Back Off Westboro Baptist Church

Last year we had a group of visitors here in Burlington from Topeka, Kansas affiliated with Fred Phelps‘ Westboro Baptist Church. For those not familiar this group you may be familiar with some of their pleasant slogans such as “God Hates Fags”, “Thank God For Dead Soldiers”, “Thank God for 9/11″, “Thank God for IEDs”, “Fags are Beasts, “God Hates Jews”, “Fags Doom Nations”, etc, etc. The list is long and oh so thoughtful. When this group came to Burlington they brought with them their signs and their children to protest Vermont being “most ‘gay’ friendly spot in DOOMED america.” This was not the first time they visited little ol’ Vermont they came a couple of years earlier to spew nonsense during the funeral of a Richmond man killed in Iraq by one of those IEDs they like to scream about so much.

During their most recent visit the anti-Westboro contingent was large, persistent, and peaceful following them from Montpelier to Burlington and all around town just letting them know we didn’t agree with their tactics or the hateful rhetoric that came forth from their mouths and those of their children. BUT I don’t know one person involved in the Burlington section of the anti-Westboro crew that thought they didn’t have the right to say what they wanted wherever they wanted. As common defense of Howard Stern goes: If you don’t like him change the station?

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Briefly This Will Only Hurt A Bit!

OK so I and my recent proposal about taxing Games of Mass Destruction have been called stupid on this site. Well I haven’t been engaged in ad hominem attacks in quite a while so I am not going to start here. You disagree with my proposal? Fine come up with your own that doesn’t adhere to the same wrote dogma of the right! Everyone that I have proposed this War Games Tax to loves it from the right and the left. It might not be your cup of tea but it took a bit of research to concoct. Stupid is not the word I would use for it if I disagreed with it or the person that came up with it. Rather I would resort to words like overreaching, excessive, or counterproductive. It could reasonably be called one of these words but STUPID? I am pretty sure that it is not stupid. HOWEVER, here is what is STUPID and again I speak of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) that a Republican AND a General feared in exiting The White House. President Eisenhower was prescient to say the least. Our MIC including The Pentagon, contractors, and bases worldwide are bloated at best and totally redundant at worst. They take from this country’s education, infrastructure, and long-term solvency, while creating nothing of actual value to anyone but those that kill either in the War On Terror, Drugs, or ____! Read

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/01/12-7

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-tyranny-of-defense-inc/8342/1/

AND GET OFF MY BACK STUPID!

The Wrong Message

In the wake of the horrible and senseless actions in Tucson last weekend I was not surprised but definitely fearful of what the response would be among the political elites. Instead of hearing them say we need to get out into our communities more and spend less time wining and dining lobbyists and the political punditocracy in DC or make a pledge to stop bullshitting us about everything from the country’s long-term fiscal and monetary stability to Peak Oil….WE GET people like Robert Brady a Democratic Pennsylvanian congressman proposing Political Exceptionalism laws. Read the rest of this entry »

Fun and Games Fueling Education

So I have been working some calculations trying to get at how much general education revenue could be conceivably generated if we taxed what I will broadly call “war games”, which include at this point “Call of Duty: Black Ops (PS3 & X360)”, “Halo: Reach (X360)”, and “God of War III/God of War Collection (PS3). All of these are top sellers for Activision (Call of Duty), Microsoft (Halo), and Sony Computers (God of War). Their average annual revenues are in toto $1.23 billion with “Halo” at $686 million leading the way and “God of War Collection” bringing up the rear at $29 million annually (Fig. 1).

Not a bad profit margin don’t you think? More importantly I was thinking that if there are so many people with the bravado to fight wars via their video consoles they wouldn’t have a problem paying a heavy tax on those games, which could be used to fund educational programs throughout the country. So I went about trying to gather up as much high-quality data as I could get on dollar sales, weekly units, and in order to come up with a progressive “War Games Tax” I used iCasualties data on a per 100,000 person basis across all fifty states+Washington, DC (no US territories due to high concentration of troops stationed there). I then used the per capita data – with Vermont being the highest (2.568) and Utah the lowest (0.486 per 100,000) – summed those values and converted them into percentages. I then multiplied the $1.23 billion figure across tax rates of 35%, 25%, 10%, and 5%, with the per 100,000 percentage conversions used to multiply across tax rate scenarios. If you do that the numbers are pretty staggering.
Lets just focus on Vermont for a second as a teaser for what we could extract from this pseudo-war profiteering that doesn’t get nearly the coverage that the explicit profiteers do. Vermont would be able to rely on an annual tax revenue of (Fig. 2):
1. 22.4 million at 35%, 14.9% of FY 2011 budget deficit
2. 16.0 million at 20%, 10.7% of FY 2011 budget deficit
3. 6.4 million at 10%, 4.3% of FY 2011 budget deficit
Or
4. 3.2 million at 5%, 2.1% of FY 2011 budget deficit

While none of these numbers is eye watering they are not trivial either, with the top rate accounting for nearly 15% of the FY 2011 budget deficit. This is not a progressive or regressive tax idea, rather it is an anti-predatory tax idea with the folks that so flippantly turn on their video consoles to play the latest virtual War On Terror paying the heaviest price. What is wrong with that? New England alone would generate:
1. 55.3 million at 35%, average of 3.5% of FY 2011 budget deficit
2. 39.5 million at 20%
3. 15.8 million at 10%
Or
4. 7.9 million at 5%

So as you can see this is not a panacea but is a step in the right direction AND unlike the much maligned soda-tax proposed by Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Paterson in NY I would argue that there should be less resistance to a tax that takes money from people that like to play video games about war but wouldn’t be caught dead signing up to go to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, etc etc and puts that money in to the educational infrastructure of this country. I would like to see someone rail against this idea in public with the lights and cameras on.

He Is Black Get Over It!

I haven’t posted in quite a while and I am compelled to do so not as a devotee of Barack Obama or an apologist for the DNC, but as someone who is fed up with a couple of misnomers being promulgated in the media and society today. First the F_ _KING Tea Party is not a group concerned with government overstretch because if they were they would have come out of their hypocrisy closet a long time ago when we began our Imperial Overstretch or more recently the Moral and Home Life Overstretch of their conservative and born-again brethren on the social right. Oh yeah and there has not been a president more intrusive in our personal communications in the name of a poorly orchestrated and lied about war than Bush, Cheney, and Co. They forced Verizon to bend over and take it, although knowing what we know of Verizon I don’t think it took much coaxing. They spied on Quakers, Friends, Peace Activists, and they thoroughly beat the shit out of many of us that dared to confront them in the streets of St. Paul in 2008. Read the rest of this entry »

Bespoke Economics

So I am pasting below a comment I left regarding this amazingly one-sided and in my opinion just out in left-field piece from Michael Boskin (Excuse the first point as I know it is petty but had to make it cause you would never someone like this call Bush, Reagan by their last name only!): Read the rest of this entry »

We’re Not Your Problem Mr. President!

I have known for quite a while now that the vote I cast for you in November of 2008 – my first ever vote for a member of The Big Two – was one that I would not regret, because I am still a huge admirer of your intellect, but would come to view with a great degree of disappointment and anger. Read the rest of this entry »

Fibbing Tax!

In reading quite a bit about quite a bit the common theme is that everyone’s angle is nested within some hyperbolic statement designed to swerve the debate in one direction or another. This happens on both sides of any debate, whether it be abortion, deficit/debt austerity vs. profligacy, or healthcare. Unfortunately up until this point there has never been any way to reprimand those that speak such language. Of course we can vote them out or in at the polls, but by then their efforts have reaped countless explicit and implicit rewards. There are 2 kinds of statements: 1) errors of commission or 2) omission. Each are well known to the speech writers, lobbyists, and political generals in DC, Brussels, Beijing, etc. Obviously our primary concern is how this language and “statements of fact” are used here in the US. To that I propose a Fibbing Tax. Yep that’s right every time these scoundrels in DC lie or CANNOT back up their statements with the data/facts on the ground they are fined personally. Those moneys would then go into a general education fund. Half would be distributed to the failing DC public schools system and have to the legislator’s home state’s public schools. Read the rest of this entry »

On Government

The video embedded in this post provides a look at one version of America without government. While I’m not one to champion government, and I absolutely loathe bureaucracy, I respect the need for hierarchical structures in society (much as said structures are employed in nearly every expression of nature). Until we humans are able to achieve the ideal of self-governance based exclusively on shared and sound principles, we’ll continue to have legislation and centralized authority. For in society, as in many other matters, it’s not Us we need to worry about: it’s Them. The distinctions worth establishing and deeply studying, then, are No Government vs. Bad Government vs. Good Government.