When a poor, disadvantaged, misguided, minority person breaks into your home, do you sit him down for a five-course meal, treat the cut on his hand he got from the window he broke, and give him a job mowing your lawn?
Or do you call a cop.
Yeah, I thought so.
I drove 1,700 miles up the East Coast last week. Gas prices are down a little from their near-record highs a month or two ago but it was still about the most expensive trip I’ve made which is a major reason Florida orange juice costs so much.
I haven’t heard a peep from any of the usual suspects about the prices and there was no ineffectual Internet gas boycott this year. The House approved stiff gas-gouging penalties in 2007 but prices are higher than ever. Even Sen. Bernard Sanders (“I”-VT) hasn’t been whining about it. I ‘spect he’s too busy running for President.
Mr. Obama is mad as heck about it. He has done nothing.
“How do you propose the president bring gas prices back down to the level on the sign?” my friend Nola “Fanny” Guay asked.
Unfortunately the Administration has done more to raise the price than lower it. Maybe if Mr. Obama stopped lying to us…
Oddly, if you were really a Liberal, you’d already know the answer to Ms. Guay’s question. Bernie Sanders says he does. Jimmy Carter thought he did.
Price controls didn’t work, of course, as the rising price going out my tailpipe shows.
The real answer? An energy policy that makes it possible to increase supply in this country and reduce our demand. Simple as that.
It’s a reasonable argument that the current economy, largely designed in the 1950s and 60s when energy was pretty much unlimited, hammers us when energy is so expensive.
Earth had three billion residents in 1960 when gas cost a quarter and water was free. Earth had four billion people on earth in 1974 when the price of oil had risen from $3 per barrel to $12 and water was nervous. Earth has 7.2 billion today. One-third of those live in China and India and every one of them wants the standard of living people have in the United States and Europe.
There is not enough energy or water in the world to do that so the world that was built on cheap energy and limitless water will soon run on very expensive energy and very precious water. I just wish we weren’t saddled with traders and traitors who want to run that price up artificially.
“It bugs me that America is producing more and using less than ever yet the prices are up pretty significantly,” Rufus said.
Supply and demand is the issue. China already consumes about 66% of what the US does and is growing like Topsy. Asia and Oceania use a combined 25BBL/day total to our 21BBL/day.
Market forces do have some impact on prices (it is, after all, what the market will bear) but speculators have more. When crude zooms because a futures trader is willing to pay (or is afraid not to pay) over $100/barrel, we all suffer.
In case you missed the arithmetic, a barrel of oil rose by a factor of “just” 4 between the day I started day dreaming about getting a drivers license and the day I bought my first new car. Now has skyrocketed by a factor of 40.
The cost per barrel has risen a couple bucks on infrastructure costs. The cost per barrel has risen a few bucks more as we squeeze the rocks harder. And inflation adds the same toll. Still, that means the $3 barrel of oil should cost $20, maybe $30 tops. Speculators get the rest.
Speculators.
I have the two-word solution to speculation: “Take Delivery.”
It works in oil. It works in grain. It works in real estate.
You want to buy something and speculate that the price will go up? Great. Take delivery. Own the product. If these airheads had to sit on a tanker load of oil, how fast would they need to turn their inventory?
And that, dear Fanny Guay, is a solution a President can push through.
“Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” Mr. Obama’s first Secretary of Energy Steven Chu told the Wall Street Journal in 2008.
OK, I guess we know why that ship has sailed.
Not the grass assassin. Some juicy tidbits have flowed in over the last couple of weeks while I was out goofing off.
Idle Hands
In the great state of Vermont, it is now illegal to let your car idle for more than five minutes during any one-hour period, thanks to a law that went into effect last week. Violators will receive a $10 ticket for the first offense, $50 for the second, and $100 for the third.
Police, fire, and other emergency vehicles don’t have to obey that law so when the cops write you that first, second, or third ticket because your car is “idling” in a Shelburne Road traffic jam next January, you can bet the police car will be running the entire time.
Sheesh.
Garbologists
An “educational technology specialist wants students to connect with the land, and to grow with it. Literally.” So sayeth the newspaper about a man who teaches at a local elementary school. Students spent a day outside with him as they planted blueberry bushes, apple trees, and blue spruce trees in a field behind the school nature center.
“Educational technology specialist”?
We used to have “educators.” Probably then “educationalists.” Now “educational technology specialists.” What is wrong with calling someone who goes hands on with classroom students a “teacher”?
Sheesh.
A Fatal Wait
Speaking of gummint, veterans have languished and died on the VA’s secret list.
VA hospitals are killing people by not getting around to caring for them. At least 40 vets have died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system alone, all while VA managers there tried to hide that some 1,400-1,600 sick veterans were forced to wait months to see a doctor.
Just a foretelling of what to expect as the Unaffordable Care Act (like HealthCanada) looks for ways to cut the cost of affordable care.
Sheesh.
Apologists
Some Liberal apologist will come along and remind us that the idle law will increase health benefits, cut down on carbon emissions, and save fuel.
No. Vermonters don’t need a nanny law for that but it will certainly help the ticket nazis raise revenue.
Some Liberal apologist will come along and remind us that teachers are professionals and the descriptors help lay people to understand what educators and educationalists and educational technology specialists do.
No. Vermonters know what teachers do. Teachers need to act professional, not make up multi-syllabic titles and print business cards.
Some Liberal apologist will come along and remind us that the Veteran’s Administration and the Health and Human Services (which runs the ACA) are completely different departments.
