Patriotranter's Weblog

All Americans are aware that the U.S. economy is in a nose dive. An economy that is getting perpetually worse by unethical corporate management and ignorant political governance.

The government continues to spend and legislate ever more expensive programs creating larger debt for all current and future Americans.

There is a way to remedy many of our problems and that is a resurgence of the U.S. manufacturing base.

How do we do that?

Increase jobs. Increase Tax revenue. Decrease unemployment. Decrease costs of government programs.

Here is a little idea of mine.

The surest way to increase tax revenue is to create jobs. Preferably in the manufacturing sector. Read this as what it is BOYCOTT CHINA/INDIA/MEXICO.Create a REAL fair trade program only allowing imports to match export, not including raw materials – all raw material exports should cease immediately – we can do the manufacturing conversion domestically instead and export a finished product

Here is some fun information.

Walmart currently has an ad that claims they save the average US Family $3100.00 per year no matter where they shop.

Now everyone knows that almost everything Walmart sells is made overseas (China) so let us do a little mathematics exercise.

Multiply that $3100 times the approximate 100 million households in the U.S. and you get $310,000,000,000 divide that number by the approximate number of unemployed people in the US which is estimated to be around 7.5 million and you get $41,000+  per unemployed person

Based on this simple math if Walmart were to require everything they sold be manufactured domestically they could potentially create 7.5 million jobs paying on average over $40,000 per year

So if we assume the above is true(Hint:It is), unemployment in the United States and the costs that go with it would be eliminated saving the government(we taxpayers that is) serious coin (about 2.5 billion per week nationwide) and also result in an extra 30 billion in taxes paid into the governments coffers. Combined this amounts to about 156 Billion on the plus side for the government. Almost enough to pay for the cost of how much Obama/Pelosi claim is required to seize control of your health care and regulate how you live and when you die.

So based on my assumptions ending all trade with China will end much of the problems currently facing the US.

Unfortunately the inverse of this math is also true – due to Walmarts solid presence as The Major retailer and the outsourcing habits of this heinous company and greedy, uncaring nature of it’s executives and the  heirs of it’s founder Sam Walton, they will not change. The future will not improve for the U.S. as long as China is our key supplier and as long as corporations practice the near treasonous behavior of outsourcing .

All countries need to be agriculturally, economically, and industrially independent of each other to guarantee that another global recession does not occur.

A few years ago Al Gore was awarded a Nobel prize. This was a nadir for the history of the award. The presentation of this previously prestigious award to Al Gore proved that all one had to do to win the award was to by a hypocrite who was made famous by issuing half truths and hyperbole.

This award was an insult to all who had won or even been nominated before hand.

I thought at the time, that after this low point in the history of the award it had nowhere to go but up. But, my mistake was in forgetting that humans have a knack for surprising disappointment. The recent actions of the Nobel Awards Committee in honoring Barack Obama with the once prestigious award proves that all one has to do to win is Nothing. Isn’t there some famous quote that goes something like “All that is needed for evil to win is for good men to do nothing”. Well it looks like evil triumphs. Not that I am calling Obama evil mind you, but he certainly isn’t a good man. If he were even a half way decent human being he would decline the award and say quite simply “I hope I have the chance to win this again when I have earned it”. Of course we know he would never say that. After all anyone who is so arrogant as to think they can sway the votes of the IOC into choosing a particular city obviously isn’t too in touch with reality.

There were several hundred other more qualified nominees who were over looked but if I think just a little out of the box I can think of one individual far more deserving than Barack Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize. That person would be President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yes Mr. Ahmadinejad has an idea for peace that requires the elimination of all Zionists and the entire Zionist state (READ: Israel) and obviously that is unconscionable but you have to admit that at least he has a plan, where Obama has NOTHING. Even the Israeli foreign minister agrees with the Iranian president saying that there will not be peace in the middle east  read the article from the BBC here so if Israel isn’t doing everything possible to achieve peace and Ahmadinejad has a solution that will result in peace than by the demonstrated  criteria of the Nobel committee he should be given the award. After all isn’t any plan regardless of how unethical better than Obama’s NOTHING.

