unemployment insurance

Crapping On Poor People

December 21, 2010December 21, 2010 by Bitchy

They obviously deserve to take the blame for everything from our shitty economy to creating the global warming hoax. If you listen to the GOP, poor people have more power than anyone in America. They’re the impoverished elite. In fact, they’re so powerful that if you were smarter, you’d spend yourself into poverty just so that you can grab some of that poor-people magic.

Here’s a charming little piece from Tucker Carlson’s little read website, The Daily Caller. It’s comically titled, “The DC Investigation; Food Stamps Are Easier To Get Than You Think. It’s comical because the “investigation” consists of a full grown adult, whose parents still support him, committing fraud in order to “expose” the exploitation of our federal food stamp program by those ever powerful aforementioned poor people. Let me summarize the “investigation”; this asshat commits fraud in order to qualify for food stamps. He then goes to that pretentious liberal bastion, Whole Foods and goes on a gourmet spending spree wherein he spent half of his monthly food stamp allowance on one meal. He neglected to mention how he planned to feed himself for the remaining twenty nine and two-thirds of the month, probably because he knows that mummy and daddy were going to have that covered for him. But this shithead didn’t even bother to consider how people that legitimately need food stamps manage to eat on $105 a month. Nor did he bother to offer up any statistics on how widespread his brand of fraud is within the system. By the way, this asshole is working on his masters degree, which is further proof that our education system is in trouble.

After reading this article (I assume I was one of a select few, since no one goes to this site), I was left with one burning question; If a douchebag speaks in the forest and there’s no one around to hear him, is he still a douche?

But the right wing jihad on the poor isn’t limited to a few fringe websites. Newt Gingrich (you know, the disgraced former speaker of the house that had to resign) continued his decades long attack on poor people last week in a speech in South Carolina. He blamed America’s problems on “The leftist news media, Hollywood, tenured academics, overpaid federal workers, and the unemployed. He went on to say, “I’m opposed to giving people money for doing nothing”. If that were true Newt, you wouldn’t charge a speaking fee.

But he makes a good point. If all of the lazy motherfuckers in America hadn’t spontaneously decided to get laid off in 2008, we would all be better off. Never mind the fact that they all had to work in order to pay into the unemployment insurance program in order to qualify to receive payments. That’s not a relevant fact in this argument. This group of feckless sloths clearly worked only to be able to someday bleed America dry.

And since they’ve been funding their lobby with a whopping $269 a week for two long years now, they’ve become too fucking powerful to touch. AIPAC can only dream of amassing the kind of power that the piss poor have managed to grab for themselves. Lloyd Blankfein makes hourly calls to homeless people to accommodate their wishes, just to keep Goldman Sachs in business.

Let’s not forget how the poor approved themselves for mortgages they couldn’t afford and forced Goldman Sachs to make billions of dollars by trading those worthless mortgages.

These people are indeed the most insidious among us, and they should not be underestimated.

The Other Big C

October 1, 2010 by Bitchy

I’m talking about Sharon Angle. She’s a cunt. I hate to use that word, but the English language doesn’t contain another, more loathsome word that I can use in order to be more accurate, so I had to settle for cunt.

She’s not just crazy, she’s a mean, nasty cunt. Everything she says when she’s not self-censoring, is complete bile.

Remember this golden oldie?

Yes Americans, your problem is that you’re just fucking lazy! You’re lazy and shameless. And Sharon Angle’s aim is to stop enabling you! Sure, we’ve always had unemployment insurance (much to her dismay) but in 2008, eight million of you just up and decided that you were going to take advantage of the unemployment insurance lavishness and give up the jobs you had. Never mind the fact that those jobs paid exponentially more than what unemployment insurance was paying you. Your laziness finally overrode your…well…I’m not sure what Sharon Angle thinks it overrode, since you’re all worthless leaches. I’m not sure what it is that she thinks kept you working for all of those years, but I’m certain that she doesn’t attribute it to anything good. There’s nothing good about you, fucking lazy bastards!

If Sharon Angle is right, you know what else we need to end? Health insurance. Because having health insurance will obviously entice you to get cancer! You’re nothing but a lazy, shameless abuser of the system so it stands to reason that you will get cancer, just to bleed Sharon Angle dry of every penny she has!

I sarcastically made that point last year, when I initially heard her remarks regarding the unemployed. But as Stephen Colbert has discovered, by looking at his significantly high percentage of republican viewers, it’s hard to parody the absurd. And here’s another gem from a few months ago that paralleled my “sarcasm”.

Yeah! Fuck the babies! Unless of course, you’re even thinking about aborting your rapist’s baby. In that instance, Sharon must step in to make sure that you don’t cruelly terminate that poor life. But once she’s done taking your free will away from you, you’re on your own if you need prenatal care. Fuck you, you leach!

