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Originally posted by 1KIKI:
I deviated from my two main platform elements to discuss healthcare because it came up.

But my two main platform elements are:
1) that we don't blow ourselves up
2) that we don't burn ourselves up.

There are MANY people in government who think a nuclear war is winnable. And so they won't shy away from endlessly escalating foreign conflicts with nuclear powers.

Our new Bolt-on replacement is also one such person.

Questioning “mutual assured destruction,” Charles Kupperman called nuclear conflict “in large part a physics problem.”

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Emergency medical services are a perfect buyout target because demand is inelastic, that is it does not decline when prices go up

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The review yielded 71 estimates from 54 unique peer-reviewed publications, government-based reports, and reports from the gray literature. Computations yielded the following estimated ranges of total annual cost of waste: failure of care delivery, $102.4 billion to $165.7 billion; failure of care coordination, $27.2 billion to $78.2 billion; overtreatment or low-value care, $75.7 billion to $101.2 billion; pricing failure, $230.7 billion to $240.5 billion; fraud and abuse, $58.5 billion to $83.9 billion; and administrative complexity, $265.6 billion. The estimated annual savings from measures to eliminate waste were as follows: failure of care delivery, $44.4 billion to $93.3 billion; failure of care coordination, $29.6 billion to $38.2 billion; overtreatment or low-value care, $12.8 billion to $28.6 billion; pricing failure, $81.4 billion to $91.2 billion; and fraud and abuse, $22.8 billion to $30.8 billion. No studies were identified that focused on interventions targeting administrative complexity. The estimated total annual costs of waste were $760 billion to $935 billion and savings from interventions that address waste were $191 billion to $282 billion.

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Originally posted by rue:
I've copied most of it here:


KaN YQ KoWNT, SUKRZ?
(click on Cyrus's quote to see & hear it)

If you're keeping count, you know the present is certainly not ours.

The wealthy are hogging up all the money. Uncle Scam is a basket case that can't even run an honest election.
The entire economy is set up like a giant cattle ranch with us as the cows. The stupid bad guys are running free, murdering us with bullets and drugs. The smart bad guys are running companies, selling us bullets and drugs.
We The People are working overtime, yet still picking which bills to not pay every month.

I'm writing this in January 2017, a week before Trump's inauguration, feeling like we are about to reboot the first decade of this millenium. Reboot as in the bigger bolder faster turbocharged 4K HD on steroids with a sparkling drop of retzin version! (in case you aren't getting it - that means bad. VERY bad.)

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It doesn't take a genius to figure out that money in the electoral system is the problem.

It's bad enuf with giant corporations doing everything they can to squeeze us dry while ruining the planet, but when money starts writing the rules we live by, eventually we wont be able to live at all.

Money has been the lifeblood of politics from the beginning, but generally speaking, it's been kept at a level.
Now that the party-of-the-rich

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has nearly complete control and the president himself is a desperate wannabe-billionaire, job #1 for them will be to lock in the next and all future elections. Then we're totally, completely and permanently screwed.

Do not make the mistake of thinking America can't possibly become an official oligarchy rather than just the virtual oligarchy it is now. Those rich suckers can count. And they are counting on your apathy and inattention to let their congressmen, senators, governors and [Presidents] tweek the levers just a little bit more without any pesky watchdogs interfering.

Trust me, it'll be GREAT! You wont believe how unbelievable it will be, believe me! FANTASTIC trust me.

I, for one, do not trust them. I can count, and can see what this adds up to: they win, we lose.
My name is JO 753. I am running for President of The United States of America because I believe that We The People still have a chance to own the future and I can help make it happen.

A VISIoN FoR THe FUTURe

It's not enuf to talk about how bad the current administration is and say I can do better. It's too tempting to pick up the weapons of party politics that forget the wisdom of together we stand, especially when you can claim 'they started it'. No. 'Better than the other guy' is just an excuse to set a low bar. There has to be a promise based on actual ideas, positive ideals, real goals.

We must set our sights with optimism on the best we can imagine, not the minimum we can settle for.

Any fool can think up ways it can go wrong. Real leaders think up ways to make it happen.

If you've looked me up on the web, you may have gotten the impression that I am some sort of starry eyed idealistic idiot-genius who doesn't know human nature so can't understand why his plans will never fly in the real world. Or you may have a strong sense of true conservatism and feel that I'm a threat to those values.

I don't have any money. I don't have any contact at all with the wealthy or any political heavy weights. And clearly, I don't know how to knot a tie. But if voters continue to judge candidates by their wealth and past political experience, the oligarchs of the world will be able to pick who you can vote for, ensuring a win for themselves no matter who wins the election. Liberal or conservative, they don't care; their speech writers will tailor the message to get your vote.

