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Last Monday, i bought gas for $1.85… Today, that same place sold it to me at $2.15….. Holy Crappo!… I’m paying 20 cents more for gas than I did a week ago….
People were still driving.
No one was declaring bankruptcy.
No one lost their home.
No one took public transportation.
All the doomsday scenarios put forth by Ms. Longhurst when she adamantly refused to put a bill on the floor that would save Delawareans $1000 a year in wear in tear on each of their vehicles by keeping our roads free of potholes for just half, half, half, only half of what just occurred at the pump in Delaware last week…
For just half of that jump that didn’t end the world. Delawareans could be fixing roads. putting people to work, and saving big, big bucks by years end off of the non-existent wear and tear of their car… And still be saving $1.50 per gallon over what was being paid less than 6 months ago….
So instead of fixing our roads and saving $1.50 per gallon, we are paying the exact same amount we would have anyways, with oil companies keeping that ten cents instead of it going our highway system…
Sometimes people do stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid things… And when they do, they should get called out on it (ideally it keeps others from doing the same stupid thing next time)…. And not passing a measly 10 cent gas tax last session was as stupid as stupid comes….
Can we get it done now, please? Or is the world going to end tomorrow?
Stealing this from Steve Newton’s Whiskey. because a) it will be awesome, and b) it drives the message better than 5 of my paragraphs every could…
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“In Delaware, folks we have exactly the government we deserve and that the corporations paid for:
–An Insurance Commissioner gouging customers as a proxy for corporate interests …
–A Secretary of Education destroying our schools for corporate interests …
–DNREC committed to the continued gutting of the Coastal Zone Act for corporate interests …
–A Department of Homeland Security and Public Safety that spies on law-abiding citizens and shares the information with corporate interests …
If you’re beginning to see a pattern here, you’re correct.”
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Point Steve made whether he intended or not is that we don’t have a series of battles spread widely across the fields of opportunity. We have one enemy… And if both Delaware and America are ever to again have a hopeful future, it is this enemy we must capture, try, and hang… or behead… or open an airlock door into space…
Now if we can all unite against this enemy we can beat him… We did before, during the Great Depression. Basically we have to minimize the power this enemy has, and bring things back into balance… a balance that for the most part propels forward policies that benefit We, The People, our government, and our local business interests. ..
Here is all we have to do…
Raise taxes on the wealthy.
- 90% tax rate on incomes (both personal and corporate) over 400 billion.
- 80% tax rate on incomes (both) between 100 – 400 billion.
- 70% tax rate on incomes (both) between 50 – 100 billion.
- 60% tax rate on incomes (both) between 25 – 50 billion.
Stop there. The lower echelons are taxed adequately… Notice I said “billions”… What we attempt to do is penalize the accumulation of wealth in very few hands, and encourage the idea of paying less taxes by spreading money around… .. And even if no one ever pays that much in tax because they choose not to make that much money by spending as much as they earn… Everyone still wins. … …
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Secondly. Minimize the impact big money has on politicians… That can be done by returning America to the age-old notion that we force there to always be ties between money dumped and real human beings… If you want to give $100 million dollars to a candidate, you had better find 100,000 people who will donate it for you…. If you can’t, then probably the influence you are trying to impose, is not in the best interest of this nation….
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Third. Make it manditorily clear that anyone can form a union. That punishing anyone for union activity can result in fines and payments 5 times over what that individual would have made if they’d continued working.. Now bosses need to again make sure that their employees are happier without a union, than they would be if they had one. If they can’t do that simple thing, then a union most likely should have already been in place for decades….
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There are more, But none of them matter if the first and second issue are not addressed… Even the third is not critical.. But I want you, for just one moment, stop and imagine how nicer things would be if you were just making $10,000 more than you would be every single year of the rest of your working life.
Do steps one and two and it happens almost immediately. Now imagine how great a country this would be if everyone, everywhere was making $10,000 per year… This needs to be to where we steer…
Privatizing Schools. Gouging Health Insurance. Destroying the Environment. Increasing Domestic Spying. are like a cough, sneeze, runny nose, and scratchy throat… WE need an antibiotic to wipe out the sinus infection. Not cough drops, Nettie pots, Vapo-Rub, or walking around with a tissue stuffed up our nose.
