intuitive ink

Part II -- Closing Compensation Loopholes In Part I we established that for this thought experiment, we need a new way of thinking about our be- loathed tax system.  It just doesn't make sense to keep gluing new doodads (exclusions / extensions) onto the old one; the best thing we can do with the rusted old contraption is to toss it out and start over from scratch.  Starting from scratch, we can implement 21st century concepts, materials, and thinking applicable to our 21st century economy. Because this new system of taxation is being designed specifically to encourage businesses, organizations and/or entities with excessive profits to more generously reward the "low men on the totem pole," the progressive tax bracket system makes the most sense.  A business can choose to minimize total tax payments by paying its workforce more, or it can voluntarily pay more in tax than it must to when it chooses to keep profits concentrated among the few at the top.  This s...

Part I:  Income Tax One of my favorite time-killing activities is fairly nihilistic. It involves thought experiments where obviously broken systems are annihilated: figuratively blown apart, sending all the blazing, broken, smoking pieces careening into smithereens.  No more  WD-40 hastily applied to the rusting, booby-trapped secret compartments designed for special circumstances almost two centuries (or even two decades) ago. Indeed, the defunct system we're talking about here is the US Tax Code.   Not just income tax (which gets most of the attention), but sales tax, property tax, the death tax, etc -- the whole shebang.  We need to re-engineer the very framework underlying concepts and philosophy of tax. In Part I today, we'll focus on the Income Tax, because income is the source of all the grease in the wheels in our economy.  After studying and pondering the current tax code, which starts taxing AT 25 PERCENT ($70,700 for a married couple), ev...

" They get away with this treatment of people because they call these men who work under them "sub-contractors," which essentially means that they need to have a CPA to understand all the wonderful tax deductions available to them.  If only those construction workers had business degrees!  " My father was a construction worker. He measured out, cut, and lifted heavy sheetrock onto bare frames of houses, fitting things together like puzzle pieces with precision and speed. He did this manual labor in the most extreme climates from Las Vegas to Alaska to Utah to Florida. He wore flannels and had a beard, and drank whiskey to ease the pain of the dental work he needed, but couldn't afford. He passed away  too young, as a single parent: zero health insurance, no life savings, no life insurance.  He spent his life building houses for other people, but passed away in a small trailer that didn't even belong to him. Everything he'd worked f...

As far as airports go, there is only one word to describe DXB, AKA Dubai International Airport: Big. Actually, scratch that.  There are two words to describe it:  big and busy.   This was my first experience in an airport outside the US, so I can't say I had any expectations upon arrival.  My initial mindset when getting off the plane was to immediately find my connecting gate. . . But then I remembered that I would have quite a bit of time to kill.   Local time in Dubai was 7:20 PM when we landed, and my connecting flight to Bangalore wasn't scheduled to leave until 3:30 AM.   Eight full hours with change to kill:  more than enough time fully restore the blood flow through my veins, to wander around the 18.6 million square feet  of floor space and become as acquainted as I could with the International Airport Scene . One of my first challenges was refueling.  While the airplanes in the 90 degree heat outside were sucking down on w...

"Ice is way too dangerous for airplanes  . . . "   The conversation with my little brother seemed a distant memory as I sat shivering in my airplane seat with nothing more than a thin blanket to cover my lap.  I'd been carefully following the route on the screen in front of me, and we were just southeast of the dot that represented the Northernmost place on the planet. Although my seat in this Boeing 777 was an aisle seat, it was toward the rear of the airplane.  So only the aisle and two seats separated me from that little window which offered a real-world peek of the Arctic. The people occuping those two seats were a couple -- tall, blond, Nordic-looking.  They wore matching white sweaters and khaki pants.  They did everything in a strange kind of synchronization, including consuming massive quantities of red wine.  I lost track of the number of mini-bottles they'd consumed, but luckily for me, they also visited the lavatory simultaneously. ...

Why hello, India.  Barely 12 hours on your soil, and already do I know that this will be a beautiful and enduring friendship.       Please forgive me; my body clock is still completely whacked after spending most of the last two days in transit.  On Thursday afternoon, I stepped onto a massive people-transporting machine.  This thing was somehow able to not only comfortably hold more than 300 other people and their 300 pounds each of luggage, but also to lift everybody and their stuff 35,000 feet into the sky with no cables , and to achieve 0.8x Mach, and to maintain these and other baffling altitudes and velocities for nearly 13 hours straight.  I am not making this up.  More remarkably still, after ~13 hours and 8,600 miles of bench-pressing gravity, this people and luggage-moving miracle was to pop out some tires and land everybody and everything safely on the ground in Dubai.   At least, that was the plan.  ( As a disclaimer, I'...

Big news. My visa application cleared . . . the very first entry in my passport book is for (drumroll, please) . . . India! As it turns out, the little bit of हिन्दी (Hindi) I know won't be quite *as* useful where I'm going, so am going to try to learn some ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada) expediently.     It's not necessary to learn, but will be fun; many (most) Indians also know English. Why India? Why now? Don't I already have enough fodder and adventure for the Great American Novel ? And when the heck am I going to post the next chapters? Patience, my friends. Yes and no. Basically what the beans boil down to* is that I'm at at a place in life where I just know this is the right thing for me to do right now. *this is a rather nuanced joke; it's OK to not get it. But if you do get it, I will love you even more ;)

It is either the scent of a memory, or the memory of a scent that prods me to keep poking through the charred, black rubble. The December sky was always gray, and it was so odd to be standing in what used to be our cozy, dark living room underneath that gray sky. Inside outside. The outside all burned up, some of the inside left, if singed, around the edges. We poked among the snow-dusted rubble. Any salvageable item would be carefully plucked from the charred black, placed in a pile. The scent of the memory was heady, almost sticky. Every salvageable item we'd find would have this cloying scent, the scent of a fireplace, almost sweet. The most impressionable image burned into my five-year old mind: the melted gaping maw of the glass and plastic television. We moved across town, where I had to start finishing Kindergarten, attending a new school. My memories of the days and months that followed were, in a word, weepy. In hindsight, it seems kind of silly, but still do I rem...