Read this site. Most of the ideas are my own. All of it fits my philosophy. None of it is intended to trick you into supporting me. What you see is what I will fight for. When facts & lojik are on my side, I don't care if the rest of the human race says no. Comprimise is usually necessary, but you can't start with a pre-comprimised position. I say aim for the best future, the perfect solution, the highest ideal because aiming for less will surely get you less.

The federal government is the 'brain' of the nation. It has to not only be cognizant of today's reality, but both the risks and opportunities of the future for as far into the future as possible. If it fails, at best, we will not realize our full potential. At worst, we will find our end.

The person with the job of directing the federal government must have the greatest level of intelligence, forsight, empathy and imagination available to humans. With luck, it will be enuf.

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GUN INCIDENT TAX


THE 2ND AMeNDMeNT

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"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

Were you expecting at least a few long paragraphs and probably a bunch of numbered sections, subsections and articles? I was. But no - that's The 2nd Amendment in it's entirety. There is nothing more to it.
As crude and simple as the guns of the era in which it was written.

Also as unreliable and dangerous. It has literally blown up in our faces, killing us instead of protecting us from tyranny and foriegn adversaries.

To the rest of the civilized world, we look like insane idiots. The US has more annual fire arm related fatalities than All the other civilized nations combined. All the nations that are comparable or worse than us are war zones of one kind or another so can't really be counted as civilized.

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The only real life 2nd Amendment freedom fighters are drug merchants shooting at cops while trying to escape. They WILL lose their freedom if they get caught! In their minds, they are only trying to conduct free trade and the government is overstepping, violating their rights.

And seriously, the only time gun advocates rise up in protest is when they fear their 'gun rights' are under consideration for even the mildest new regulation. They do not utter a peep on any other issue that involves the limits of the government, let alone show up en masse armed for war.

Even if they did, the idea that a bunch of guys with pistols and rifles would scare Uncle Sam into changing his mind about a new law or that they could prevail if The Military decided to take over is ludicrous.

Whatever the founding fathers had in mind when they wrote the 2nd amendment, (it is rather vague and contradictory) they failed to consider how much technological advancements could increase the power and deadly efficiency of fire arms in the future. They weren't crazy, so if they'd been given a hint, I'm sure they would have emphisized the part about well regulated and put a few stipulations on shall not be infringed.
FLINTLoK PISTL
KRQZ DiUFRaM
Click the pix to see these guns in action.

PRoLIFeRATIoN

The main factor driving the gun problem is proliferation - too many guns everywhere. Anybody who wants one can get one quickly and cheaply. Guns are left in easy reach of toddlers. Depressed teenagers can take the easy way out using the 'emergency self defense' device their parents bought to protect the family. Burglars cheerfully add them to the bounty, supplying their fellow bad boys with the prefered tool of their trade.

America is at a level of saturation that makes it impossible for a city or even a state to effectively regulate them. The violence in Chicago is proof of that, not that the laws themselves are bad.

During fierce debates in The Skeptic's Society and Marylin Vos Savant Forums (see below) I realized thatv guns are not an essential component of our society, unlike cars, which gun proponents often compare them to due to the similar annual fatality numbers. Every gun in the country could dissappear tonite
and tomorrow morning the rest of our society would roll right along as usual. If all the cars and trucks in America disappeared, the entire country and much of the rest of the world stops moving.

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What I realized on July 20th 2012 is that guns are effectively a HOBBY! And everybody in America, even those of us who are against guns, are subsidizing the major cost of that hobby. Some estimates put the annual cost of fire arm fatalities, injuries, property damage and law enforsement at over 250 billion
dollars, dwarfing the value of the entire industry, which is around 15 billion.

Since it is extreemly difficult to amend the Constitution, even if the National Rifle Association allowed their pet senators and congressmen touch the 2nd Amendment, some way of balancing it out is needed.

GUN INCIDeNT Tax

In a nut shell, the GIT moves the entire monetary cost of fire arms to the owners, lobbying organizations and manufacturers - anybody and everybody with a stake in the hobby of private citizens owning guns gets to help pay for all the resulting death, injury and destruction. No more freeloading!

Adding a function to an existing agency, or even starting a whole new one is a much lower hurdle to clear than amending the Constitution. In addition, framing it as a matter of not freeloading will make it harder for the supposedly self sufficient quazi-Libertarian minded Republicans to object.

The GIT would work alot like insurance. All legal gun owners, manufacturers and proponent organizations would recieve a quarterly bill that would reflect the cost incurred during the preceding period caused by guns.

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... [since this is a stupid, counterproductive idea, I eliminated a lot of turd-polishing.]


Just like cars, all guns will need to be registered by their owners. Owners will be licensed and tested and will need to notify the government whenever they buy or sell a gun, including who from or to.

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... [more turd-polishing]

As proven by Japan

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[MORE ABOUT GUNS, WHICH MAKES UP AN INORDINATE PORTION OF JO'S PLATFORM. I DELETED IT. ] ....