There is one enemy… All parties must join and focus their death rays upon it…..
A tidbit upon which historians will agree, was ultimately why the Democrats were not able to capitalize on the phenomenal results of today’s thriving booming American economy.
Republican policies created this imbalance. But it is Obama who as CEO, gets the blame for its residual effects.
How to fix it? A marginally accurate 73% tax on incomes over $73 million would turn the tables nicely with no residual effect to the other 99.9% of the population…..
This kind…
Doesn’t he have an election coming up soon? If so, how can anyone expect to make a credible run for Attorney General IN THIS STATE, AFTER BEAU BIDEN’S TERM, and be guilty of keeping a tiny little bill, which has no harm but opens all board meetings to being recorded and accessible on line?
Only Simon Barsinister could be against something so inane… Or…. Hmmmmm…. Somebody … With… Something…. To …. Hide….
Hmmm. Now… Why would the surprise future attorney general, be sooooo adamant, even to the point of losing an election over blocking legislation so inane, that all it does is open school boards of all things, open to the public as a service… Anyone can walk into a school board and hear exactly the same thing they’d hear on tape… But sometimes… a diaper needs changed. But sometimes, a family meal needs prepared. Sometimes extra work for the office must be done for deadline the next day…. Darn we say now….I guess we won’t get to know what happened…
So why? Why is HB 23 being put on ice as my compatriot Kilroy is found of saying. Who is soooooo scared someone will find out what is really going on in school board meetings? Is it Charlie Copeland? Is it Mark Murphy? Is it… Darryl Scott? Is it Pete Schwartzkoph?
Hmmm. I wonder if it has any sponsors in the General Assembly right now?
HOLY MOLY!!!!!! LOOK AT THIS!!! Sponsors: Hudson, Sen. Peterson, Reps. Dukes, D. Short, Miro, Peterman, Wilson, Baumbach, Bennett, Mitchell, K. Williams; Sens. Hocker, Lavelle, Simpson, Townsend….
Is Pete Schwartzkoph there?….. No…… Is Bryon Short there? ….. No…… Is Melanie George Smith there?….. No…… Is Valarie Longhurst there?……. No…… Is Darryl Scott there? … No….Is Earl Jacques there?…… No Is Patty Blevins there? …… No…… Is Quentin Johnson there? …. No…. is John Viola there?…… No…. Is Ernie Lopez there?….. No?
Hmmmmmm… What do those all have in common…… 🙂 Hmmmmmmmmmmmm…. Do they all drink their coconut milk imbibed with lime? …. No….. Do they all call each other up and wear the same color of underwear each daily session?…… No…… Ummm. Do they all have the same Delaware extension tatoo’d to their buttocks?….. Ummmm…..M a y… b e…….
It is someone with a lot to hide; that is for sure… And it is nobody from here:
Red Clay, Christina, Capital, Delmar, Brandywine and Colonial currently already voluntarily record their board meetings! As well as the Delaware State Board of Education records their meetings!
So why is this something that has to be kept secret, and never brought to pass?….. Because we are not talking about individuals VOTING on a bill…They could vote YEA or NEA and it wouldn’t matter! What concerns us and you, is the pure morality of KEEPING A BILL FROM BEING VOTED FOR YOU BECAUSE IT WILL PASS….
So according to its sponsor, Deborah Hudson, Matt Denn is sitting on this bill…. He is doing it to protect someone else, to whom perhaps he is loyal…. How seriously then, were a procedural crime to be committed requiring a judicial investigation, can he be trusted to dig and search for the truth instead of whitewashing the whole affair to protect this same someone, when he can’t even be trusted to get a vote for heaven’s sakes….on a voice recording of school board meetings, out on to the floor for a vote? Let that sink in for a second…. Really?
Put all else aside….. Really?
IS that really the kind of attorney general we want after Beau Biden…. a crony?
Really? He’s going to throw his whole career away …. on that?
Really? Why would he do that? But it is definite a campaign issue, like blocking the GW bridge, one that resonates and will stick, because EVERY parent has a child in school….Whether they would ever listen themselves or not, this concerns them now… They too will question: why is Matt Denn, who is running for Attorney General, trying so hard to keep information regarding my kid and his friends, from ever being made public??? Hmmmmm….
