Taxes and Death

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer

Life, Death, Taxes, And Excess

Modern life can be so complicated. When you went to your favorite “Greasy Spoon” for breakfast this morning, did you bother to check the kitchen for a clean grill, proper stove temperatures, clean exhaust systems, and super cockroaches? Did you bring your thermometer to check the hot water temperature of the restaurant’s automatic dishwasher? Did you eat next to a smoker?

Oh. I forgot. Did you personally check the safety of the roads, streets, and bridges you traveled on to get to get to your breakfast? When you stopped at your liquor store to pick up a bottle of Kentucky bourbon for your nightly Old Fashioned, did you bring along a tester to see if the booze was really 90 proof? When you stopped at your travel agent to plan your vacation, did you ask to see the maintenance record of the jet engines on the passenger jet you are going to fly on? Or did you ask to inspect them? Did you know that the taxis in Ciudad Trujillo have no meters? Did you remember to pay all the tutors for your children for the month? Did you check with your poor neighbors you have employed to fight your wars overseas? Are they protecting you from kidnappers and IEDs? Did you remember to buy a test kit to ensure that your tap water is “pure?”  Is your water supply enough to fill the bathtub so you can drown the rest of the government when you get home?

Did You Check Your Seismometer For Earthquakes This Morning?

Is your cottage on a lake where each resident establishes his own fish limits? Do you hunt by the season and not by limits? Are you going to ask your neighbor why he didn’t put in sidewalks? When you went outside this morning, did it look like rain? Did you check your seismometer for possible earthquakes? Have you checked for sun spots for communicating with satellites? Did you check the air before leaving home to ensure it was “breathable?” There must be someplace in the world where one wouldn’t have to worry about all of these things. But isn’t trust a big part of being civilized? What does government do for you?

What Would Americans Do?

A resident of Phoenix told an interesting story about a culture that is different than ours. He and his family were eating a late lunch in a restaurant at the Narita Airport near Tokyo when a 9.0 earthquake hit central Japan. The walls were shaking, the light fixtures were swinging, and the glassware was tinkling. The restaurant workers immediately told all customers to leave. They said: “Please don’t worry about paying the bill.” But all the Japanese customers lined up at the cash register to pay their bills. The Phoenix man joined them. As they paid, they left. What would have happened if the earthquake had been near Phoenix? Is this the definition of integrity?

Shall We Step To The Music We Hear?

Bear with me for a moment—even if you hated to read Henry David Thoreau in American Lit. He began one of his essays with this line: “Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.” In his day Thoreau thought we were relatively free of political tyrants (today we have a surplus!), but he felt we were still “the slave of an economical and moral tyrant.” A tyrant called Mammon. He wrote the world is a place “of incessant business…It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once.” He was not opposed to a “certain amount of labor, industry or enterprise,” but the ways we acquire money “leads us downward and involves lying, flattering, voting, and contracting yourself into a nutshell of civility…so you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat…I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. A Chinese philosopher once said, ‘Those who know they have enough are rich’.”  Why are so many rich people so dumb about what wealth is?

Thoreau asks some very difficult questions: If we always want more luxuries and comforts, do we really understand the meaning of economy? Do we understand that the real cost of something is the amount of life we spend getting—whatever? Are people’s lives becoming compost so they can live in McMansions, wear Gucci, Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, and drive Bentleys?

In his best advice Thoreau reminded us not to wait for politicians “for enlightenment before we begin our journey toward simplicity….If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

Is Money The Key To A Better Life?

Can money buy you liberty – and a better life? London has some of the richest people and some of the most expensive real estate in the world. The rich want to stick around London where the action is, but their aging mansions are getting to be too small and lack certain amenities such as swimming pools, gyms, wine cellars, home theaters, bowling alleys, squash courts, climbing walls, waterfalls, Jacuzzis, saunas, hair salons, and the absolute ultimate — garages to contain their vintage car collections. So if you can’t go wide and high with your additions you go low and lowest. Some richies are going down four levels to add “livable” space to their homes. Neighbors are getting upset by the huge machines used to dig out hundreds of cubic yards of dirt. One billionaire built several levels of garages beneath his mansion to garage his vintage car collection. The garages contain special elevators so he can lift his cars to street level. Lees Associates installs below-ground swimming pools. The chairman is particularly proud of one that has projectors which show moving sharks along the walls of the pool while the theme from “Jaws” is playing. Another pool below a mansion is completely covered with hand-made golden ceramic tiles embedded with tiny LED lights to give swimmers the impression they are swimming to an exposed night sky.