"The main thing about money, Bud, makes you do things you don't want to do."
- Lou Manhiem, Wall Street

MoNEY: SeRVANT oR MASTeR ?

Money is one of the foundational inventions that makes civilization possible. It enables the efficient transfer of value from one person to another and a way to store value that doesn't take up much room and wont rot away.

Perhaps it's most amazing function, money can work as artificial co-operation. When someone has an idea for a big project thats a little hard to imagine the benefits of, money makes it happen.

Go back to 1889, gather a thousand men in a muddy field and explain to them how, if they spend 5 years building a giant factory where they are standing, then 5 more in that factory making a thousand copies of your 'automobile' invention, they could all be riding those around instead of horses.

See? It does not work. There has to be some way to motivate people to work on stuff that's not going to be of near term benefit to them. You may be able to get a hand full of your best buds to co-operate on something relatively small, but the big projects that make up our civilization require money to work.

Unfortunately, the invention is not perfect. It has a dark side.

The same compactness and mobility that make it work also make it easy to steal. Every idea ever intended to improve it's efficiency also made it easier to steal larger & larger amounts.

It is supposed to be like oil in a machine, not the reason the machine exists. Banks are only supposed to help move and store money, not be a money making venture in themselves.

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The entire financial system is supposed to be like plumbing - the pipes and valves that get the fluid to where it needs to go, not a wealth extraction machine.

Money is supposed to work for us, not be our boss.

We are living with the consequenses of allowing our invention to run amok.

There is an ocean of money floating way up in the stratosphere that us ordinary people can hardly see, let alone reach. It's that BIG MONEY we only see on TV,

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so it doesn't seem real to us. We only know it's there, we don't feel it. We don't really believe in it.
It's in the same fantasy world as I Dream of Jeannie.

But it really is there.

We see only glimpses of it with stories of Bill Clinton getting a million bucks to talk for an hour.
Lebron James getting a 77,000,000$ contract. Angelina Jolie getting 30,000,000$ for 1 movie. Bill Gates on his way to becoming the first trillionaire.

Aside from the celebrities, we only see a hand full of names occasionally mentioned in the financial news.
We do not know the names of hundreds of super rich individuals, thousands of hedge fund managers, countless overpaid corporate executives and myriad rich for whatever people.

That ocean was created by greedy people with lots of

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money figuring out increasingly complex and effective ways to use money to extract more & more from everybody else.

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They long ago perfected the art & science of making the wealth created by the workers of the world vanish before we are even aware that it exists, immediatly materializing in their pockets, only occasionally visible to the rest of us as mind boggling numbers, lavish lifestyles and crazy expensive merchandise.

A question that I have never heard asked by the media or any politician is this: What Herculean effort producing what astounding accomplishment resulting in what incredible benefit to our society can any of these super rich individuals claim to justify the amount of wealth they have taken from all of us?

We already know the answer is none, so now another question presents itself: What good is the system that makes their wealth grabbing possible?

Again, we know the answer is none. 'They' will launch into long explanations concerning
capitalism, free trade, supply & demand, market forces, etc. etc. etc. Their condescending lecture will be full of quotes from PhD experts and long dead theorists to remind you that you are nobody to be questioning them! But really, it will only add up to how it came to be this way, not why it is of benefit to anybody but the rich.
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

There are 3 movies I like to watch that are about money:

Wall Street

Glengarry Glen Ross

Boiler Room

And theres a book I often recommend that explains how and why things got so out of
whack leading to the collapse of 2008: The Looting of America.

Watch and read, my friends. Watch, read and understand.

INCeNTIVe FAILURe

There's no real incentive for Wall Street to not break the law

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if the penalty is a tiny fraction of the profit to be made. And if someone occasionally goes to prison, so what? A little danger makes the game more exiting!
Plus, seeing some fall guy in a fine suit being led away in cuffs on the evening news does wonders for the public perception that the regulators are on the job. 'No need to look into it. Saw it on 60 Minutes.
They're cracking down on that now. No further attention required.'

The entire financial 'industry' seems to operate with an attitude that all the money is theirs and it's their duty to squeeze as much out of the rest of us as possible. If there isn't a regular trickle of people losing their houses and factories going out of business it's a sign that they can dial up the pressure. When there is a crash, maybe they have a clearer idea of where the limit is, now that they've seen the other side of it.

What is obviously needed is some serious pain for irresponsible behaivor. Something so scary to them that any 'opportunity' they see for mischief is immediatly rejected.

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THe PeNALTY

Any failure caused by financial institutions will result in cancelation of all debts owed to them, up to and including a total meltdown like we saw in 08.

For example, if you have a mortgage on your house and the bank crashes, the house is yours, free and clear!
If Wall Street puts the world's economy into a tail spin again, whatever payments you were making to a financial institution are OVER! The house, car, student loan, commercial property, etc.. Everything!