Seriously, this blemishes his entire pro-family image he developed while serving as our insurance commissioner. This makes him one of the snakes….. with those evil eyes…..
One of the greatest tragedies the exposure the NSA has given America abroad, is its loss in the dream… We all have a dream losses in our lives. For some it is experienced when as the fathers we idolized growing up, somehow over the course of 4 years in college or the workforce, matriculate from being the source of all wisdom and goodness, into becoming just regular people struggling along like everyone else….
The USA experienced the same disillusionment under the Snowden leaks.
Our nation always propelled high ideals, and usually we were willing to back them up… Iraq could not take over Kuwait, (though we tarnished that ten years later when we tried to “take over Iraq” but now are out.)
The Soviets always tried to paint us as a capitalist nation, an imperial power using economics as opposed to force, but the power of our good people always thwarted that message and annulled it’s impact… We couldn’t be as bad as the Soviets said, because “look at all the good America was doing, and how richly everyone lived over there… Factory workers over here could afford cabin cruisers for heaven’s sakes.
What Snowden showed was that the We, The People are no longer in control of this government’s policy OR actions… Instead we had a government saying one thing, and a shadow government doing the opposite… and all that it did, was not just for its self protection… It was for its corporate protection….
Listening in on German chancellor Merkel’s phone conversations really has no solid reason inside our relationship. We are good friends. However it does have great importance in the worlds of investing or competing with trillions of dollars of European money… What are her plans? How can our investment community turn that into cash? These are extremely useful pieces of information, and investing in the obtaining of such, would be a very wise course of action if takenwith in the limited context strictly inside that frame….
One can trace the chilling of the warmth of the US-Soviet relationship to Snowden’s defection and asylum in Russia, June of last year. These things are done on a quid pro quo basis, and everyone is well aware that Snowden is only in Russia, because it is better for the Russians to keep him safe there, than turn him over to the US authorities….
The true picture of the NSA’s release and further actions they took after that release, does indeed cast truer fears that the American nation is not being controlled by it’s people… That a cabal inside the government is operating freely on its own, using the conduits of information as its unlimited fiscal source and to create situations out of manipulating that medium… The idea that this could exist were rare and ethereal before the initial Snowden releases. But since, the possibility has become real. And the cabal would never have to become known. By creating the context of events, they could control the outcomes… By making dissent invisible, they could corral popular opinion to follow their whims…
All I can say to anyone detracting this as a complete impossibility, that propaganda is incapable of bottling up truth for any length of time, is to remind them that when Stalin died, everyone (still living) in Russia thought he was a god. A wonderful, loving, benevolent and caring man. Don’t believe me? Look it up… Controlling information can do amazing things.
But to the shock of Putin and the Chinese, the Snowden releases showed that the President, and Congress, and our bureaucracy were wimps at the hands of corporate dollars. That a illegal request to infiltrate computers of a Brazil oil company in order to find the high yield offshore oilfields prior to the official bidding, would be fast tracked. That listening on Merkel before a bond deal for Greece, would be done to satiate the whims of the big investors.
That our entire Federal governmental structure is pawned to big money is something our Supreme Court just made even more believable with its bizarre McCutcheon agreement lifting caps on unlimited campaign spending. further benefiting those responsible for all these international illegal actions, and hindering further progress by Americans set against such behavior…
It is really hard to hate the American people… Not even Muslims can do that effectively.. But it is every easy to hate American corporations that have no qualms with devastating a third world nation, then when money is gone, pulling out with no sense of responsibility for the damage done.
What Snowden did, was to expose that was really the truth behind the American dream… So much that when we say America is for democracy, … around the world, the global audience says…. yeah, right…
Taken from within this context of inside knowledge, Putin’s moves in Ukraine now make a great deal of sense as a solely defensive action… What if the entire Ukraine disturbance was indeed pushed forward (in Reichstag fashion) to create a crises punishing the Russians in the East? Put it this way,…. before Snowden, that would have been deemed preposterous…. Now it has to be interpreted within the context of: “wait a minute, these are the people who listened in on Merkel’s cellphone.”….
The real global problem in the world today, is this unlimited wealth against which no one is safe… Would anyone of us turn down a billion dollars for one or two seconds of work? Especially if done in secret and no one , no one could or ever would even know?
