The Opinionated Bastard

So it seems to me that we’re at an impasse. For a long time now, our anti-immigration laws have been at best, nudge-nudge wink-wink laws. Suddenly, Arizona seems to want to rock the boat and actually enforce those laws. “How dare they!” cries the President. “Those racist bastards! Let’s boycott them!” says the Los Angeles city council. None of them quite seem to grasp that our actions have nothing to do with dishwashers, busboys, or “dos hombres”. My father-in-law was illegal, my two cousins on my father’s side were born in Ecuador, and Arizona is 30% Hispanic. Like many people in America, I often eat at those special businesses that serve food where many of the personnel are illegal aliens; I understand those of you in other states call these special businesses “restaurants”. I live in a dwelling whose supporting structure was covered with a special coating applied by illegal aliens; this coating goes by the name dry wall in other states. Yesterday I had fruit picked by illegal aliens. I bought this fruit in a special store called a “supermarket”.

Yet I support this law. Because this new law is not, and never has been, about “undocumented workers”. Arizonans would be perfectly happy to give everyone in the entire country of Mexico a green card. This law is about the fact that Arizona is being invaded. Invaded. That sound like hyperbole. When armed foreign nationals cross your border, calling it an invasion is merely being accurate.

Ultimately, our new law is about the cartels and the violence they’ve brought. Phoenix was the #2 city in the world last year for kidnapping, but facts like that are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the huge increase in violence we’ve seen in the southern half of the state over the last two years. It’s not an accident that we’ve made it easier to carry concealed weapons in Arizona; if you’re a woman in Southern Arizona, it is likely you’re packin’.

So in the interest of reconciling with our fellow states who keep missing the point of our new law, I offer my own modest proposal. Since the whole point of our law was to get rid of the cartel members and had nothing to do with the people crossing the border to work, I have come up with an alternative that should work for everyone.

I’ve heard that currently, the going rate for crossing the border is $3,000. The amount of money you need to spend on lawyers and bribes to get a green card is even more.

So it seems in America we want to have our cake and eat it too. We want to pretend to be against any sort of guest worker program while eating in restaurants, eating produce and living in houses. For a long time, Arizona was perfectly happy to pretend along with everyone else. But we just can’t any more. We have to start kicking the cartel members out of our state.

But people seem to be worried that we’re going to be cracking down on the nudge-nudge wink-wink immigrants, yet they don’t want a real guest worker program.

But again, in Arizona we don’t have a choice. So in order to both streamline the process, and emphasize that this was never about keeping out the worker bees as much as it was about keeping out the cartels soldiers, Arizona will now offer something called an Arizona Green Card. The cost will be $3,000 a year, but that will include health and auto insurance from a selection of providers. So instead of the cartels and the lawyers getting $5,000, a guest worker can get insurance instead.

In addition, Arizona will issue these cards along with a bus ticket good for anywhere where a city council or other government body has seen fit to chastise us. Don’t worry, we’ll pre-screen the people we let into the country to make sure they’re not cartel members. We’ll use what I call the IQ points to Tattoos ratio. You’re allowed one square inch of tattoo for every point of IQ you have. Anyone with more tattoos than brains is obviously either a cartel member, so we won’t let them in.

So what do you think, Californians? Does that seems like a better solution?

Location:W Mountain Shadows Dr,Flagstaff,United States

So last Saturday, my wife went to Traffic School. She came home with an amazing story that put this whole Immigration thing Arizona is doing in perspective.

We live in Flagstaff, Arizona, which is about 2 hours north of Phoenix in the mountains.

So we hear about Phoenix, but only obliquely. So we know more about what’s going on PHX then the rest of the country, but not so much that “everyone knows that, so no one talks about it”. So we understand why Phoenicians like Sheriff Joe, and now, we understand why Arizona just passed this seemingly extreme immigration bill. So hopefully, I can use our unique position to explain it to you, as it was explained to my wife, and then me.

What she found out in Traffic School is that murder-in-progress or rape-in-progress is no longer the top priority for police in Phoenix. The number one call that will cause every policeman in miles to scramble is “Truck Full of Drunk Mexicans”. They will leave an active “situation” in order to swarm to stop said truck.

I know, I know, that sounds racist. Bear with me. It’s not what you think.

What’s been happening in Phoenix and Tucson is that the drug cartels have been slowly invading our state. When I say invading, I am not exaggerating. We’ve begged for help from the federal government, and been rebuffed. If you knew anything about Arizona, you’d have to realize that we’d rather ask for help from Satan than the Feds.

On Friday and Saturday nights, the young-dumb-and-full-of-cum members of the drug cartels load up in pickup trucks, stoned, drunk and heavily armed. They then proceed to drive around crazed, purposefully causing accidents. They shoot at schools, schoolchildren, other mortorists, and even police stations. When the cops corner them, they all pile out of the truck and run in a zillion different directions, while laughing hysterically. They do this all over Phoenix in all kinds of neighborhoods, rich or poor, white, black, Hispanic, or Native American.

