Divemedic

There is a lot of hot air being blown about, claiming that the rich don’t pay taxes. That is completely false.
The top marginal rate in 1960 was 91 percent. However, there were so many tax deductions that the effective rate was much lower at 42 percent.

Compare that to today. The richest 1 percent make an adjusted gross income of about $435,000 or more. My wife and I are in that one percent. For 2018, we are paying an effective rate of 30 percent, even though my marginal rate is 37%.

Compare this to a couple that each earn the national average income, thereby having an AGI of $80,000. Their marginal rate would be 12%, but the taxes paid would be $24,500, making their effective rate 16 percent.

Now compare this to a married couple making just over Florida’s minimum wage. Their annual income would be about $35,000 a year, and their marginal rate would be 10 percent, resulting in about $3,800 in taxes. That means their effective rate would be just under 11 percent.

I pay a tax rate that is 3 times higher than minimum wage, and in total dollar amount, my wife and I are paying more than 60 times as much.

Don’t tell me that we are not paying our fair share. 

Isn’t a home made firework wrapped in aluminum and powerful enough to blow off a person’s fingers called a bomb?

So the story goes that breweries can’t release new brews until the ATF reopens after the government shutdown. It seems to me that, if the ATF is closed, there isn’t a whole lot they can do if you just release the beer anyway, and if they CAN stop you from releasing the beer, that simply proves that the government shutdown is a kabuki theater farce.

This is the nineteenth day of the government shutdown.
Still have electricity and water, no purge. no looting, no cool gangs of gangs wearing colanders as face shields. I still have to go to work. Worst apocalypse ever.

Maybe if this shutdown goes on long enough, people will finally see that most of government is a waste of money, and we can make this permanent.

My brother in law came to see us for the holidays. He brought along his girlfriend and her parents. What makes this unusual is that her parents are from Slovakia and don’t speak English. The girlfriend and her parents grew up in East Europe under the Soviet Union. 

This shooting will be used to justify a law that only allows cops to have guns on school property.

A Florida sheriff’s deputy killed three relatives, including a child, before killing himself outside of a high school, officials said.

A 17 year old walks into a jewelry store and asks to try on rings. Once he has three of them, worth about $3,000 or so, an employee tells him that he cannot try them all on. The thief threatens her, and then runs from the store. The owner’s husband, along with another employee, chases him out of the store, and this happens:

The man with the gun fires into the fleeing vehicle, hitting the 17 year old in the head.

When I pointed out in the comments on social media that this was a bad shoot because you cannot shoot someone who is fleeing, I was called an idiot, pro criminal, anti-gun, a Democrat, accused of having an “agenda” and every other name you can think of. Even when I pointed out that this case was very similar to another Florida shooting case, it got worse.

Stuff like this is what makes gun owners look bad.

I had quite a bit of money in the stock market. A few weeks ago, the stock market’s volatility had me down about $30k. I decided enough was enough, and I got out. I moved all of my funds to an online savings account that pays 2.1% interest. Since that day, the DJIA has lost more than 10% of its value, down almost 4000 points from its 52 week high of 26,951.

The Fed appears to be purposely destroying the market with these interest rate increases.