Believe it or not, the global solution is to raise their taxes… When any excess money earned is going to be sent to some government somewhere, the incentive to use all this unused money in illegal actions to make more, disappears… Instead of gambling big money on a price’s rise and fall,… hiding it as an expense by investing in real physical capital becomes the prime option to maximize wealth, one which will benefits us all… Raising tax rates marginally to higher heights on very, very, very big money, is a policy change that turns the wealthy from being the bad guys, into the best human beings possible…..
Today, March 25th, the Supreme Court hears the Hobby Lobby case.
The question before the court is this:
If a law violates one’s religion, does one have to follow it? We have by fortuity and circumstance, brought ourselves so low to now ask of our court, to decide which of the two shall have predominance… Law or Religion.
If law wins, than religions must conform to the law; if religion wins, then to circumvent any law, one simply has to state it is against one’s religion.
There are good reasons for both sides, depending upon which predominates in your mind. If you think religion is above the government, then obviously you will think that as an individual, your government shall not make you do something your religion tells you is wrong…. Basically the law is compelling you to sin.
We’ve seen it before. Burkas: your religions dictates you wear them, and the law says you can’t for safety reasons… Withholding medical care for a child, your religion tells you to put faith into divine intervention, and when that turns out badly, the state sends you away for murder. Vaccinations. your religion tells you no, but the government says yes…..
In all those cases religion lost; here is why.
There were other people affected. Religion is a deep personal internal experience. and the law generally upholds that one has the right to adhere to doctrines if one wishes…. AS LONG AS THEY DO NOT HARM SOMEONE ELSE. The canon of law is very clear, that hurting other people, cannot be excused on the account of ones religions… The Burka ban is to protect from human bombs. The courts have said that if safety in a crowd is an issue for many other people, then the law can be changed to violate the harm-giver’s religion. The potential for harm controls the dynamics of the case.
Likewise the dead child not receiving medical care can be a very moving religious experience, but the child died. He obviously was harmed ant therefore the law trumps religion. The potential for harm controls the dynamics of the case.
Again the same is true over withholding vaccinations. Not being vaccinated creates a possible host-carrier for the disease sometime in the future… It is not just the subject at risk for failing to become vaccinated. Everyone else is susceptible to that carried organism. The potential for harm to many controls the dynamics of the case.
So we turn to birth control. One of which is abortion. Who could possibly be harmed over not insuring contraception? Is it really as cut and dried as Rush Limbaugh speaks, when he says it is all about him paying for Sandra Fluke to have sex? He’s paying and it isn’t even with him? Tant pis.
Prophylactics. Who gets harmed? That one is easy. Every person who picks up HIV for one. For two, gonorrhea and syphilis. For three, someone getting the herpes virus. Harm is endemic. And like vaccinations, harm can be unsuspectingly spread to others. Lack of free contraception could cause multiple spouses irreparable harm through no fault or wrongdoing of their own. Everyone has the right to intercourse, just as everyone has a right to their own Roth-IRA. But not everyone has an Roth-IRA now, do they? Many can’t afford it and so do without. Same with contraception. Therefore not funding free prophylactics causes irreparable harm to innocent people….
Chemicals, birth control pills and RU-486. Who gets harmed if these are unavailable? That one is easy. The future baby (def: humanness does not or will ever start until birth), the mother, the father, the grandparents, the great grandparents, the physician, society in general, future taxpayers… Quite a few harmed souls actually…. Withholding these birth control items is exactly on par with withholding antibiotics to a child dying from blood poisoning. Just as the child is suffering needlessly through no fault on its own, so is the pregnant woman suffering as is her child, though no fault of their own. Normally she would have gotten free contraception. But no, religion stepped in and now that is impossible.
Third is performed abortion. This is an emotional topic, that some equate with murder. The courts have flatly said it is not. Life begins at birth, always has, always will. Therefore performed abortions are perfectly legal, even though some people may not agree. And here the law is clear. They have the right to decide for themselves and not agree if they so choose, but they do not have any right to decide for others. No one does. That is embedded in the foundation of our founding documents…. That is the definition of freedom. One cannot say they for freedom and yet rail against choice. That is a scientific impossibility. Obviously what those well meaning people are trying to express is that they are all for freedom when it applies to them, but certainly not when it applies to others who have a different value system from them. Enforcing the right to free abortions, is like allowing burkas to be worn without restriction, fully knowing that suicide bombers are rampant in the crowds around you… Banning abortions for certain women, is the equivalent to telling the Israeli population, ” oh, sorry; no protection for you; you have to die if someone sets off a bomb, because you see, burkas are so sacred, we aren’t going to violate one of our tiny minority’s religious beliefs. If someone smuggles a bomb in under one, sigh, oh well.
