OT: Taxing shituation

I didn't say I agreed with the argument. ;-)

Ever hear of the "marriage penalty"? It's alive and well.

do

That is because you have to pay for salaries out of your PRESENT operating funds, but you pay for pensions out of FUTURE funds. Since they weren't required to do any such troublesome things like actually build up a pension fund, it was easy to promise pie-in-the-sky for pensions, and hope that it would be somebody else's problem when the bills came due!

Charlie

That wouldn't have solved your problem. You still would have had a swamp to drain and no one to do it.

Passing the test. For the third grade this is pretty easy; reading, spelling, and arithmetic.

For the third grade? Certainly.

Tough shit. Get a tutor.

Sure it is.

Some actually do. Some get serious donations from local businesses. One VT town refused a scoreboard from Coke because sugar is evil.

One company I interviewed with a couple of years ago made scoreboards. When I asked about the company union, they responded that the unions bought a *lot* of their scoreboards to give to local schools, with the union logo on them, of course.

Agreed! This is needed for the brightest as well as the slowest. Again, progressivism: spreading misery equally.

There wouldn't be any room left for lawyers.

do

Years ago, when the wife and I were co-presidents of the TPA, we ran summer sessions at our local elementary school. We paid teachers their normal pay, and charged only a nominal student tuition of (IIRC) $35 per course. We made over $20K profit for the TPA for two months of sessions :-) ...Jim Thompson

I managed to light my bed on fire as a kid, but also put it out before it could do any real harm. I was scared s*itless about that, and was very happy that my mother only scolded me for "playing with matches [again]." :-)

After that little incident I went out and bought a fire extinguisher and mounted it to the side of my desk!

I have a friend who managed to light his parents' field on fire; it had to be put out by the fire department -- his (first) scolding was from the fire chief!

Small companies aren't necessarily that much better -- at work here we had a guy who was charging a LiIon battery from an RC aircraft with a bench power supply. He somehow managed to overcharge it or something failed internally, the battery caught fire (really taking off, too, of course), and to this day there's still a good-sized scorch mark on the linoleum he knocked it onto (off of his lab bench) before stomping it out. He received some burns to his hands and said he was fine, although we made him go to urgent care anyway just to make sure none of the burns weren't worse than they looked (happily they weren't).

At the time we didn't have any fire extinguishers in the building.

By the end of the next day we had several. :-)

---Joel

Well, assuming I am running a private school, it makes good advertising and public relations. Also, CAN serve as a motivator for some students...

Charlie

The service manager (new hire, at the time) plugged the LiPo batteries into the wrong charger. That made a pretty good fire, too.

The biggest "bomb" disaster I had was when I was making a mortar. It went off (really stupid design, in hindsight) prematurely, burning both hands pretty severely (mostly 2nd, but some 3rd degree). I didn't get the emergency room until the next day. One of the teachers saw my hands and called my mother to get me.

The fire department is right across the road. They came over a while back and gave us all fire extinguisher training.

...and they've never been used.

do

You aren't making sense. You say you're going to keep the same teachers, and TEACH. Not gonna happen.

Wow, glad you survived!

Yep, that's true.

I was burning some plastic once with my older brother watching and managed to drip a 1/4" or so blob on his hand, giving him a pretty good burn. I think he's still a little ticked about that to this day, as I believe you can still see a mark if you look closely (and this was now 30+ years ago!). :-)

---Joel

Charlie,

The issue isn=92t that government pension plans exist; the problem is that the contracts promise unsustainable rewards. The returns are guaranteed regardless of the economic climate. When the economic returns are bad and investment returns down, the programs must rely on the taxpayer to keep the funds rolling.

SS excess funds eventually became another resource that the government could tap in order to fuel the drunken madness / fiscal mismanagement that got us to where we are today. The silly policy that allowed the transfer of the excess into the general fund is what eventually prevented the system from being solvent way into the future.

The other problem is that the average guy retiring today will suck out more than his lifetime pay in. We old farts are just living longer than what the system was designed to support.

regards

I made pipe bombs out of thinwall conduit, too. They never went off prematurely, obviously. ;-)

Of course. You have them, so they will never be needed. ;-)

You can't really see my scars. The worst of the burns covered the whole palm so there isn't any distinct line. Neosporin really works, too. The other hand only had a few second degree burns on the fingers. That was in '66, so it's been a while too. ;-)

No, the issue is that there is nothing backing up the pensions, other than the credit of the governmental entity. Unlike many corporate pensions, there is no actuarially sound fund behind them.

There is no choice. The government can't "invest" money without taking over. There is no way that SS *could* work.

That's only part of the problem, and not a difficult one to solve.

er

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SS excess funds were loaned to the government in exchange for government bonds paying interest. What else would you do with excess SS funds that need investing, put it under a mattress? What does any private investor do with excess funds to invest with no risk?

-Bill

He doesn't take it out of one pocket and put it in another, then write one pocket an IOU.

Eww! Speaking of burning plastic - in 1969 or 1970 or so, I was stationed at Keesler AFB, Biloxi, MS. Tech school. On the weekends, we'd walk to the white sand beaches on the Gulf, and drink beer and screw around. One day, I took a nap in the sun, and I got the mother of all sunburns - I peeled literally in sheets. One time, sitting on the toilet, I pulled about a

It burned like that plastic you mention, and even made a blob that dripped and landed on my foot. I decided not to do that any more.

Cheers! Rich

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No, he takes it out of his pocket, puts it in the government's pocket, and gets in return an IOU in the form of a (no risk) treasury bill, bond, or note.

-Bill

No, stop confiscating the money of the wage-earners, and let _them_ put it under a mattress.

They'd have a better chance of a return on their savings than they do now of recovering their illusory savings under the socialist system.

Thanks, Rich