Tag: Big Government

Political

The Myth Of Owning Your Home And The American Dream

Think You Own Home? Well You Don’t And Never Will!

The Myth Of Owning Your Home And The American Dream

Property taxes, State and local rules turn you into a renter, not a homeowner. If you have to pay for something in perpetuity or it will be taken away, you don’t own it and you never will.

By Pete Sisco

I’m not talking about the bank holding the mortgage on your home. Even if you think you own your home free and clear, you really don’t own it at all. You lease it from the State and it sets the terms and conditions that allow you to occupy the house or sell it to another lessee. The State owns the house and land in perpetuity and you can not alter this arrangement.

When I was a kid my dad bought a new four-bedroom house in 1964 for about $28,000. He had a good job and stuck his financial neck out by taking on a whopping monthly payment of $190 on a twenty-five year mortgage. He and my mom would talk about how when they got the house paid off they would not have to pay the $190 every month and that would basically put them on Easy Street.

My dad never made it the twenty five years. By the time my mom paid off the mortgage the monthly property tax bill was $450 per month! There is no way to pay that off once and for all and, in fact, it is subject to constant increase by political whim. Eventually the money paid in relentless property taxes exceeds the cost of the home. What was true for her is true for all homeowners.

Moreover, the terms and conditions under which you occupy “your” home are a further burden to you. You can’t add onto the home without permission, you can’t subdivide the land without permission. You can only have certain pets and only a certain number of them. You must maintain the home to a certain standard. Violation of any rule can cause you to lose the home and be evicted for repeated non-compliance with State orders. (After all, they are the true owners.)

Depending on your tax jurisdiction, when you die a large portion of your home’s value can be claimed by the State and your heirs would either have to pony up the cash or sell the home to pay the inheritance taxes. Then the State resets the clock with the new “tenant.”

Throughout the long life of the home the State does not contribute a penny to the expense of the home’s upkeep or the costs of complying with the myriad of regulations concerning things like fence heights, swimming pool regulations, tree trimming, wildfire regulations and dozens of other ordinances or bylaws.

Moreover, the State-granted monopoly utilities provided to the home – water, phone, gas and electricity – are further taxed at constantly increasing rates which you must pay in order to occupy the home.

Claiming to be an “owner” under these unilateral and coercive terms and conditions begs the definition of the word ownership. I have briefly lived in a communist country and I can tell you there is very little practical difference in home ownership there. Oh, plus their kids didn’t have put their hand over their heart and pledge allegiance to the State every morning at school – I guess that would be too Orwellian for communists.

 

Political

Feds Spend Nearly $200,000 Analyzing Tweets About E-Cigarettes

Yet another reason to cut taxes now: Feds Spend $199,665 Analyzing Tweets About E-Cigarettes

Feds Spend Nearly $200,000 Analyzing Tweets About E-Cigarettes

The University of Kentucky received $199,665 for the project, which began on August 10th. Still, corrupt lifetime politicians like Mitch McConnell keep getting reelected. It’s very true that, “Voters like their own Senators, even though they hate Congress.”

Is it any wonder that Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell was once named to a watchdog organization’s list of the most corrupt members of Congress?

Drain the Swamp!

From The Washington Free Beacon:

The National Institutes of Health is spending roughly $200,000 on a study of tweets about electronic cigarettes.

The project, “Toward Fine-Grained E-Cigarette Surveillance on Social Media,” will analyze hashtags and “follower-friend connections” of people talking about e-cigarettes online.

Operating on the premise that the popular smoking cessation products are harmful, researchers say it is necessary to document what is being said on Twitter and Reddit for one year.

“Electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) have emerged as the main smoke-free alternative to regular cigarettes over the past few years,” according to the grant for the project. “While the ongoing healthy scientific debate about their long term health effects and their suitability for smoking cessation are important, in this project, we propose computational approaches toward fine-grained surveillance of specific themes, factors influencing message popularity, and demographic variations.”

“The overarching goal is to create new affordances for researchers and health agencies to leverage online social media platforms for knowing and reaching their audience in effective ways,” the grant states.

The University of Kentucky received $199,665 for the project, which began on Aug. 10.

Researchers say they will study “#retweets” and “#replies” of tweets about e-cigarettes. They will analyze all tweets sent about e-cigarettes between July 2016 and June 2017.

“Twitter has become the favorite network for teenagers and young adults owing to the short message size and associated ease of use on smart phones,” according to the grant. “For an emerging product like e-cigarettes, the asymmetric follower-friend connections and hashtag functionality in Twitter offer a convenient way to propagate information and facilitate discussion.”

Researchers hope the Food and Drug Administration can use their findings to make the government’s anti-electronic cigarette messages go viral.

“We expect these results will help Health agencies, the FDA, and Researchers gain insights into observed viral nature of certain messages and designing effective strategies to maximize diffusion of their messages,” the grant states.

 

Jokes

Joke Of The Day: A Cowboy Named Bud

Joke Of The Day: A Cowboy Named Bud A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in Montana when suddenly a brand-new 2015 BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust. The driver, a young man in a Brioni® suit, Gucci® shoes, RayBan® sunglasses and YSL® tie, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?”

Bud looks at the man, who obviously is a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure, why not?”

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell® notebook computer, connects it to his Apple i phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop® and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.

Within seconds, he receives an email on his Apple iPad® that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL® database through an ODBC connected Excel® spreadsheet with email on his Galaxy S5® and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet® printer, turns to the cowboy and says, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.”

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says Bud.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then Bud says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?”

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”

“You’re a Congressman for the U.S. Government”, says Bud.

“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required.” answered the cowboy. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions of dollars’ worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don’t know sh*t about how working people make a living – or about cows, for that matter. This is a herd of sheep.”

“Now give me back my dog.”

 

 

 

Load More