Government sucks (my laziest post ever)

I started writing a column about the incompetence of government, and I found this video (which I intended to use as a source). But after watching it, it was too damn good.

So here's Gov. Bobby Jindal, putting it better than I can.

Capitalism gets sweeter with time

I saw Mark Levin on TV last night, promoting his new book. One item he discussed in his appearance was the extreme liberal bias in most news media sources. He asked a wise question: "When was the last time we saw a story about the greatness of capitalism?"

And tonight I'm writing from San Diego, at the tail end of a trip that has allowed me to learn something about myself. I used to be a casual and inexpensive wine drinker, a purchaser of only Yellow Tail or cheaper. But whilst here I (to my benefit, I've since learned) visited a few wineries. The Schwaesdall Winery in Romona and the Orfila Winery in Escondido, especially, grabbed my attention.

The Schwaesdall Winery is owned by a married couple who spend their weekends working in their tasting room (which looks a lot like a shed near their house). It's a tiny winery that sells just a few thousand cases a year. But its product (as near as I can tell) is superb.

Here, two Americans had some resources and put them to work. Through their own hard work, ingenuity and sense of purpose, the couple makes a living for themselves. And in doing so they don't piggy-back on the good graces of someone productive — they are productive.

The Orfila Vineyards and Winery was built by Alejandro Orfila, who moved to the United States after retiring from a post as Argentina's ambassador to this country. Mr. Orfila grew up in a different land but his life's work showed him how good Americans have it. He moved to southern California and took to wine-making. Orfila wines have won more than 1,300 awards.

Here, one South American man saw the glory of free enterprise and — like all of us, or our ancestors — came to America to find a better life. While here, he created something truly glorious.

California boasts more than 1,200 wineries and wine from the golden state is the best in the world — and don't take my word for it, believe the French judges at the 1976 Judgment of Paris, where American vintages were chosen in blind taste-tests over their French counterparts.

For years, government has stayed off Americans' backs, and they've grown grapes in low-water areas of southern California and percolated, brewed and bottled their product into a huge industrial accomplishment.

California's wines are of great quality and quantity. They became great, not because the government passed a "wine stimulus bill" to name them so. Greatness cannot be legislated. It takes too much hard work and people are disinclined to do hard work unless they will benefit from it.

California wines became great because skilled, industrious people desired to sell their products at a profit, so they made their products better.

And they made their products pretty darn good. But you don't have to take my word for it — you can visit a winery or liquor store and taste the sweetness of freedom for yourself.

Reagan Library pics

A wee bit of self-indulgence here. I visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley last weekend. A 'religious experience' doesn't even begin to cover it.

The landscape near the library. The site was chosen because it was near the Reagans' Rancho del Cielo. I can see why they liked it up here.

A piece of the Berlin Wall on display. Today the wall imprisons 0 people. (This is not an accident.)

Another shot of the scenery near the library. I never thought I'd see anything that rivaled Colorado, but some of southern California certainly does.

Ronnie's and Nancy's saddles. Ronnie's is the one on the left.

Mr. Reagan was given more than 350 belt buckles while he was president. These are some of them.

The burial site. I got goosebumps

Trusting the government will kill you

I'm still astounded when someone thinks government is the answer.

Excerpts from an Associated Press story about a government-run hospital in England:

... Receptionists with no medical training were left to to assess patients arriving at the hospital's accident and emergency department ...

Julie Bailey, whose 86-year-old mother Bella died in the hospital in November 2007, said she and other family members slept in a chair at her bedside for eight weeks because they were so concerned about poor care.

"What we saw in those eight weeks will haunt us for the rest of our lives," said the 47-year-old. "We saw patients drinking out of flower vases they were so thirsty.

"There were patients wandering around the hospital and patients fighting. It was continuous through the night. Patients were screaming out in pain because you just could not get pain relief." ...

"We do apologise to all those people who have suffered from the mistakes that have been made in the Stafford Hospital," said Prime Minister Gordon Brown, questioned on the matter at his weekly grilling in the House of Commons.

At least 400, and maybe as many as 1,200 people died because of this hospital's incompetence. This took place over the course of 3 years. I'll go out on a limb here: Somebody should have noticed.

It doesn't take an especially creative mind to picture what would happen if this story was about a profit-driven private hospital. Parliament members would quickly take to the torch and pitchfork and demand the heads of the greedy evil-doers sitting on the hospital's board. It's likely criminal charges would be filed against the hospital's management. The facility would be shut down and labeled a notorious house of torture.

Unfortunately for British residents (especially those who might, one day, get sick), these government big shots can blame nobody but the fella in the mirror. And all he has to do is say he's sorry.

More bureaucrats, more waste

A friend just told me he saw sign that read "The government is not your mommy." It's also not your guarantor of employment, at least it wouldn't be if there were any sanity in our economic policy.