Furthermore, to discourage all sorts of sneaky deals and negligence, if a real company goes out of business due to excessive debt pressure thru no fault of the management, the former employees who can't pay their debts are off the hook!
THIS MAKeS LoTS oF ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

The most likely effect of this is that we will never see another stock market meltdown. The boom and bust cycles that somehow always screw the little guy and leave the big guys wealthier than ever will stop.
The Gordon Gekko wannabees that currently infest the world will be on the endangered species list.

If there are failures, they will almost always be the result of outright easily provable criminal fraud rather than gray area negligence or something that can be claimed as an innocent result of market forces. And even if it's due to market forces beyond the control of the institution in question or the entire industry, same result for us so same penalty for them! People pulling down king's ransom salaries to run these productless money moving businesses should have the keen awareness and great forsight that the job requires.

If this sounds unreasonably harsh, it's only because we have been living in a financial environment created by the money shufflers for our entire lives. The normal deal is an outrageous raw deal. The fact that it's been
institutionalized for centuries does not make it any less outrageous.

If you think it can't work - that the entire system will fall apart - you are mistaken. You aren't seeing the big picture. You are ignoring the massive wealth inequality the current arrangement has produced.

STRUCTURAL REFoRM

Financial regulation in the US is handled by a confusing tangle of federal, state
and local agencies. This can only make it easier for crooks to operate and honest financial businesses to make mistakes. Scrap the whole mess and replace it with single agency chartered with the job of serving the interests of the public rather than the businesses they are supervising.

As President, I will not be appointing Wall Street insiders to run The Federal Reserve or the consolidated regulatory agency. Previous Presidents apparently had the notion that it takes an insider to understand the business, but we can see where that got us - institutionalized cleptomania and continuous boom & bust cycles.
That is over with my administration! No more banks and billionaires writing their own rules.



A FAIR DAY'S PAY FoR A FAIR DAY'S WoRK

Not much agreement between employers and employees on that idea.
That's why The Government needs to be involved.

Unfortunately, how much one gets payed to do whatever type of work is based mainly on tradition rather
than some connection to real tangible measurable benefits to the employer or society. Whenever workers
appeal to Uncle Sam to settle a dispute, 'prevailing wage' usually wins the argument for the employer.

The attitude seems to be that if you choose to be an employee, you are a chump who is lucky to be
getting anything at all from the company for your time and labor. Better do exactly as told, kuz there
are stacks of applications this high cluttering the personnel office!

As a model maker and tool maker the most I ever got was about 23$ per hour, even tho the jobs required a great amount of knowledge, skill, intelligence and talent - more than many medical professions require.
Millions of tradesmen in hundreds of different technologies are trapped under an inequitable pay ceiling.

Even more unfortunately, while us honest working chumps are thinking 'fair pay' everybody else is playing by 'as much as I can possibly grab'!

Lawyers, politicians, ball players, crooked appliance repairmen, singers, dentists, corporate executives, bureuacrats, news readers, shock jocks, real estate salesmen, etc. etc. etc. - a long list of professions that can grab massive piles of cash with no consideration at all for the value of the work they do to 'earn' it. Whatever they can shovel into a wheel barrow and slink away with is rightfully theirs.

Think about these points:

• Employment for most people is a raw deal, especially if the job involves physical work on tangible products.
If its feasible to outsource or automate your job, good luck asking for a raise. The company will complain that raising wages will automaticly require raising prices, causing sales to decline. Then in the next news report they will justify the CEO's 50,000,000$ salary with 'you have to pay that kind of money to attract good people'.
And it seems like half the time, this super genius will be the same guy who golden parachuted out of a tech company that went under some years ago.

• Now that the Republicans are firmly in control of the federal government and the majority of states, we can expect wages to stagnate or decline. They always fight tooth and nail against any organized wage increase demands, ESPECIALLY minimum wage increases, even becoming emboldened during their echo chamber campaign rallies to loudly proclaim their opposition to ANY minimum! And mark my words, ladies, don't be surprized when you hear about them trying to undermine the Lilly Ledbetter act.

• A sensible strategy for us working chumps is to trade as little of our precious time as we can for the meager stipend they graciously allow us. The words 'fair' and 'earn' are meaningless. There is no real reason why the CEO of the megacorp you work for gets paid 1,000x more than you do. You are probably as smart as he is and I bet you'd risk taking his job at half the price with no golden parachute if you fail!

SLAVeRY

Outright slavery started to fall into disfavor in the 1700's. Altho many of America's founding fathers wanted to kick this country off to a good start by banning it, too many others were slave owners and adamantly opposed to such a radical idea. It took about 3/4 century and civil war before slavery only sort of ended here in America and our greatest leader was murdered for his accomplishment.

I say sort of because it really only changed to less obvious forms.