No. VA is funded by Congress. Obamacare is funded by Congress. That’s a CF. As funding declines and managing-the-finger-pointing increases (the usual route for any government program), we’re gonna die.
Fortunately, two apples a day reduces the risk of stroke by 32%.
Yesterday was Easter Sunday. Tomorrow is Earth Day. In between, we can find a message of faith.
“God has the last word,” Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, reminded television viewers yesterday.
One of those last words has long been, Don’t poop where you perch.
I saw Hurricane Hazel annihilate a larch tree in my front yard. I saw the 1998 ice storm decimate the forests around North Puffin. I watched Hurricane Wilma drown my South Puffin neighbors and Irene flood and sink and forever change the southern half of Vermont.
That was a more than a little bit of rain.
I’ve watched pilots shoot flares of silver iodide and dry ice, and liquid propane, and even table salt into a cloud in a vain hope of making it give up just a little bit of rain.
Rainmaking attempts go way back. A typical Tübatulabal shaman’s rain making bundle contains the all important quartz crystals plus charm stones, biface fragments of obsidian, a fossil fish vertebra, pebbles, some stibnite, milky quartz, and steatite, a small tobacco bag, a piece of rawhide, some plant material tied with a bit of denim, some soil and a denim sack. Oddly, the great southwestern American desert is still a desert in spite of those best efforts to make rain.
I’d say nature has the other last word over man.
Today, rain isn’t (quite) the issue. Temperature is. Over the millennia, the climate has and does change as solar activity varies, the magnetic poles shift, the moon wobbles, and Earth’s axis tilts a few degrees one way or the other. Right now, the planet is cooling (slightly) from what the alarmists said was the all time high but it had been rising precipitously. Despite the alarmists, it hasn’t gotten as warm as during Roman and Medieval times, but it is warmer than 100 years ago.
There are two schools of thought about what drives global warming. On the one side are a small but growing number of scientists who have found wider swings in the fossil record before homo sapiens walked upright. They’re looking at drivers like the sun now. On the other side are a large number of scientists who believe man and only man has driven every variation in planetary temperatures. They’ve stopped looking for the drivers.
The U.N.-operated sanctioning body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says it is too late. They arrived at this conclusion not by making startling new discoveries but by tweaking the data they already have.
But wait! We can fix it if we just give up meat and cars and our iPhones!
Those who pray at the altar of Al Gore have faith that man has the last word over nature.
I have great faith in two certainties: good science and man’s hubris.
Tomorrow is Earth Day. I have great hope that good science will triumph over great hubris in the long run. Day-to-day? I’m not so sure.
Today is the day.
Although 64% of individual tax returns filed electronically this year were done by tax professionals (as of April 2), the total number of electronically filed, self-prepared returns was up 6.7%. More than 36 million people used tax software this year.
E-filed returns account for about 80% of individual tax returns filed.
I started tax prep in January this year, since I have to report sales tax then. It gave me a nice jump on louts like Rufus who hope the post office will stay open until midnight.
Except.
There were a couple of glitches.
I couldn’t finish until Vermont sent SWMBO a W2. January came and went. February came and went. Much of Marchuary came and went. We couldn’t even log into her employee account online to get the electronic copy.
They did eventually give her a new login so we discovered they had addressed her W2 to the street address of her former (and now defunct) employer, not to her home. That was useful.
She called to get a “corrected” W2.
“Oh, you don’t need that,” the State of Vermont Payroll Division rep told her. “The IRS won’t look at that.”
<sigh>
It looked as if we’d gotten everything straightened out until I discovered that there was no longer a mortgage interest deduction on Anne’s return and that !@#$%^ Tubbo had “forgotten” some of the personal info checkboxes. She has claimed that mortgage interest on every return we’ve used !@#$%^ Tubbo. The 1098 for the bank was right there in the Forms. Blank. It wouldn’t let her enter the interest until she created a new 1099.
I found the most recent round of errors by going line by line through the tax return PDFs rather than through the pages in !@#$%^ Tubbo. It’s easier in !@#$%^ Tubbo because I can quick link to other pages but I keep discovering that what it shows me on screen may not match what it prints. The PDF does.
I was taking a “last look” at my tax return when I wondered about something I simply had not noticed before: a data error in a 1099.
I looked up the proper numbers and overrode the Tubbo values.
The $282,834 !@#$%^ Tubbo reported as my tax due certainly got my attention.
There is no easy way to correct imported data because the “forms view” doesn’t have a copy of the 1099 it came from. I found it by going back through the “interview” and correcting it there. That’s when !@#$%^ Tubbo decided my income was $1,203,147.14. Ya know, if I had made a million bucks, I’d pay the tax in a heartbeat and retire.
Estupido.
I did eventually find a hidden link to the right data entry point.
Then we tried to e-file.
Worked great for the federal return, sort of.
The “Congratulations! Your Returns Have Been Sent! (Your current e-file status is pending)” emails did drift in but I had to go to IRS.gov to be sure the IRS had accepted them.
And e-filing didn’t work for SWMBO’s state return. Seeing “Federal State Returns” plus “E-File” in bold letters on the box led me to expect I could e-file our Federal and State returns.
Noooooo.
!@#$%^ Tubbo demanded $24.99 to file her first (and only) state return electronically.
She has printed and mailed her Vermont return, complete with a printout of the W2 the State of Vermont sent to the wrong address.
Tax Freedom Day is not until April 21, three days than last year.
We have a voluntary tax system. It’s the law that people pay, but the government doesn’t calculate it for you.
Not until after you file, anyway.