Pollywogs!

This time about economics.  However, all is not what it appears…

I’m against the $85,000,000,000 bailout.  Instead, I’m in favor of giving $85,000,000,000 to America in a “”We Deserve It Dividend”.  To make the math simple, let’s assume there are 200,000,000 bonafide U.S. Citizens 18+.  Our population is about 301,000,000 +/- counting every man, woman and child. So 200,000,000 might be a fair stab at adults 18 and up..

So divide 200 million adults 18+ into $85 billion that equals $425,000.  My plan is to give $425,000 to every person 18+ as a “We Deserve It Dividend”.  Of course, it would NOT be tax free.  So let’s assume a tax rate of 30%.  Every individual 18+ has to pay $127,500.00 in taxes.  That sends $25,500,000,000 right back to Uncle Sam. But it means that every adult 18+ has $297,500 in their pocket.

A  husband and wife has $595,000. What would you do with $297,500 to $595,000 in your family?

• Pay off your mortgage – housing crisis solved.
• Repay college loans – what a great boost to new grads
• Put away money for college – it’ll be there
• Save in a bank – create money to loan to entrepreneurs.
• Buy a new car – create jobs
• Invest in the market – capital drives growth
• Pay for your parent’s medical insurance – health care improves
• Enable Deadbeat Dads to come clean – or else

Remember this is for every adult U S Citizen 18+ including the folks who lost their jobs at Lehman Brothers and every other company that is cutting back. And of course, for those serving in our Armed Forces.

If we’re going to re-distribute wealth let’s really do it…instead of trickling out a puny $1000.00 (”vote buy”) economic incentive that is being proposed by one of our candidates for President.  If we’re going to do an $85 billion bailout, let’s bail out every adult US Citizen 18+!

As for AIG – liquidate it.  Sell off its parts.  Let American General go back to being American General. Sell off the real estate.  Let the private sector bargain hunters cut it up and clean it up. Here’s my rationale. We deserve it and AIG doesn’t.

Sure it’s a crazy idea that can “never work.  How do you spell Economic Boom?  I trust my fellow adult Americans to know how to use the $85 Billion “We Deserve It Dividend” more than I do the geniuses at AIG or in Washington DC

And remember, The Family plan only really costs $59.5 Billion because $25.5 Billion is returned instantly in taxes to Uncle Sam.

Ahhh…I feel so much better getting that off my chest.

Kindest personal regards,
A Creative Guy & Citizen of the Republic.

Since this was unattributed, I took some liberty with regards to formatting, and corrected a couple typos.  On the surface, this makes pretty good sense to me.  However, let me comment on a couple of the points:

US population is roughly 300,000,000 people.  About 25% of those are under 18, so those benefiting above would count roughly 225,000,000.

I’m not sure where $85 billion came from, it looks like the current legislation could release up to $700 billion.  Let us work it both ways:  if the bailout ends up being only $85 billion, that is a check for a cold hard $377 per adult.  If the entire $700 billion is eventually released, we’re looking at $3,100 per adult (the rich are stealing from you, by the way!!!  socialized losses, privatized profits).  So, why is the author so terribly crippled at math that they’d spend an hour creating this email, but not spend 5 seconds on google checking their math?  I think it is the barb “puny vote buy” which gives away the intent of this device, I believe this is a McCain-machine created email whose intent is to create FUD about Obama and his ideas on economics and tax reform.  Look how much traction McCain’s lies on Obama’s tax plans have, people STILL think Obama is going to raise their taxes simply because McCain repeats it so often…someone needs to tell McCain that simply saying something doesn’t make it so…unfortunately the precedent of the past eight years teaches McCain that the truth is an unnecessary restriction…

…can’t quite remember, but now I’m forced to repost this…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pollywogs/sets/72157602783010702/

One day, I’ll sit down and write an actual blog post about an actual something…

I am not sure if this is temporary or permanent, I’ll see what kind of feedback I get. The old theme had a couple depreciated WordPress tags that I didn’t realize needed updated until I did a little digging yesterday. Once in a while I’d get a “Not Found” message on my homepage, but I didn’t realize that it was occurring for other people and had no way around until yesterday. I updated the offending tags (that I could find with my poor coding skills) but it didn’t seem to fix the problem on the various machines we have around here. So, I threw on a different theme (called Foliage) in case the old one had problems I couldn’t find. This also did not seem to fix the problem, but I ran out of time and motivation, work had caught back up with me at that point…

Anyway, I like this theme a lot, but it has a few issues. It does something weird with the CSS that I can’t figure out that scales the entire page rather than just sets the font sizes.  I increased the font size, and it widens the body?  Why not just define them both independently?  Anyway, I can’t figure out how to change it yet.  You can hold down the Ctrl key and scroll up/down with your middle mouse button to change font size. I adjusted the default font size from 62.5% to 75% after editing the .css, and it now renders pretty nice on 800 pixel width monitors, although on my Firefox/Ubuntu setup the images don’t render very nicely with the font size adjusting the entire width.  This does not seem to cause a problem with browsers on Windows platforms.  Also, note that there is a number to the right of the post title and post date that if you click shows you the comments for an entry. I do like the way it displays comments along side…