We've recently seen President Barack Obama bragging about his $787 billion "economic stimulus bill" saving 25 jobs in Columbus, Ohio — that's $31 billion per cop, and in two years the money for their salaries will be gone and they'll probably get laid off anyway.

And while the flat-broke state of California has spent a month refusing to send income tax refunds to citizens that it overcharged last year, the state has added bureaucrats to the payroll.

My parents both work government jobs. Mom's the county treasurer and Dad's an equipment operator for the County Road Department. I understand that the government needs employees to provide some necessary services. And, frankly, I understand the benefits of working for a government employer that has an "unlimited" inflow of cash and never has to lay off workers.

But it is ultimately not government's job to ensure people are employed by making up jobs for them and putting them on the public payroll. Doing so creates an enormous class of employees who suck money out of the real economy while not creating anything useful. (No, welfare checks are not useful.)

Government debt and waste spending drag on production. Hefty taxes to pay government workers' wages rob business of the money to pay productive employees. It's a vicious circle that's all-to-often painted as necessary.

During recessions and times of slowed demand, real businesses are forced to cut their spending to avoid going broke. But governments think they aren't bound by the laws of reality.

And California's politicians, and federal bureaucrats, wonder how they got themselves so far into debt.

The complete history of the Manly Tax Service (as I remember it): A tale of tyranny

Chapter 1: The early years

Every now and then, one of Mom's older tax customers will mention her dad, Grandpa Coder. "Bob'd help me out," one farmer has chuckled. "If the bill was gonna be too much, he'd say 'well, you had a bull die here,' or something like that."

For 40-odd years (the real number is unclear, but according to the verbal histories I've heard, it's in the 40-range) Grandpa prepared income tax returns for customers. As I've heard it, Mom and her siblings pitched in when they were young children. Grandpa was a friendly cuss and knew most everybody in the county, so his little business developed quite a following.

Chapter 2: The peaceful transition of powers

As grandpa aged, Mom started to take over the tax business. When he became frail with ill health, Mom took over more and more of the business, eventually taking care of all of Grandpa's clients and splitting the money with him.

After he died, Bob's work became Mom's. She bought ads in the paper every year for the newly-named Manly Tax Service. Most of my grade school teachers sent manilla envelopes full of financial documents home with me in the spring, so Mom could prepare their tax returns. There were many days in the spring when Mom would get off work in town, then spend the rest of the night (until 9 or 10 p.m. sometimes) buried behind mounds of paperwork at the kitchen table.

Chapter 3: A family affair

My very first job was as a filing and copying clerk for the Manly Tax Service. My brother's, too. And my sister's. When we were 10(ish) we'd just pass the job along. When we graduated high school and moved away, Dad took over the busy.

When we built our new house, Mom moved the work from the kitchen table into an office. We first bought a computer so she could do taxes on it — it saved her a tremendous amount of time. The home office evolved to include a copy machine, a printer, a filing closet, all the things you'd expect to find at H&R Block. But smaller and cheaper.

Chapter 4: Service with a smile

I'll be honest. I couldn't tell you what a 1040 is.

When customers come to see Mom, some of them bring boxfuls of records covering information ranging from gas royalties and retirement to cattle feed (and even the money earned by turning in recycled cans. Cheating on taxes really isn't an American tradition.)

If I can't understand my simple, one-income tax returns, I can certainly see how some folks don't know what to do with their paperwork. Mom doesn't know all of the rules, either, but she has a lot of experience and knows where to look.

Mom is the friendliest person I know. She's hardly met a stranger, and if she has, they probably knew Grandpa and she's glad to talk to them. She knows enough about tax laws to always get people the best (legal) deal possible. She gives advice. For her elderly customers, she makes housecalls, bringing packets of papers to someone not much able to come pick it up themselves.

Mom charges a lot less than H&R Block would. And her customers know they have somebody they can count on. Mom's spent 20 years — and Grandpa spent decades before that — taking care of hundreds of families in town.

Chapter 5: Conclusions

I think back to my childhood. Every spring, tax season dominated a huge chunk of our lives. It was how my parents paid for our family vacations and how they make money to make extra mortgage payments. They bought me my first BB gun with money made doing taxes. It was where I earned my first spending money.

For several decades, my family has put forth an enormous entrepreneurial effort. That's what it's taken just for hundreds of people to comply with the federal government's taxes. Not to pay them — to figure out how to pay them.

All of our effort, all of our hard work, has been essentially wasted. Nothing was produced. No net good was done for anybody; they were just not penalized for failure to comply with government regulations.

That's asinine.

Epilogue

My sister will graduate from college in May. As such, she won't be available as a "deduction" for my parents anymore. So between my mom's three other jobs and my dad's income, my parents will be in a higher-than-ideal tax bracket. So most of the money Mom makes on tax preparations will go to the government. Hence, she's not going to do it anymore.

