem that way.  Where everyone is entitled to their own faith and practice, that entitlement does not grant them authority of persuasion.  This is one of the underlying problems with religion, I believe, that has tainted faith for centuries.

I was initially raised in a Catholic setting, as my Dad was Catholic, and so we went to a Catholic church.  My mom, I believe was protestant, because her parents were protestant, or something along those lines.  Apparently Catholics and Protestants don’t get along too well, which is surprising to me because they come from a Christian background.  Anyway, I don’t remember much of the teachings, as I was pretty young, and more or less went by force – not the kind of force, like I was shackled and dragged to church.  The kind of force where, I was a child, and it was either go to church peacefully, or I wouldn’t get to play with my Legos afterward.  Later on in my childhood, after my parents divorced, I would sometimes attend my Grandparents church as well.  I could not discern the difference of either sect.  It was just another boring hour on Sunday to me.  At the same time, my stepfather was practicing his parents’ religion – Mormon.  Oh god, that was the most painful of the three because it was THREE HOURS LONG on Sunday.  Sure we got to go out to Boston Market afterwards, but I would have gladly made that trade if it meant sleeping in longer and playing in the woods.  I’m not sure if it was the lack of pressure to pay attention to the teachings, the lack of consistency of a distinct sect or religion, or some inherent trait that led me to be rebellious to religion, but I never once used faith based teachings in my daily life; at least none that I remember.

I find that the center of all religion is fear.  Fear of the creator.  It’s a bit socialist to me – that fear is instilled in the believers in order to keep them conformed to the faith.  I also find it a bit frightening, and borrowing a line from a Death Cab for Cutie song – “fear is the heart of love” as dictated by a nun, is particularly harrowing.  Love should have no fear.  You should not love out of fear, rather you should love out of compassion and loyalty.  You love someone because you choose to, not because you fear the alternative.

Now faith – faith to me is completely separate from religion, although every religion has faith of some sort.  Save the atheist, everyone has faith.  Even scientists have faith.  What you cannot prove but believe to exist is the nature of faith.  Theories are the scientist’s faith.  I identify more with a scientists proof than a religious proof as there are evident mathematical equations, physics, chemistry… all things science that have created many mechanical and electrical wonders that we can see, and that work.  So they have to be doing something right.  The reason we still have a conflict of religion and science is because of the ultimate question in the reliability in both faiths – You can’t prove God exists, but you can’t prove that he doesn’t, either.  Lack of proof doesn’t necessarily promote faith, but it also does not negate it.

I believe religion is a faith based government.  It is a governing power over a group of people that teaches them, and holds them to a set of rules in order to maintain an organized and growing society.  Religion happens to use faith as the basis of their governance.  Take Christianity for example.  The word of God was passed down to the people.  These people must follow the word of God throughout their life.  The reward is entrance into His kingdom.  However, if you do not follow the word of God, you will spend eternity in Hell, which apparently is not a very nice place this time of year, or any other time for that matter.  None of this is proven, it is a matter of hearsay and mass acceptance.  I believe that many basic religious followers use religion to promote a set of morals that all men should follow.  This idea is actually very good.  Imagine a world where everyone was held to the same moral values and principles.  The only problem is that these are written by God, or more specifically translated and taught by the highest followers of God.  Some of these morals and principles are logically flawed.

First of all, most religious texts are known to have been written by man, as an interpretation of God’s word.  The religion is based on this book.  However, man is fallible, therefore religion is fallible.  Most religions hold its followers to a code of deliverance.  It is their duty to convince the non believers that the word of God is the true word, and that the non believer’s faith is immoral and wrong.  This may be the one flaw that creates the most problems.  Thousands of lives have been lost to this ideology.  In my opinion, if religion were taught to live and let live, the world would be a much better place.  I don’t believe that religion should be abolished.  Faith in an organized sense is important to those that need it to believe there is a higher purpose to their existence.

My biggest peeve with religion is that it is used as governance for all of society, whether individuals in said society believe or not.  Many will quote religion as if it is an ultimately accepted standard for all people.  For instance, some will quote our very government, and country as a Christian based country, that our Country was made on the basic principles of Christianity, and therefore the citizens must be accountable as such.  I doubt many of them know that our founding fathers had a variety of different religious backgrounds, and that none of those beliefs laid the groundwork for our constitution.  The pledge of allegiance was actually written by a socialist named Francis Bellamy in 1892.  Congress later adopted this in 1942 and added the phrase “Under God” in 1954.  Many people forget that practicing their religion in this country is a right, but not an absolute.  This should be a globally accepted norm, rather than just an idea by those who seek peace – You may practice your religion, you may have your faith, but you have no right to impose your beliefs by force, physically nor legally, upon any one person.  The bottom line is – Religion should never be used as a basis of governance over any society.  Religion has no value in government, and it is ignorant to believe so.