London has strict zoning laws which often prohibit changing the footprint or the height of the building, said Sarah Lyall in a New York Times article. But old zoning laws often say nothing about going down, down, down. The digging often results in neighboring houses or buildings collapsing, trucks going through holes beneath the streets, and neighbors suing each other about damages, nuisances, noise, dust, and the blasting of air hammers and drills. Perhaps the wealthy should have read Thoreau about simplicity and the different drums heard by different people. There is a difference among the kettle, snare, bongo, barrel, bonga, and hundreds of other drums.

Why Don’t The Rich Buy More Cars, Freezers, Depends, And Homes?

It seems our economy is in the Doldrums, the Sargasso Sea, the Marianas Trench, and the Sahara Desert all at one time. Some economists say the only way out of this recession is to have consumers consume again. Gee, why aren’t they? Haven’t they noticed that we no longer have a middle-class large enough to make a difference in the economy? It’s funny Nieman-Marcus, Saks, Tiffany’s, Nordstrom’s, and other high-end businesses are doing quite well. Bigger yachts are selling like Lund fishing boats. Sotheby’s and Christie’s are selling big art by the many millions. Was it $45 million for Andy Warhol’s “Campbell Soup Cans?”

But now the Dollar Stores are stealing customers from WalMart — and are still having a hard time making a buck. Shouldn’t that tell the rich something? The top 20 percent now own over 90 percent of the wealth and assets of the United States. The poor and the middle class have not made a cent in 30 years! In fact, wages are presently declining for 90 percent of the population! Over 68 million Americans often go hungry. The poor never could buy much, but the middle-class once bought big items — homes, cars, stoves, fridges, freezers, and cell phones. They can’t do this anymore.  While the rich are buying vanity license plates in Texas for thousands of dollars (“Freedom” will cost you $2,500, “America” runs $3,000, “Ferrari” sets you back $15,000), millions of the unemployed middle-class are losing their homes. Harper’s magazine has reported that it will take New York state courts, at their present rate of workload, 61 years to foreclose on all houses currently in default.

Making Millions Off Garbage

Our current recession was caused by the greed of Wall Street banks and their investment rating agencies who sold Triple FFF sub-prime mortgage garbage in bunches labeled as Triple AAA investments by the rating agencies. The feds are now suing 17 big banks to get some of the middle-class money back. The rich love to proclaim their innocence in this gigantic ripoff while counting their bonus money for “excellent performance.” Most of the following bank CEOs should be sitting in jail with Bernie Madoff for fraud instead of going to their homes on Fifth Avenue and the Hamptons, but they are busy counting their bonuses for 2010: Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein “earned” $67.9 million, Goldman’s President Gary Cohn, $66.9. Goldman’s Financial Officer David Viniar did such a good job screwing the public he got over $20 million just in bonuses. Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit “earned” $80 million in salary, but he may “earn” up to $200 million in compensation and bonuses if he is a good boy. JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon took home $90 million of middle-class money – and feels he “earned it.” Wall Street bonuses in 2009 during our current recession was a record-breaking $145 billion. But the record only lasted to 2010. Wall Street executives broke the record again with $149 billion in bonuses.

Why Should 75 Percent Of Medical Bankruptcies Be Filed By People With Health Insurance?

Gee, why should health care expenses continue to rise during a recession? Who can afford health insurance and hospital care? Health insurance executives probably have a pretty good health policy. While CEOs of Cigna, Humana, United Health, WellPoint, and Aetna got record-breaking salary and bonuses in 2010, they were also seeking insurance premium increases as high as 39 percent for their respective businesses. Cigna CEO H. Edward Hanway took care of his health with $110.9 million last year. His two assistants split $136.3 million. The poor guy from Aetna, Ron Williams, must have bowed his head in shame for getting only $24.4 million in 2008. But he was back to $72 million in 2010. Well, what the hell, only 75 percent of the medical bankruptcies filed last year were filed by people who had health insurance!  Sixty percent of all personal bankruptcies in the United States are the result of medical bills. So you hate Obamacare? Only the American people are stupid enough to spend over $7,500 per capita on medical care, twice as much as any other civilized country in the world, and receive pathetic care, while 50 million have no insurance at all. All I can say is, it must take a huge army of proctologists to treat Republican Congressmen, executives of the health insurance and hospital industries, drug company executives, and all Chambers of Commerce members who are opposed to universal coverage.

To show the absurdity, the obscenity, the society-destroying depravity of American-style capitalism, I would like to use the example of hedge fund manager John Paulson. Remember that hedge funds make nothing, not even suppositories for afflicted Congressmen and Warren Buffett. They play with other people’s money. Paulson personally made himself $9 billion over the last two years but his current tax bill is $0.00. According to laws passed by Congress, Paulson can keep his $9 billion under “Carried Interest.”  His taxes are deferred until he cashes out later. What does he live on? He is allowed to borrow from his “carried interest” at two percent. What a deal!  I think it’s time for pitchforks to clean up Washington, D.C. Or don’t you think $12,328,767.20 per day is rich enough?

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