AMERICAN ALPTRAUM - PART 4
YESTERDAY
All my Trumplings seemed so far away,
But now it seems as if they’re here to stay,
Oh, how I long, for yesterday…
Have you ever wondered why people have to
pass a test to get a licence to drive cars, or why it’s illegal to operate a
vehicle or machinery when they are drunk, off their face on drugs, or have
dementia? Not really? Makes sense? And yet you can access IVF without a
psychological evaluation or background check providing you can afford to buy a
baby. Or you can just go freelance and make one on your own. That doesn’t
really sound right, does it? What’s to stop the wrong kind of people from
inflicting themselves and their stupidity on vulnerable children who deserve
better? How much does that cost in regards to revenue, society and individuals?
Now think about voting, and what impact this has when people who have no idea
about the issues vote for the Party that is best able to manipulate them based
on the ignorance and flawed comprehension of the voters. There should be ten
simple questions you have to answer about politics and the issues that have
appeared in an official ‘fact check’, and unless you get at least half right,
your vote doesn’t count. But there isn’t. What’s that cost society?
Which brings us rather neatly to the topic of
taxes. Over here, in Australia, we get ill-educated jackasses bitching about
how other people are stealing their taxes. That comment reveals their stupidity
in far too many ways. Let’s wander down the old taxation road for a moment. Over
here, tax isn’t paid on the first $18,500 you get paid. After that, it depends
on what your income is. Not what you earn. What you earn and what you are paid
are usually two very different things. People on minimum wage usually earn more
than what they are paid while a company CEO may get themselves millions of
dollars but earn far less – take away the product producing labour and
management produces nothing and earns squat. Most people really don’t get this,
or that a bonus should be distributed evenly to all employees, as a reward for
their hard work, not to just some wankers in an office that already get paid
too much.
Taxation makes no distinction between an
individual and the number of dependents relying upon that income. It gets taxed
at the same rate regardless. An income of $85,000, for example, will get taxed
about $20,000. That leaves $65,000 to cover rent or a mortgage, utilities, fuel
and maintenance for a car, along with registration and insurances (for home,
contents, health, car or whatever), public transport, visits to the doctor,
food and clothes. Whatever is left is disposable income. If the income supports
two adults and three children, it’s now $13,000 per dependent. Those folks are
now living below the poverty line. The family gets is a rebate of $2,000 to
help them support all of the children. Someone on full unemployment benefits
gets just $13,260.
At that wage and taxation format, there is no
disposable income, and affording food becomes problematic. “Can’t feed ‘em,
don’t breed ‘em” is the usual response from the half-wits over here that think
they are better than everyone else despite the fact that they are often chain-smoking,
beer guzzling, motor-head, misogynistic, racist, bigots who spend too much time
gambling, inflicting themselves on others, and received what could only be
considered a participation award for whatever schooling they got. They fail to consider that many of the
families suffering financial stress brought on by low-socio-economic
circumstances are people who have suffered the death or disability of a mother
or father, been made redundant by failed companies led by shifty or incompetent
management, are the victims of shifty business exploiting systemic failure that
leaves victims without justice, or who were amongst those unfortunate enough to
have a gutless parent who abandons their kids.
Perhaps going back in time and telling the
parents of idiots that make those stupid comments “won’t educate, go
masturbate” would have been more appropriate. At least then the world would
have less dumbasses unleashing their stupidity on the people that need and
deserve help. The children caught in the middle of socio-economic problems (or
wars) should not have to suffer because of political or parental failures, and
they certainly shouldn’t be subjected to morons who need to keep their idiot
mouths shut. So taxation wise, who pays the most? Turns out, families and, more
accurately, children who can least afford it. And not just in terms of taxes.
They pay most in terms of opportunities. They are, inevitably, sentenced to a
lifetime of generational poverty.