There are two topics I rarely bring up in public discussion unless it is with close friends.  These are politics and religion.  The two systems are so complex that there is no logical one any one person can be completely versed on the subject or their point of view.  This does not stop people from justifying their beliefs regardless how logically flawed they are.  The main problem with religious argument is that their word must be taken literal in order for it to be valid.  Everything must be followed as it is written without argument.  This is the basis for the argument against same sex marriage – the only reason there is opposition to same sex marriage is because marriage is deemed as a religious act, and in the Bible it is written that it is to be between a man and a woman.  This poses a problem for those that are homosexual but wish to be married as acknowledged by the society and government they are a part of.  Whatever you believe, there are benefits to having the government recognize you as man and wife.  Some use religion to deny these people of this right, and this is fundamentally wrong.  My biggest argument is that one who is religious, and clings to the word of God as absolute and unchangeable, chooses to ignore those teachings that are archaic, barbaric and immoral.  This, I believe, is the definition of hypocrisy and if you do not allow yourself to reason then you should not be allowed to impose law over those with many different faiths.  I will not go into specifics, but I will say that my thoughts on this matter come from the fact that there are religions that promote stealing as wrong, but rape as an act that is not necessarily unethical.  Not to single out Christianity, but many cling to the bible as the basis for their morality and judgment of others, without actually knowing what is in it.  I have a sneaky suspicion that this is true for many other religions.

I will admit that this article is extremely compressed, and I could write a book resembling a work by Ayn Rand that explains my thoughts on the matter.  The bottom line is that I believe there is a very unstable pressure by many religious individuals to the masses.  Simply forcing one to believe in faith will not ensure acceptance and obedience.  One must choose to believe, and the religious should only preach, not force, their faith to others.  They must put faith in their teachings that they will inspire someone to follow them.  I think this was the intention of religion that was eventually degraded and tainted by greed.

I have never attached myself to any one religion.  I would place my ideology of morality close to that of Buddhism, as they preach acceptance more than any other religion know of – including the absence of faith (I am not Buddhist, I just like their style).  I am not atheist – I cannot discount the existence of a creator simply because we cannot prove it.  I am neither faithful to religion in a sense that I must believe there was a certain way or reason we are here.  I am also not an antitheist, which is an opposition to organized religion.  I may disagree with it, but I also must accept it, even if I do not accept their involvement with government and large scale society.  If anything, I would say I am Deist.  This is the belief that God may exist, and that many religions may coexist.  Some may view it as a weak faith.  I believe that you should not put absolute faith in anything that you do not fully understand.  When you really look at it, I don’t believe we should even be all that worried to hurry up and figure out exactly why we are here and where we go when we die.  The only thing we should be doing is living with each other, without imposition, but with morality and compassion.

Representation by Taxation is Dead

I find most people in the first world are incredibly intelligent.  So smart, in fact, that whenever there is a national or global issue the majority seems to have an educated, expert opinion on the matter.  The internet has been a great place where people can show up and present their knowledge on everything.  There is no retribution, because on the internet you are faceless.  That egotistical extreme racist asshole that makes disparaging remarks on an internet forum on how this race or that race is the reason for all the problems of the earth could just be your mild mannered neighbor.  He’s not going to say those things in public because he enjoys borrowing your power tools, and having you watch his cat while on holiday.

The most recent event that has everybody spewing out their empty knowledge on the matter is of course the economy.  More specifically, who is responsible for the disparagement of wealth, who to blame for ruining the American Dream, and what to do to fix everything in the shortest amount of time possible.  The new face of the movement for economical reform is the Occupy Wall Street protesters, which quickly sprouted into a nationwide protest at several different locations.  I even saw a small demonstration of people at the capitol building in Columbus, Ohio, where I currently reside.  It would appear that anybody with enough money to enjoy the American Dream look down at the protesters as smelly hippies that don’t have jobs and don’t want to work hard for their wealth.  The protesters look down at the reasonably and extremely wealthy as the silver spoon, trust fund people who never had to face the challenges of the lower 99% of Americans.  The problem is, both sides have their own opinion on the issue, but as usual are extremely ill informed and don’t really know what they are fighting for, or against.

The protesters know that they are sick of the growing number of poor and lower middle class.  The ultra rich are sick of these liberal hippies (their words, not mine) smelling up their territory.  What is interesting to me is the media coverage of this whole thing.  The protests had been going on for more than a week before I started to see the media placing the news on their websites and newspapers.  Now there are several articles printed a day on any given news outlet about protests in whatever state, about which companies don’t pay their fair share, and how big business screws up the economy.  The thing is, this has been going on for decades but nobody does anything about it until an unruly mod appears.

