Nearly 40% of my paycheck is withheld for taxation of some sort. That's fairly normal for the average income earner in the United States.

What about you? (Do you even know?) Do you have full confidence that a third (or more) of your paycheck is being spent responsibly by your government officials?

Some folks aren't concerned yet. At what point will they start taking notice? 60%? 70%?

Don't forget the taxes on other things. Like oh, you know, gasoline. And then there's everything else you buy.

This is important, and it's not necessarily a Democrat or Republican issue... so far, both parties have fucked it up pretty badly. This is the issue that will determine the fate of our economy, and most of us don't even think about it... because it happens before our checks get deposited in the bank.

I remember being a small child and watching that Eurythmics video for "Sweet Dreams" when it was popular.

Seeing as how I was a small child, with no real concept yet of what "normal" meant, I remember thinking there was nothing terribly unusual about those two people laying on the table while a cow circled around the room.

I saw it again today, and it struck me how bizarre the entire video is.

Was the whole 80s like that? Now that I think about it... I'm pretty sure it was.

Everybody knows school text-books are a complete rip-off. What to do? Involve congress! (This is, of course, the knee-jerk reaction of our present generation to most problems.)

If we really cared about this, we (not congress) would be holding the educational institutions themselves more accountable for providing quality online curricula, cheaper "unbundled" books, or perhaps we'd just take our tuition to those institutions that already do this sort of thing.

If we are too apathetic to do any of that... well, then it's probably not all that important to us, is it?

The first entrepreneur to comprehensively fulfill a University's needs for providing digital materials--significantly cutting students' costs in the process--is going to make lots of money. (At which point there will likely be a congressional hearing to call his salary into question.)

We, as a populace, still have the power to influence the conditions of our society without expecting Washington do it for us. Government regulation of things like this are almost always harmful to us in the long run.

This video depicts a group of US soldiers completely decimating a small group of children overseas.



Warning: strong, emotional content; shows kids getting served in graphic detail. Watch at your own risk.

This is great:

The ninja is a metaphor for the corporate employee. A ninja will get the job done or die trying. A ninja will kill everyone in his own family if he’s ordered to. A ninja has no sense of entitlement or dignity or flex time.

Meanwhile, the pirate is the entrepeneur, or maybe the upper-level executive. He has no sense of duty or honor. He seeks adventure and glory only. He’ll jump ship as soon as possible. He might even maroon his crew-mates on a desert island if it means he gets the treasure to himself.

Pirates love to hire ninjas because a ninja never disobeys. Ninjas love to kill pirates because they can pretend they’re killing their own pirate boss.

I've always aimed for a balance of both pirate and ninja characteristics, personally.

I'm more excited about Google's App Engine than anything other G release in recent memory. I'm happy about the quick uptake from the public, too. This guy totally gets it.

I'm going to start embedding suggestive pictures of women in all of my posts, regardless of any possible relevance to the content.

(Why didn't I think of this before?)


[UPDATE - I decided to go back and re-fit some old posts with my new theme. I now love blogging.]

Drinking Alone + Internet Access = Blog Rant

With gas prices soaring, the issue of price-gouging is impacting us all quite visibly. (How was traffic today?)

What's slightly less visible on your TV is the profit margin of domestic oil companies. Consider Exxon, which currently has a profit margin in the ballpark of 11%. How does that rank when compared to the profit margins of other Fortune 500 companies? Top five? Top ten? Actually, if you look more closely, they only rank at 116th on the list.[1]

Your government, on the other hand, takes a combined total of around 45 cents in fuel taxation for every gallon of gasoline you buy. That means the current "tax margin" taken from gasoline is 14.2% (that's the current average combined tax of 46.9 cents for each gallon, which is now averaging $3.28 nationally.) A huge portion of that tax, about 40%, goes to earmarks that are completely unrelated to infrastructure, transportation, or alternative energy sources. The tax burden for diesel fuel is similar. (Reminder: diesel fuel hauls all those goods that make up the backbone of our economy.)

That is worth re-stating: our government already takes a much larger chunk of gasoline revenue than Exxon receives in return for its effort in producing the product.

And that's just what they take at the pump.

Here's an overview:

• Your government takes at least a third of the typical citizen's earnings before a pay-check is even printed... which tends to put a dent in purchasing power, to say the least.
• At every stage in the production of every domestic product, they confiscate an additional percentage, creating an embedded tax that's far higher than most Fortune 500 companies' profit margins.
• Then, when you the consumer go to buy a gallon of gas, you pay yet another tax... which, once again, is far more than what the oil company retains as profit.[2]

Government revenues from oil are far beyond the profits of Big Oil. And you think Washington leaders are concerned about our nation's oil dependence, eh? Ah, right, the carbon tax will fix this! (How very innovative of them!)

Naturally, the government has decided to get to the bottom of this mess by accusing oil companies of price-gouging. We, the stupid-ass citizens who voted them into office, fail to recognize any irony in that.

On a related note... statistically speaking, there's only a few more weeks left until you actually start earning money for keepsies this year! Yay!

Moral of the story

Our economy, in a fairly predictable near-future, is headed toward ruin (or at least a very nasty dark age) and it's because half of our wages are being cleverly funnelled into nebulous government programs. Many of these programs just feed the cycle and lull us into further dependence. If you're going to get angry about the way things are, then you owe it to yourself to get your priorities straight.

Have a nice day at work tomorrow! Keep earning that money!

[1] Profit margin ranking is from here, which is the ranking for '06. I'd run more recent numbers, but I'm tired and I'm just some random blogger person anyway, so it doesn't really matter. Besides, my cursory intarwebbing would indicate that their profit margin has actually gone significantly down since then. (If you want to run the profit margin rankings for the current figures, then please comment and I'll update this.)

[2] Those profits (which hardly stack up to the government's cut) accomplish things like fund the average Joe's pension plan, provide growth for mutual funds (think: 401K), and other healthy economic functions that benefit the common citizen. The popular perception of oil profits going mostly to pad some evil CEO's pocket is just a tool for political class warfare... a simple but effective manipulation of your vote. Sit back and watch as we all applaud further oil regulation, which will cripple the aforementioned healthy economic functions... at which point we'll all blame those evil price-gouging Big Oil bastards for causing a recession in our economy. (But, where did most of the money really go? Innumerable efforts such as this might give you a hint.)