eh_notsomuch

Well, this isn't so much of a guest post, but some articles about the economy that he thought were worth reading. ( Check 'em out! )

• I was putting some bottles in the wine fridge this morning (w00t~!), and I noticed a tuft of cat hair on the bar countertop. The cats are obviously conducting their own building inspections. I hope we're up to code!


• I reiterate: kitties are not digging the "get locked up in the bedroom all day" routine. And of course if the door were open, they'd still spend 90% of their day in there! It's just the closed door they object to. But I don't care what they think. Until all the contractors and subcontractors hand me back their spare keys and I can be assured that no one else will be coming in and out of the house when we're not there, the cats stay sequestered in the bedroom during the day.


• Speaking of the remodel: stuff in the kitchen works! Like last night, I unpacked the microwave stuff and set up the little plate, and found a place to store the convection rack. (Ooooh fancy!) I ran it at very low power for 30 seconds. You know, just to make sure the plate was in right and able to move. And it works! Today we turned on the hood, and it's got 4 nice bright 50 watt bulbs in there. The fan is... kinda loud. But if you turn it down to 2 (out of 6), it's manageable. If I'm watching TV while I'm cooking and running the fan, I'll be very glad for those two speakers installed in the kitchen ceiling. I started putting in oven racks, but it feels too loose. Need to find the manual and make sure I'm doing it right.


• I'm wearing an inexpensive brown T-shirt I bought at Target a couple weekends ago and my new beige skirt. I look decent and am very comfy! I must go snag more of these cheap and cheerful shirts.


• Just saw a headline go by: "Unlike 1Q, Apple shares rise after 2Q report." Translated: when Charity buys Apple shares, she gets a decent earnings report but the stock tanks anyway. After they claw back up to a reasonable level, she sells them to Hubby, who then gets a hhhhhhawesome earnings report, and they go sky-high. Eh, whatevah. I am clearly not cut out to own individual stocks. I will stick to mutual funds. Or bonds.


• But yeah, so I got my Apple stock money back, and my 6-month CD matures next Friday. So when they announce the next release of the MacBook Pro, I am ready, baby! I figure they'll do a refresh in time for the back-to-school buying crowd. I'll wait till November or so to let them work all the kinks out, then SNAG!!!


• Today was "Bring Your Young'uns to Work Day." Remember when the whole idea of it was Bring Your Daughter to Work, so she can see different roles for women so she doesn't have to stick to "nurse" or "teacher" or "mommy" as a career path? Yeah, so that lasted. My company actually has organized programs for the kids now, and they shuffle them off to the auditorium or something so you hardly see them. This is a vast improvement from when it was just an excuse for the kids to eat all our cookies and download South Park cartoons at their mothers' desks. (Tru fax, saw that with my own eyes.)


• Dr. H and Dr. M back-cracked me yesterday. I consistently have tightness and issues with my mid-back, so I got the office ergonomics guru to give my desk a makeover. So he's got my chair rearranged now. It's weeeeird. Not bad, just weeeeird.


• Wanna hear something that sucks? Next month Hubby has to fly down to Tampa for a meeting at 1 p.m., then turn around and fly home! I mean, he prefers not to have to go away overnight and all, and there is value in face-to-face meetings. But doesn't that seem like a huge waste of money!? Not to mention an e-nor-mous pain in Hubby's posterior.


• I'm sneezing and blowing my nose like a mofo today. Hard to tell if it's the cold or allergies compounding the problem. Although I am grateful that the sore throat has finally! passed. Hopefully this won't last much longer.


• I do see my doctor next week, but that's because I need a new scrip for Wellbutrin. Even though it hasn't helped much lately with not overeating, I think I should stay on it. When I read that story a few weeks ago about Cabinet-level members of the administration sitting in on torture meetings, I literally got depressed. I had to shut off the TV and go to bed. Coincidentally, I had been alternating days on with days off, to try and get off it. After that, I was like, "Oh yeah. We're keeping it." I'll be interested to see what the doctor says.


• 3 shots of decaf espresso + large cup full of ice = free iced coffee at work. Take that, Starbucks!


• So glad I'm getting my hair cut on Saturday. It's becoming bushy, and no matter how much effort I put into blow-drying, I still look like a little Dutch boy with a bowl haircut by the end of the day.


• Back to remodeling news: we're meeting with a lady next Wednesday. She's a friend of Georgie's and does cool things with framing and mounting photographs. We're going to have a bunch around the 2nd floor, including two super huge ones on the dining and living room walls.


• To those of you on my F-list who need it, just know I'm pulling for you.


• And finally, boom de yada!

• Well halo thar. How are you today?


• I bought one of them there fancy Sonicare plug-in toothbrushes. My dentist Dr. B says they're a waste of money, but I was tired of my $10 Crest Spinbrush running out of batteries. And Amazon had a sale, plus I had a $25 gift certificates, so I got it for a lot less. This Sonicare thing is a srs brush! It feels like you have a lit hummingbird in your mouth! It has a timer, it has three different sensitivity settings, two special "brushing programs," a timer to let you know when to move on to a different section of your mouth. And even a UV filter to specially clean them! (Although I'm not convinced it's not just a tiny blue lightbulb.) At any rate it's fun, and anything that will renew my pursuit of perfect dental hygiene is a Good Thing.


• But man, my teeth are not white. Shocking in someone who drinks at least two big cups of coffee a day. I would do those white strip things, but we had a friend who used those, and her teeth turned blue after drinking red wine! If my choices are off-white or blue, I'll stick with the one closest to Nature.


