Quick Hitts

For decades business have been required to inform the IRS if they paid any non-employee more than $600 a year. That’s about to get much more complicated and difficult due to a new clause in the Obamacare bill. Now business will be required to send 1099s to every business they’ve paid more than $600. This is a desperate attempt to tap into the underground economy – the people who work for cash and don’t pay taxes on every cent they earn.

There are plenty of other blogs and articles about how much more this will cost businesses – especially small businesses – so I won’t harp on that. It’s more important to consider how much of the legitimate economy would be lost by shutting down the underground economy.

We can’t tell for sure how much buying and selling happens without Big Brother getting his cut, but around 10-15% would be a reasonable guess. Under-the-table money can’t be banked or invested, so it’s spent directly, and usually quickly, providing an immediate economic benefit. The fact that it’s tax free means there’s more to go back into the community. It creates a huge, positive ripple effect.

We tend to think of the underground economy as being drugs, prostitution and gambling but that’s only a part of it, and probably a minor part. The larger underground economy supports and grows the above ground economy. When a contractor, building your deck, gives you a 20% discount for cash, he’s still buying his supplies from a lumberyard and paying employees (in cash). This law is designed to make that more difficult. If you don’t have that deck built because it costs you 20% more to do it “legitimately,” the contractor loses, his employees lose, the lumberyard loses, and you don’t get to enjoy a deck.

But that’s a one-shot deal. Consider the lasting effects of another huge part of the underground economy – daycare.

Legal daycare costs about $150 a week, per kid. Parents with two kids are likely to figure that $1200 a month makes it unprofitable for both of them to work. That changes dramatically when a neighbor agrees to watch both kids for $100 a week, cash. Now both parents can work full time, paying taxes in the above ground economy. If the neighbor is watching the kids for two other families it results in three full time workers contributing to the economy.

I don’t know if my neighborhood is typical, but several years ago there were at least a half dozen women offering illegal daycare in my smallish village (and that was just the ones I knew about). Figure three additional working adults per babysitter, times six, times, say, $35k a year that the parents were earning, and were talking $630,000 extra in the local economy. These are ass numbers, so lower them if you like and you’re still looking at a significant positive effect. Going after these “criminal” daycare operators would hurt everyone, damage the economy, and help no one. Doing it on a nationwide scale will have devastating effects on the economy.

And that’s just one sector. It happens all over the country, with all kinds of businesses.

Unintended consequences always result in the government causing more damage than it intends to. We can only hope this bill fails its attempt to crush untaxed transactions. If it succeeds, we’re going to see even more economic devastation.

It’s extremely annoying that time and resources have to be wasted, over and over again, keeping IDiots thinly veiled creationism out of public schools.

You can spend forever explaining how evolution happened and why it may look like things were designed and blah blah blah, but it’s like trying to teach long division to a Golden Retriever. This is a much better approach.

When dealing with a True Believer in nonsense like homeopathy, you can take the time to carefully point out why what they believe in is impossible.  You can refer to chemistry and physics and just plain old common sense.  You can do this for hours, and then days, almost always to no avail.

So you might as well just make fun of their stupidity.

The first two people in this clip are for real.

Kudos go to the mashup artist for including clips from the Retro Encabulator:

The Retro Encabulator is, as you all know, an improvement on the Turbo Encabulator:

This is more of the same, but there’s fresh material at the 1:50 mark, explaining how to repair it, or at least generate high bills from your customer.

You’ll find many more variations if you search Turbo Encabulator or Retro Encabulator on YouTube.  But it’s older than that – this joke goes back to 1962, when someone inserted a joke data sheet for it into a GE Handbook, complete with a diagram to accompany the description.  But it’s older than that – it was reportedly spotted in the “Institution of Electrical Engineers, Students Quarterly Journal” in 1955.  But it’s older than that – it was originally published in Time magazine in 1946.

Wait, what were we talking about?

Conservative and Libertarian pundits are having an outrage competition among themselves over Obama getting BP to put some money up front for victim compensation.  The best and the brightest pontificaters are joining the dumbest and the dullest and they’re all spitting mad.  It’s an Outrage!  It’s a Shakedown!  A Shakedown, I tell ya!  It’s bad and evil and will lead to the fall our republic!

This is why I’m a small L Libertarian.  Pragmatic.  Willing to compromise when it’s necessary.  Or, according to the Big Ls, someone with no principles.  (Libertarians spend an inordinate amount of time comparing the sizes of their Ls.)

I understand the ideological viewpoint and can see where the pundits are coming from.  From a conservative or libertarian viewpoint the correct and proper way to do this is to let it wind through the courts, slowly, slowly, and eventually, get compensation to some of the victims.  That’s what happened with the Exxon Valdez mess.  Two decades later there’s still oil sitting  below the surface of the ground.  Much of the fishing business still hasn’t recovered.  The lucky residents and business people have received pennies on the dollar. Others got fractions of a cent on the dollar.  The rest have received nothing.

That’s the right and correct and legal way to do things.

Discarding Utopian ideology for a pragmatic approach makes a lot more sense.  Victims can get reimbursed faster and have a chance to recover at least somewhat from the massive mess BP created.  It’s a small bit of payback as well.

Big Oil is one of the special interests that owns congress.  They receive special tax consideration, huge discounts on leases, and other favors that have saved them tens of billions of dollars over the years.  Now, BP gets to pay some of that back.