Sharon, I don’t think that you fundamentally understand how insurance works. Let me explain it to you, you stupid bitch; we all get insurance so that we can pool risk. We all put money in, and then when one of us needs medical care, we take money out. If we all started deciding whose medical needs we’re unwilling to pay for, we end up with a pool that’s too shallow to meet anyone’s needs.

For instance Sharon, I’m not willing to pay for your hysterectomy and ongoing hormone therapy treatments. You were irresponsible when you decided that getting old was a good idea. You can do whatever the fuck you want with your beard; shave it, wax it, groom it and let it grow long, I don’t care. I’m just not paying to prevent you from having it. Fuck you, I’m not paying for that. And your husbands penis maintenance is out too. I’m not paying for the viagra that he needs, just to fuck you, and I don’t give a damned about any kind of prostate or testicular cancer he may get. Again, he just needs to be more responsible and avoid those things. I don’t have penis maintenance woes, so I shouldn’t have to pay for anyone else’s.

Honestly, this woman is so mean that it’s made her irrational.

But she’s not the only one. Did you see this charming speech by Mike Huckabee?

He’s supposed to be the pious theologian in the republican party? I have two main issues with Huckabee; he’s an idiot, and he’s too mean to ever actually know God.

Let’s start with the stupidity. His analogy is ridiculous. It’s predicated on the belief that if you’re sick, you’re dead. A better analogy would have been if you tried to buy life insurance on someone that passed away yesterday. The point of not letting insurance companies deny you for a pre-existing condition, is to make sure that you don’t die! Huckabee’s premise is that you’re as good as dead. Fucking asshole. Really, he’s just a giant asshole.

I don’t know which God he prays to, but I’m not familiar with any religious text that advocates for just letting the sick die, because they would cost too much if we didn’t.

These people are so fucking viscerally mean, that they can’t think straight. It’s not that they’re looking out for themselves. They’re not. They’re undermining their own self interest. They’re blinded by their nastiness. A person that is protecting their own self interest would understand that giving everyone access to affordable health care is vital to our country’s livelihood. Healthy people can work. They can contribute to our GDP. They can pay taxes. If they’re not being bankrupted by medical bills, they can buy homes which makes all of the homes around theirs worth more. This isn’t some convoluted argument, designed to confuse people. This is simple logic that should be obvious to everyone. Everyone that isn’t mean spirited, that is.

Teabaggers and republicans that perpetually believe that their pockets are being picked by the government in order to help other people are fundamentally mean. And that kind of mean supercedes ones ability to truly look out for themselves. Nobody is picking your pocket, because whatever is in your pocket was in some part placed there, on the backs of others. You didn’t make it on your own, regardless of how much you kid yourself. If you went to public school, used a road, ever drank tap water, or did anything in this country, it’s because we all paid for it together. Tax dollars flow from you, and tax dollars flow to you. Get a grip, haters.

I’m not a bleeding heart liberal. I’m the smart kind of capitalist. I understand that keeping people healthy costs a fraction of what dealing with them once they’re sick does.

Can you tell how bitchy these damned people make me?

Entitlement?

September 3, 2010September 3, 2010 by Bitchy

I’m really alarmed at what I’m positive is about to happen to social security. I don’t know if you guys caught this story, but last week Senator Alan Simpson, who is on Obama’s deficit commission referred to social security as “a milk cow with 310 million tits”. He made another appalling comment a few days later, but I’m going to stick with social security for this post.

Simpson isn’t alone. republican representatives have had nothing but disdain for social security since its inception. I’m not going to list all of the republicans that are opposed to social security because the list includes almost all of them. They view social security as an entitlement program, and anyone that collects a social security check as a scourge on society. I said that republican representatives have a disdain for social security because polls show that even republican voters don’t feel the same way. Three out of four Americans are strongly in favor of preserving social security, which means that a significant percentage of republican voters want to preserve it. Their elected officials simply aren’t representing them.

There’s a fundamental dishonesty in the way republican representatives view social security. It’s not an entitlement, as they claim. Social security is something that we all pay into for our whole professional lives. When we retire, we collect the money that we contributed. There’s no entitlement involved here. The same holds true of unemployment insurance. We pay into it when we work, and we collect from it when we’re laid off. No fucking entitlement to see here!

Welfare is an entitlement. Medicaid is an entitlement. These are not programs that we pay into, and then collect when we need them. Tax cuts for the rich are an entitlement. Cutting capital gains tax is an entitlement. Donald Trump shouldn’t be entitled to pay less taxes on his capital gains than you pay on your earned income. Paris Hilton is not entitled to inherit the totality of her grandfathers wealth, simply for being born. Any tax code that allows people to pay less taxes on anything than we do on earned income is an entitlement. More than that, it’s bullshit. The earned income tax rate should be the lowest tax rate that we have. No other system of taxation is equitable. Earned income is the hardest to come by. You have to work for it. It should not be taxed at a higher rate than any other type of income. Period. I honestly can’t conceive of a rational person disagreeing with that, unless they’re the heir to a large fortune. But 99% of American’s aren’t, so what the fuck are they thinking? Are they under the delusion that Paris Hilton is working harder than they are?

