Divemedic

Many on the right are blasting the recent ruling on Obama care, stating that the government has this supposedly new power to compel you to do things by using taxes as an incentive. As if taxing people if they do not buy things is a new phenomenon, or some new concept. The fact is, this has been going on for decades.
Buy a house, or you pay more in income taxes, because people who rent cannot deduct mortgage interest, nor can they deduct the property taxes that are paid as a part of the rent.
Buy energy efficient appliances, get a tax deduction.
Buy an energy efficient car, get a tax deduction.
Obtain an expensive college education, get a tax deduction.
Do with a student loan, deduct the interest.

Or are you pulling a switcheroo by claiming that a deduction on your taxes for buying something is any different from an addition to your taxes by not buying something? That is the same logic that a business uses when they are prohibited by law from charging extra for customers who pay by credit card, so they give a discount for cash.

Then there are the taxes that are designed to punish you for buying products, instead of not buying them:
Taxes on tobacco, alcohol, luxury goods, gasoline, tanning beds, certain foods, cars, and on and on. There are even taxes that increase with income, designed to punish you for being successful.

There is nothing new here, and you are fooling yourself if you think that the SCOTUS has changed anything with this ruling.

That doesn’t mean that I am in favor of Obamacare. What it means is that I have long ago come to the understanding that taxes in this country only provide about 65% of what the government spends, and are used more for behavior modification than they are for revenue generation.

A lifeguard is assigned to watch a given area of beach. A swimmer in an area that is uncovered by a lifeguard a quarter of a mile away gets in trouble, and citizens report it to the lifeguard, who then leaves his assigned area to try and save the swimmer. He is fired for leaving his area uncovered.

I can understand why they fired him. The lifeguard company cannot allow this to happen. Unfortunately, policy is made
because of legal liability. The company has to look out for what it is
contracted to do. The company and its employees have a duty to act
within their area, a duty that they cannot fulfill if their lifeguards are off elsewhere. It may suck, it may not make sense, but it is the way that the law works.
 

The lifeguard left the area where he had a duty to act in
order to go to an area where he did not, thus leaving him and his
company open to legal liability. The fact that nothing happened in his assigned area while he was gone doesn’t
change this. 

If the company he works for doesn’t discipline him for this, then the precedent is set: other lifeguards can leave their area to do whatever, and then claim that they left to rescue someone, and the company will not be able to discipline them in the future.

This is freelancing, pure and simple. I know this sounds harsh, but the guy who was drowning decided to swim in an area that is not covered by lifeguards, thereby assuming the risk that he was swimming on an uncovered beach.

This reminds me of the people who live in an area that doesn’t have a public fire department, and refuse to pay the membership fees of the fire department who does cover their area, but then get upset when the fire department that they consciously avoid paying for refuses to provide service.

This lifeguard knew the rules, he was told that they couldn’t go beyond a certain limit, and would be disciplined if he did. He broke those rules, and was fired. He knew what he was doing, and figured that the rules didn’t apply to him.


Of course people in this situation are quick to say that you should, as a rescuer, be willing to sacrifice your job to rescue someone. To those people, I ask you this:
On 9/11, did you quit your job to rush to ground zero and help out?
During hurricane Katrina, did you quit your job to rush to New Orleans?
Why are you sitting here reading this? You should be out west, saving people from the wildfires there.

Or is it easier to bitch on the internet about what others should do, but not actually do it yourself?
  
There are limits to what we can do. We can’t go off and try to save the world. All we can do is take care of our piece of it.

So the voters of Orange County, Florida are starting a drive to get an initiative added to the ballot in November: A law that would require employers to give an employee one hour off with pay for every 37 hours worked. All the employee must do is call in sick, and get paid for not being at work. This means that for every 37 hours of work, the employer must pay the worker 38 hours of pay.

This astounds me that people do not see what will happen here: Employers in Orange County will have to find a way to be competitive with businesses that are not in Orange County. There are a few ways to do this:
1 Not own a business in Orange County
2 Cut employee wages by 3%
3 Get rid of 3% of the workforce

Many will not be able to raise prices, because they will lose sales to businesses that are outside the county and charge less.

One way to reduce the workforce is by contracting. I work for an employer that only has ten employees, and the rest of us are “independent contractors” who are issued 1099’s for work. We must pay our own taxes, so we are not employees: but we must still punch a time clock, wear a uniform, follow the policies of the employer, and are paid by the hour. Don’t like it? If you complain, they will simply not call you to work any longer.

Local theme parks do the same thing. My son dates a woman that is employed by a company that is a contractor, contracted to a local theme park to train animals for shows in the park. They are paid 6 hours a day, but must work until the jobs are done: mostly this means a 10 hour workday.

My ex-wife once worked for an employer that refused to pay for any hours worked over 40 in a week. Instead, they added hours worked to a “paid time off” bank that you could theoretically use as vacation. The problem was that they never let you take the time off that you had earned. When she complained, they fired her. She had to hire a lawyer and sue them in order to get paid for the time that she had banked.

With laws like simply being paid for the time you actually work being ignored, I just don’t believe that paid sick time will work.

This new law is a bad idea, and will not fix anything. Employers will just find ways to skirt the law, and it will hurt people in the long run.

Under a proposed California law, a child can have more than two parents. This would mean that mothers would be able to receive child support from multiple men for the same child. Isn’t modern jurisprudence wonderful? Get pregnant once, and you are set.