So some 200 clients will have to find alternative preparers. They'll probably have to go farther out of their way, put their tax well-being in with someone they don't know and might not trust, and probably have to pay more for the service. Mom and Dad will earn less money.

An entire community will have their lives made more difficult by the government.

So the government made tax law so bizarrely complicated that it created a huge market of people who need assistance to figure out their taxes. And now it's charging taxes so high that it's driving those preparers out of business.

Two thoughts today

First, I just watched Real Time with Bill Maher (which is maddening, but kinda funny). One of the guests was Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker. He's obviously a leftie — he just said "I think we have the best president imaginable" — and I definitely don't see eye to eye with him on a lot of things.

But he's also intelligent and believes in America. He's aggrandized the notion of ingenuity. He likes inventiveness and entrepreneurship.

In short, we don't have the "best president imaginable" right now. Booker would be a hell of a lot better.

And second, I just learned Jupiter's Great Red Spot is shrinking.

So I'll bet Al Gore is, at this very moment, concocting his next Nobel Prize-winning scheme ...

Government gone wild

Fred Thompson was my favorite presidential candidate last year because he was the only one who understood that a government with the power to give you anything is a government with the power to take it away.

As examination of government's recent activities shows us, enacting a government-run health care system would be suicidal. I'm not saying that just to be dramatic — if we adopt a "universal health care" system as Teddy Kennedy and Co. would have us, people will die.

When government gets involved, citizens get trampled. Some examples:

— Earlier this week, about 300 residents of Orlando, Fla., met at a special summit to discuss ways to fight the spike in crime seen in the city in 2008. For one, 123 people in the city were murdered last year.

So on Thursday, police in an Orlando suburb threw four women in jail for flashing fellow partiers at a nightclub.

— Mike and Chris Thompson suffered last fall when thieves took the wheels and tires off of their $70,000 car and left it sitting curbside on cinder blocks. The Thompsons reported the theft to District of Columbia authorities — and then the real damage came.

A city-contracted tow truck hauled the car to the impound lot. The owners had been cited and fined $250 for the car being "too dangerous to be on public space."

No trailer. No tires. The car-draggers didn't even bother to remove the concrete blocks. The Thompsons say they did $20,000 in damage to the car. Then the Thompsons were charged $120 by the impound lot.

— John and Jennifer Davis were on their way to the emergency room. Jennifer was significantly pregnant, with contractions coming just a few minutes apart and a baby threatening to appear at any moment.

To bypass the bumper-to-bumper traffic, John pulled onto a freeway shoulder and cruised down the road. Until they ran into state Trooper Michael Galluccio, who stopped the couple, demanded to see Jennifer's belly (to prove that she was not faking the pregnancy with pillow-cases stuffed up her shirt, and cited John with a $100 ticket for illegally driving on the shoulder. This after two decent-minded state patrolmen told them using the shoulder was OK.

(In spite of Massachusetts authorities, Charlotte Jane Davis was born later that day, with no further reported complications.)

— Two Salinas, Calif., police officers opened fire on a couple — and left the couple's car full of bullet holes — after stopping them because a license plate light was not working. The cops started shooting after one of them — and I'm quoting here — "thought he was shot."

It turns out, he was not shot, nor was he shot at, nor was he shot in the vicinity of. The couple that the officers fired upon were entirely unarmed and (as far as we can tell) never threatened the police in any way. No arrests were made and no citations were issued. Only bullets.

— The City of Chicago has informed rental car companies outside the city limits that their customers are subject to the city's 8 percent rental car tax. The only way for customers to get out of the tax is to swear an oath that the rental will be used outside of Chicago.

For what it's worth, I am now notifying Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley that his own breathing transactions are subject to my personal oxygen tax. Unless he submits to me a notarized affidavit swearing that none of the air he inhales has ever been in Kansas ...

The only difference is, I don't have the bullying power to enforce my tax.

Save DC school choice

President Barack Obama is smart enough to send his own children to someplace more conducive to their good future than an inner-city public school.

In Congress, some are attempting to end a DC scholarship program that allows poor children the same opportunity. I hope Obama stands up to them and saves a government program that actually does some good.

Read more from the Wall Street Journal.

More on the tax-cheats (I'm even angrier this time)

I'd say I'm kicking a dead horse, but the Obama Administration keeps reviving it.

According to the Associated Press, Obama's Treasury Secretary — Tax-Free Tim Geithner — announced today that the Obama people will soon unveil a series of new rules to limit the ability of companies to avoid U.S. taxes by sheltering earnings in tax haven countries.

Any economist worth his salt would say Obama would do the U.S. economy more good by transforming this country into the world's greatest tax haven — thereby giving every company on the planet a substantial motive for shipping jobs here. But that's secondary today.