Perhaps the biggest revolution was that wealthy people and companies found that paying a wage to employees is much easier and cheaper than owning slaves. Instead of having to house, feed, cloth and care for workers, just give them money and let them do all that for themselves! All you have to do is pay them as little as they will settle for. Not hard at all to find people who can do the work for less than it would have taken to run a slave operation.

In the 1800's a variety of scams emerged that effectively got work done for zero or lower cost. Many were based on paying workers in 'company script' which could only be redeemed at company owned businesses.
Men could begin their employment with real money saved and soon find themselves flat broke and forced to choose between continuing to work at a loss or leave in debt to the company.

The so-called 'employers' got away with this mainly by having thugs on the payroll to suppress any complaints.
Taking a job in a mining town could be a fatal mistake, not only from hazardous working conditions, but also for trying to leave with money in your pocket.

If you have any Fiscal Conservative notions about the Department of Labor and unions being the evil enemies of the heroic job creator capitalists, you need to read up on how bad things got before Uncle Sam finally stepped in to put some limits and regulations in place. Not that they did a good job - to this day, you are lucky to make a living wage and will probably get fired if you complain about unhealthful and hazardous working conditions.

Not a huge difference between slavery and employment if you are permanently trapped by a lack of money in your louzy job and living in your parent's attic or a crappy subdivided apartment crowded with similarly underpaid workers.

TIMe & eMPLoYMeNT

I am going to establish some fundamental principals here.

TIMe

It is your most precious resource.

It doesn't matter if you are an unemployable Skid Row jib head felonious bum or Bill Gates, you have at most 500,000 hours of conscious free time with which to make your mark on the world. That's cradle to grave if you live to be 100. Realisticly, it's probably less than 1/4 of that because alot of your time is taken up by the chores of life, leisure activity, leisure inactivity, laid up from disease or injury, and various types of assclowns stealing your time. Plus, how old are you now AND you do not know how much time you really have left - you could get zapped by a freak electrical failure while reading this!

It's all about the odds. Very slim chance you will get electricuglied in the next 5 minutes, but also very slim that you'll be alive & kicking in 2117. The still alive odds favor something in between and it's a downward ramp starting now. So, working 75 hours a week and never taking a vacation in order to retire at 50 may not be such a great plan. Not only could you die before or not long after retiring, but your nest egg could be rendered worthless by Wall Street crashing the economy again. And the increased stress of working too much will certainly take some toll, leaving you older than your years.

eMPLoYMeNT

It can save you a bunch of time.
IF you manage it properly!

You have to think of it this way: 'I only have a year left. How many of my remaining 5,000 hours should I trade for dollars and how much should I charge to maximize my quality of life?' Factor in what you will be doing in those sold hours and your odds of being happy with your life increase. If you happen to live more than a year, great! You can decide what you're going to do with this next year.

The notion that if someone else is willing to work for less you need to accept less leads to bankruptcy and, in the bigger picture, the eventual collapse of the community. There is always someone on Earth more desperate than you who will work for less, so an employer can theoretically get his product or service done for virtually nothing. In the biggest picture, this could lead to the collapse of civilization. If money always goes straight from the customer to the CEO, pretty soon nobody has any money so there are no customers. Game over.

Companies that don't pay their employees some amount above the bare minimum required to support themselves are essentially parasites. Their product or service is actually stolen from the workers.
The business plan that depends on the worker's cost of living being far below what it is where the product or service is sold does not change that at all - parasites suck.

Just because a place in Tennessee or Taiwan is desperately poor does not justify paying them less. 'It's better than nothing' never works out. They take the new jobs, then 5 or 10 years later the company goes out of business or moves to an area where the workers are even cheaper and the community finds itself just as poor as before, plus their land and health ruined.

What has gotten lost sometime in the distant past is that we are all co-operating to make life better than it would be if we were independently scratching out an existence in the wild. The man with the dollars isn't any better than the rest of us. He does not automaticly deserve a bigger chunk of the proceeds of our co-operation.

The laws and policies have been tilted in favor of the rich for too long, turning vast swaths of America and many of the countries we trade with into slums. Far too many of us would be happier living like Les Stroud (Survivorman) out in a forest instead of being employees.

Civilization can not exist only to benefit people with excess money.

PAY FoR WoRK IS GoING AWaY

We started replacing muscles with machines hundreds of years ago.
80 years ago we began replacing brains with machines.

The job is almost done.

Before this century is over, the only work for pay available will be for athletes, entertainers and artists.
And even that will only be if we still like to have real humans in those roles, not because machines can't do them 10x better than us. All manufacturing will be automated. Construction, repair, service, and other non-stationary jobs will be done by droids.

How will people get payed? Not everybody can be the owner of a manufacturing facility that's cranking out the stuff people want to buy. A new way to distribute wealth has to be adopted, otherwise civilization falls apart.
We can't wait till massive hordes of starving American citizens are storming the castle walls of the people who ended up with everything at the end of a giant game of Monopoly.

