What matters is the fact that I really wanted to see Brinkley climb across the tables and up the dais and beat the holy crap out of Young. Or any member he could reach.

I have reached the point where Congress, and government in general, is so loathed, so mistrusted, that I wonder if a good, old-fashioned, John Wayne western beat down is the only thing that will satisfy my emotional needs. Why do I feel that way? Why is it even a thought that isn’t greeted with aghast faces and prompt calls to the Secret Service or Capitol Police?

The why is really simple: Anyone NOT in Congress can come up with 50 ways to get ourselves out of our current economic and international funk, and any idea that would pass the straight-face test is better than our government has produced in a decade. This is not just a sign that any committee is dumber than its dumbest member, but a further sign that there is NO LEADERSHIP in our government.

It wasn’t the beatdowns that John Wayne gave that we loved. It was the sense that something was being done. Action was being taken. Problems were being solved. Dominance was being asserted and the cowpokes were learning who they were going to follow into battle or on the long trail.

That’s what we need in our government. A right and righteous leader who won’t mistake mealy-mouthed press releases for true leadership. Or mistake a silly congressional hearing for an important event in anyone’s lives.

I don’t agree with the envirowhackos on ANWR and have no idea what Brinkley’s testimony was, but if you didn’t get a little thrill at someone belittling a congressman, you are not American. You are just a partisan.

The Honesty in Taxation Amendment

This amendment removes the ability of the Federal government to withhold taxes of any kind from any persons’ paycheck or electronic pay for work.

From this time forth, all taxes formerly collected before the issuance of paychecks shall be instead listed at the bottom of every paystub with the following instructions:

“Please remit the above amount immediately by check or ACH to The United States Treasury <address to be inserted> <ACH info to be inserted>.”

End text.

Wanna see the size of government shrink in a hurry? Sneak this in.

The Takeaway, or 30-second pitch:

If the government can’t guarantee your tiny Social Security payment, shouldn’t you be able to invest that money yourself and make twice as much, ten times as much as Social Security?

The Social Security Trust Fund is empty. Congress started raiding it in the 1950s and has spent all that money. Today’s workers’ Social Security taxes pay today’s retirees’ payments. And the government still can’t guarantee the payments.

The money is earning a terrible rate of return, and the government still can’t guarantee the payments.

If your retirement is just as risky in the government’s hands, shouldn’t you be making a lot more for taking that risk? Let’s privatize Social Security.

♦

Please, follow my logical interpretation of Merrill Matthews in a Forbes blog:

Here’s how President Barack Obama answered CBS’s Scott Pelley’s question about whether he could guarantee that Social Security checks would go out on August 3, the day after the government is supposed to reach its debt limit: “I cannot guarantee that those checks [he included veterans and the disabled, in addition to Social Security] go out on August 3rd if we haven’t resolved this issue.  Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.”

That, to me, sounds as if Dear Leader has just legitimized privatizing Social Security.

And Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner echoed the president on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday implying that if a budget deal isn’t reached by August 2, seniors might not get their Social Security checks.

Merrill then proceeds to remind us that there is supposed to be a trust fund for Social Security, and that said trust fund is suppsedly fully-stocked with available cash, gold, diamonds, bonds, and celebrity teeth.

Well, either Obama and Geithner are lying to us now, or they and all defenders of the Social Security status quo have been lying to us for decades.  It must be one or the other.

Here’s why: Social Security has a trust fund, and that trust fund is supposed to have $2.6 trillion in it, according to the Social Security trustees.   If there are real assets in the trust fund, then Social Security can mail the checks, regardless of what Congress does about the debt limit.

President Obama’s budget director, Jack Lew, explained all this last February in USA Today:

“Social Security benefits are entirely self-financing.  They are paid for with payroll taxes collected from workers and their employers throughout their careers.  These taxes are placed in a trust fund dedicated to paying benefits owed to current and future beneficiaries. … Even though Social Security began collecting less in taxes than it paid in benefits in 2010, the trust fund will continue to accrue interest and grow until 2025, and will have adequate resources to pay full benefits for the next 26 years.”

