We gotta love our country. It's what we're trained to do, practically from birth. And, yes, I do love this country: The U. S. of A. I guess this is part of why it makes me feel sick to see how our personal freedoms are being regulated and taxed into oblivion, all in the name of keeping this a "free" country.
What's free about it, anymore? Our own president has just regulated the heck outta health care. Obamacare - because the government knows better than the real doctors how you should be treated; in fact, they'll debate whether you're worth the cost, before deciding if you should live, or die! Isn't that the whole premise of Obamacare? To let a committee of people with little or no medical knowledge decide if a person is valuable enough to get the treatment they so desperately need? Oh, no! That sounds suspiciously like government subsidized euthenasia! Sorry, little Tommy can't get his bone marrow transplant, because you and your family don't appear to be able to contribute enough to society. Blah...
Tobacco? Oh, no!!! Let's face it, folks: there are a lot of people in this country who smoke. A lot of them are rich. A lot more of them are poor. Obama, himself, has been seen with the occasional cigarette. So, I have to ask a quick question: Who is hurt the most, when the government taxes tobacco products at such a high rate? In Missouri, my own state, the government is paid about 48% of the profit from each pack of cigarettes sold! That's roughly $2.03 per pack, being paid directly to the government.* Half of the price tag! That's ridiculous! Especially when you consider who is being hurt the most by this massive tax rate - the poor. That's right. The rich can easily afford this "small" boost to the price of cigarettes; the poor, who scrimp and save as it is, end up paying a much larger percentage of their income to these insane tax rates. There are a lot of relatively new taxes that have gone through, in the past few years, that impact the poor much harder than they hit the rich. In fact, the next subject is one that impacts one of the, overall, poorest classes of people in this country: our Farmers.
That's right, now we get to talk about cow farts. Today, there are approximately just over 90 million cows in the united states; actually, the population is stated as "cattle," which may include other animals, as well. In the past, there were once herds of buffalo across much of the continent - in number, perhaps 70 million.* Buffalo are larger than cows, yet so similar that the species can actually interbreed (leading to "Texas Long-Horn Cattle), so... it makes sense to me that buffalo, in their heyday, actually farted out more methane than all the cows in the United States do, today! But, our legislators, being such fair-minded people, (especially the liberals who look oh-so-good when they pose for pics at ecological functions) are trying to decide whether to tax farmers based on how many cows they own... because of the methane emissions from cow farts!! Yeah, do that. What's that tax rate they were talking about? $70 per head? Let's see how that works out: about half of the farmers currently raising cattle end up losing their farms, which have, in some cases, been in the family for over 100 years, because raising cattle becomes too costly - the price per head at the sale barn isn't all that good, after all. The farmland gets chopped up into subdivisions for people who want their own "farms" (these 5 to 40 acre plots do NOT make farms... they just annoy real farmers. Not to mention all of the wannabe "farmers" who think the REAL farmers in the area should follow the same rules that are expected inside the city limits... REAL farmers do things a certain way, because they cannot afford to do it the "city" way!) The rest of these family farms are bought up by mega-farm corporations, which are about as much like a family farm as a shark is to a goldfish. What happens now? The price of beef FINALLY begins to rise, and those mega-farms, and few remaining family farmers, start making a tiny bit of profit; enough to cover expenses, perhaps. What happens to the price of steak at the grocery store? It goes sky-high, leaving, once again, meat for the rich, and a weak beef-flavored broth for the poor.
It just about drives a guy nuts, when you think about how much the government is over-regulating, and filling in the gaps with repressive taxation. No wonder we're in the grips of such a nasty recession.
Hey. Was I ranting, just then?
Good.
Maybe next time, I'll rant a little about democratic education... ummm... I mean, the "no child left behind" program.
C'ya soon.