Children are the next future labour supply
and tax payers. If we suffer them to grow up impoverished and poorly educated,
the crop we reap is going to be a piss-poor one. They’re going to be frustrated
by their circumstances, disenfranchised from society, with no means to invest
financially or socially, and with no comprehension of patriotism or reason to
behave in such a manner. That costs society money and causes associated
problems. Desperate, angry people suffer physical and mental health issues, and
may resort to anti-social and sometimes criminal activities to survive. This is
a wasted opportunity. Worse, they tend to vote for charlatans that promise them
false hope, and the situation in your entire country gets exponentially worse.
If that $85K income of the mum and dad with
three kids was taxed based on dependents, the family would pay no tax at all.
The family would keep the $20K. They would not need that $2K welfare ‘benefit’.
The government currently covers a percentage of child-care costs up to a fixed
amount too, but few families access it because they don’t have enough to cover
the ‘gap’ (‘their share’). Besides, child care facilities are a rare commodity.
The family wouldn’t need the government to cover half of that either. Instead,
they’d have an extra $4K per family member they can spend on a holiday, white
goods, renovating or maintaining their home, pay off debts, put in the bank or
whatever to invest back into the economy. Best of all, they have less need to
rely on credit, reducing personal and National debt levels, and have the
opportunity to raise their children in a manner that has the potential to break
the cycle of poverty and increase the benefit for society in general.
That sudden sound of weeping, wailing and
foul-mouthed abuse is all the RWNJs venting their fury about the most
disadvantaged not “paying their fair share” and demanding “who will cover the
lost revenue” to support the “bludgers” living parasitically off everyone else.
Well, considering the parasites are usually those who make hundreds of
thousands or millions of dollars by little more than exploiting the labours,
stupidity or ignorance of others, maybe those are the “bludgers” living
parasitically off everyone else who should be paying their fair share. RWNJs
laud Trump as a genius for paying no tax on his billions. The hypocrisy is
astonishing. Part of the problem is the argument is that you cannot tax the
rich because they keep the economy going by investing their wealth into it, and
there is no way to define who is rich.
First, the rich do not invest enough to keep
the economy going and employ the surplus labour force, obviously. A lot of
their wealth is spent on luxury cars, jewellery, homes, holidays and parties,
but not enough to flow-on into the wider community. Second, we can define who
is rich, very easily. The official poverty rate is $18.5K, so when someone is
getting ten times this as income that supports only them, they are getting the
same as what supports fifteen unemployed people for the same period of time. At
a tax rate of almost a third of that income, around $60K, they still have
enough to support ten unemployed people. That’s your benchmark. That and higher
is rich. Every dollar after that should be taxed at seventy-five percent.
Anybody that disagrees is a greedy bastard that needs a good dose of empathy
and humility at the business end of the boot to learn gratitude.
Perhaps the most despicable aspect of the
taxation system is the absence of real taxation on big business. They pay only
a small percentage of their massive profits in taxes, using loopholes to evade
or ‘minimise’ their taxable income, and often avoid paying off debts for
environmental damage and massive incompetence and corruption within management
despite posting record profits. It allows them to maintain near monopolies and
crush any potential competition in pricing wars. If they were forced to pay the
taxes they should, revenue and debt issues would be far less than what they are,
and real competition and employment might flourish. If a company threatens to
stop doing business in your country, show them the door and charge them a
departure tax.
Where there is an opportunity to do business,
and profit to be made, investors will come. The only way to deal with
tantrum-throwing bullies like Clive Palmer, Gina Reinhart and Donald Trump is
to stand up to them, draw a line in the sand, and give them a good kick in the
ass when the need arises. They are psychopaths. They feel qualified to inflict
their ignorance, bigotry, idiocy and hypocrisy on others. People like them live
in a fantasy world insulated from reality and have no idea how the real world
works. It is bad enough they live as parasites without blaming all the ills
they inflict through their greed on the victims upon which they gorge
themselves. The only value they have is the taxes they should be paying, but
given they don’t, they have no value at all other than as landfill and
fertiliser. And given they are so full of shit, that appears to be the best
use.