So the reason Truck Full of Drunk Mexicans will gather every policeman for miles in a swarm in order to stop them is that the people in said truck are about to commit wholesale murder, rape and property damage; the police want to stop them and prevent it. Because its really a Truck Full of Drunk Murdering Cartel Members.

We have lots of people of Hispanic descent in Arizona. We have lots of illegal aliens who are good, hard-working, law-abiding people. They’re not the problem, and everyone knows that. No one really wants to go after them.

But we have to do something, and this law is it. Its unfortunate, and we’re seriously hoping that the police won’t go too far, or be abusive. But the cartels have just gone too far. Basically, this law was written so that we can stop these trucks and send the people in them to jail.

So the way that ObamaCare works, if a single employee files for a government subsidy for health insurance, the government bills the company for all employees at $2,000-$3,000 a head if the company has more than 25 employees. (Part-time workers count as half a person so I guess you could have 50 fully part time employees).

So lets say you’re a company with a lot of part-time employees for whatever reason. If you offer health insurance for your full time employees, and a part-time employee applies for the government plan, well now you’re going to be billed not just $3,000 for that employee, but $3,000 for all employees.

So the logical choice? Don’t offer health insurance at all. I mean, why pay twice?

Now some people think the Democrats are stupid for having stuff like this in ObamaCare.

I disagree. I think its pure genius.

First, the Democrats complain that all corporations care about is making money.

This is, of course, true.

Then, the Democrats promise to protect the populace from the evil corporations, and they do it in such a way that the only practical way for the corporations to proceed is to to screw the populace.

Then the Democrats complain that all corporations care about is making money, and that they will protect the populace from the evil corporations.

It’s genius.

But it pisses me off that my taxes are going to go up down the road because Walmart is going to dump all of their employees, both full and part time onto the government plan.

So basically, I create websites for a living.

Not just any websites though, I build websites that are essentially computer programs behind the scenes. People have to be able to use my websites to get their work done.

So I never, ever use Flash, and I’ve always found websites made with Flash to fall in the following categories.

First, there’s what I call the “Vanity” website. Those are for companies that don’t really need a website. There’s nothing wrong with that sort of website, as long as you realize that’s what you’re building. Pepsi isn’t going to pour colored sugar water into a glass for you over the internet. So building a sexy Flash site makes perfect sense for pepsi.com. Anyone going to pepsi.com is bored. So dazzle ‘em with bullshit. If you’re building a website for a local veterinarian though, that’s not a vanity site. Don’t use Flash, and put the phone number and address on every single page.

Second, there’s what I call the CEO site. Those are sites that you know were bought by a non-technical CEO from a laptop demo. No one in the real world ever goes to their website, because not only is it Flash, but its 20 minutes-to-download Flash. I once had a gig working for a music company and one of their subsidiaries had a flash site and a low-bandwith version of their site. The “low-bandwidth” version of their site had been broken for 4 months and no one at that company had noticed. Their “web guy” who knew nothing about the web always used the “high-bandwidth” version.

Then there are all the poseurs who who don’t know what they’re doing. Making HTML, CSS and all those other lovely acronyms sit up and beg is hard, and Flash ofters what seems like a solution. Some of these poseurs even have thriving companies. Again, at the record label, I went and visited the “web design firm” that was doing Metallica’s new website. They did everything in Flash, and not a single person at their 30-person company could write a basic anchor tag. They created beautiful, but ultimately unusable websites.

All I can say is: Skip Intro.

Anyways, that brings us to today’s topic. The Flagstaff Unified School District.

Currently, we have an election going on in Flagstaff about whether or not to raise property taxes in order to fund our schools. This is the second election on the same issue in the last few months, because the school district has already lost once and didn’t like the answer. They’re threatening to lay off teachers and close schools.

The reason the taxpayers keep voting no, is because our schools are badly mismanaged. We have one of the most top-heavy school districts in Arizona. So for many taxpayers in town, this initiative seems to be a case of the last straw. Even though the average increase in property taxes is going to be $250/household, many people in town are looking at not just this increase, but the other ones being threatened by other local governments and saying NO!

Given that the increase will be $1,000/year on local businesses, some of which are already marginal and failing in Flagstaff, and I suspect this tax increase could actually decrease revenues.

Oh, and did I mention that this whole override thing is pre-emptive? Its based on the theory that the state probably will implement cuts, but it hasn’t yet. So does that mean that our taxes won’t go up if the state doesn’t cut the funding? Do we get our money back, especially if the state raised taxes in order to prevent the funding cut? Nope!

Oh, and this particular election is illegal after losing the first time, but the district got a bye from the attorney general.

Meanwhile, I’m frankly of the opinion that the real solution for our schools is to fire everyone in the administration but the janitors, use the money to buy gift cards for Amazon, and hand those directly to the teachers. I even created a website for this project last year, The Amazon Project.

