Exemptions, Deductions, Credits, aka Loopholes

Doing your own personal income tax is a zoo. Took me a couple of days, with computer assistance. It's all the damn loopholes, exemptions, deductions, and tax credits that make it a mess. If we got rid of ALL the loopholes, doing your taxes would be simple, just use a calculator to figure a straight percent of your income. Get rid of all the picky definitions of who's a child, single, married, married filing separate returns, head of household. Pay the same whether you are married, single, divorced, what ever. Get rid of deductions for mortgages, medical, state and local taxes, the works. Get rid of credits for electric cars, energy saving furnaces, foreign taxes paid. children raised, tuition paid, houses bought, and money earned if you have children.
Just tax the income, don't try to give tax breaks depending upon how you spent it. If we dropped all the loopholes, we could drop the rates down to 15% for the average taxpayer. Charge the wealthy a little more, charge the poor a little less.
Put H&R Block out of business.

Enlisting Robots

The Army is experimenting with a four legged walking robot. Looks pretty much like a mechanical mule. Can pack 340 pounds and has a range of 12 miles, and a speed of 4 mph. It's autonomous, able to find it's own way, does not need a driver.
Looking at the picture, I keep wondering if it is any better than a real mule. It certainly won't be as quiet, what with an engine racketing away.

I remember Dick Clark

Fondly too. Way back when American Bandstand was in it's second season, it was THE TV program. I was attending a boarding school near Philly. The lounge at Boy's End had one black&white 21 inch TV set, a table model mounted on a shelf high on the wall. Channel selection was a majority rule thing and late afternoons the channel was ALWAYS channel 6 WFIL American Bandstand. For 10th 11th and 12th grades. I'm sorry Dick Clark died, a little part of America died with him.

Speculators! Evil, evil evil

Obama is blaming gasoline prices on "speculators" and wants to "invest" $52 million of our tax money in fighting them. Wow.
It used to be, in the United States of America, that buying stuff and selling stuff was legal. We have commodity exchanges to facilitate buying and selling of pork bellies, wheat, gold, oil, and a bunch of other stuff. Anyone can see that oil is getting scarce, and Obama is working to make it even scarcer. If you took a course in real economics in college, you know that when things get scarce, the price goes up. This ain't rocket science.
So plenty of people are buying oil , expecting the price to rise, and they to make money. That used to be legal. Still is legal far as I know. Ought to legal even if Obama doesn't like it. Freedom we call it, freedom to buy and sell as we please. Should not need a government OK to buy and sell anything, anytime.
This is also called speculation (boo hiss).
Druther have a few speculators make some money than not be able to buy any gasoline at all.

"End Cheap Oil" says a Kennedy

The Daily Caller quotes an email from Joe Kennedy III saying “The cycle that allows cheap oil to trump tough choices has to stop.”
Wow. Talk about a brain made from solid reinforced concrete. Does Kennedy think that oil is cheap, or has been cheap anytime since 1973? When is the last time young Joe paid for a tank of gas? And expensive oil is good? For anybody?
Kennedy is running for Barney Frank's old congressional seat down in Massachusetts. Maybe he can lose to a Republican?

Bondholders get special bankruptcy deal

Jefferson County Alabama declared bankruptcy last year. Wall Street was left holding $3.14 billion of country bonds to finance the sewer system. And now Wall St is whining (and suing) because the bankrupt county wants to stop paying the bondholders.
Why do Wall St banks think they are entitled to payment when others go unpaid? What makes bondholders more important than anyone else? Why should not bondholders take a haircut after lending ridiculous amounts of money to a borrower that clearly cannot repay it. The bond sales amount to about $5000 for each resident, man, woman and child, in the county. No way they are ever going to pay that off. Should not the banks take a haircut for stupid lending?

How can you tell when a politician is lying?

Simple. Whenever they make ten year forecasts of anything, but especially tax revenues and government spending. Nobody knows what things will look like ten years from now. But they stick with the 10 year forecasts because ten years from now, nobody will remember how ridiculous their forecasts were. Make a one year forecast, and even the newsies will remember what it was, and dump on you if the forecast was wrong.