Transitioning to an economy that does not involve selling and buying each other's time needs to begin as soon as possible. We are in the beginning of that future NOW. Delaying the transition will only make it more painful.

Politicians who are still talking about bringing manufacturing jobs back to America are either pandering or very short sighted. The majority of today's good paying jobs are nonproductive or even counterproductive.
Creating more fake jobs is a waste of everybody's time. We don't need more lawyers or insurance clerks.

Nobody entering the workforce today will be retiring with a pension in 2070.

Some countries are beginning to experiment with Garranteed Basic Income plans as a way to cope with automation. We should be leading the way on this because American technology & capitalism are the forces pushing the world in that direction.

SoLUTIoNS FoR NoW

oFF SHoRe LABoR

A BIG part of past and current problems is cheap foriegn labor sucking jobs out of this country. Trade agreements have never worked out well for us because they failed to address this.

Intead of trying to even things out with tarrifs, which only raise prices for consumers, a law that requires companies to pay foriegn workers at least half of what the American workers get, regardless of what the cost of living in those countries is, will both reduce the temptation for companies to offshore AND raise the standard of living in the countries where they are already operating, creating new customers.

Since alot of these countries are burdened with cleptocracies that would just steal all the money, it will be neccesary to create an enforcement agency with the authority to protect against such activity. Companies could be required to employ security forces to protect workers from local criminal organizations that are common in 3rd world countries, usually in cahoots with the government.

exeCUTIVe PAY

Capping executive pay at a reasonable 50x whatever the lowest payed worker in the company gets would free up LOTS of money for paying the employees andor lowering the price of the products and services. Here's an idea for them: Use the money to hire enuff customer support people to handle calls in a timely manner!

15$ NATIoNAL MINIMUM WAGe

This would raise the standard of living in poor communities and help to even out the regional wage variations.
another part of this will be that it's an absolute minimum - no exceptions! No more unpaid interns! No more phoney salary schemes created to bypass overtime laws! No more migrant farm workers getting next to nothing!

Seriously - if a business can't pay a living wage to all it employees, it is really just a charity relying on the government and parents of the workers to make up the difference. They need to either rethink their business plan or give up and let their more competent competitors expand.

ReTRoACTIVE PAY

Women who worked for any part of the government will be payed whatever the difference is between what they got and what male employees got all the way back to the Equal Pay Act of 1963 in adjusted dollars. No red tape for you to deal with, accountants would just go over the records, calculate the discrepency and notify the Federal Reserve to cut a check to the victim or their decendants.



Tax

GOP: "Why should we punish people for being successful?"

JO 753: "Because it's more profitable than punishing people for being poor."

Get over the notion of taxes as 'punishment'. It's a worthless, ill-considered perspective.
Until we all have pure spirits and IQs over 200, we need some form of government to make
and enforce the rules that allow us to live and work together. It takes money to do that.

The bigger the population, the more money it takes. The stupider and meaner we are,
(maximum and average) the more money it takes. The more power available to individuals and groups, the more money it takes.

And its not like we can limit these considerations to America. The entire world is interconnected, so what's going on everywhere needs to be monitored and sometimes acted upon for the good of The Nation. It takes money to do that.

Then there are natural dizasters - the usual list of weather and geological events and the unusual ones that could be much worse. The massive effort and resourses to deal with
these takes money on a scale that only the Government can handle.

Therefore TAXES.

But there's certainly room to quibble over how much and who pays.

Congress uses it's authority to levy taxes to influence all sorts of activities in every aspect of society, all presumably to help the Nation. Unfortunately, it has often been to the overall disadvantage of us ordinary citizens. The 70,000 page U.S. tax code is mostly complex loopholes for rich individuals and large corporations. People with money want to keep it and have found that contributions to political campaigns are a good investment.

A GREAT investment, in fact.

The top 1% now hold more wealth than the bottom 90%. The 'poorest' person on the Forbes 400 list is worth 1 billion 700 million dollars! That's 21 times more than in 1982 and the gap between the top and bottom people on the list is getting wider faster.
The 4 richest people now have more money than the bottom 170 million citizens combined.

And as if the wealth gap wasn't spreading fast enuff already, last year the oligarchs told their pet Republicans to 'pass tax reform or don't bother calling for the next election'.
They got a reform in which 83% of the savings go to them. We get a few crumbs at first, then our breaks expire and we start paying more than before. Plus, that pesky national debt Republicans are always harping on increases by 2 trillion! They will surely use this as an excuse to start cutting back on all sorts of services.

The wealth gap proves that Uncle Sam is working for the rich, rather than us. Although the tax system isn't the only way they are favored, it's a big factor. And they know it can be used not just to level the playing field, but to tilt it against them and for the rest of us.

If you are thinking that it's wrong to make it rich vs poor, you are literally helping them win the game by pretending there is no game being played.