Notice that Lew said nothing about raising the debt ceiling, which was already looming, and it shouldn’t matter anyway because Social Security is “entirely self-financing” and off budget.   What could be clearer?

Well, that settles that. Right? Grandpa will get his automatic funds transfer (they don’t write many checks any more at the SSA). Right? Charles Krauthammer invested 3.5 seconds of his intellect, knowledge of the habits of legislators and historical knowledge to remind us that the trust fund is “fiction…” it “contains — nothing.”

Merrill continues:

Social Security status-quo defenders have assured us for the past 25 years that Social Security is fully funded—for the next 25 years, or 2036.  So if there are real assets in the Social Security Trust Fund—$2.6 trillion allegedly—then how could failure to reach a debt-ceiling agreement possibly threaten seniors’ Social Security checks?

The answer is that the federal government has borrowed all of that trust fund money and spent it, exactly as Krauthammer asserted.  And the only way the trust fund can get some cash to pay Social Security benefits is if the federal government draws it from general revenues or borrows the money—which, of course, it can’t do because of the debt ceiling.

Thus, the answer to my initial question is that the president is telling the truth now in the sense that he is conceding there’s no money in the trust fund to pay benefits; but he and other Social Security status-quo defenders have been deceiving the public for decades.

What! All the funds Grandpa put in are gone and Congress is living hand-to-mouth? What! When I read this, I reactivated my anger and vitriol over crooked politicians. Anyone who has studied Social Security knows the trust fund is basically full of IOUs. (Treasury Bonds, I believe, whose only value is tied to the “good faith and credit of the United States of America,” whatever that is worth today.) I can’t maintain the furious rage that this legal embezzlement gives rise to in me for more than a few hours, so I have to put it on a back burner until something like this reminds me of it.

In the next second however, an itch struck me: If the government can’t pay what it owes to SS recipients, then the government is no better at securing the later years of citizens than the private markets. Indeed, one of the prime reasons for rejecting privatizing social security has been the “lack” of guaranteed payment in the private markets. The song goes that a private investment might crash, might be stolen, might go bankrupt, or even be poorly invested, and therefor not be paid.

Well, now, in an effort to scare seniors and intimidate the Republicans, Dear Leader has handed us the stick with which to beat not only him, but the entire government-run Social Security apparatus:

Government run Social Security is just as risky a financial investment as a fly-by-night private investment.

PLUS

Government pays almost zero rate of return.

PLUS

Private investment offers significant return (5-10 percent per annum, maybe better, maybe worse).

EQUALS

If one is going to face practically equal risk of not getting paid (Government in default), sensible people opt for the higher rate of return to hedge against that risk.

Cue the rising orchestra. I read on:

And here’s the real irony: Anytime someone has proposed personal Social Security retirement accounts as a way to ensure that people have real assets in their own account without bankrupting the government or future generations, defenders of the status quo would pounce, calling such a reform, in Al Gore’s words, a “risky scheme.”  They have vociferously claimed that those trust fund assets are real and that only by having the government manage and control the accounts would seniors be guaranteed to get their retirement checks.

Well, we have the status quo and seniors may not get their checks.  Had we shifted to a system of pre-funded, personal Social Security retirement accounts years ago, this wouldn’t even be an issue—because retirees would have their own money in their own accounts.

Yes, the accounts likely would have declined when the stock market went down, though not if the reform were structured like three Texas counties did 30 years ago (see here).  But in case you haven’t noticed, Social Security revenues also declined during the economic downturn—because fewer people were working—so that the government is paying out more in benefits than it is taking in, and hence needing additional federal revenues, a fact admitted by Lew.

Ah! Merrill also clued into this. Great minds and all that….