More importantly, the Obama Administration is attacking one of the most important things government can take on: people's money. Most surprising is the administration's willingness to bring up the issue on which it is the least credible.

When I see Tax-Free Tim and Co. at work, it doesn't take long before I'm furious. Geithner, who is in charge of the federal department that oversees the IRS, doesn't think he has to pay his own taxes but now he wants to ensure that everyone else gets sufficiently fleeced.

Today he described the (perfectly legal) efforts of companies to base their assets in financially beneficial locations as — his words — "tax evasion." It makes one wonder what harsh language he would use to describe his own illegal failure to pay more than $30,000 in income taxes — he claims he didn't know he was supposed to pay income taxes for about four years. I bet he was aware that everyone else is supposed to do so.

Picture Ted Kennedy lecturing us on safe driving, or Dick Cheney lamenting recklessness with guns.

As much as I dislike Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and as dangerous to the Second Amendment as I think Attorney General Eric Holder is, I thought the Senate should have voted to confirm most of Obama's cabinet nominees. I tend to think the president should get the people he wants and senators ought not stand in his way without a darn good reason. But I thought it was pretty obvious:

Not paying your taxes is a darn good reason.

Obama should have fired Geithner the moment he learned of the latter's tax transgressions, and then he should have ordered Holder to prosecute Geithner until Tax-Free Tim was sent to federal prison.

The irony is, if Obama wanted to really add stimulus to the economy, he would fight to declare a portion — say, half or maybe the first $50,000 — of all Americans' income to be tax-free for a year. I'd bet a month's pay that'd boost spirits and the markets.

But that income is not tax free. I have to pay the taxes on it. I work hard for my money and I don't have much of it. So when those jerks in the Obama Administration and Congress are caught having not paid their own taxes, they are caught in violation of a serious code of decency.

The legend of Robin Hood says that he robbed from the rich to give to the poor. That's erroneous. Robin Hood robbed from the corrupt Sheriff of Nottingham — the government — and returned to the poor the money that the sheriff had stolen from them in the first place.

That tale does not glamorize stealing from the rich, it glamorizes rebellion against tyranny.

Tax-Free Tim and Co. are not socialists. This is not robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. It's the rich robbing from you and I, and keeping it for themselves.

Only it's even worse than that. If they poked a gun into my nose and took my wallet, at least I'd have to respect the fact that they had beaten me by force. These toads are hiding behind the government and letting sniveling bureaucrats do the dirty work for them. They're enjoying the fat while taking away our lean portion, too.

If that isn't low-down cowardice, I don't know what is.

Obama and the tax cheats

I recently heard a joke: Democrats are always voting for higher taxes because they know they won't pay them anyway.

It's just not funny.

And now we've found another (what is this, 37?) nominee by President Barack Obama who owes huge amounts of taxes from previous years, and is going to pay them — now — before taking hold of an executive branch office.

Ron Kirk, a former mayor of Dallas and Obama's nominee for U.S. Trade Representative, owes about $10,000 in federal income taxes from years ago. (On a side note, somebody ought to slap Kirk for wearing those idiotic glasses.)

Kirk is just the latest in the growing list of Obama personnel to decide — "voluntarily" — to pay their back taxes ... now that they've been appointed to high office. The most egregious of them remains "Tax-Free" Timothy Geithner, now the Secretary of the Treasury. His reward for choosing not to pay taxes was to be put in charge of the federal department that oversees the KGB. Err ... IRS.

Add U.S. Rep. Charlie "Cha-Ching" Rangel, who is under investigation for not paying all of his income taxes — he's chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the one that forms tax law, by the way — and there are some serious issues here.

At least Tom Daschle had the decency to step down. (And that was a three-fer ... it disgraced him, allowed him to redeem himself, and then got Kathleen Sebelius out of Kansas. Go Tom!)

That allegedly wise men, charged with writing and enforcing tax laws, are having difficulty understanding our tyrannically complex tax code is proof positive that it needs to be edited down tremendously. If the ones who wrote it can't figure it out, how are the rest of us supposed to?

And the ones who wrote it have a special obligation to hire competent tax attorneys or accountants and get it right. They're applying laws onto the rest of us, and they must live up to them themselves.

During the campaign, when Obama said all of those lovely things about the Bush-era across-the-board tax cuts "going to the wealthiest few" and helping people "who weren't even asking for it," I'm a little skeptical. Not only are those "fortunate few" failing to voluntarily pony up more of their hard-earned money than they're legally required to (as they would, if Obama were right about them secretly desiring to pay more) — but in the case of Obama's employees, they aren't even paying for their obligations.

These people take my money. The money that I earn, through no help from them or anybody else. And they don't think they have to pay their part, too.

I can't imagine anything more outrageous.