Taxes bore me to stone. Look at the original post date for this page - nearly a year after I first
put a button up for it! Finally got around to buckling down and cobbling it together with alot of help from internet forum friends who have specific and well thought out ideas based on real world knowledge and experience. Its impossible for it to be perfect on day 1, so I expect to get many suggestions for improvements. Don't be shy! Email, or better yet, post your ideas in one of the forums I'm in. You can help yourself and help the country!

JO'Z HeD TRND TO STON oN U 1040 FORM
THe InteRWeB Tax PlaN

SeCTIoN 1 - THE eMPLoYee Tax

No more income tax for employees

The IRS will no longer care how much individual workers are making. Instead, with the
Employee Tax system, it will keep track of how much a company is paying it's employees.
You will never hear from the IRS as long as all your income is from an employer.
Instead of the microscopic increments found on the tax tables, there will be only five rates:
0% up to 10,000$, 5% from 10,000$ to 50,000$, 10% from 50,000$ to 150,000$,
30% from 150,000$ to 1,000,000$, and 50% for 1,000,000$ and up.

Companies will save a mountain of paperwork by grouping employees into 1 block to make a
single report and payment to the IRS. This will also save the IRS a bunch of work.
- - - - - - -

example 1:

Instead of being told you are getting paid 30$ per hour but only getting 27 after taxes, you will be told that your pay is 27.30$. By the end of the year you earned 70,000$ so the company pays Uncle Sam 4,000$. That's 2,000$ for your earnings between 10,000$ & 50,000$ (5%) and 2,000$ for your earnings between 50,000$ & 70,000$ (10%).

You are effectively getting a 30¢ per hour raise compared to what it would have been in the income tax system at the same rate, but it's only about 2¢ more to the company. Instead of seeing a big chunk chomped out of your paycheck every week, you were never thinking 30$ per hour so don't feel like you're being robbed.

Actually, you are getting much more than 30¢ per hour compared to the current income tax system. Going by the tables linked to above, you would have payed 11,970$, making you sorry for working all that overtime.

example 2:

You work at Walmart full time stocking shelves, earning 15$ per hour. You have a 2nd job managing a bowling alley 3 nights a week for 500$. You also average 100$ per week selling Nooalf charts on Ebay. Your total income for the year 2022 was 61,400$.

Walmart payed 1,060$ to the IRS for the hours you worked. The owner of the bowling alley payed 750$ for the 50 weekends and Wednesdays you worked. Both of them payed the 5% Employee Tax based on what they payed you over 10,000$ for the year, not needing to know how much you earned elsewhere. The 5,200$ you made on Ebay is self employment income (see below) under 50,000$ so the IRS doesn't care about it.

The fact that 11,400$ of your income would have been in the 10% rate catagory if you'd earned all your pay from 1 employer makes no difference. The IRS does not collect income taxes from individual employees, it collects Employee Taxes in bulk lots from companies.
- - - - - - -

No more IRS boogyman casting a pall over the first 3 months of your year. No more confusing forms to procrastinate about. No more torturous vizits to H&R Block. Nothing to ail in before the deadline. April 15th will be just another day. Worries about income tax dvantages or penalties will no longer be skewing your decisions about major purchases. You won't be keeping records and saving receipts all year trying to get a little more money back.

SeCTIoN 2 - SeLF eMPLoYMeNT Tax

No tax for self employed citizens up to 50,000$

There will be only four rates: 0% up to 50,000$, 10% from 50,000$ to 150,000$, 30% from 150,000$ to 1,000,000$, 50% for 1,000,000$ and up.

It's a waste of time for everybody to keep track of all the measly crumbs earned and payed by people mowing lawns, doing garage sales, fixing junk cars, etc. Not worth the IRS's time to deal with millions of individual piles of paper to extract petty cash from people who are already on the edge of poverty.

Same deal for employed people who suppliment their income from such activities. Honest citizens shouldn't feel like criminals for selling their unwanted knick knacks on Ebay but don't have the time to play accountant on top of their real jobs.

The obvious restriction on this is that it can't be used by companies to avoid paying the Employee Tax by hiring people as independent contractors.

Unfortunately, self employed citizens earning over 50,000$ will still have to fill out tax forms.
There will be a gray area up to 60,000$ that they won't be penalized if the IRS finds that they were in the taxable range but didn't file. Beyond that, or habitual failure to report will be fined.

SeCTIoN 3 - GoVeRNMeNT PaYMeNTS

All money payed by the government is tax free.

As per section 1 above, government employees may see their stated rate of pay decrease, but their actual take home pay stays the same or increases slightly. The difference is that the government will not be sending itself a percentage for each employee.