I’ll admit, I am on the protesters side, and I am fed up with big business, which includes corporations as well as investment banks (such as the ones we paid first to screw us over, and then again to bail them out when screwing us over stopped making them money).  So why haven’t I lifted a finger to help the cause?  As it stands, these protests are just a show of force, but aren’t attacking anything specific.  They just hope to make a presence and expect someone to step up and make a change.  It’s a start of a movement that needs to transform into something much smarter.  The people they expect to resolve their problems are the same people that allowed this to happen in the first place.  These protests aren’t going to convince the wealthiest of Americans to stop taking advantage of our economic system out of good faith.  We are talking about the greediest, souless…est people on this Earth, that are more concerned about having power than wealth – it just so happens you must have wealth in order to have power.

I don’t want to sound hypocritical, but I believe what needs to be done is to start outlining the factors that contribute to disparagement of wealth.  This is how I see how wealth is gathered – an individual or group of individuals forms a company that produces goods or services.  This is the basis of an economy, and is needed for society.  These individuals receive money for the goods or services from the consumer.  Some of this money is paid to the workers for the company, some is paid to maintain the company (utilities and infrastructure), some is paid to people that invested in the company as dividends, some is paid to the government in taxes, and the rest is (should) be invested back into the company for growth (profits).  Seems simple enough – the entire global economy runs off this principle.

So it’s simple – A company loses revenue due to operating costs, dividends and taxes.  The leftover stuff is profit to re-invest in the company or other ventures.  With big business, these revenues and profits can be enormous and the payrolls for the top executives get higher and higher (re: Disparity of Wealth in America).  Somewhere, more cash is either pumped into the company or cash is freed up somewhere else to allow this extreme shift of money.  Whatever happens, the result is this – the top earners exponentially or geometrically grow their wealth, while the bottom earners have to fight for a raise, or even to keep their job.  This starts the uneven spread of wealth across our society, and it has been happening for decades… centuries, millennia even.  I’m sure if you look at any society that has ever existed, the scenario is all the same – the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.

So, now we have a movement on our hands.  The 99% is fed up with the rich getting richer at their expense.  Unfortunately this doesn’t solve anything.  Bringing the fight to the front door doesn’t stop the rich from sneaking out the back.  We, as a democratic society, need to put pressure on the government and our political parties to fix the funneling of mass quantities of money to the uber rich.  Capital investments are important to society, but only when they benefit everyone involved.  Many people who look down on these protesters because they think these people aren’t willing to work hard for their wealth are not looking hard enough into the underlying problem.  It’s not that they aren’t working hard enough to achieve the American Dream; they aren’t given a fair chance.  Thousands of people unemployed from the high school graduate to the doctorate.  Companies are throwing even more people on the street while giving the executives million dollar bonuses.  The 1%, or rather the 0.5% of top earners in this country know that in order to keep power in this society they must control the wealth of everyone else, or they will have more competition.

How do they do it?  How do these ultra rich, faceless enemies of the general public manage to make so much money while everyone else suffers?  The government and our politicians allow them to do so.  Big business lobbies for a complex tax system and loopholes to reduce their taxable income, so they have bigger profits to stuff the pocket books of the ultra rich.  They create offshore entities to amass an extreme amount of wealth and then tell the government that the only way the country will see this income is to allow them to move it into their US entities at a tax rate barely comparable to the 35% it should be, thus reducing the expecting income of the government that relies on this money to take care of its citizens.  Big business holds the government hostage, telling them the only way they will manufacture on American soil is if they get huge tax breaks, then somehow funnel income to other countries so they aren’t taxed for it.  They do all of this and when we complain they insist they are only conforming to our governments laws… only it’s not really the governments laws, rather the big business that puts out big cash influence into the political system.

It is sickening to think that most big businesses get their start in the US – from the American Dream, and then work so hard to destroy it for others.  The U.S. gave them an opportunity and they exploit it at every chance they can to make more money, to have more power.  It’s not just an act of unfairness or injustice.  It’s an act of treason.

Of course, saying all of this doesn’t make a lick of difference – no more than the Occupy protests do.  All I can say, is we need to hold our government, our politicians accountable for the decisions they make that regulate our economy.  We don’t need to tax the big business or the rich more; we need to tax them, period.  They need to be taxed fairly, just as the ordinary American.  Progressive tax, flat tax… whatever tax – as long as EVERYBODY is taxed.  Remove tax loopholes that allow the funneling and blanket movements of cash in and out of the country at reduced rates.  Increase excise taxes so it is no longer economical for companies to manufacture in other countries only to import the product straight to America (eliminating jobs AND reducing our export/import ratio, which directly effects GDP).  Remove high barriers to start a company so that when these greedy companies exit our economy all together because they don’t get their way, there is someone else waiting to pick up where they left off, in a much fairer manner.  Let these people know that we are not going to be bullied any longer.  Let our officials know we will only put them in office if they promise to stop letting big business get away with being greedy.  Let them know that everyone should have a shot at the American Dream.

TL;DR:  Dear government, stop letting the ultra rich big business and capital enterprises take advantage of the other 99.5% of Americans, and take care of the society you have sworn to protect.  We are still a Democracy, and we should still have a voice.