Now, here is the context to offer this to the public. There was once a Social Security Trust Fund. About 50-60 years ago, Congress began stealing this money away from us. They left us IOUs that pay beneath free market interest. Congress took all the money and spent it. Six decades of bridges to nowhere and airports for one congressman, and failed program after failed program. In the real world, we would hang these thieves and confiscate their assets. But what they did is legal, if only because they make the laws that make it legal.

Now, this month’s Social Security is paid by this month’s tax revenues, with nothing going into the “Trust Fund” for current workers to get retirement benefits from SS.

Angry yet? Furiously, ragingly, where’s-my-shotgun angry yet?

But now, when the government is approaching the debt limit, President Obama is not sure if the government has the money to pay next month’s Social Security payments. Payments that are supposed to be guaranteed. Payments that would be there if the trust fund were intact, earning returns.

If one invests about 6.2 percent of his income throughout his work life (let’s say 25 years for the fun of it) and his employer matches that investment, then a person earning a lifetime average of $37,300 a year will be investing about $409 per month for 300 months. Let’s assume they invest this at an annual rate of 8 percent, compounded monthly and do not remove any month from the account for all 25 years. They will have paid in $122,700. They will end up with $388,969. And this is conservative. How many people do you know who earn the same amount every year of their working life?

According to sources (Heritage Rate of return calculator , Cato, Political Calculations rate of return calculator), SS returns from -1+ percent to about +3 percent on the taxes paid in, depending on your age, sex, marital status and the shaving habits of rhesus monkeys at the San Diego Zoo. Let’s play using the 2 percent number. If we compound the interest, it’s only $152,093 after 25 years. Remember, we got nearly $400,000 in the real world with an 8 percent APR.

And the private market is just as likely to pay off as the government.

If the risks are now the same, does one want to get $388,000 or $150,000 for that risk?

$388,000

or

$150,000?

One final note: The above completely ignores what a person could invest OUTSIDE of the Social Security tax deduction. In short, a good investor would probably be investing an additional amount in addition to this, which would also compound and grow. If $409 = 12.4 percent of your monthly income, then an additional $220 would be investing 20 percent of your gross income. For giggles: That comes to nearly $600,000 over 25 years at 8 percent, compounded monthly.

The Takeaway, or 30-second pitch:

If the government can’t guarantee your tiny Social Security payment, shouldn’t you be able to invest that money yourself and make twice as much, ten times as much as Social Security?

The Social Security Trust Fund is empty. Congress started raiding it in the 1950s and has spent all that money. Today’s workers’ Social Security taxes pay today’s retirees’ payments. And the government still can’t guarantee the payments.

The money is earning a terrible rate of return, and the government still can’t guarantee the payments.

If your retirement is just as risky in the government’s hands, shouldn’t you be making a lot more for taking that risk? Let’s privatize Social Security.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/opinion/07kristof.html?_r=1

by Nicholas Kristof.

Gruber’s DF lead-in posed an interesting question.

Nicholas Kristof on U.S. Income Inequality

Nicholas Kristof argues that the U.S. is at the level of plutocratic banana republics:

CEOs of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.

Step back and (for the moment) avoid passing judgment on whether this state of affairs is good or bad. What’s fascinating is that against this backdrop, last week’s election went to the Republicans, who admit that their top priority is passing large tax cuts for the richest 2 percent of Americans. I know much has been written about this, but I think it defies easy explanation how economic policies that benefit so very few enjoy the support of so many.

Okay, my question is as follows:

How does one debate this point with liberals/progs?

I understand the simple point that what one earns, whether janitor or CEO, is simply no one’s business (perhaps not even the government’s), but I’m more interested in the implied connection between a a failing middle/lower class and the extreme rich making orders of magnitude more than their employees than they made in the past.

As a stockholder, I certainly don’t think the CEO’s of many of my companies deserve tens of millions of dollars (no matter what the revenues) when they are not the actual workers. But, as an owner of the company, I am within my rights to say so. As an outsider, I would not be.