• We've hit another lull -- not LOL -- in remodeling. Nothing more can happen until the countertops are installed. And they're not coming to do that until this Monday, the 7th. So all has been quiet in the construction zone. I wish they could have at least hooked up the fridge and dishwasher. It would be nice to get rid of the old white fridge in our entryway, and I cherish the thought of machine washing dishes again.


• Georgie, the interior decorator, wasn't able to come over last night after all. Sick child, or sick sitter. Someone was sick. Anyway, we're meeting tomorrow night now.


• She's on the prowl now looking for a TV for us. We've told her that we don't want to decide on chairs until we get the TV hooked up, so we know how far Hubby will need to sit. I figure if it's another month until we can have people over -- with places for them to sit and to eat, you know, the little things -- then it's another month. Which would actually give me a chance to play with all the new appliances, learn their little quirks, and produce earthquakingly good eats.


• I ran a meeting yesterday and was a total bitch about keeping to the agenda, but it worked. We got sooooooo much done in an hour. And we even resolved an issue that'd been floating around since February! Yay for being a complete bitch!


• Hubby and I have decided we will attend my 15th (!!!!!) college reunion in early October. Unfortunately it's the first weekend of October, and past experience tells me there is no decent foliage in the Hudson Valley that early. I'm not much of a one for the rah-rah stuff. I just want to see folks from my class. So we're just going to drive Saturday morning, go to the party that night, then go home the next day.


• Hee, it's amazing to think that Hubby came with me to my 10th reunion too. I remember getting the invitation in March. Hubby & I had only been dating for a few weeks, and this was going to be in October. I decided I would make reservations at a nice B&B anyway. If we were still going out then, fantastic. If not, I would just go myself and enjoy it. I worried about inviting him for something so far in the future. I didn't want him to feel pressured or anything. Well, I had nothing to worry about. And we were living together by the time October rolled around anyway!


• This year, the reunion is 2 days after our 3rd wedding anniversary.


• So anyway, we still need a fall foliage weekend trip. I suggested yesterday to Hubby that perhaps we could go in September up to Maine or something. He likes that idea. Now I just have to find a place! Any suggestions will be cheerfully accepted.


• Speaking of days off, I just reserved my time off days before and after Thanksgiving this year. I'm cooking Thanksgiving, in the new kitchen! First Thanksgiving cooking evar. I've never done the whole thing before. But I feel with help from the Good Book -- Cook's Illustrated -- I can do it.


• Gotta get back to work!

The Republicans are like the Mafia -- they'll do you a favor, but they'll always expect you to do them a favor later. And somehow the favor they want from you hurts you more than the favor they do for you hurts them. 

The numbers in that e-mail are correct, but they don't tell the full story. 

The tax rates shown in that e-mail are on earned income. Earned income is income that you get for working. The change in tax laws back in 2003 cut taxes a little bit on earned income for everyone. That's the favor the Mafia did for us. 

So what's the favor that we did for them? The favor they expected in return came in two parts. The first part was a massive reduction in capital gains, dividends, and inheritance taxes. For the rich, capital gains and dividends taxes were essentially cut in half. You can actually see this from the same website linked to in that earlier e-mail:

Federal Capital Gains Tax Rates, 1990-2008

Federal Individual Income Tax: Exemptions and Treatment of Dividends, 1913-2006

To sum up those two links, capital gains taxes for the richest Americans dropped from 38% to 15% (or from 20% to 15%, if the asset was owned for longer than one year) and dividends taxes dropped from 38% to 15%.

The estate tax (called the "death tax" by trust fund kids) is set to disappear completely in 2010.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Growth_and_Tax_Relief_Reconciliation_Act_of_2001#Estate_and_gift_tax_rules

So, in 2010, Bill Gates could leave his entire fortune to his kids and the kids would pay no tax at all on receiving that inheritance, and then they would pay a tiny tax on interest earned off of that inheritance. And then they could leave that money to their kids, and so on. Basically, the Republicans are creating an aristocracy of people who never have to work and just live off of old money (ie, people like them).

So the bottom line of these tax changes is that the spoiled trust-fund kids of the world (people like George Bush) -- that is, people who inherit most of their money and live off of income earned from dividends and capital gains (not work) -- got a HUGE tax cut. The rest of us got a little tax cut.

Now, you might ask -- so what? At least we got a small tax cut. Who cares if the super rich got a bigger tax cut? 

Well, this is the second part of that favor that we owe the Mafia (i.e., Republicans).

These big tax cuts to the rich (along with the cost of the Iraq war) resulted in a big increase in the budget deficit (remember that under Clinton, we had budget surpluses).  That budget deficit has to be paid for somehow, and you can bet that it wasn't going to be the super rich who would pay for it. It would most likely be working people, and it would most likely happen using Social Security. 

There is a great historical example of how the Republicans use Social Security as a way to pay for tax cuts on the rich. Back in the 1980s, Reagan cut taxes on everyone, but particularly on the rich. The result was a massive budget deficit. At the same time, people warned about a "crisis" with Social Security. This "crisis" was "solved" by a massive increase in the Social Security payroll tax. But guess what -- the SS payroll tax is not paid on income over about $90,000 (in today's dollars). So, in effect, the tax cuts on the rich back in the 1980s were paid for by an increase in Social Security taxes on working people. Obviously they never described it that way, but that's what essentially happened. 

I suspect that this was Bush's plan, too. Remember that he wanted to make all sorts of changes to Social Security after he won in 2004? The Democrats managed to stop him from doing that. But if they hadn't, I suspect that those tax cuts on the super rich would have been paid for either with cuts in SS benefits or an increase in SS taxes, or both.