But back to ‘your taxes’. ‘Your taxes’ don’t even
cover a fraction of what you suck back out of society. Those roads you drive on
cost money. The hospitals you visit most weekends after binge drinking,
chain-smoking or over-eating your dumb ass into DEM and a cancer, coronary or
diabetes ward cost money. Police, Fire fighters, Legal Aid (if you can get it),
public transport and schools all cost money. The mining companies that provide
work and flow-on employment cost money in ‘incentives’ and ‘rebates’ despite
making massive profits for their owners, executives and shareholders. ‘Your
taxes’ don’t pay for more than a fraction of what you access. There can be no
doubt funding cuts could be made where there is rorting and junkets, but before
you suggest austerity measures to cut costs, try thinking your idiot idea
through.
You raise public transportation costs and
suddenly it becomes unviable for a huge chunk of the public to travel to the
jobs they do. They need a pay raise to cover this or they will have no choice
but to look for another job. Cut funding to schools and you get young folk who
have trouble reading, writing and doing basic math. You want them to think
things through on the job? Forget about it. You don’t have kids in school or
uni? Fine, when you need your dumb-ass cut open for surgery, you can have a ‘Dr’
Patel. Yeah, that’s right, people you need to do things the right way for you went
to school. Maybe cut funding to health services or make people pay as they go?
Great. What happens when someone gets sick, can’t afford treatment and gets
worse? They can’t work and now their wife and kids don’t have that income. Looks
like they need welfare. Genius. Cut police or welfare and social services?
Crime and anti-social behaviours increase. You get it yet?
The one thing the US does well is adopt the
attitude that if a company can’t support itself, it deserves to fail. It must
find a way to be viable. Throwing huge sums of tax-payer money at a big company
to encourage it to stay in business despite being unviable and run by the
greedy or incompetent is counter-productive and open to rorting, especially
when it is more than the wages of the employees, and far in excess of
unemployment benefits. The tired old excuse that a company cannot afford to
increase minimum wages or pay penalty rates is self-serving when companies are
posting record profits and management receives million dollar bonuses. It has
never been unsustainable wages that is the problem, it is unsustainable profits
and executive greed.
Trump has avoided dealing with these same issues
by resorting to school-yard bullying, distracting the media, public and Hillary
from asking what the voters need and want to hear. Trump has gathered a mob by
focussing on all of their concerns and frustrations and “telling it like it is”
even when it isn’t, but has offered no real solutions to the problems. Why
would he? He doesn’t need to because his supporters aren’t smart enough to
understand, notice or care, and he doesn’t keep promises. Besides, Trump is
part of the problem. This horrid mess is the direct result of real wages and
employment falling across modern Western countries. In addition, the Trojan
horse of Trickle-down Economics has failed, abysmally, to accomplish what was
promised in the decades since it was implemented, but succeeded beyond
expectations in making the wealthy even richer.
The solution is simple. Flow-across
Economics. A model that relies upon the masses having enough disposable income will
keep the economy moving – a drop of water does little, but enough drops can
create an ocean. With the balance of power shifted, the ideologies that Western
societies are meant to be founded upon can be restored, especially in the US. Taxation
should take into account the number of dependents relying upon an income, and
the wealthy should pay their fair share. When everyone has a means to invest in
the economy and society, they have a reason to invest in their community
emotionally rather than feeling like an alien in their own country.
Donald Trump claims to have a fortune of $10B
but hasn’t paid taxes for almost twenty years because he lost $1B in his
efforts to make money running casinos. Casinos. Who loses money running
casinos?! Donald Trump. He has a long history of failed business ventures. And
yet he feels qualified to run the US economy. He’s been bankrupt four times and
pays his staff less than other employers do, and sometimes not at all. The dude
has another $9B dollars. His massive fuck-up in his own business ventures is
his own fault. A lot of people in the US lost their homes and everything else
in the Home Mortgage scandal while the banks got a tax-payer funded bail-out
for non-existent debts, but Trump loses $1B, still has $9B and doesn’t have to
pay taxes or wages.