I have to ask . Is the Nobel prize now a consolation prize for ignorant politicians who have already failed or are destined to failure ?

I truly feel sorry for the people of Norway who have been embarrassed by this pathetic lack of judgment of a once august body. Poor Alfred Nobel must be spinning in his grave to see what the heirs to his legacy have done.

We can only hope that maybe someone such as Bill Gates or some other wealthy individual will create an award system of their own design and we can say good bye to the Nobel. Let them put it to bed before they devalue it any further.

Awarding Al Gore the Nobel Peace Prize rendered the value of said prize to next to nothing. Awarding Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize literally and inarguably rendered the value of the prize to NOTHING !

This is a continuation of my previous post Health Care Reform Part 1. In this post I will discuss some of the absurdities of the current health care system and possible solutions to improve the program.

Okay, in Part 1 we have agreed there is a problem with health care and we have demonstrated that the Obama plan will be a very costly failure, so let’s talk of a genuine solution.

Here it is !

Are you ready for it ?

I bet not !

100% Socialized Health Care

Yep, you read it right. All health care costs must be paid for via the government by taxes applied to the populace. But before you flame me, back away from the keyboard and read why this doesn’t have to be executed as badly or as costly as so many people are afraid it might.

The current process goes something like this:

Scenario 1

You become sick, you weigh the probability of what illness you have being covered by your insurance policy, you decide that you are too sick to ignore the problem and try to make an appointment with your doctor, they can’t fit you in right away so you have to wait another day or two before an appointment can be made. You show up at the doctors office twenty minutes before your scheduled appointment in dire hope that there has been a cancellation, but there have been no cancellations, instead there have been several walk-ins so the doctor is running an hour late. If you cancel now you will be billed a cancellation fee so you decide to stay. Even though you have insurance you still have to give them money to cover your co-pay (who knows what the logic behind this is but someone somewhere has gotten rich off it) you then wait for two hours as the original one hour behind schedule was really a pipe dream all the while being infected with whatever everyone else in the waiting room is hacking up.  You finally get in to see the doctor who spends five minutes in consult writes a prescription for the drug that he gets the best commission from the drug company to sell and sends you on your way. If you are lucky you have a prescription drug card that covers 100% of the costs of your prescription drugs, but you are a hard working, law abiding US citizen which means you are not lucky and the particular drug your doctor wrote the ‘script for is not available in a generic form manufactured in Asia, it is only available in the genuine copy write formula so you have to pay 50% of the very high cost. It is expensive because the manufacturer has to make as much money as possible before their patent runs out and generic varieties produced overseas start being shipped in by the megaton undercutting their production and development costs.

Some may think I’m joking but anyone familiar with health care knows that the sad sorry above is all too common of an occurrence.

Now let’s examine the process in a properly run socialized system. You are sick, you go to the doctors, you wait (Yes, the waiting will still be there until massive numbers of new medical professionals are educated and inserted into the system, this will take YEARS so get used to the wait.) You see the doctor, you are handed the necessary prescription, you go home. No money changes hands, no forms to fill out, no claims to make. No being hassled by the insurance company that they are refusing your coverage, no being hassled by the doctors office that you are responsible for the costs as the insurance company is refusing to cover you. Most importantly no getting turned away at the doctors office because they no longer accept your particular insurance due to repeated non payment.

“How can this happen?” you ask. By taxes. Everyone who lives in a particular county will pay a percentage of the total cost of health care administered in said county.  I encourage it to be done on a county by county basis as the average county already has the necessary medical infrastructure in place and compiling a budget for all the various health care providers should not be too difficult. You then simply divide that sum by the number of people residing in the county and you have the base amount that needs to be charged to each individual.

First let us discuss actual operating costs vs. the cost of insurance premiums. If you don’t have health insurance and you go to the hospital you can figure that a visit with any type of surgery as well as diagnostic procedures are going to cost you about $150,000.00 assuming you are only in the hospital for a week or two. If you do have insurance the company will typically negotiate the cost down to less than $100,000.00. Still very expensive but it does reveal the true cost of medical care compared to what the medical profession would like to charge. There is a distinct lack of ethics on both sides of the business. So now that we now the actual operating costs of the health care industry are far below what their billing practices would have us believe. We also know that a significant portion of our insurance premiums go towards fuelling the operational costs and towards profit margins to boost stock prices of the insurance companies. We can now get an honest quote from the health care industry for total operational maintenance and eliminate the middle man bureaucracy of insurance companies.