Back to social security. As it stands right now, we have a 2.5 trillion dollar surplus (sort of) in social security. It’s the only damned place in our economy where there’s a surplus of any kind. I say sort of, because that 2.5 trillion dollars is effectively made up entirely of US bonds. It’s not actual cash. Bush, Clinton, and Bush 2.0 all siphoned money out of social security. Bush 2.0 took every nickle that was left to pay for his war, occupation, and tax cuts. When a president takes money out of social security, they leave an IOU, or a bond in place of the cash. When the US borrows money from China or any other country, they give that country US bonds in exchange for that loan. Those bonds are insured by “the full faith and credit” of the US government. If we were to ever default on these bonds, our economy would crumble because we wouldn’t be able to borrow any more money. It works exactly the way your credit card does. If you miss a payment, you can’t use that card until you get current on what you owe.

I’ve never, ever heard a single politician talk about defaulting on our bonds to China as a means of balancing the budget. That would be an insane idea that would bury the US.

So why the fuck do they feel so comfortable with the notion of defaulting on the bonds to you? Because they honestly have nothing but disdain for you. They don’t respect you, and they don’t give a damned about your quality of life. They’re openly talking about stealing your money, and they’re doing it to get your vote! ARE YOU BATSHIT CRAZY? Why would you vote for that? It’s your goddamned money! They have to falsely call it an “entitlement” to try and get you to go along with this scheme. And while Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of preserving social security, most of us don’t believe that it will pay out when we retire. Managing expectations is 60% of the battle in getting anything done. If we accept the idea that social security is going to be diminished on us, then we’ve set ourselves up to get robbed. This is madness!

Yes, social security will be in trouble in 2037 if we maintain the current rules. By 2038, if we do nothing to the system at all, social security will pay each recipient 78% of what it pays now in order to keep the system solvent. Keep in mind that what I mean by solvent, is self sustaining (i.e NOT an entitlement). There’s a simple solution to the solvency problem. As it stands now, we stop making social security contributions when we’ve reached an income of $106,800 per year. After you’ve made that, you’re no longer paying into the system until the next calendar year. All we need to do is remove that cap, and problem solved! I don’t know about you, but when I’m 107,000 into my annual earnings, that’s when I can most afford to get taxed. I honestly don’t even notice when those contributions stop being taken out of my check.

If I were writing the US tax code, here’s what I would do;

-No federal taxes on anyone for the first 35k you earn. That first 35k is when you most need every cent you make.

-Federal taxes would kick in on every cent over 35k that you earn, and the percentage would increase incrementally on every 35k.

-Capital gains tax would be some percentage higher than earned income taxes, and they would be paid on every cent of capital gains. Right now, rich people defer some of their income to take stock options, in order to avoid paying that higher earned income tax rate. This must end. They’re stealing from you by doing this.

-There would be no contribution cap on any federal insurance program (social security, medicare, unemployment, etc).

Look, if I have to be taxed, I’d rather be taxed on the last 35k that I earn every year than on the first 35k. That first 35k is the money that keeps me from being homeless. The last 35k is what keeps me in Ferragamo handbags.

And let me say one more thing to the “entitlement” hating crowd. Until you can name one single first world country that doesn’t have social safety nets, you need to shut the fuck up. There’s no such thing as a first world country with no social safety nets. “Safety net” and “first world” are inextricably intertwined. And if you’re telling yourself otherwise, they you’re a complete idiot. If you can’t show me how your bullshit idea of every man for himself has worked to improve one single country, then SHUT UP ALREADY. I’m tired of hearing about your fucking unicorn.It makes me bitchy.

Social security is the only solace you have when Enron, Arthur Anderson, and WorldCom rob you by suckering you into investing in their worthless company. Social security is the only solace you have when Bank Of America, CitiBank, Goldman Sachs, Wachovia, and Chase falsely inflate the value of your home by giving out loans to people that can’t afford the other homes on your block. Social security is the only solace you have when the lobbyists for the financial institutions that robbed you, buy politicians so that they can turn Fannie and Freddie into coconspirators in the real estate ponzi scheme.

Corporations are picking your picket every single day, in a million different ways. Our wages haven’t gone up in a decade. I got into the staffing business almost 14 years ago. When I started, I was hiring JAVA developers. I’m still hiring JAVA developers today, for the exact same wage that I was paying them 14 years ago, when gas literally cost half as much as it does today, and milk was $2.50 a gallon. You’re making less money, while the company sells its wares at a higher profit.

We’re on the fast track to turning into Mexico. Taking away social security will accelerate that devolution faster than other single factor that got us on this road.

You’re not the one sucking on the tit. You’re the fucking cow. And when your milk stops lubricating our country, you’re fucked, and your kids are fucked. Wake up!