Red Shoe's Chronicles: Train Wreck

A Colossal Train Wreck!!!!

One of the more famous trainwrecks involved an engineer by the name of Casey Jones... he was from Jackson, TN, and died in a train wreck near Vaughn, MS in 1900...

But I am going to write about another train wreck...

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It seems that the primary part of the president's health care reform law that was forced through Congress on a late Christmas-Eve vote has been removed from the law by the Obama administration... you can read about it HERE. This part of the law was the part that was supposed to make the plan cash-heavy, would pre-fund the plan for the first ten years, and then would pay for the second ten years.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has said from Day-One that the cost of this health care ~~train-wreck~~ was being understated. It will be interesting to see how the Super Committee, a committee appointed by the president after the August 2nd vote on the debt ceiling responds to this news. If you remember, their purpose is to come up with the ~~budget~~ reductions to finance and pay for the new debt ceiling.

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In an another insane moment in this country's declining history, Michael Moore, movie director , this past Friday called for the police of our country to come and join the Occupy Movement, just like the Egyptian Army did in Cairo... quote:

MICHAEL MOORE: My last word here out in the hallway just outside of [Lawrence O’Donnell’s] studio is that the police need to join us. In the same way the Egyptian army joined the people in Freedom Square there in Cairo. This is my appeal to the New York Police Department, the police departments all over the country. You are working class people. You’re not paid enough. You have the most dangerous job in the country, and these rich bastards on Wall Street they have ruined your 401(k)s, your pension funds, your future, your children’s future. Money that should be going to having better law enforcement has gone to needless wars in other lands.

So, my appeal to the police is you are us and we are you, and join us. It’s fun. We’ll even let you beat on a bongo drum. That’s my last word. Thank you.

Is Moore aware that the Egyptian Army fired upon and killed over 30 Egyptians in the last couple of weeks? Is it because the Egyptians killed were not Muslim (but instead Coptic Christians) that this slides under Moore's radar? Do those people at Occupy Wallstreet know that Michael Moore is worth over $50 Million? Isn't he part of why they are 'protesting?'

... and then what about this?

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United States Attorney General Eric Holder and his 'Operation Fast and Furious' that's just gone amok! You can read about this HERE. The Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms that is supposed to control and regulate the purchasing and sales of firearms, just one of their reasons to exist... was running guns into Mexico. I recall when the news of this was first breaking, the mass media was reporting that the primary source of firearms in Mexico were local, legal, firearm distributors who were all in compliance with the existing Federal and State firearms laws. What hypocrisy!!

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And, lastly, Warren Buffett, etal who claim, that as millionaires, they they are paying less than 17% income tax on their earnings... Below, you will find a tax table that is from the Tax Policy Center... you can see the full link HERE:

According to this table, the top 1% of all taxpayers should be paying 30.4% of their earnings in Federal Income Taxes. My question to Buffett would be, what tax manipulations are you pulling off to only be paying 17%?

Now, it is possible that most of Buffett's (and other millionaires' income) consists primarily of dividends, which would be taxed at a lower rate of 15%. BUT, one needs to remember that corporate dividends are taxed BEFORE being paid by the corporation to the share holders at around 35%. This means that each $1,000 of dividends is reduced by $350 before being paid to the stock holder, where it is then taxed a second time at 15%... 15% of $650 is $97.50, which results in a net to the investor of $552.50. This makes the effective tax rate on dividends almost 45%... that sounds like a Hell of a lot to me...