So for the sake of argument let’s assume that the cost for operating every hospital, doctors office, clinic, and medical practitioner in our fictitious county is $1 Billion dollars (yes this is a seriously inflated figure but whatever the TRUE cost of operations is you can pretty much be sure that it is more than 30% less than what insurance companies are bringing in now, as they have to cover their exorbitantly paid chief executives as well as an entire staff of tens of thousands of claims processors)  . Now let us consider that the population of the county is 500,000 people. We divide the billion dollar costs by the total population and we get $2,000.00 per year per person. If we eliminate the insurance company profit from this figure it falls to $1400.00 per person. Still a very large amount of money, but remember the basis is $1 billion it is very likely that number is extremely high and the final cost may be as little as $200 million which would further reduce that per person cost to $400.00 per person.

What I am basically trying to say is that no one currently has any idea what the true cost of health care is, they just know the current system is very expensive and poorly managed.

The goals are now to discern the bottom line cost of health care. To find ways to reduce that amount even further. To increase the quality of the care you receive.  To make sure no one is getting a free ride from honest tax paying citizens.

Many of you are concerned that once government inserts itself into the health care industry quality will plummet. Normally I would say you are correct that is why my plan prohibits government from being involved with the decision making process. You pay your taxes. You get health care. All decisions on your care will fall onto the shoulders of you and your doctors regardless of the costs involved. Also anyone who receives medical care will be required to fill out feedback on their caregivers. This feedback will be used to assess wage evaluations and future budget predictions for the particular facility from which you received care. This would be handled by an independent association of unpaid citizens.  

How can we reduce the cost of health care ?

Scholarship programs ! Any prospective student interested in a career in the health care industry should be given 100% free college tuition. Caveats that apply would be the requirement to being a US born citizen. No foreign students would be allowed to participate in the program. There would have to be a certain level of ethical behavior by the student. No arrests. No controversial activities. Obviously a minimum level of grades would have to be maintained. Finally they would have to commit to 15 years of service at wages defined by the local standard of living, no more exorbitant salaries, but yes they would be compensated very well indeed.

By reducing the salaries of medical practitioners you will rapidly drive down the costs of healthcare and as such be able to hire far more doctors, nurses, physician aides and what not. This will rapidly increase the quality of care whilst not inflating the cost of said care.

Further driving down the cost of healthcare will be how illegal aliens treatment is handled. Currently they are treated, at the cost of the taxpayers due to chronic lack of insurance amongst this demographic, they are then allowed to return to society. From now on when an illegal enters a hospital for care they will be given the most basic care to sustain life and then turned over to the INS for immediate deportation. It is assumed that illegal immigrants cost honest citizens more than  $250 BILLION in health care costs although this number is questionable due to the fact no one is entirely sure how many illegal aliens are in the country.

There are dozens of other things the country can do to revitalize the health care industry. One thing for certain is that sweeping change is a necessity and that.

There are also hundreds of potential questions I left unanswered for the sake of brevity (too late I know!) an example of which is regarding care whilst travelling on vacation or for business and they are easy enough questions to answer. Hopefully I will receive some excellent feedback on this concept and if so will launch a Part 3 that will handle any questions posed. Thank you for your time

patriotranter 

One of the current Hot Topics is how Barack Obama wants to regulate executive pay at private companies as stated here in the Chicago Tribune.

The whole concept has capitalists up in arms. Now the Obama administration claims it is only for companies that take federal bailout money during hard times we have to ask ourselves this. Once the government claims a toe hold on some aspect of public life do they ever let it go or do they try to take more ? Democrats for sure are the worst culprits in this type of a scenario, they would love to have every one in the U.S. sucking off the government teat so they can control us as the sheep they believe us to be.