Here is a story complaining that an 18 year old man who was caught and convicted for committing a string of seven armed robberies, one of which where he engaged in a gunfight with a concealed weapons permit holder that resulted in an accomplice getting shot, and was sentenced to 162 years in prison. The press is complaining because he is a “teenaged first time offender.”

He isn’t a first time offender, he is a seven time offender. Just because he was committing so many crimes that he wasn’t caught until after his seventh robbery doesn’t mean he gets a pass on the other six. Under this theory, a serial killer who isn’t caught until after he kills 40 women is a first time offender? Of course not.

In this case, the press would rather scream about the unfairness to the criminal, and outlaw the guns he used.  

The violent felon had this to say:

“There ain’t no justice in the justice system,” he said, gazing down at
his olive-green prison jumpsuit and beige rubber sandals.

Justice?
Justice here has been served. You are a person who has committed at
least seven armed robberies, attempted to murder one of your victims,
and now you want to talk about justice?

Rot in there, you fucking douchebag. And to the press that is slanting this article: this is why the mainstream press is becoming more and more irrelevant. We are tired of your biased reporting that blames the working people, and excuses the lazy slackers of the welfare and criminal class.

Read the incredible story of German Bosque. He has been accused of cracking the head of a handcuffed suspect, beating juveniles, hiding
drugs in his police car, stealing from suspects, defying direct orders
and lying and falsifying police reports. He once called in sick to take a
vacation to Cancún and has engaged in a rash of unauthorized police
chases, including one in which four people were killed.

He has been arrested three times, fired six times, but still has his cop job:

In 1990 (while still in the police academy), he was arrested for impersonating a police officer, auto theft and possession of a firearm in the commission of a felony. The vehicle he was driving had been stolen a year earlier from a housing division where he had been working as a locksmith.

He was arrested in 1992 for driving on a suspended license.

In 1994, he engaged in an unauthorized pursuit that ended with the deaths of four people.

In March of 1998, he was suspended for yet another unauthorized pursuit. He was suspended for the same thing in May. Then, he called in sick because he was in Cancun.

In 1999, he engages in another unauthorized pursuit, and then lies about it when it results in an accident. He waits 20 minutes to call the accident in, thus delaying medical care. He is suspended for 20 days over that one. Six months later, a prisoner accuses him of beating him after he was handcuffed. No action was taken.

In 2000, he was involved in yet another unauthorized pursuit. He was fired, but the union managed to get him rehired three months later.

Two months later, he skates out of trouble again, when he is reported by another officer for punching a 14-year-old boy three times in the head, telling the youth:
“I am the law, if I feel like it right now I can f— you up and no one
will say nothing to me.’’ Bosque admits striking the boy, but the state attorney declines to prosecute.

A month after that, he is suspended for a day for skipping work.

Less than a year later, he slapped his girlfriend in the face while they were sitting in his personal vehicle,
then slapped his own face and called police, telling them that she had
battered him. An investigation subsequently showed that Bosque’s facial
injuries were self-inflicted. Investigators recommended he be terminated
immediately. Charges of lying under oath and making a false police
report are dropped because the department failed to initiate
disciplinary action within 60 days.

He is caught making false statements on a police report a month later.

and on, and on. Read his entire record here.

In comments to this post, Aaron be Bruyn states that there are different “stratta” [sic] of libertarians. Of course there are. just like there are democrats that support guns, and republicans that support abortion. I am talking about the party, and the beliefs of the majority of them.

The point he goes on to make, that a person should be able to “opt out” of police and fire, while still saying that an army is necessary is pure hypocrisy. What makes an army, designed to deal with external threats to the citizenry, any more legitimate than a police force, designed to deal with internal threats to the citizenry?

What if someone were to rob you, and you had opted out? What if your house caught fire? Would you be OK with the fire department standing by while your house burned down because you “opted out?” Or would you all of a sudden want to “opt in” at that point?

You see, fire departments are a way of spreading a risk pool among a large population, thus taking a high cost/low probability event and diluting the cost across that large population. Waiting until you need it to pay for it does not pay for the time that the fire department had be there during the times that you didn’t need it.

Same goes for the police. If you “Opt out” and someone rapes and murders your wife, is it acceptable if the police don’t enforce the law, because you “opted out?”

This is why I find your libertarian position to be ridiculous. Of course, the national party says:

1.5 Crime and Justice

Government exists to protect the rights of every individual including life, liberty and property.  Criminal
laws should be limited to violation of the rights of others through
force or fraud, or deliberate actions that place others involuntarily at
significant risk of harm. Individuals retain the right to voluntarily
assume risk of harm to themselves. We support restitution to the victim
to the fullest degree possible at the expense of the criminal or the
negligent wrongdoer. We oppose reduction of constitutional safeguards of
the rights of the criminally accused. The rights of due process, a
speedy trial, legal counsel, trial by jury, and the legal presumption of
innocence until proven guilty, must not be denied. We assert the
common-law right of juries to judge not only the facts but also the
justice of the law.

Yet another attack where the assailant eats the other one’s face, this time in China. You can’t blame this one on the widespread Zombie mania here in the states, and you can’t blame it on bath salts.

Of course, the recent attack in Miami that police blamed on bath salts wasn’t due to bath salts, after all.

I don’t care what is causing it, drugs, alcohol, or psychosis, if anyone approaches me without clothes on and covered in blood, he is going to see what my carry weapon looks like. If he doesn’t immediately stop, I will use deadly force. This is getting totally out of hand.

On a related note, this man is foolish: