Mine...mine...IT'S ALL MINE! *cue the scary music*

Did you see the roll-out of the new Trump Tax Reform Plan yesterday?  Have you actually read it?  If you have, it probably didn't take you more than a minute or so as it's really not a "plan", but just a few bullet points.  Here it is if you're interested:

That's it.  This is what The Prez and his Team have been working on for the past 98 days.  Honestly, it looks like something I might have whipped out at 2am the night before a college paper topic outline was due.  I give it a half hour effort, max.

In short, it's insulting.  It seems at first glance to give a break to the middle class by increasing the Standard Deduction, but also seems to take away some possible deductions, too, most notably property TAX deductions.  Property INTEREST deductions appear to be left intact.  What will the middle-class bottom line look like?  Probably either "revenue neutral" (Gubment speak for "no change") or maybe a slight tax cut, just enough to give the incumbent Congressman a good shot at re-election, which is all he cares about.

On the other side, corporations, notably including privately held corporations like Trump, Inc, will make out like absolute bandits!  It will result in tax cuts, on paper at least, to small businesses like mine, but it will be a drop in the bucket compared to what the ultra-wealthy will get.  Let's face it, this is simply another wealth transfer to the rich.  They haven't even made much of an effort to disguise it.  We reportedly already have approx $1.7 TRILLION +/- parked in short term investments looking for a better place.  Another trillion dollars isn't needed....there is NO shortage of investment capital.

The bean counters say the tax cut will leave the Treasury short by approx one TRILLION dollars, to be offset by the ever popular "future growth" somewhere in the future.  Maybe.  Hopefully.

The one possible good thing in there:  The one-time opportunity for corporations to bring back earnings from overseas that they haven't before now because of the higher taxes that would be due here.  This has been done before (so much for "one-time") with minimal success, as it didn't create the new jobs it promised.  Instead companies used their windfall for stock buy-backs and dividends, which *big surprise* went primarily to the already wealthy.

Those who read my protestations will again probably accuse me of being a pinko anti-capitalist, but nothing could be further from the truth.  I am an ARDENT capitalist, one who understands it is the middle class that is truly the goose that laid America's golden egg, and who is trying to see to it it isn't slaughtered.  Right now, in Washington at least, words like mine are like a lonely voice in the forest.

When you stiff the middle class and concentrate too much wealth in the hands of too few, you get Czarist Russia 1917 (revolution), America 1929 (Great Depression), TWA under Carl Icahn, (bankrupt), Eastern Airlines under Frank Lorenzo (kaput), etc.  When companies share their wealth, you get wildly successful stories like The Staubach Companies (Roger Staubach), Broadcast.com (Mark Cuban), Ford (after Henry Ford doubled employee wages), Southwest Airlines, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and more.  The owners actually made MORE money thanks to the efforts of their grateful employees than they EVER made before. Come on people....this ain't rocket surgery!

*sigh*

Rough landing ahead.  Hold on.

S

So now I've pissed off Germany, too?

"I had...a bad...experience!"  from The Italian Job.

Earlier this week I said some rather disparaging things about India, and immediately my technology tools all went kaput.  This necessitated a call to Yahoo customer service, which of course is contracted out to a couple of semi-English speaking idiots in....INDIA!   It has been suggested to me this was simply Karma coming home to roost with a vengeance.  (NOTE:  Just as I typed this, the battery compartment door on my wireless keyboard popped open and the batteries fell out.  That's creepy!)

Yesterday my car's driver side power window wouldn't open, and I remembered there was a fuse that controlled just the driver's side front window.  The other 3 windows worked fine.  So while I was out making my rounds I stopped in to my mechanic and asked him to please check it.

He got in my car (an Audi), turned on the key, hit the "down" switch....and it came down.  DAMN!  So it was just me?  Am I jinxed or what?

Then he tried to close it, and just as happened to me....nothing.  Now it was stuck down*.  Yes.  I AM jinxed.

What have I done to piss off Germany?  I like Germany, especially their cars.  *sigh*

I need the weekend to hurry up and get here.  *pout*

S

*They got it back up temporarily. It wasn't the fuse.   Replacement parts are coming pronto from Canada.  I'm just thankful they aren't coming from #$%^& India.  ;)

You live by technology, you die by technology

Technology really kicked my ass yesterday.  My business email just vanished.  Pffffft!  I can't access my business website, and my email can't forward (link?) over to my personal email account.  I used to log in to my personal Yahoo account, then I could skip back and forth between the two emails....been doing it that way for years.

And I use my biz email as my "paper trail".  I have thousands of emails saved, available to refer back to if needed.  Where'd they go?  

K says they're on a cloud somewhere, but I have no idea which one.  So what am I supposed to do?  Call Google, Yahoo, Apple, Amazon, the NSA, etc and ask 'em if they have my stuff?  And if they do, I'm sure they're gonna want a password.  

"Sure, here's 50....let's try 'em all and see if one of them works."  I'll be "locked out" after the first 3 and have the FBI after me for suspicion of hacking.  DUH!

And on a non-technology matter, even dinner kicked my ass, too.  The little jingle on TV said, "Any footlong Subway sandwich....$5 all month long."  So I went to get K and me a footlong Chicken Bacon Ranch Melt for dinner last night.  They made it, toasted it, put on my toppings, wrapped it up, and then said, "That will be $7.75."  

"Umm....what happened to $5?"

She pointed to the small print on the bottom of the menu 15 feet up in the air, 30 feet behind the counter.  It said, "Any footlong except the Chicken Bacon Ranch Melt".  Those bastards!

Then back home I pulled up my ATT Uverse app on my iPad to check the TV schedule and it said I had no favorites saved.  Bullshit!  

It wants me to look through 800 channels just to find the 10 or so I actually watch?  I've been looking at it every evening for months.  I know I have them saved.  Where'd they go?  

Then I tried to log out and then back in, and it said it couldn't find the server.  It...couldn't...find...the...server?  How do you lose an entire $%^& server?  Aren't they the size of a refrigerator?

Is there some weird sunspot activity going on?  I mean, why me?  Why couldn't it smite Iran or North Korea or Cleveland?

*sigh*

S

The art of logos

In my humble opinion, the biggest con man (men) alive today are the ones who design corporate logos.  They'll tell you they're trying to define the essence of a company by just one word or one symbol.  OK, fair enough, but why does it take a whole team of $500-an-hour graphic designers months to come up with a winning design?  Are they the ultimate control freaks or just high-class pickpockets?

A story in this morning's news told of how new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer (who makes considerably more than $500 an hour) spent an entire weekend with her "logo design team" putting the finishing touches on a new symbol that had taken months (and probably cost millions) to get to that point. 

Some logos make sense, having a story behind them:

Ford's logo says....well....FORD, as in "Henry Ford".  The epitome of simple.

Audi's four interlocking rings represent the German companies Horch, Auto Union, DKW, and Wanderer that joined together to form Audi in 1932.

BMW used to make airplane engines, and the blue and white circle in the middle of their logo represents a spinning propeller.

I'm guessing their logo "design teams" knocked those out in an afternoon, probably drawn on a cocktail napkin after a few beers down at the corner tavern.  But nowadays we tend to over-think everything.  We have to hear from (pay) graphic designers, consultants, psychologists, focus groups, etc, before we can come up with a winning design.

The stock brokerage firm Merrill Lynch's logo is a bull, as in "Bull Market".  Get it?  I wonder how many million dollars it cost to design that stylized bull?

But back to Yahoo.  Here was their old logo:

Here is their new logo:

They wanted something that would look "sophisticated, yet whimsical".

Here are the doodles that it took to get there:

I have visions of the mail room boy pushing his cart down the hall when he stumbled across the logo team hard at work.  "Why don't you just straighten out the letters, and make that last O a bit bigger and tilt the exclamation point?  That would be sorta whimsical."

DOH!

But what do I know.  I designed ours on the back of a cocktail napkin after a couple of beers down at the corner tavern.

To me it says "Sophisticated, yet too cheap to hire a design team".  ;)

S

I've got all the answers. It's the questions that trip me up.

So now leaked information has come out that says the NSA has paid $278M to media companies (Google? Yahoo? etc) for access to their customer's data.  What a waste!  They could have just come straight to me in the first place and for a whole lot less than that I would have "cc'd" them on all my emails from the get-go.  We could have cut out the middle men and saved the taxpayers a bundle.

I don't quite understand what's fixing to happen in Syria.  With the aid of maybe France....the Germans and Brits have opted out....the US stands ready to strike Syria in retaliation for their use of chemical weapons.

We've announced probable targets are their Ministry of Defense building, their Secret Police HQ, their Republican Guard barracks, certain military warehouses, etc, ALL OF WHICH ARE BY NOW UNDOUBTEDLY EMPTY.  And we've said we have no desire to target Bashar Assad personally....we're not looking for "regime change".  And we have no idea how to measure whether or not we're successful.

Yeah boy, that's a well thought out plan.  Can't we just hit a few keystrokes and cyber-fry all their computers and be done with this?  Yes, I know....they can retaliate and maybe fry ours, too.  Feces occurs.  I'll chance it.  (Which just reinforces my case for good 'ol yellow pads and #2 pencils.  :)

IMO we should either kick the ever-lovin' shit out of them or stay home and let's watch football.  And since cruise missiles cost more than we have left in petty cash, I say "pass the nachos".

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I hereby declare the long Labor Day weekend begins the second I click "Publish".  (The boss won't mind.  Go ahead and mention my name.)

Y'all have fun and stay safe.  ;)

S

It's not "what were we thinking?" but "ARE we thinking?"

It's said by middle class Americans that one class pays taxes, and another class gets the benefits.  That is probably greatly exaggerated, yet I would agree it still holds some truth.

Yes, we all benefit from police and fire protection, public sanitation, a strong military, the (increasingly irrelevant) postal system, etc, but individually, most of us in the middle class simply don't qualify for any public perk.  We pay for them, yet we "make too much" to qualify ourselves.  No wonder we're resentful.

Europeans pay considerably higher taxes than we do, but I've read that most pay it willingly (Greeks, Italians, and a few others excepted) because the average taxpayer there personally gets something in return.  Higher education is subsidized or is free, health care is subsidized or is free, day care is subsidized or is free, elderly care is subsidized or is free, and so forth. Not just for the poor, but for everyone.

I'm not saying we should necessarily emulate European socialism, but just pointing out how even middle class taxpayers there recieve something for their tax  dollars....er....Euros.  They're getting "bang for their buck".

If you're middle class in America, you're on your own.  You pay, you just don't get your money's worth in return.  As long as you have a good job and believe a bright future awaits you, you'll pay for your kid's daycare and college tuition, mom's nursing home, etc, out of your pocket and still pay your taxes and not think much of it.  But in this age of globalization, that often isn't possible any more.  

Anyone remember when Ross Perot ran for president back in 1992?  Free trade agreements were the hot topic back then (the opening salvo of globalization) and Ross said, "That giant sucking sound you hear will be American jobs going overseas." Prices were cheaper at Walmart, so (almost) everyone was happy.  We lost a few jobs initially, but no big deal.  

The next year, a few more jobs left, but the price of a toaster was cheaper still so who cared?...on and on.  Now the news (USA Today, Yahoo) reports that 4 of 5 middle class Americans are fearful of their future and are essentially just hanging on.  

Yes, we're creating new jobs once again, but they generally aren't anywhere near as high paying as the ones we've lost.  We're constantly lowering the bar.  

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A real world example of the mess we've caused for ourselves:  Our roads and bridges are crumbling.  They say it will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to fix them, money the state and federal governments don't have.

Road maintenance and expansion are paid for with gasoline sales taxes.  Because new cars get better (mandated) mileage these days, more people can drive more cars more miles and still buy less gasoline.  They put more strain on our highways, yet pay less taxes to maintain them.  

We really need to *gasp* raise gas taxes.  In my state most of our new major roads are toll roads.  So now I'm not paying more taxes, but I'm paying tolls instead.  My wallet can't tell the difference.  

Paying more taxes isn't necessarily a bad thing IF YOU CAN SHOW ME I'M PERSONALLY GETTING SOMETHING OF VALUE FOR IT.

The politicians are just playing games with us.  Yet by touting their tax cutting record, we keep re-electing them.  We've become a nation of airheads.

S

More stuff that really chaps my hide....

I've found several more things that just chap the heck out of me:  It seems the abbreviated online versions of many news services (Yahoo, USA Today, NYT, etc) like to tease us with articles such as "10 things you can do now to save on your electric bill" or "The 5 best and worst places for retirees to live".  So you click on those links and expect to see a list....#1, #2, #3, a so on.   Instead you see 16 paragraphs of text.  So where are the "10 things..." or "The 5 best..."?  Just show me the damn list!

And freeway designers.  I've been in many parts of the country where there are tall screens separating the freeway lanes going in opposite directions....northbound traffic can't see what's happening on the southbound side.  I'm guessing this is to prevent rubberneckers from slowing traffic while looking at a wreck on the opposite side of the freeway.  Makes sense, right?

But not in Dallas.  Ooooh no!  Here we build 12-lane-wide brand new freeways that have a 4' tall divider between lanes going in the opposite direction.  So every time there is a wreck going one way, cars going the opposite direction slow to 3 mph in order to see all the carnage.  Then as soon as you pass the wreck it's back to 80 mph.  WTF? 

Then all the "traffic engineers" complain traffic is too slow and initiate another 10-year, gazillion-dollar project to install more lanes.  (Job security?)  Bullshit.  Just include a tall divider down the middle and traffic will zip right along.

Come on all you egghead engineers.  This ain't rocket surgery!

S