So with all this going on, I decided to go to the website for the school district at fusd1.org. Supposedly, they have their budget up there, and the challenge is that if you think you can do better, they’re willing to listen. So I went there.

And you know what happened? Flash.

That’s why our school district is in trouble. We’re spending money on a Flash website. I mean seriously. You’ve got to be kidding. Every single teacher in the Flagstaff School District tells me that the textbooks they’re forced to use are universally awful, and what do I see but a Flash website? There’s money flushed down the toilet right there. It’s just typical. Money spent badly by bureaucrats on nonsense, so they don’t have money for the right things.

So instead of decent textbooks, we have Flash. Flash is for rock bands, not school districts.

Oh, and they don’t really have their budget up there. At least not that I could find.

I’ll be voting no.

My wife is a poll worker today.

For her, election day really started last night when she and the other workers set up the polling place. Then she had to get up at 4:00 in order to be at the polls by 5:15 in order to open the polls by 6:00.

Tonight the polls close at 7:00, but anyone in line by then gets to vote. Closing the polls takes an hour or more because everyone is super tired by then. Then you have to drive the ballot box over to the registrar.

So an 18 hour day for my wife today.

This chart is a remake of a New York Times chart that is supposed to show how great Democrats are. Why is it a remake? Well, because the original chart had to lie, change scales and do other trickery so that Democrats looked better then Republicans. Because they don't.

The original chart was supposed to show that Democratic administrations are better then Republican administrations. Reworked to be honest, it shows the opposite. What this chart shows is that in general, growth has been better under Republican administrations than Democratic administrations.

The two exceptions are Nixon and Bush. But its impossible to discuss the Bush administration without talking about the three significant economic issues that happened during his administration:

• The Dot Com Bubble Bursting
• 9/11
• The Financial Meltdown (which he tried to head off, but I digress)

Even after the financial meltdown, if you charge the Dot Com Bubble and 9/11 against Clinton, Bush would have positive growth during his 8 years.

Similarly, Nixon had the Energy Crisis to deal with. Other people have pointed out that if you include the roaring 20's, Hoover was a net wash over the previous period.

So frankly, I think you have to throw out Nixon/Bush/Hoover as outliers. So if you look at the chart, its pretty obvious that except for Clinton (who got to ride the dot com bubble), growth is significantly better under Republican administrations than Democratic administrations. 3-5% bigger.

The reason this matters is because Obama is making a big deal about how he's giving the middle class these $500 tax rebates. A $500 rebate works out to about $.25/hour. It's about 1% wage growth for a median income of $50,000. But if growth is better under Republican administrations, then that means you're passing up a raise of 3-5%/year, which works out to be $1500-$2500 the first year, and for every year after that.

Since raises and growth are cumulative but this "tax cut" is a one time bump, you're even father behind after four years, because 3-5% growth for 4 years would mean that 4th year you'd be making $6,000-$10,000 more.

So that $500 isn't looking very good to me.

Basically, Obama's "Middle Class Tax Cut" actually sucks. What he's really doing is adding about 10 more checkboxes to the 1040, most of which you probably won't be able to check off. There's an article from the WSJ which covers it. But I want to talk about this graph from that article:

We all get that Obama is raising taxes on the rich. But do you know he's raising taxes on the poor?

I guess lawyers are bad at math. Because the way he's structured his tax plan with all these checkboxes that apply or don't apply at different income levels what he's done is raise the tax rates on what economists call the marginal tax rate, and I call the overtime ass rape.

I call it that, because basically, the government doesn't tax you on the first dollar you make. It ramps up from there, until at the end of the week, your paycheck is a lot smaller than it should be. Whatever that works out to be, that's your general tax rate. But when you work overtime, you get taxed at a much higher rate. So if you work say 4 hours of overtime one week, you might expect your check to be for 6 hours more if you get an extra 50% for overtime. But it never is, because that 6 hours of pay gets taxed at the maximum rate. So instead of 6 hours of pay, you get 4 hours of pay.

The people who get reamed the most are the people making $40,000/year. Their marginal tax rate is 40%. Which means that even before state income taxes, if they work 4 hours of overtime, they get paid for 3.6 hours.

So with Obama's plan to hand out this $500 tax rebate, someone making 20/hour would make an extra $.25/hour, or $40/month. Whoopdedo. But if they worked 4 hours of overtime, instead of making an extra $120 they only make $72. So they just paid $48 in taxes. That $40 they got this month suddenly doesn't look so good, and if they worked 4 hours of overtime each week, they paid $192 more in taxes.

This is not the way to rebuild the economy, and it illustrates the fundamental problem with the wealth transfer philosophy at the core of Obama's Tax Plan. It completely undermines people's incentive to work just a little bit harder. Why work overtime? The government will just take it all, and what they don't take will be eaten up by more child care.

Forget about Joe the Plumber who wants to make $250,000. What about Joe the Factory Worker who just put in 4 hours this week of overtime but had to pay more in child care? He's now behind because the government will take more in taxes than he earned.