Monday, April 30, 2012
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Friday, April 20, 2012
Twenty Best Cultured Small Towns in US?
Smithsonian Magazine released its
picks for the 20 best small towns in America in the May issue. To be considered, towns must have fewer than
25,000 people and are ranked based on culture. The picks were:
- Great Barrington, Mass.,
- Taos, N.M.,
- Red Bank, N.J.;
- Mill Valley, Calif.;
- Gig Harbor, Wash.;
- Durango, Colo.;
- Butler, Pa.;
- Marfa, Texas;
- Naples, Fla.;
- Staunton, Va.;
- Brattleboro, Vt.;
- Princeton, N.J.;
- Brunswick, Maine;
- Siloam Springs, Ark.;
- Menomonie, Wis.;
- Key West, Fla.;
- Laguna Beach, Calif.;
- Ashland, Ore.;
- Beckley City, W.Va.,
- Oxford, Miss.
Interesting distribution.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
The GFU - understanding taxes, spending and fairness from a government perspective.
What we have here is a failure to communicate. I, for one, am overwhelmed with task of matching my fixed income, which only goes into 6 figures if you count decimal places, with the rising cost of utilities and cat food. Thank God, I don’t have a cat. So when I heard that the defeated Buffett rule would have taken $5,000,000,000.00 annually from tax payers and given it to the government, I was puzzled about why the President said passing the Buffett rule was a matter of fairness. To me, taking 30% of anyone’s property is more like robbery than fairness. Perhaps there is a better way to understand the relationship of tax increases and fairness. I suggest a new economic fairness measurement. It can be called the Government Fairness Unit (GFU) and it can be used to simply state the amount of money (fairness) that it takes to put on a government conference, (approximately $1,000,000 counting scouting trips) multiplied times the number of government agencies (I am using 1,250 to be conservative), which gives us $1,250,000,000 or 1 GFU. Therefore, had the “Buffett” tax increase passed that would have resulted in 4 GFU’s; or 1 party per each government agency per quarter. Now I see the fairness! Although this does not seem fair to interns, who will still have to scrape to pay for their parties out of the agency budgets.
It is also a handy tool for measuring spending. For instance, the failed stimulus package was $819,000,000,000.00 which is incomprehensible to me. But using the GFU then comes out 655 GFU’s - or 655 years of government parties up in smoke. OH, the inhumanity.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
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