Things

I learned something today, that makes much clear to me. Frappucinos aren't coffee. Even though they're sold in coffee places. It's not coffee when you add caramel, chocolate, whipped cream, regular cream, chocolate chips, etc. It's a milkshake. Frappucinos are just milkshakes that are sold as "coffee" so people can pretend it's coffee and have it for breakfast, or order it without embarrassment. Especially the ones without coffee in them, which are exactly milkshakes.

I had something else I wanted to write here also, something of more import and deepness than insights into marketing measures for corporate America, but the Internet has once again distracted me and torn the rails away from my poor train of thought quite effectively.

Also, it's 1:30, so sleep toxins make concentration hard. Which means I should either be in bed, or stick it out for another hour till they fade back and then kick in, hard, and give me nicely loony things to write.

If I wrote, which I haven't been lately. My longtime pal, irony, has deserted me, or perhaps, I've deserted it, for with the way the world's been going, and people who'll take any parody you do of them, and then do something so much more ridiculous and bad, humor's a hard weapon to wield. I've floundered around in too-familiar seas of depression and trudged through the mud of repetition, my reflexes aren't what they were, I've forgotten how to be naturally weird.

More awesome stupidity

The second on the list of Amazon's Best-sellers, right behind Harry Potter, is The Fair Tax Book. Allow me to quote from the description.

Wouldn't you love to abolish the IRS ...
Keep all the money in your paycheck ...
Pay taxes on what you spend, not what you earn ...
And eliminate all the fraud, hassle, and waste of our current system?

Then the FairTax is for you. In the face of the outlandish American tax burden, talk-radio firebrand Neal Boortz and Congressman John Linder are leading the charge to phase out our current, unfair system and enact the FairTax Plan, replacing the federal income tax and withholding system with a simple 23 percent retail sales tax on new goods and services. This dramatic revision of the current system, which would eliminate the reviled IRS, has already caught fire in the American heartland, with more than six hundred thousand taxpayers signing on in support of the plan.

It's a book by a talk show host, who's written books like "The Terrible Truth About Liberals". And this congresscritter. That's raw talent there. But that's not even the most ludicrous part. (Okay, the most ludicrous part is probably some of the comments, like "The book is right. As a business owner, I will admit that I pad all my pricing to make sure that I get a certain amount of money after taxes. I hate doing it, but that's the way it is. Under the Fairtax, I could drop my prices anywhere from 20%-30%, and still make the same amount of money." Okay...so... you're telling me that businesspeople price their products so they can make enough money to stay open and live on? *GASP* That's not padding. For the love of monkeys.)

No, the most ludicrous part of the whole thing is the basic idea. Chuck the IRS and current tax code, and replace it with a 23% sales tax. This is the "fair tax". Well, no, it's not. It's about as unfair a tax as you can get. It's simple, and has that going for it, and it SEEMS fair at first glance, "Oh, everyone pays the same amount!" Well, no.

For starters, the devil is in the details. Would business to business sales be taxed? If so, that's gonna raise prices. If not, then expect to see anybody who can manage it buy their car/house/home entertainment system for "business". Second, does it include necessities like food and shelter? If so, who decides what's necessary? If not, I really doubt that prices would drop 2some% to make them even stay the same as they are now under the so-called "fair tax". Or does it have some kind of "rebate" for the first $X,000 you spend each year, tied to the poverty level? (That wouldn't suck, really, but there's other flaws with the tax). The biggest flaw is the simplest. A consumption tax like this is regressive as hell. It's only taxes on money spent, so it obviously affects people who spend their money than it does people who save it. Who can save money? The rich, generally. This wouldn't affect investment income, dividends, or even just interest on savings accounts. So somebody who doesn't spend all of their money pays a lesser percentage of taxes.

But, of course, if they implement some form of rebate for the first $X,000, then it won't hit the poor as hard. So, if the poor wouldn't be paying it, and the rich wouldn't be paying it, who does that leave paying most of the taxes? The middle class. This is just another of the Republican Party's ongoing efforts to shift taxes off of wealth and onto people doing actual work. I think there's a name for that. What is it...ah, yes. Class warfare.

