Day: April 10, 2010

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“Pain is just weakness leaving the body… “

Yard work. Stepped in mole trace. Three loud POPs, excruciating pain… Yep. ACL. Again. Crawled back into the house. Ice packs, loads of ibuprofen and acetaminophen (they work well together and are safe in low, OTC doses), wraps and a cane. Manageable. In a few weeks, just the knee brace will be enough, and after a few months I’ll only wear the knee brace for yard work and such like.

Again. Oh. Well. I guess I ought to set my calendar by my Spring events, spaced every six years or so–just long enough for me to start being careless again. *heh*

The unkindest injury of all (the self-inflicted kind :-)).

Continue reading ““Pain is just weakness leaving the body… “”

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The FairTax: Is It Fair?

And would it work?

I’m not going to state my opinion in this post (although I’ve stated it elsewhere, earlier); rather, I’m going to put up two links for your review and come back to this topic later.

First is the 2005 President’s Advisory Panel on Tax Reform documents. It occasionally lapses into typically obscurantist bureaucratese from time to time, but I especially commend to your attention to page 14 (actual page of the pdf document) and following, wherein the panel reveals its bias up front, pages 55 (as numbered by the report) and following–a discussion of flat tax proposals, including the panel’s own model of a flat consumption tax (not the FairTax bill’s model). Following on through the report (it is in three pdf files for the report and another for the appendices), make sure to take note of the characteristics of the panel’s models, and do refer to the appendices for clarification of the panel’s sources.

Then, go here and read. The differences between the model of a consumption tax put forth by the 2005 President’s Advisory Panel on Tax Reform and the FairTax I leave for the discerning reader to see for himself.

(Yeh, I could have used the awkward and linguistically useless “himself/herself” but I don’t bend that way. If non-PC language offends you, tough. :-))

We’ll continue after homework’s done. (Or not, if the task isn’t one that appeals to anyone. C’est la vie.)

*sigh* TF points out in comments that, among other things, one of the resources I link to is quite lengthy, and just reading the first few pages got his blood boiling (my characterization of his comments–and I have to admit the document tended to boil my blood a bit, too). Trrue, it’s over 270 pages of material that is highly-laden with political bushwah, spiced with bureaucratese, but perhaps I can ameliorate the burden by pointing to this 36-page summary of the FairTax, at least. (Warning: pdf file) I don’t feel the bill’s actual language is really much of a barrier, but it is much longer and the summary is, in my estimate, a fair summary of the bill itself. There. Lightened the reading load, class, and all the other materials are there for your perusal if you wish as well.

My good deed for the day is done. 😉