If you are sharp about your wits, you picked up the clue I left you in the paragraph above. Right up there where I said..”they do not have any right to decide for others”….. Probably Conservatives will pick it up faster than contraception supporters. “Wait a minute” they will say, “see, that is exactly what you are doing to us by making us pay for contraception when we don’t want to cough up the money for it. You are deciding for us, what we have to do…”
And that is exactly right…. We are.
If you remember up at the top of this piece of writing where I stated this case was to decide the supremacy of law versus religion? Well that is the caveat. In religious circles we are deciding what one needs to do. We are saying that contraception will be available to everyone through their insurance free of charge…. In the legal realm that is the law. You can choose to follow it or not. If not, then beware of consequences. Why just today, I saw a Toyota that by my guess, chose not to follow the posted speed limit. He didn’t look too happy either…. We make decisions every day on whether to follow a law or not, and we choose to what degree we wish to comply… Some of us, unluckily, will pay a price…. But though angry, we really have no right to bring in religion…. Because it is a non-religious law….
In the religious world, we are however making a person (although admittedly in an extremely indirect and via a convoluted pathway, be associated with something he doesn’t wish… However, that is not a problem of our governmental courts. Religious issues are not in the bailiwick of the Supreme Court. It decides issues of law and order, and is forbidden on deciding on religion. Instead, religious issues need to be decided by a denominational or religious court if their denomination should happen to have them… If not, they should then be decided by that religion’s Inquisition or equivalent…. Then through whatever authority those courts have, they need to exercise their options of enforcing those religious edicts in ways that do not run up against the laws of the land…
A second issue is whether information or facts on file inside a Delaware Courthouse is also a real person. Are Corporations people too, as Romney once said? That is preposterous to even consider, but alas, so it will be one of the hinges on which this outcome depends. The sole point of this case is that a corporation (Hobby Lobby) is so sad, it’s heartbroken that it will have to pay for contraception for its employees, it cries every night and has insomnia. It can’t urinate correctly and has irregular bowel movements. As a result, this corporation is now suffering from malnutrition, and dehydration. Quite possibly, through all the duress and stress, this corporation has also suffered brain damage, causing its malignant depression. It might even have cancer….
If a corporation is not a person, then this case is simply dismissed. Corporations are subservient to human beings and therefore must confirm to the laws of the land in which they may find themselves. But if a corporation IS a person, then we have a battle over which person suffers the most, if free birth control is abandoned…. or…. no longer free…
If a corporation IS deemed to be a person… the next question for discussion, is when does that person-hood begin…. Did it start when it is born,upon the signing of its documents? Or, has it existed as a corporation ever since its idea was first conceived?
In a recent piece I did on Biden, as I read over his biography I was reminded of his plagiarism incident in 1988. He dropped out of running for the presidency because he forgot to attribute an Irish speaker before quoting him on one of his hundreds of stops that day… The “uproar” caused him to drop out of the race.
He dropped out for that little thing?
Today we have Ron Paul plagiarizing every line said this past legislative session. As if to reward that, he is now considered a top contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Today we have Fox News blatantly lie through careful edits, and no one cares. We have CBS create a fake story about Benghazi, and no one cares…. We are fed daily lies in the House of Representatives; no one calls them out anymore… Our own News Journal publishes gross misstatements by our Secretary of Education, and only bloggers call them out.
But Biden was ridiculed and totally forced out of the race for forgetting one time to mention Kinnock before he borrowed a line from him…
The big difference is the uproar… It started deteriorating after 1994.
I remember Newt Gingrich throwing irrational after irrational accusations out against Clinton. I asked an old politico what he was doing… ” Sounds like he is just throwing mud to see what will stick.”