Help me combat this. Please and thanks.

That is if you define a moderate as someone who, to steal Peggy Noonan’s analogy from today’s WSJ Online, starts negotiating from the 18-inch mark on the 36-inch Yardstick.

A digression: Noonan partly describes Tea Party members as those who want conservative, smaller, less-active government in today’s piece. She uses the analogy of a yardstick, with the wildly liberal ideas on the end with the 36-inch mark and the deeply conservative ideas on the end with the 0-inch mark. Digression ended.

Noonan describes the exasperation of many citizens:

Democrats on the Hill or in the White House try to pull it up to 30, Republicans try to pull it back to 25. A deal is struck at 28. Washington Republicans call it victory: “Hey, it coulda been 29!” But regular conservative-minded or Republican voters see yet another loss. They could live with 18. They’d like eight. Instead it’s 28.

So, Senator Brown, the question becomes a challenge for you and the other so-called “moderates:” From what tick mark do you start? If your starting tick mark on the yardstick is a number larger than 18-inches, then you are not what we conservatives are willing to call a Republican.

Obviously, different issues may offer differing starting points (The Fed’s role v. abortion v. universal health care), and I suspect that reasonable people could tolerate a Republican who holds some values that are liberal (This is the “there is no litmus test,” paragraph), so long as the average/mean/median for this member stayed below 18 inches.

I could tolerate John McCain’s heartfelt pro-amnesty views as long as he cuts budgets in half and personally assassinates terrorists with his grimace of doom.

Mike Castle lost because he was not a Republican or a Conservative. He was a member of a country club that pilfered the name “GOP.” No honest observer would rely on him to carry the party water on a close issue, just as they would assume the Girls of Maine would defect to the 34-inch mark when the D’s called.

That’s fine. There are black sheep in every family. The problem is exactly as Noonan described, though:

For conservatives on the ground, it has often felt as if Democrats (and moderate Republicans) were always saying, “We should spend a trillion dollars,” and the Republican Party would respond, “No, too costly. How about $700 billion?” Conservatives on the ground are thinking, “How about nothing? How about we don’t spend more money but finally start cutting.”

What they want is representatives who’ll begin the negotiations at 18 inches and tug the final bill toward five inches. And they believe tea party candidates will do that.

Yes, really, how about that? We understand that we will never get everything we want, but we sure seem to be giving the left half of the yardstick what it is willing to accept. The black sheep need to be pointed out often. That won’t be comfortable for them. Too bad.

Moderation, Senator Brown, is a result. It is not a starting point. When you negotiate, you always ask for more than you want and let the other side wheedle you down to ‘only’ what you want. They feel power and you get to frown and grimace while giggling inside.

Castle made winning the negotiations harder, not easier. So do the Girls of Maine. Sometimes, so do you Senator Brown. Let’s start with deep conservatism and let the process moderate us.

Let’s not start at 18 inches and let ourselves be pulled toward 36. Let’s start at 1.

–

Noonan’s Column: Why It’s Time for the Tea Party

http://www.rickeystokesnews.com/article.php/gayla-white-gets-boot-from-female-republican-group-10701

http://www.rickeystokesnews.com/article.php/republicans-looking-to-oust-more-republicans-for-democrat-support-10719

The Tea Party movement is not an organization. It is a shared set of beliefs:

Government controlled by the people, not vice versa
Individual responsibility and rewards

Those beliefs are a subset of other beliefs that Tea Party-ers may or may not share. The only time the Tea Party really happens is when those shared beliefs are at stake. Everything else is attempted usurpation of the name.

Can one be a TPer and want to lower taxes, to defeat oligarchical health care, to beat the proverbial doors down so that Congress admits it hears us? Sure. Can those be major things we share? Sure. But it all comes down to limiting the power of local, state, and federal government to control our lives.