Non-existent debts, you ask? How to explain
it. Okay, you borrow $300K to buy a house and pay it back at 5% over twenty-five
years. To get there, you had to save a deposit and that took ten years. You’re
thirty when you get the loan and fifty-five when you’re done. Assuming you
didn’t suffer misfortune and actually made all the repayments, you did not pay
back the $300K plus $15K (5%). You paid back around $600K, probably more. That’s
a loan at 100% interest. The house is not worth that. After all the costs for
maintenance, you might sell it for just over half of that, inflation factored
in and all. That $300K in interest isn’t real.
Here, consider this. If you have $300K and
put it in a bank accruing 5% for twenty years, will you end up with $600K? No,
inflation and taxes will eat into this and you’ll end up with about $300K. So
where did that $300K interest come from? Does the bank pay taxes on it?
Unlikely. They post billion dollar profits though. So all those home-loans
people couldn’t pay back, all the repayments they made, the bank kept. Then the
bank took their homes and land. But the banks got so greedy they forgot the
whole concept of supply and demand. They thought they controlled both. They had
too many homes and they had taken everyone’s money, so nobody could buy
anything and they had created a massive socio-economic disaster. Unregulated
Capitalism. Well done.
The banks had all those homes and land, but
claimed they were still owed money for defaulted loans, interest rates for
investments that no longer existed on homes and land the bank now owned through
legalised injustice. People still had no homes, no jobs, and no money. They
were blacklisted for the rest of their lives. They have no way of ever really
changing their circumstances. But who did the government provide a financial
bail-out to? The banks. Idiocy. People without homes is not only shameful, but
counter-productive. Did the government get any of the defaulted homes and land
in exchange for this bail-out? No. Opportunity lost.
Step one. Real regulation for private and public institutions. If you change nothing, nothing changes.
Step two. Prosecution of shifty business practices and passing laws to ensure nobody can
circumvent justice by using the entrenched culture of corruption and systemic
failure. Time to think ahead rather than in hind-sight.
Step three. If you don’t know what the outcome might be, don’t do it. Looking back and saying “shit, that was a mistake, how do we hide it” only causes more problems.
Step four. Impose tariffs on imports and make trade agreements that will allow you to maximise and maintain domestic employment. People with no jobs have no money and can’t invest in the economy.
Step five. Take responsibility for unemployment when the number of unemployed folk exceeds the number of jobs that are available. Not individuals. The government.
Step six. Consider citizens an opportunity in which to make an investment – and act on it – rather than a ‘burden’ to be blamed for the failures of government.
Step seven. Make sure everyone has a home and can afford basic utilities, food, and health services as well as enough disposable income to participate in the economy and society. And for the love of God, make sure Credit and loans only get approved for the people that actually have the ability (at least at the time) to make repayments, and maintain communication to work around any issues before they become problems!
Government is responsible for a positive
employment environment. Not the unemployed. The incentive to create jobs is the
reduced cost in welfare. Welfare must be no less than the poverty line.
Anything less leads to even greater long-term costs in terms of the physical
and mental health of the disaffected. The unemployed must be employed as public
servants with all the usual employment agreements under casual contracts so
they accrue sick-leave and holidays, receive a wage and Superannuation, get
training, and have access to Unions (if they want it) to make sure Workplace
Health and Safety is not being violated.
The government then has an opportunity and
obligation to train staff and build a State asset that can be sold off to
private enterprise. The jobs these staff undertake should be appropriate. If
they are a stay-at-home parent or carer then they could continue doing this but
be expected to undertake training provided to qualify them for a job in similar
fields when they can return to the workforce. They could work in childcare, be
part of a Patient Support team in a hospital, gardeners in public parks, or
learn trades building public housing.
The unemployed are actually sacrificed by
government to create a surplus of labour to keep wage growth down, so punishing
them for this deliberate act or government ineptitude is unacceptable. Stripping
them of what little welfare, dignity and self-esteem they have is idiocy
because they will be forced to turn to crime to survive, and at $100K a year to
lock them up, that $12.5K a year to force them into miserable poverty is
suddenly a bargain. Again, they are not a problem as they are – they are an
opportunity.
People with an income can invest back into
the economy. People with jobs can get loans to buy homes. People with loans
have an incentive to continue working and even seek more employment or better
paid positions. A minority of extremely wealthy people that control the level
of investment into an economy can effectively hold that economy to ransom. They
can demand all manner of immoral and unethical advantages and tax-payer funded
subsidies. If they withdraw investment, jobs are lost and the economy flounders
or even collapses into recession. Allowing mega-corporations to dictate terms
is an investment about as wise and profitable as a war.
Locking refugees up in detention centres for
years at a time is also a bad investment. Women and children fleeing from
psychological, physical and sexual abuse and oppression should not be locked up
in camps with predators. They are an opportunity. Integrate them into the
community, show them a better way. Make them part of your society by
encouraging them to assimilate your values and ideologies. If you leave them in
those vile camps, it costs a great deal of money and they suffer such trauma
that you will create people with mental health issues and an overwhelming
hatred toward those that inflicted such a living hell – you.
They don’t get that you did not personally do
this to them, they only know your government did it and they saw some of you
justifying it with bigoted hatred toward them. Children don’t understand why people
that never met them have such irrational hatred toward them. Hell, I don’t get
why some people are worthless arseholes either. Once upon a time, a long time
ago, thousands of people fled from oppression in Europe, Asia and other places.
They migrated to the US with nothing more than hope and a dream to become part
of a utopia that would inspire the world. They became the ancestors of the citizens
of the United States. What the hell happened?
The crisis in Europe is used as an example of
what mass migration can do, right-wing extremists using examples of crime
committed by a tiny minority of immigrants to brand all of them as evil. The
real evil is harder to see without a mirror. Once upon a time, long ago, the
people of the US would have been front and centre, leading the charge against
injustice. Over five-thousand migrant children have gone missing in Germany,
the fear being they have been forced into prostitution or murdered and maimed
for their organs. Where is the US to voice the outrage? We can’t hear them.
Trump and his hypocrites are shouting them into silence by accusing the victims
of crimes they haven’t committed. You want terrorism, there it is: right-wing
extremism.
The US is all about respecting their flag but too many people have been pissing all over it for decades, and hiding all manner of shit underneath it. Maybe it’s time to have a little more respect in the people that make the US. Maybe it’s time to stop using misinformation and pathetic excuses to churn out generations of ill-educated kids who become so disenfranchised by the hopelessness that is reality. The US was the greatest country in the world, a utopian society to inspire respect and pride. It was their greatest export. It’s still there. They just have to work to get it back. It’s not going to be easy.
Obama made a good start. He was a good man. A
great leader. Someone who will be missed. Even the unfounded hatred and
psychotic ranting of so many racist lunatics in social media demonstrates how
right Obama was to do the things he did. The voters in the US had a tough
decision to make. Neither candidate was ideal but it was no longer a Democrat
and Republican issue, it was Democrat and Trump. Paul Ryan should have stepped
up to the plate long ago. He would have won. It would have taken Joe Biden or
Bernie Sanders to beat him. All three are good, honourable men supporters of
both factions respect. The Republican Party and Democratic Parties really let
their supporters down. But it wasn’t about factional disputes. It was about
keeping up the momentum of what Obama started. It was about the best interests
of every US citizen, not just the privileged few or a twisted, white
supremacist minority.
And nobody asked what Trump’s real motives were.
The idea of deporting eleven million people for the sins of a minority who
occupy a genetic-cultural demographic is disturbing and reprehensible. The idea
of deporting US citizens because they are related or married to someone who
falls into the deportation catch-net is shameful. Nobody noticed that this was almost
3.5 percent of the population of the US, or the consequences. How many of those
people own homes, land, run small businesses, attend school, undertake all the
crappy jobs others don’t (or won’t) want to do? Did anybody consider what this
would do to the value of homes and land, how it would rip the arse out of the
property market as supply suddenly increases as prices drop?
Donald Trump has. You bet he has. That guy is
all about exploitation. Trump will use his position and inside knowledge to
dominate the biggest land grab since European ‘settlement’ of the US, and the
Home Mortgage Scheme, an action we haven’t seen on this scale since the Nazis
started seizing the property of people that had a Jewish heritage, and not much
different. At some point, all the fun and excitement of the racism and
corruption will extend to another demographic, and another, and the people that
laud this vile bigotry will suddenly find themselves sacrificed by their
hill-billy king or the target of real US citizens fed up with the hypocrisy.
But those white supremacists will not learn from their mistakes. They are too
stupid for that. They will just continue to bitch and whine and blame others.
A few days before the election, a woman
posted the FB comment above. Aside from the fact that Trump actually has four
wives, not three, the comment demonstrated what too few people understand,
especially in the US. It revealed the disturbing reality about the nature of
the US, what it has become. It demonstrated the sheer hypocrisy and mass
delusion. It exposed the flaw of inadequate public education, and deliberate
manipulation of even those who attended expensive private Tertiary education
facilities and claim to be intelligent. It proved a need to affect positive
change, to really qualify people rather than reducing ‘qualifications’ to
commodities little better than a participation award. If you suffer your people
to be ignorant, and target the unemployed, the poor, or an ethnic group to
blame for all your own failures, then all you do is breed tension, bigotry,
hate and more ignorance – the real cause of the failure remains concealed,
enabled, and, inevitably, escalates.
The Statue of Liberty in New York bears a
plaque with words that defined what the US once was, and Trump seems hell-bent on
doing the exact opposite. He claimed he would make America (we can only assume
he meant the US) great again. Since all of his claims and twisted behaviours so
far have demonstrated the exact opposite, we can only assume that he plans to
wall himself and all his Trumplings up inside Trump tower so that we never have
to deal with him and his ilk ever again. In a Presidential campaign to limit
the damage the candidates would do to the United States, and world in general
(and what they’ve done so far is bad enough), Hillary Clinton was not a great option,
but she was the only viable choice. The majority of voters thought otherwise. Michael
Moore nailed it – they wanted to send the greatest “fuck you” the world had
ever known to their government, a protest vote against the administration, a
demonstration of almost unprecedented, monumental stupidity.
The ranting insanity of Trump and his
half-wit sycophants that the world would come to a cataclysmic end if they did
not get what they want was bullying and fear-mongering designed to restore and maintain
the status quo despite claims to the contrary. The fact that so many of his
mindless nutters were attending polling stations armed to the teeth or using
other means to intimidate and silence voters demonstrated just how far the US
had strayed from its core values. Trump’s most unhinged supporters claim they were
exercising their Second Amendment Rights to protest against their BS claims
that Hillary planned to take away their guns, but we know exactly what they were
doing. Their claims were just another one of Trump’s bullshit lies designed to
incite anger, resistance and aggression, and conceal festering racism and
misogyny.
Trump will not make the US great again. He
will not restore the modern Western ideologies of equality, justice, freedom,
liberty, meritocracy and accountability. He will do what he wants, and we’ve
already seen more than enough of that. The concerns of RWNJs are only that
their world will come to an end, the death of their way of life: the abject
misery inflicted on the disadvantaged majority to ensure a dominant minority
live in a comparative paradise. But the potential death of their lifestyle
doesn’t bother good people in the least – it is the continued existence of
their way of life that concerns us a great deal.
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