Up here, that means winter is coming. Sadly the days of flip flops are over, for most people. I tend to wear flip flops as long and often as I can, even in the snow. Only when it’s 4 inches deep or more do I switch to boots.
Yesterday after Jag’s cross country race and Ty’s soccer game, Lori and I headed down to Big D to get her hair done. As soon as I dropped her off I headed over to Nordstroms with a pair of Jag’s dress pants and told them I need some an inch bigger in the waist and 6 inches longer in the legs. He’s now in adult clothes at his size (30/36) so I had to shop the sale racks. I found two pair of Hugo Boss pants on sale for $146 a pair. That sounds like a lot but in today’s prices, it’s really reasonable. Next up was a couple things for Lori and then I was off to pick her up. We had to stop back at Nordstroms to exchange one item and then had a salad before heading up the hill. Finally around 8pm we were home.
For most of the ride home, Lori was on the phone with the wife of a patient from Aspen who is having a 6 hour surgery Tuesday. The wife is pretty high maintenance but after 90 minutes on the phone, her and Lori are now new BFF’s. (best friends forever, ha ha)
Today the boys have some studying and we have some cleaning. I think we’ll run d0wn to the storage unit to get some snow boots and winter clothes out of storage. Taxes are coming up on the 15th, uggh. We’ve already sent in enough money to buy a new car and probably (we don’t know yet), have to send in just as much again. I don’t think our tax system is very fair as we pay more and more and people that don’t work get more and more free stuff and our Country’s debt just continues to go up and up. If anyone ran a business like that, they be out of business in a few months. Yet our politicians just go on spending OUR money on anything that’ll get them votes to stay in power. I’m sure if they were spending their own money, things would be different. Oh well, I need to stop before I ruin my day. But people, you have a choice, forget that it’s Hillary vs Trump. What it really comes down to is more of the same or something different. No way can any sane person say “oh yea, give me more of the same cause the Country is in great shape and headed in the right direction”. If you’re honest with yourself, you know this is true, Vote for our kids future, please, as that’s how you need to look at things, and if you do, you have to vote for Trump, period.
Guess I’ll run, Lori put a second comforter on our bed last night so she’s back in it with her coffee. The sun is kissing the top of the mountain out the window and is slowly working it’s way down the slope to lighten and warm up our little town. It’s almost 8am and time to get moving. Enjoy your day and be thankful for what you have rather than dwelling on what you want, you’ll be much happier, trust me.
If you’re older and plan on leaving anything at all for your children or grandchildren, you also have to NOT vote for Hillary. You see she now wants to tax all inheritance at a rate of 65%. Don’t think this affects you, well, read on…
Hillary’s Huge Estate-Tax Hike
09/30/2016
“Hillary Clinton Proposes 65% Top Rate for Estate Tax†blared a headline in The Wall Street Journal. Since the current top statutory tax rate on estates is 40 percent, Clinton’s proposal is nothing if not audacious. I can’t recall Barack Obama, our most left-leaning president, ever calling for a 65 percent increase in tax rates for the rich.
Going after inheritances and estates is textbook Marxism. That is not an exaggeration. The third plank in Karl Marx’s 10-point platform for achieving socialism through democratic means — see his 1848 textbook to communism, The Communist Manifesto — was the abolition of inheritances. To repeat: it was point three in Marx’s 10-point plan.
Why They Love Estate Taxes
For a long line of communists and socialists, the animus against inheritances has both an economic and a sociological purpose. Economically, the tax is part of the overall Marxian/socialist war against private property. Sociologically, Marx sought to weaken if not eliminate the traditional nuclear family. Clinton and her progressive allies have recently succeeded in weakening the traditional family by redefining marriage, and so it comes as no surprise now that she is extending the battle against families to the economic front by seeking more confiscatory taxes on the estates of families.
I have written before that Hillary Clinton gives every appearance of never having taken Economics 101. Taxes on estates are economically harmful, because they destroy capital. While running for the Democratic nomination, one of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s favorite campaign lines was the statement that the very rich have far more money than they could possibly spend. That may well be true. But what neither he nor Clinton understands is that those large pools of wealth are more valuable to Americans of modest means than they are to the rich people who own them.
The Economic Function of Inherited Wealth
Taxing 65 percent of large private fortunes will not significantly affect the lifestyles of the super-rich. But if the government taxes that wealth and transfers it to non-rich Americans, most of it will vanish in current consumption. By contrast, when the rich are allowed to retain ownership of wealth, much of it becomes the capital that is invested in business enterprises where it provides jobs for non-rich Americans and produces goods and services that uplift society’s standard of living. Like the old Chinese proverb says, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.†Capital is better than a short-term handout, for it enables men and women to support those families for many years.
My late mentor, Grove City College professor Dr. Hans Sennholz, explained another economically destructive aspect of estate taxes in his book, Death and Taxes. Many estates are not in the form of cash, but are working businesses. When the government demands a huge sum of cash from a deceased person’s estate, often the only way the heirs can raise the cash is to dismember, shrink, or liquidate the business. Who does this hurt most? Answer: the middle-class workers that were employed by those businesses. Where is the social justice in that, Mrs. Clinton?
In one respect, I have to give credit to Mrs. Clinton for her proposal. She is right to inform voters of what taxes she wants to raise in order to fund the massive spending increases she has proposed. But the amount of revenue that she hopes to obtain from increasing the estate tax will be less than she envisions. The much higher rate will incentivize many rich people to make increased use of the same legal devices (trusts and foundations) that Mrs. Clinton herself employs to shield her immense wealth from the clutches of the taxman.
Combined with her grand visions of social engineering — plans to involve the state ever more intimately in our daily lives — Hillary Clinton’s enthusiastic embrace of the Marxian policy of transferring more inherited wealth from families to government will take us down a very dark path.
So, who do you believe, Hillary or a Nobel Prize winning economist. Stop the madness, please, vote with your brain, not your emotions, God Bless