Okay, so what about their other claimed benefits from their so-called "fair tax"?

* Make America's tax code truly voluntary, without reducing revenue

Baloney, as I explained above. And their claims about "not reducing revenue" are probably wrong, which means the sales tax would have to be higher than 23%. (Not to mention state and local sales taxes, income taxes, property taxes, and so on, which would still exist.)

* Replace today's indecipherable tax code with one simple sales tax

True, but. The indecipherable-ness of the tax code has nothing to do with the fact that it's an income tax, or that it's (slightly) progressive, it has to do with generations of exemptions, deductions, rebates, and other modifications, pushed by anyone with an agenda. It wouldn't be very difficult to set up a simple, progressive income tax structure. And it'd probably be a good idea, the current tax code is a mess.

* Protect lower-income Americans by covering the tax on basic necessities

See above. Can you say "soak the middle class"?

* Eliminate billions of dollars in embedded taxes we don't even know we're paying

By replacing them with an equally large number of embedded sales taxes. (Plus state and local income, sales, and property taxes)

* Bring offshore corporate dollars back into the U.S. economy

Maybe, sorta, kinda, not really. Okay, so companies might reincorporate in the US, rather than having a PO box and a single telephone at their "head office' in the Cayman Islands, but it wouldn't bring the corporate money back "into" the tax structure, since they plan to eliminate corporate taxes. (See above about questions about business to business sales)

Okay, let's think about what would happen if this were implemented. Tomorrow, there's a 23% sales tax on everything. Would prices drop 23% overnight to compensate? Probably not. What reason would the companies have to drop their prices 23%, instead of just pocketing the extra cash? "Oh, well, the free market would take care of that, one company would do it, and the rest would have to follow suit." Maybe, but I'm doubtful. What if they only dropped their prices, say, 10%? Everything still just went up. And the companies would just shrug and go "Don't blame us, blame the 23% government tax." And if they dropped prices lower, do you really think the money would come out of profits, or do you think they'd claim they have to cut salaries for workers, or health insurance, or other benefits (while still giving billions of dollars of bonuses to management and CEOs)?

Now, I realize that this is boring, wonky, economics, but sometimes, it's the boring, wonky parts that are important, and you can't let people just push stuff by because people are too bored to see the badness in it.

Technorati Tags: Politics, Rants, Economics, Crazies

It's the cluelessness, stupid

"U.S. Congressman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, recently introduced H.R. 2726, a bill that would ban cities from running communications networks that compete against private-sector telecom companies. Sessions, a former SBC executive, argued local governments should not compete with private companies.
He and other opponents of municipal broadband argue that almost half of Internet households have broadband that is getting faster and cheaper over time. Building more networks, opponents say, not only threatens private enterprise but wastes taxpayer dollars."

As Sifu Tweety, over at The Poor Man says, "Fair enough! For what’s the sense in letting cities and towns spend their own local tax revenue on free or low-cost municipal wireless when some giant telecom conglomerate might some day wish to offer it’s own high cost, marginally profitable wired broadband service in approximately the same area." (There's more, including profanity, but I swear too, so)

But hey, everybody knows government's inherently evil, and companies are inherently good, right? Not that he might have any conflict of interest at all, or anything.

Technorati Tags: Politics, Everyday Evil

Another thing that makes me wonder

I was at a mall recently, and I would have to guess that literally half of the stores were clothing boutiques. Half of them. How does that work? How do they all stay in business? Why do people need half of the stores in the mall, PLUS Sears etc all selling clothes?

I know the markup on clothes is something on the order of a couple hundred percent, so is it just the ridiculous profit margins that let these boutique clothing stores stay in operation in high rent mall locations? Or is there really that much demand for clothes? I know, yeah, there's 250 million people in the US, but even so...

I dunno, maybe it's just 'cause I'm a geek and don't care about clothes.