Thursday, April 18, 2019

Taxation

The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong...the truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I'm not too sure."--Mencken


Chris is recovering well. He's sore today.
Brian got a monster bonus.

Marte got hit over the left ear with a 94 mph fastball and got up grinning.

Pew Research Center projections predict that Hispanic American voters will now be the largest voting minority in the 2020 presidential election, passing black American voters for the first time in United States history. Hispanics have been the largest minority group in the U.S. since 2003. The black community should be really alarmed.


Imagine what Marte could do if he had Crosby's work ethic.

The redacted report will be out today. There will be endless speculation about what was withheld. Reputations will be desperately impugned. But there is a delicious consequence of this investigation. Fearful of the threat of an inadvertent inconsistency--and likely a Martha Stewart indictment as a result--people were less than candid when interviewed. What a shocker. And, if they got subpoenaed to force them to speak, they were protected by law under the grand jury restrictions and they could not be exposed to creative reporting by the Press. So, being a recalcitrant witness was really rewarded.

The DA in Dallas said that he would not prosecute theft of perishables when the cause was poverty.

By the end of this year, credit and debit card fraud is expected to reach $33B globally. While a criminal can steal your credit card just as easily as they can steal your debit card, the consequences are different. Debit cards are not as well protected as credit cards. And since your debit card is linked to your bank account, anyone with your debit card information can have access to all your funds. Worse, debit cards do not have the after theft protection credit cards have. They  should never be used in restaurants, as down payments, in hotels or on travel and never, ever used at non-bank affiliated ATMs.


On this day in 1906, an earthquake estimated at close to 8.0 on the Richter scale hit San FranciscoCalifornia, killing an estimated 3,000 people and toppling numerous buildings. The quake was caused by a slip of the San Andrea Fault over a segment about 275 miles long, and shock waves could be felt from southern Oregon down to Los Angeles.
 

The ex-president of Peru has shot himself over investigations into graft regarding the Brazilian construction company, Odebrec. He was facing imminent arrest. No country outside Brazil has gone as far in prosecuting politicians tied to Odebrec, which admitted in a 2016 plea agreement that it paid nearly $800 million throughout Latin America in exchange for lucrative public-works contracts.
$800 million dollars in South America by a Brazilian construction company. Imagine what it is like here.
So, this little look at the spending of our taxes:
                                             Taxation

Some small examples of the efforts of our taxes:


Since 2016, the Air Force has spent $326,785 on 391 mugs that can be reheated in flight.

Paraguay’s government established an agency in charge of seizing assets back in December 2017. The U.S. government allocated $400,000 to support the new agency’s “strong and sound institutional growth from the beginning and help it become effective at managing and liquidating seized and forfeited assets for the benefit of Paraguayan national interests.” 
$400,000 for asset forfeiture in Paraguay.

In November 2017, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) awarded a $297 million contract to an outside company called Accenture, with the understanding that it would recruit and hire 7,500 more agents in five years. Ten months into the contract the agency had paid Accenture $13.6 million in return for two accepted job offers.


The NIH gave the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation $333,210 to determine whether “younger Mexican Americans in the border cities will be more likely to drink in public venues such as bars and clubs than at home and with family than age matched Mexican American and Whites in Valley cities.”
The Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation group, in 2018, also got $180,304 to study “the high risk behaviors…of young adults who patronize clubs.”
These seem to be examples of the spending patterns of people and administrators who are simply not serious people. But that is not true. A few years ago the Congressional Budget Office testified before congress and their representative was asked, how much money was lost to graft--lost to graft--in the average financial bill before it left Washington? 
"6%," he said.

6%. They are very serious.

No comments: