The official ticket sales for Sunday won’t come in until this afternoon, but The Avengers movie is projected to be the first movie to make $200 million in the U.S. in its opening weekend. Incredibly, that is already more than each of the entire individual theater runs of Thor, Captain America, and the Incredible Hulk (it will take another week to catch the Ironman films).
Continue reading The Avengers Opening Weekend: Not Frontloaded
April 2012 was a pretty bad month for Americans under the tyrannical Transportation Security Administration. I believe we need to focus as much attention as possible on these abuses, not because I want to make you feel outraged or depressed, but because I believe everyone needs to be aware that the TSA is one of the greatest present dangers to the everyday freedoms of Americans, and things are only getting worse.
Let’s start with the latest outrageous assault stories which have, sadly, ceased to be surprising:
An article from The Daily Caller has been storming the Internets this week. The Obama administration’s Department of Labor was reportedly planning to “prevent children from doing farm chores” by applying child labor laws to children working on family farms, prompting lots of outrage from lots of people. (I’m glad I waited my self-imposed 48 hours before commenting on new controversy, as it now seems that the administration “withdrew” the proposed rule after the outcry. The reversal happened almost as fast as last year’s Christmas tree tax.)
Was Obama trying to lose the rural vote? Heaven forbid children have the opportunity to learn responsibility and work ethic – they might learn they can get by without the federal government guiding their every step! Maybe the government doesn’t want kids helping out on the farm because that’s not taxable! What kind of country are we living in where parents increasingly allow their children to do irresponsible things while the government is actively clamping down on responsible options?
“1 in 2 new graduates are jobless or underemployed”
I saw this article on my lunch break yesterday. I’ve seen college friends nervously sharing it on Facebook. I’ve seen anti-Obama people spreading it on Twitter. It’s the sort of rare national news that personally impacts lots of people you know. College is supposed to be the path to prosperity, and when it’s not, you get a whole lot of ideas about what to do to fix the job market and what to do to help new graduates and what to do about student loans and what to do about the whole notion that college is the path to prosperity.
But as I read this article, I couldn’t help thinking that it suffers from the same nearsighted paradigm I discussed in my post a few months ago about Steve Jobs and the 99%. There’s a lot of talk about graduates “finding” jobs. There is absolutely no talk about graduates “creating” their own jobs.
Continue reading Graduates Can’t Find Jobs. Can They Create Them?
The level of political discourse surrounding this year’s presidential race has not been particularly remarkable, but it stumbled to a new low this week. Tired of the incessant liberal mockery of Romney’s terrible treatment of the family dog a couple decades ago, the Romney campaign attacked Obama this week for eating dog when he was a kid in Indonesia.
Or something like that. (I don’t feel like retrieving the exact details, which would give the dignity of more page views to news articles reporting on this nonsense.)
I’ve heard people from both the left and the right call for simplifying our complicated tax code. So why does it seem like all the discussion these days is about making it even more complicated?
President Obama has been touting the “Buffet Rule,” which would require Americans who earn at least $1 million to pay a minimum income tax rate of 30%. The rates for regular wages are already higher than that, but since a lot of millionaires earn most of their money from investments, which is taxed at a lower rate, combined with a variety of other tax breaks, a lot of millionaires pay an overall rate lower than 30%. Thus, the hoopla about Warren Buffet paying a lower tax rate than his secretary. Thus, the “Buffet Rule.”
But apparently there aren’t too many millionaires cheating the system too badly, because the Buffet Rule is supposed to add less than $5 billion a year to government revenues (remember, we’ve been running deficits over $1 trillion – or $1,000 billion – for several years and are projected to do so for several more). As the Obama administration itself admits, this is less about reducing the deficit and more about the vague concept of tax “fairness.”
Following last month’s turbulent attempted caucus, my county completed a successful GOP caucus last night, and slates of Ron Paul supporters won seats for all 147 delegates going to the party’s district and state conventions in Missouri.
The caucus was probably even less relevant to the actual 2012 nomination than it would have been a month ago. Santorum announced his campaign suspension hours before the event, all but erasing whatever feeble hopes remained that someone but Romney would come up with enough delegates to win the nomination.
Continue reading Ron Paul Wins Rescheduled St. Charles County, MO Caucus
Yesterday there were elections in my county. I found some sample ballots on my county’s website, but I couldn’t tell which one was mine and they had to do with school system board of directors and stuff like that. I didn’t know anything about the people running, so I didn’t vote.
It’s ironic that the elections we pay the least attention to are the ones where we could probably have the most impact. I know lots of people living in my county who have expressed opinions about President Obama and various Republican candidates. I know several people who attended our fraudulent caucus last month. But I don’t know a single person who even talked about yesterday’s local elections.
How many people in my county actually voted? Was it just a glorified high school popularity contest where people won if they knew the most people and got them to vote for them or if they got enough people to randomly check their box because of their cool sounding name or some signs they had seen by the road?
Or George Zimmerman.
By now we all know that Zimmerman shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. I don’t have an opinion about this yet because there’s still way too many missing and contradictory facts out there. But that hasn’t stopped people all over from letting selective facts and rumors combine with their biases into predictable outrage.
Continue reading Hey Everyone! You Are Not Qualified To Have An Opinion About Trayvon Martin
I finished my taxes last week. By “finished,” I mean I completed the steps on the H&R Block website and accurately checked boxes and filled inputs to the best of my ability based on my understanding of the terms presented. But it sure is complicated, especially now that there’s a house involved; good thing vehicle property taxes don’t start for us until next year.
But it’s not just getting worse for me as I get older; it’s getting worse for everyone. This graphic about the length of federal tax law was going around the Internet the other day:
That’s a stunning growth rate (even with the inconsistent Y-axis), and every year around this time we hear calls for tax reform. Fareed Zakaria had a good post on CNN the other day:
Continue reading Taxes and the Slow War on Law-Abiding Citizens