Tea Parties don’t have to be in FAVOR of anything. In fact, it is one of the best strategies I’ve seen: Don’t demand a particular solution; do reject unacceptable solutions. It is the free market idea: If one has a great idea that meets certain criteria, that idea will win the day regardless of party or origin.

What a wonderful place to be: unable to be effectively cubby-holed by the major players.
What a wonderful way to be: free to terrorize (politically, publicly) the entire political apparatus for failing to live up to the American standard.

Tea Parties do NOT need to be an ongoing force. They only need to be felt when the ship of state is off course. When that course is righted, we don’t care if you stand on your head while you steer.

What I found was so gloriously understandable that it surpassed simplicity. This little Mac had real-world, human-understandable names for the System files and the files in its system folder. Not only that, but (in that pre-Internet world), the error messages made sense and pointed out what needed or didn’t need to happen.

These are things that still don’t exist in Windows, Linux, and have mostly gone away Mac OS X. Now, in Mac OS X, this is understandable. In Mac System 7 and Mac OS 8, the TOTAL number of files on the hard drive of a new Mac was only a few thousand. It was possible in those operating systems to actually SEE every visible file on the computer in a couple of hours of looking – so a lost file could be found by HAND if necessary. Compare Mac OS X, any version. The basic install of version 10.0 has a quarter-million files – more than a million if you actually count the files hidden from the user as invisible unix files, application bundles, etc. There is NO WAY to look through that number of files by hand in a reasonable time.

Why does that matter?

Complexity breeds resentment – Or “I can’t find a thing on my computer!”

Yes, you finally mastered your TV/DVR remote, even though you only use 10 of the 50 buttons 95 percent of the time. What you do with the other buttons is figure out how to NOT press them when using the remote.

Yes, you make your mobile phone or BlackBerry™ sing and dance. But you don’t use most of what it can do, do you? You use a core set of capabilities almost all the time and rarely use the other features, if at all.

Now, your home or office computer is the same way. It can do literally millions of different things. It can edit video, edit audio, edit photos, publish all those, create books, drawings, process numbers, words, presentations, present movies, tv shows, the Internet, email, play games, let you play games, enable you to write other programs that do things. Of the universe of things your computer can do, maybe you use 5-10 percent.

Please note that I am not talking about the intensity of how you use your computer. You can put all of your computer’s resources to near-maximum use just doing a small number of things (think high-end gaming or editing video or animation). I am talking about the POSSIBLE number of things your computer can do.

That said, the lions’ share of nontechnical computer use is likely confined to just a few items: interpersonal communications (email, IM), Internet browsing (reading, shopping, social networking), basic home/home-office tasks (letters, resumes, budgeting, taxes), and family/personal tasks (pictures, home movies, music).

Enter the Canvas™

By any standard, a modern Windows-based or Mac OS X-based computer, far exceeds the needs of most non-technical users. Even low-end machines can handle the tasks of the previous paragraph if properly equipped (enough RAM, hard drive space). Any computer that seems slow doing these basic tasks is either lacking in these basic specs or in need of some maintenance or tuning. I’m not saying a low-end PC will blow the doors off a quad-Xeon with 32GB of RAM running OS X 10.6.x. I am saying that saving the family photos will not take 3 days and require 525 floppy disks (ahem). (oh, and What about gaming? – more later).

I believe that Apple’s new Canvas™ will replace the basic home computer for most home users. It will do this because it will be specialized to do the things these users want and need exceptionally well, while NOT doing some of the other things a regular computer can do. Wait. That needs to be a bit more subtle. The Canvas will do the things a typical home user wants to do most exceptionally well. It will not prevent these users from doing other things, it will simply not be created to do those things as well as it does its core tasks.