It hasn’t stopped sense. Ridiculous claims get emailed to the press. The press puts them up, and others talk about how ridiculous such accusations are. Then someone finds a similarity to something that may have really happened and suddenly a scandal is born. The crime is solely in the similarity, not the actual action… Next the press is talking about how much damage these items will cause the person being accused. The person himself gets asked, and we all will then judge his guilt by his demeanor in giving back his rebuttal… If his eyes shift, we discuss his guilt. If he misses a point, we discuss how he missed his point….and whether or not both show weakness in their leadership…
Yet it was all over something absolutely ridiculous originally said by someone making things up out of thin air and throwing mud…
Today, when I hear news from any of the main media, my first response is not to believe it…. “yeah, right I say”.
Isn’t that terrible? I’m just like those Soviets reading the Pravda. The assumption being made by me is that the story is reported only after being edited by the propaganda officer of the news corporation. No matter whether that media is grounded from the right or left, if it comes from any commercial media, it can’t be believed. I’m not sure how your mind works today but to borrow from computer technology, I tend to put all main media stories into a nebulous cloud, a purgatory of thought so to speak. As more nuggets get offered, I let them settle them into either columns of pros or cons supporting or denying the original nugget, and then have to use my guessing powers to determined which story of the pro or con is the more truthful….
It’s a lot of work.
The point is, our society has moved past telling the truth....
Truth is not what is important anymore.. Making you believe what they want, is the sole purpose of messaging… It is not about telling you that such and such happened… Absolutely almost all of our messaging system is set up to tell us that such and such a thing happened … because of this reason….
Hate Liberals! Because this thing happened.
Hate Conservatives! Because this thing happened.
Hate Communists and Socialists! Because this thing happened.
Hate Corporate America! Because this thing happened….
And the erosion of telling truth is huge…. Our courts for the most part have determined political discourse does not have to be factual, certainly not the ads. A new industry has developed to test the truth of political statements, because the press fell down on the job. Our courts have determined for the most part, that lying shall not to be punished. Whenever our government speaks today, it is not believed.
“We have nor will ever have any means or desire to collect American’s metadata and store it so we can go back and look through it” said May 2013 by the head of the NSA; Snowden released the truth just over a month later.
Truth no longer relates to the science of what happens; truth has become the art of stretching belief up to the edge of the envelope without going too far.
Our real lives are always fret with uncertainty, of intrigue, of mistrust. Which is why it was reassuring to have laws on the books regarding the truth being told by our media. We could trust it as being true to the best of their knowledge, because they would be incarcerated if it were not so….
It freed our minds considerably.
So in a proper frame of mind, in a world of truth, Obamacare would be framed as thus:
Obama had a mandate through the electoral process to improve the health insurance system for everyday citizens, but Republicans sought to represent the Large Insurance Companies all who would make less profit if they had to fairly pay out claims… Every little fight was then laid out in that context.
What is sad, is that our children as were those children once of Communist China, Soviet Russia, East Germany, Albania, and Bulgaria, are growing skeptical of all official pronouncements.
Slogans saying “capitalism is corrupt” ring hollow when you have to stand in line for a daily loaf of bread, and you see Americans shopping in supermarkets lined with products. Our news media is now in the same boat.
When was the last time you saw a major media state we seriously need to raise taxes on the top one percent if we are ever going to have a strong America again?
Never?
When you do, stick close to that source. They are close to telling the truth….
What if McDonald’s, Wal*mart, Papa John’s, and other companies whose wealth is made off the backs of sub-standard wages, had to pay for each one of their employee’s food stamps and Medicaid costs?
It would be similar to our Unemployment tax… Essentially we ( the State of Delaware’s Employment Services) would state that you had “x” amount of employees on Medicaid and Food Stamps and therefore you must pay this higher premium so we can care for them…. To someone like Costco, they would say since you had very few employees on Medicaid and Food Stamps you get to pay a much lower rate into the pool…
As with unemployment, companies who cost the state more by firing with impunity, pay a higher rate into the fund than companies whose employees very rarely ever have to file for unemployment benefits…
Apply the same to Medicaid and Food Stamps….. it is simply putting the cost to society into the right account. Something accountants have to do all the time when going through a companies books….
We hear about a divided America. But look at our at-large candidates in the Senate. Fairly even after all.
Next look at the House, where districts are gerrymandered. In this case it was done by the Republicans in 2010. …. We don’t really have a divided country. We have a country arbitrarily divided.
kavips 