Finally, all of my blog-bling is gone. I don’t know what to do about that. I may stick it all on it’s own page. For a long time now I’ve wanted to completely re-vamp the way all of this shit worked. I want garrettsocling.com to be a personal landing page for me, and my domain pollywogsblog.com to be my personal blog (only loosely associated, so that you actually have to dig a little before you equate a baseball bat up John McCain’s ass with Garrett Socling). Perhaps this will be motivation for me to get my butt in gear. This theme would be idea for my personal page, and the Painted Desert theme would be ideal for my Pollywogs. We’ll see if I ever find the motivation…

I rethemed my laptop as well. I had been using a custom theme I composed out of Clearlooks-DarkLime, Buff icons and a few other choices, but I recently switched to this Dust Ubuntu theme, which I like a lot (primarily because now I can read the popup menu when using ThunderBird!). I went with Rodent icons as they are very clean and modern looking, as well as some background I found somewhere. Here’s a before and after:

Old:

New:

Got one a few days ago.  This is one of those ‘forwarded a million times’ emails, and it came to me unattributed.  I may still kiss someone’s feet for sending it my way, even though they did not craft this piece.  Usually I’m less than impressed with the drivel that gets bounced around.  This one, however, struck me and gave me pause.  I liked it, and recognized something in the writer within myself.  Perhaps you’ll find it rises your ire as well.

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Once again, just providing info. I’m a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight.
If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you’re ‘exotic, different.’ Grow up in Alaska eating moose burgers, a quintessential an American story.
If your name is Barack you’re a radical, unpatriotic Muslim. Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you’re a maverick.
Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable. Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you’re well grounded.
If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate’s Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran’s Affairs committees, you don’t have any real leadership experience.
If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you’re qualified to become the country’s second highest ranking executive.
If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you’re not a real Christian.
If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you’re a Christian. If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.
If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state’s school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you’re very responsible.
If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family’s values don’t represent America’s.
If you’re husband is nicknamed ‘First Dude’, with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn’t register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable. OK, much clearer now.

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Pretty concise, don’t you think?

When viewing such a creature, you’d be hard pressed to describe it.  In fact, you may exclaim “Hell, there ain’t no such animal“.  I can’t say what political party I belong to because no political party represents me.

There is nothing wrong with conservatives in general, I myself have conservative leanings.  It is pretending that they all stand under one big tent that causes problems, as they all then move in lockstep behind some very poor leaders.

Republicans have historically been very good at keeping everyone reigned in by pandering heavily on a few core issues that are knee jerk issues for some people (gays, guns and god), but the past eight years prove that just because you say you love baby jesus and guns, and hate a-hrabs and queers, doesn’t mean you are competent to run a country:

• ignoring pre-9/11 intelligence (SOCOM’s Able Danger had Al Qaeda all figured out, but you still don’t see that info in the 9/11 commission report, hell, Israel knew 9/11 was going to happen and had some intelligence operatives on-site to document it (< YOU MUST WATCH THIS VIDEO)…lack of accountability!!!)
• ignoring real economic reform at the expense of our national deficit and quick profits
• ignoring the inevitable energy crunch
• ignoring Katrina (heck of a job Brownie)
• ignoring Afghanistan, and instead focusing trillions of dollars into Iraq (Paul O’Neill came out and said that an attack on Iraq had been planned since the inauguration ffs).

Deep down inside, I am have conservative leanings, I guess you could call them Libertarian.  I believe in a strong limit on the federal government’s powers.  I think people have the right to be free to do whatever they like in the privacy of their own homes (including owning fully automatic AK-47s, worshiping whatever they choose, and homosexual oral sodomy), and the government needs to quit pretending that they are our mommy or our nanny, that they can legislate “what is Right” with law after law after law.

I think national governments in general are a joke, a structure that exists simply to perpetuate themselves and defend themselves against other national governments…while providing very little in return.  Local and state government, those give you services you can see and use every day.  The federal government…just what the hell ARE they doing with all of my money???

That said, I am COMPLETELY disillusioned with the conservative movement of the past forty plus years, and would never call myself a Republican as I can’t abide by Reaganomics, a standing army geared towards fighting a third World War, war-hawks in general who think that military force is a diplomatic tool, fear and disgust towards gays, Muslims, atheists and people of ethnicity, and all the other platforms that Republicans have stood upon for the past thirty years.

The debate is framed so that only these knee-jerk issues matter, while defense spending spirals out of control, our media is owned by international mega-conglomerations which get orders to promote or bury stories based on profits, our national infrastructure decays, our educational systems costs increase and yet continue to churn out mediocre students, our health care costs spiral up at the same time our infant mortality rate increases to the second worst in the industrialized world…damn I’m riled up…