I almost want to agree with the Obama regency that this would be a good policy but you have to wonder just how far could the government push the law. Here’s a fallacious and intentionally hyperbolic possibility. A professional sports team wants to locate in your area, they will not do this unless they get tax incentives and financial assistance to build a new billion dollar stadium. So the government issues a bond and maybe tacks on a half percent to the local sales tax to raise the money. Now officially the sports team has accepted government money so does that mean the government can set all the salaries for the highest paid team associates ? I believe the law would say YES !

Do a quick internet search under Obama Limits Executive Pay and you will get a few hundred thousand hits. Unfortunately many are only discussing the issue and protesting the audacity of Obama to even consider this a viable solution. Although I don’t read anywhere of anyone offering any kind of actual solution. So me being me, here is my solution to the executive pay conundrum.

CEO compensation packages are disgusting, not in the amount of pay but based on pay for performance. Being paid a few hundred million over the course of two or three months whilst driving a companies stock into the toilet is unacceptable.

First of all CEOs and all corporate executives should be prohibited from owning or trading the company stock in any way. I know the concept behind this is that the CEO will perform well increasing stock value and reaping a reward for their actions and in an ethical world this would work. The reality is that execs manipulate the financial reports artificially elevate stock prices and cash in on a bogus wind fall. So the solution is to bar them from being shareholders, they now have no incentive for creative financing.

Next give them a base pay just like any other salaried worker. Say $20,000.00 to $40,000.00 per month. This is something they will earn no matter what and if they turn out to be idiots and can’t perform there is no big payout when they get canned.

Finally, they get the end of the year bonus based on a percentage of taxes paid on claimed profits. This could be any amount theoretically and even vary from 1% to 100%. Example: A company claims $1 Billion in profits of which they pay $300 Million in taxes (combined state and federal) the CEO is then eligible for a bonus equal to a percent of that $300 Million be it the 1% $3 million or the 100% $300 Million.

With this scenario the CEO gets a tidy sum, the shareholders realize growth and the government gets a nice chunk of change as well. Another benefit is that creative accounting practices, devised to claim losses instead of profits to avoid taxes, will go away as the execs will want to pay the highest amount of taxes they can so their own pay packages improve.

This is a very simple solution to a very complex problem and although my figures are purely theoretical, they would work.

thanks for reading and please leave a comment

patriotranter

In the United States property taxes are currently calculated based on how much a home is worth. This is probably the most asinine system that could ever have been put together.

Assessed value of a home is based on an arbitrary number derived from calculations on the size of the home, the size of the lot, upgrades made to the home and lastly how much the home was purchased for. The key problem with this is that just because someone is willing to pay a certain amount for the home does not mean the home is worth anywhere near that amount of money. People willing to pay way more than a home is worth is one of the key reasons the real estate market imploded. Second only to avaricious unethical lending institutions.

If you pay any attention to the news, or if you are a homeowner, something that will crop up fairly often is people suing for unfairly assessed property. Rightly so too because technically property only has value to the people who live on it and those who wish to buy it. But if the government deems that your property would serve the greater good being used in a manner different than which you use it. They (the government) can come in and take your property from you by using the so called eminent domain clause. Now under this clause the government is supposed to buy your home from you at a fair market value, although it must purely be coincidence that what the government decides is fair value when trying to buy your house in no way matches what they decide is fair value when assessing the taxes on your property.

The only fair way for government to collect property taxes should be based on

• The square footage of the lot
• The square footage of structures used for actual residence
• The square footage of structures used for storage

Each of these criteria would be calculated at a different rate. For example you may be charged $.10 for each square foot the lot requires, $1.00 for each square foot of residential structures and another $.50 for each square foot of storage structure (ie. barns, sheds, carports, unfinished garages or basements and such)

Obviously the actual rate schedule would vary per geographical region and actual usage of the property. Although the taxing agency should be responsible for including an itemized report on how your tax dollars were being spent. Including all the necessary municipal functions, Police, Fire, Road Maintenance, etc. Any time the particular government wanted to increase budgets for these agencies they should be required to enclose a prospectus explaining how it would benefit the tax payer, how much it would raise the particular taxes for them and a ballot so the tax payer could vote directly on whether they approved of the new budget or not.

