Holes In Thoughts

Thursday, November 06, 2008

Perils of the Political Church

Mormons spent hundreds of millions of dollars and told their pastors to read Prop 8 propaganda in their churches. The IRS doesn't tax churches, provided they don't participate in "carrying on propaganda, or otherwise attempting, to influence legislation." Therefore, their tax exemption should be revoked. I would LOVE to see all those tax dollars put towards schools, roads, and our veterans.

This site can help anyone file the complaint.

Labels: evil, gays, irs, Mormons, taxes

posted by Steve @ 6:21 PM 0 comments

Sunday, February 03, 2008

The Good Government

It used to be the people in power could pretty much sit back, have orgies and collect taxes until the Revolution came, and when it did they were treated to a quick death that sure beat syphilis.

Now, the best they can hope for is a blowjob and some kickbacks (although, the above is still true in parts of the Middle East, former parts of the USSR, and most of Africa).

The biggest reason for that is that in developed countries, the citizenry have raised the bar of expectations to levels a 13th-century serf couldn't have imagined: free education, good roads, and food regulations. More recently, free public health care and welfare programs have upped the ante substantially (to mixed success). The government is suddenly there for the common good! But it's not the easiest thing to get people to do what's good for them in the long term, or as a whole, when they can do stuff that benefits them in the short-term but hurts the group as a whole.

Take those ubiquitous little plastic shopping bags. About two thousand are made per second (42 billion per year), and a lot of them end up in landfills, but an awful lot end up in forests, streams and sewage systems. It's a little problem, on an individual scale, but when anything is multiplied by millions or billions, things get dicey. This is the kind of problem that governments are ideally suited to fix. Ireland has done a nice job in the way that a government knows best: action through taxes. It charged 33 cents per bag sold (a type of 'sin tax') and suddenly everyone uses cloth bags, putting the plastic bags in the category of social ills like not picking up your dog's poo.

This is how governments can do some real good very easily: appeal to the Capitalist system we use to make it profitable or in people's best interest to do the right thing. Obama wants to charge companies and power-plants for every pound of smog produced, and give the income to subsidize the companies that buck up and use more expensive, non-polluting means.

Labels: food, government, history, money, Obama, taxes

posted by Steve @ 1:56 PM 0 comments

Sunday, July 01, 2007

"... I'm never going to need this!"

The mantra of every high schooler in a class they dislike: "... I'm never going to need this!"

Yet, as a teacher, I could very rarely give a convincing rebuttal. Do I know what the subjunctive mood is? Yes. Subordinate conjunction? Yes. Do I use them as well as I need to, and were I ever to be asked by a stranger to give an example, I could (in fact, that last sentence illustrates both).

It makes me want to teach things that matter. Most of what we teach does matter, if nothing else as an exercise in how to get oneself to understand concepts without 'feeling like it.'

But why not the stuff that you need to survive as an American?

I wish someone had taught me how to:

Do my taxes.
How the current health care system works
The relationship between taxes and government benefits
The military-industrial complex
The effect of fanaticism in religion

I did learn some things that tangentially helped me: Supply and demand, inflation, and other basic economic concepts. I do wonder if that's because of where I went to school, though.

I responded to a post to The Daily Dish with this sentiment here.

Labels: health care, high, military, politics, rant, religion, school, taxes

posted by Steve @ 12:44 PM 0 comments

Monday, June 11, 2007

Proposition 301

Summer school in the computer lab at Eastpointe High School is winding down to our few, last students. Craig (the self-describe curmudgeonly English teacher) and I are finishing up the day, and my boss comes up with the kind of envelope normally associated with a paycheck.

Payday isn't until Friday.

He tells me that it's my Prop 301 money, and smiles. He's always a good boss, but he's showing up with random, unplanned income. That makes him a great boss.

Anyway, unbeknown to me, Proposition 301 passed in 2000 in Arizona. It called for a pool fund for teachers, drawn from a 0.06% increase in sales tax. It's distributed annually, based on the population and performance of Arizona schools.