Whatever the income tax rate is for companies doing business with the government will simply be subtracted from the original payment. For example, Chrysler sells the FBI 20 Challengers at 50,000$ each and their tax rate is 20%, so they will recieve a check for 800,000$

Lottery prizes will be the actual advertised amount. Same with pensions, social security, disability, etc. In the future, the idea of Uncle Sam handing someone money and then nagging them to give some of it back will be the basis for jokes about the current absurdity.

SeCTIoN 4 - BUSINeSS TaxeS

Manufacturers: 20%. Tangible service providers: 30%. Financial businesses: 50%

An important distinction between different types of businesses is how much it costs to generate income. It's one of the biggest flaws in the Libertarian ideas about free market capitalism and why we have so many problems stemming from insufficient money.

The biggest disparity, and thus the best example, is between financial businesses, such as banks, and businesses that create tangible products.

Consider the mind boggling number of details in the business of manufacturing cars. The enormous cost of special machines, thousands of vendors each with hundreds or thousands of employees, billions of dollars in research, developement & design work, compliance with workplace safety and environmental regulations, providing parts and service for decades for old models, billions lost for recalls, product liability insurance for the inevitable lawsuits, gigantic payouts when something really big goes wrong and people are injured and killed.

Banks just have to shuffle money around. Hell! The car companies have to do that too!
Kids do that for fun playing Monopoly!

Financial businesses include insurance companies, investment firms, banks, currency exchanges, pay day loan shops, hedge funds, financial planners, banks - every type of company that uses money to make money. They contribute nothing to the common wealth, so they are equivalent to friction in a machine - it's unavoidable, but you do your best to minimize it.

SeCTIoN 5 - SoCIaL SeCURITY

The current system takes 6.2% out of your pay and your employer pays another 6.2%. The problem
is that it's capped at 128,400$, so those benefitting the most from our society are contributing
a progressively lower percentage. The new rate will be 5%, begin at 50,000$ and have no cap.

A ball park estimate puts the revenue of this at 1.5 trillion dollars, about 570 billion more
than the current system. (as reported by the clowns Trump put in charge of it, so who knows?)

Everybody will get the same Social Security payment when they reach retirement age or are
otherwise qualified. How much you contributed makes no difference. Individuals can choose to
forego receiving payment, but can change their mind for any reason at any time. Continuing
to work after retirement will not reduce your payment and it will be illegal for companies
to pay less than the usual rate of pay to people receiving social security.
- - - - - - -

example 1:

You are payed 100,000$ a year as the executive secretary/receptionist at a small Cincinnati
radio station. 2,500$ will be deducted from your pay for the year and the station will pay
another 2,500$. Your weekly paycheck will be 1,875$, showing 48$ has been subtracted.

example 2:

You were payed a total of 1 billion dollars last year in salary, bonuses and stocks as a hedge
fund manager at Brindly & Strackmoore Investments LLC. Your accountant writes a check for
47,500,000$ to the US Treasury, BSI LLC includes the same amount for your services in it's total
5% payment for all its employees, it's executives, it's own profits, and shareholder dividends.

example 3:

You retired from your position as a shoe lace renibber at the shoe store last year. There are
60 million citizens who are retired, on disablity or otherwise qualified to recieve Social
Security payments. Your monthly check is 2,050$, the same as everybody else's. That is the
total previous year's collected revenue divided by the total recipients rounded down to
the nearest 50$ to create and maintain a reserve.
- - - - - - -

As technology continues to eliminate jobs, this system can be gradually expanded into some
form of Basic income simply by increasing the percentage and adding qualifying circumstances.
THe BIG TIMe & eFFICIeNCY aDVaNTaGe

This system eliminates inefficient revenue collection efforts and at least reduces the rate
at which the wealth gap is widening. Having the IRS and every adult in the country
spending their time almost literally sorting thru bread crumbs in the dirt while the REAL
money is flying way over their heads like swarms of gold plated jumbo jets is ludicrous.

Going by Sutton's Law ("because that's where the money is") will unburden the IRS
from about 90% of it's enforcement duties since 100 million working people won't be
motivated to cheat anymore. Going after Wall Street crooks and big corporations who find
ways to game the system no matter what the rules are is way more productive.
LeVeLING THe PLaYING FIeLD

This tax plan will be seen as a calamity to those benefitting from the current arrangement.
They will offer intricately detailed explanerations on why it can't possibly work, why it
will crash the world's economy and send civilization back to the dark ages.

I don't know what they are teaching in business schools about the principals of capitalism, but I do know what the results are. It cannot be denied that something is not working properly when a major percentage of the world's population is utterly destitute, the majority in 1st world nations spend most of their adult life in debt, and a tiny fraction at the top have more money than they could reasonably spend for themselves in a million years, yet are still taking in more at an obscene rate. Clearly there is something fundamentally wrong with the theories.

http://www.7532020.com/eNViRMeNT.htm
http://www.7532020.com/RESRC.htm
http://www.7532020.com/NaSU.htm

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