School taxes would be calculated in the same manner but be collected separately for the purpose of a more accurate budget and the ability to keep a more focused eye on how the school district was performing financially and academically.

With a socialized health program the hospital and medical maintenance costs could also be absorbed this way thus freeing the average family of the hardship of dealing with insurance companies and the bureaucrat filth that work with them. I discuss Socialized Medicine elsewhere in this blog

Now if you think that this program is allowing renters to evade taxes you are wrong. Rented properties would be taxed at a higher rate than regular owned properties to compensate for excessive enforcement required at these properties. Every home must meet certain building and livability codes and rented properties are more likely to violate these codes than properties lived in by the home owner. These code violations require more housing inspectors and police and fire enforcement to handle and as such they would be billed appropriately. Higher taxes on rented properties would make it possible to inspect these properties on a yearly basis to ensure they meet codes for health and safety.

Now I know this mini-festo does not cover all aspects of the property tax problem, it is just a simple guideline pointing out that things could be done better than they are now.

If you agree with the idea stated here there is no need to contact me – Contact your local politicians instead and tell them to do something right for a change.

Thank you for your time

PatriotRanter

Now even though I call myself the patriotranter it does not mean I have only a political mind. I do often think about the tragedy that today’s modern families are facing.

Since World War II, women as housewives have been entering the work force at record levels. Few children of the baby boomer era were fortunate enough to be raised not only with two parents who managed to not get divorced but also with a mother who was home all the time to give these children a proper familial environment.

You can easily find a direct correlation between teenage drinking, drug use and even pregnancy by wether or not the child was raised by a parent or raised as a latchkey kid by absentee parents.

Upon entering the new millennia there is an upsurge in parents placing their children in daycare or various after school programs to ”keep them safe” whilst the parents selfishly pursue their own goals.

With both parents working there are certain inevitable events that occur. The child gets sick, school gets canceled for some reason, or plain old school vacations. These events place the parents in a bit of a problem. What to do with the child ? In many households the answer is to simply abandon the child to his or her own devices and hope for the best. Another solution is that one of the parents take time off from work. The parent this falls upon is usually the mother, which leads to women in general getting a bad reputation at work due to their unreliability.

It is my fervent belief that there should always be one parent home to take care of the children and with a modern day economy where both parents are forced to work (due to their own lifestyles exceeding their incomes – but that is an entirely different topic).

The question is how to provide children with a wholesome home environment whilst parents achieve their own personal goals.

The answer is to have three parents. Two parents who work and one parent to stay home and raise the rugrats. 

Of course religious zealots are against this type of activity, but if you ask them to provide a solid topical reason WHY they are against it the best answer you will get is that The Bible is against it. Now we know that The Bible was written solely for the purpose of controlling the unwashed masses. Religion was the main form of government as little as 1000 years ago and anybody with a modicum of intellect knows that the sole purpose of Government is to control the weak minded Why else do you think churches refer to their attendees as a flock of sheep ? Enough said,  there is no reliable argument against the idea of plural marriage. Now we must describe the benefits of plural marriage.

First let me disabuse anyone on the potential sexism of this idea. I am not insisting that every man be allowed multiple wives. Nor am I suggesting that women be saddled with multiple husbands. Although these two concepts would consist most of the dynamics created by this plan there is another possibility of two couples forming a union and living in harmony.

The upside of this is that several parents can go to work and provide a nice solid income whilst the extra parent can stay home and attend to the needs of the children. Also if the parents were working with an understanding company they could rotate the duties at home and the parents who go to work. Having this kind of labor pool available to them would also benefit companies in untold ways.

In families with four parents you could have a situation where two parents work and the other two parents attend college part time whilst raising the children part time. Upon graduation they could find better paying jobs and rotate the duties of all parents.

I can continue to extol the incredible possibilities of plural relationships but there is not one single reason I can come up with against them. Of course religious leaders and political leaders are against them because this kind of activity strengthens the position of the people and weakens the power of the so called leaders. And that right there is the best benefit of them all.