Now, Eastpointe is a relatively small school which caters to "at-risk" kids - kids that need help with everything in life, not to mention school. Fortunately for the number-crunching, there were very few teachers at the school - 8, including myself.

Also, it helps that I have a good boss. Apparently, Tucson Unified School District promised a 3-year raise plan for their teachers. The first two went ahead as planned, but the district very illegally used the 301 money to fund the third raise. Of course, it was supposed to be distributed in addition to the raise, but through some seriously questionably conspiratorial lobbying, they got away with it. As for the previous two years' 301 checks, I hear that $400 was unusually good.

I knew nothing of any of this, of course, but I was still elated to find this on the check: $1,925.24

So. Two grand in unplanned income. I'm spending roughly half on Rachel's truck - which went unsurprisingly over-budget with its new carburetor install and a new camera. After months of deliberation and surfing the web (especially dpreview), I decided on the Ricoh GX100. I'll be ordering from PopFlash.

Words fail to describe how awesome this is. The other half of the check will act as a buffer for the bank account while I figure out how to do my taxes for my newly-official business, but hopefully will go into my first stock purchase...

Labels: 301, Eastpointe, impulse designs, photography, Ricoh GX100, school, taxes, work

posted by Steve @ 1:02 PM 0 comments

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Impulse? Impulse Media?

I have started looking into making my sole proprietorship business a reality - after freelancing for a half decade.

What? I was busy.

The main reason is so that I can deduct a lot of my business-related expenses. While I do (often) question what is being done with my money, I don't plan on weaseling my way out of taxes completely. Strikes me as un-patriotic and, well, weasel-y.

So that means I will be reading government forms in my spare time. Oh, the joy! But it will be worth it. After all, I'm putting all the music, design, and art into one business. That means that a new computer, guitar, and paint are deductible. I just hope that the IRS understand that the design will be funding the other two - the music and art are a rather long shot at ever becoming profitable, but I think the odds are good enough to merit the business' money...

Labels: design, government, impulse designs, Impulse Nine, irs, sole proprietor, taxes

posted by Steve @ 12:57 AM 0 comments

Saturday, March 18, 2006

Exciting Event no. 10: Intermission

I am now in Tucson for Spring Break, and this allows me to do a few things - basically, to clean and plan. But that stuff's relatively boring and relegated to the bottom of this blog.

I decided recently that I'm still a pretty big slacker. So I'm trying an experiment. I'm letting myself slack to an extent, but I'm limiting my options to "acceptable" ways of slacking. I've decided that all of these things are ways I can allow my self to slack off:

Post a MySpace blog.
Play guitar and work on Ignition (my new album).
Dream up new Art class assignments.
Consider and note new ideas for my car.
Update my homepage.

I'm hoping that by doing this, I'll either stop slacking or at least, have a good blog, finished album, an interesting Art class, an awesome car, and a cool homepage by the time I learn not to slack.

To clean the apartment to help prepare to move; I've already fixed a toilet and am about 7/8ths of the way through re-organizing and going through all of our files (W2's, reciepts, titles, etc.).

This also has other, cooler things I can do with a week of time on my hands. I inherited a pile of about 300 CD's from Maloney's when they went with an all-Mp3 based system. A lot of them are crap, and a lot of them are scratched, but I figure this is as good as any an opportunity to add to my Mp3 collection.

I can attempt to give Rachel a functioning computer (again). I even have a legit copy of XP to use now, too, so that'll save some headache.

And to plan for the rest of the semester at school. I really jumped into the semester but had a lot of problems with organization. Now that I'm more or less caught up with that part (heh, though I still have a huge pile o' grading to do yet), I can start planning lessons a bit better, maybe through the whole year (I hope).

Currently reading :
Silverlock
By John Myers Myers

Labels: BASIS, blog, cars, Ignition, Maloney's, mp3, MySpace, school, taxes, teaching

posted by Steve @ 7:55 PM 0 comments

About Me

Name: Steve
Home: Tucson, Arizona, United States
About Me: I like to think about things, and I occasionally like to write what I think.
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