This doesn’t mean it will be cheaper or even cheap. It does mean that it will blow you away doing the things these users want most. How? I don’t know. Rumor is that it is a touch-screen tablet, perhaps with an on-screen keyboard that actually gives touch feedback via certain patented riser technology, enabling touch typing. It is supposed to be thin, light, a tablet. There might be accessories (Apple or 3rd party), and there will definitely be apps from the App store. The interface has supposedly been re-designed for touch-screen use – no external mouse or keyboard, and includes multitouch technology (where you can use multiple fingers at the same time to manipulate the desktop, apps). The OS is likely to be similar to the iPhone OS, with no discernible disk structure or only limited access to the underpinnings of the storage media (a place to keep things, but you can’t go dancing around in the System files, etc).

A large number of people get lost in the filesystem of their home PC. They save files in folders that they can’t ever find again and resort to using the OS search function to get to their data – over and over. Or they save everything to the Desktop in a pile of files. This makes sense to them – they can “get” looking through a stack of stuff on a desktop. They can’t easily make the translation to a file system hierarchy – especially one imposed on them by the OS (Do you “get” c://Documents and Settings/Users/Administrator/Desktop/MyDesktopFiles/oh, here’s my letter! versus double-click on the item on the desktop?)

iPhone and iPod Touch users don’t get lost in a filesystem. If they save anything, it is saved under the App itself’s own management or remotely on the web. The user generally doesn’t have to go looking for the file unless it is stored on a remote filesystem as complex as a regular computer’s. This is convenient for power users and novices alike. Need access to complex filesystems – ok. Don’t need it? That’s fine too.

The Canvas™ will not be a workstation in the traditional sense. Don’t think about doing 3D design work or complex spreadsheets with entire interfaces built into them. Oh, the software and hardware can handle the demands, but the INTERFACE is designed to make NORMAL users happy, not power users. At least that is my opinion.

The Canvas is not designed to be the latest toy of the technorati (though it might be marketed to them as well). It is designed to make it even easier for computer novices to enter the digital world. Intuition, simplicity, ease-of-use for normal people. Almost no one NEEDS a 5-button mouse. or even a 2-button one. Those are kludges (workable and useful kludges) for a more intuitive way of working with your computer.

The Canvas™ may well revolutionize the digital world to the same degree as the graphical user interface.

“Hello.”

Indeed.

Of course, I don’t know anything about this device beyond what I want it to be.

So there.

In the pre-dawn summer of 1944, nearly 200,000 troops from the allied nations attempted an invasion of Normandy. More than 90 percent of the ships sank with all hands on board due to the overloading of ammunition not accounted for in the ships’ manifests. Of the troops sent, less than 1 percent reached the beaches.

In the face of this assault, the mighty German army moved to intercept. Along the way, they neglected their hygiene and a rapid viral infection killed 100 percent of the soldiers exposed to the virus.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower reported to the President of the United States that the invasion was a success.

In 2002, a North Korean spy successfully infiltrated a combined NSA/CIA/FBI datacenter just outside Washington, D.C. The spy, carrying state-of-the-art DVD-R media, successfully copied 800 Gigabytes of personnel data onto 200 DVDs. Data included undercover spy ops, source code for encryption algorithms (including back-door codes for all commercial encryption programs), family and friend names for all serving espionage task forces as well as notes for how to remotely access the remainder of the data without detection.

Upon leaving the data center, just outside the front entrance, the North Korean spy fell dead of a heart attack caused by an undiagnosed heart valve infection. Reports to the President and the public stated that the security system did its job fully.

Oh, yes, Secretary Napolitano, the system worked. Really.

Wehner’s kernel is that Glenn Beck’s belief in a greater organization orchestrating the destruction of what America stands for is angst-mongering and threatens the Conservative movement in addition to the Progressives.

Abso-freakin’-lutely. And not just because it doesn’t take a conspiracy for like-minded people to nudge an entire nation toward socialism. It just takes similar goals and patience. Think Comintern.

If you define the Conservative movement as the march to put more Republicans in Congress and the White House so that they may go back to doing what they have done over the last 50 years (spend like high sailors instead of drunken Democrats), you better believe Beck is a threat.

The real question is whether the Conservatives will wake up in time to see that Beck is correct when he says the parties are almost exactly the same in the big picture. Case in point: Both parties spend rather than cut costs. Government has not shrunk in size in my lifetime. There is NO honest argument that Republicans are significantly superior to Democrats in this respect. Of the two evils, Republicans are preferable. But they are only preferable if the question is “Shall we take both legs or just one?” I don’t think that is a particularly good choice to start with. Nor should you.

Republicans, even such as historical scholar Newt Gingrich, miss the goal here. There is a fundamental movement here. It is not to have another contract with America. It is not to restore mere fiscal restraint. It is to disembowel the Federal mafia all the way back to the destruction of the institutions created by the murderous Progressives of the early 20th century. At least that’s what I want you to think.

Death to the monstrous departments that exist because we have violated the rules given to us by our Founders; chief among them: allowing the populace to take others’ wealth for their own agendas.

There is almost no one alive who knows what NOT having an income tax and a large central government is like. Consider that. Consider that a significant percentage of every tax dollar that is taken goes to maintain the existence of the bureaucracies that spend those dollars (Cash for Clunkers apparently used HALF of its cash to PAY for the administration of the program – a program whose ONLY goal was to check a stack of forms for proper completion, accept or reject them, and send out checks. What about a truly complex system like Medicare? How high must the admin costs be there?* What about our tax code enforcement – whose laws and regulations are better measured by the pound than by the page?)

In all, 3 Trillion dollars are spent by just the Federal government each year, with more in the offing. That’s about $10,000 for every living human in the United States, every year.

So, what could you do with half that money if it was yours to keep? If you and every member of your household had an extra $5,000, right now, and every year? You could buy decent health insurance, including disability coverage, life insurance and still have money left over. You could invest for retirement. you could sock money away for the kids’ college days. You could take care of your parents when they need you.

What’s more, prices for things would either come down or become more profitable for you and your company. Government is the mooch that has been coming around and eating half your groceries even as you shop for them. Hidden taxes, fees, regulations, and imposed costs drive up the costs of goods. If some of those hidden costs go away, you can come out on the better end of the deal: either your company can become more profitable and you can ask for a better wage or prices for goods will come down, or BOTH.

Our founders knew that you were the best determinant of your own future. They knew that taxes were not only unfair, but actually sucked the will to succeed from those who paid them. They knew that letting the Congress get its hands into YOUR wallet was the biggest threat to the nation, and ran on quite long about the evils of factions (special interests in our day) who could manipulate the relatively small number of politicians who held the pursestrings. It was among the founders’ most strident warnings, both in the Federalist Papers and throughout many of their debates.

So we have a real revolution in the works. One to usurp the factional wrongs amended to our Constitution. This is completely kosher in Conservative thought, but likely frightening to those who like the system of bought power as it is. That’s okay. They will adapt to freedom when it comes.

I would also add this, for those who think such a proposal as this goes too far: I would happily negotiate away the current tax code in favor of a flat tax or national sales tax. Taking the position that the Income Tax must go, along with its amendment, offers you a chance to lure me back toward what you call sanity. I call it a good way of scaring you into doing exactly what I want while you think I am making a concession.

Remember: Moderation is a result, not a starting point.

* 2009 Social Security income is expected to be just shy of $700 Billion (Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) – NOT including Disability Insurance). The admin expense is predicted to be 0.6 percent (six tenths of one percent) of that $700 Billion figure. OASI is VERY efficient. Or is it? It’s fundamental job is to spend funds given to it by other departments. By and large, it does bank transfers and little else. I suspect that it is still inefficient by private sector standards and that only the extreme scale of the enterprise makes it look good. For the record, OASI costs $4.2Billion to run. $100 for each of the 42 million people on OASI. -Could you direct deposit to my bank once a month for less than $100/year?

Source: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/index.html