Twenty billion dollars may sound like a lot, but the mass media isn’t reporting that it’s really five billion a year for four years.  That’s a pittance for a company the size of BP, with assets worth over six hundred billion dollars.  It would be like you or me having to pony up five hundred bucks a year.

We can only guess at the conversation Obama had with BP.  I’d like to think it went like this:

“Guys, you’re going to have to pay out sooner or later, so let’s do this.  You set aside five billion a year for four years, and we’ll announce you’ve put up twenty billion.  We’ve got a good guy to do the payouts, a fair and independent guy who has lots of experience with this kind of thing.  It will give you some good PR, which you really need.  It will also head off lawsuits, because people who have already been paid won’t have as much of a case.”

That would be great.  A friendly agreement designed to benefit everyone.

But maybe it went like this:

“Ya got a real nice oil company here.  Real nice.  Sure would be a shame if anything happened to it, ya know what I mean?”

Considering that BP caused this mess by cutting corners and ignoring basic safety practices, I’d have no problem with that approach either.

Sometimes you’ve got to set the ideology aside to do something that works. That’s why I sport a little L. It’s rather cute, and much more useful in the real world than a big one, which often just gets in the way and looks ridiculous.

The Left Coast has always been a hotbed of woo, junk science and nanny alarmism.  I have power tools labeled “WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.”  Damn, and I’d been planning on French kissing my router.  There goes my Saturday night.

Stupidity is entertaining, but it can also be costly.  San Francisco, for instance, has just been hit with an $80 million stupidly tax.

Woo-wooers claim cell phones cause brain cancer.  They’ve got a few, very few, studies that appear to support them, but it’s not necessary to take the time to debunk them.  Instead, you just have to know that the rate of brain cancer in the US has remained the same from 1980, when no one had cell phones, to today, when everyone has them.  But woo is impervious to facts.  Instead they scrounge around for poorly conducted studies that appear to support their woo and shout “See! See! I was Right!”

The paranoid brain trusts in San Francisco has passed a law forcing every cell phone retailer in the city to label their phones with radiation levels.  Their rhetoric compared cell phone manufactures to the tobacco and alcohol industries.

Cell phone manufactures warned them they’d fight back, but no one on the Board of Supervisors was listening – perhaps they were too busy taking on their cells.  They passed the law and the CITA, an international association for the wireless industry, announced they won’t be holding conventions in SF any longer.  They have one scheduled for October, which is too late to change, but all subsequent conventions, which bring 68,000 attendees and an estimated  $80 million to the local economy, will be held elsewhere.

Stupidity isn’t always a capital crime.  Sometimes it’s just really, really expensive.

The Democrat’s dominance in congress is threatened by thousands of small political organizations encouraging people to vote against incumbents.  Dems are desperate to silence them, so on Thursday the house passed a first-amendment-shredding law called The DISCLOSE act, which stands for Democratic Incumbent Safety Contract Locking Out Simply Everyone.

The law is designed to make it nearly impossible for political organizations to speak out by hobbling them with draconian regulations.  They will have to submit lists of their donors to Big Brother.  Any broadcast ads must list their five biggest contributors, which eliminates the possibility of an economical 15 second radio ad, as well as giving pause to contributors who don’t want their name blasted everywhere.  And ridiculous amounts of paperwork are included, of course.

The NRA spoke about against it, so the Democrats carved out an exemption for them.  Once they received their exemption, they bravely shut up and are now refusing to take a stand.  Since they’re protected from it they no longer give a damn.

Other groups complained about the NRA’s special treatment, so the Dems rewrote the NRA exception to cover other very large organizations.  It’s only the little guys who will get screwed.

This is the NRAs excuse.  Lame, isn’t it?

Nice move, you gutless wonders.

Gunther Link, 45, was stuck in an elevator.  As soon as he was rescued he ran to church to thank his God.  His God then crushed him under an 860 pound stone altar.  That God dude is such a practical joker. An atheist would have thanked his rescuers instead.

God also sent 117 people to the hospital via contaminated holy water.

Allah is has the same sense of humor.  When one of his followers, who was obviously not an atheist, insisted on wearing a head covering at a go-cart track, he rewarded her by strangling her with it.  What a jokester!

It looks like Pakistan is going to be calling for the execution of Facebook operator Mark Zuckerberg.  He allowed the “draw a picture of Mohamed day” page to stay up, so the Religion of Peace wants him killed.

A month after the earthquake a Haitian couple tried to get married.  Christian evangelicals, not atheists, helpfully attacked them with rocks, because it was a pagan wedding.

An African mob burned down a home, putting a family of nine on the street, because they believed they were witches.

John Smith has more imagination than the parents who named him.  He fired Jammie Harms because her fetus was hostile toward him, and was projecting negative energy.  His psychic confirmed his suspicions.  He did try to resolve it by going to a chiropractor/energy worker, but that didn’t work out, so he canned her.

Christians and Muslims in Nigeria enjoyed a three day riot that left dozens dead.  Perhaps they were arguing about whose god was more loving.  The last atheist riot was. . . um. . .never.

A US military supplier of very sophisticated gun sights inscribed each one with a scripture.  Surprisingly, when it was revealed, they stopped doing it.

Who needs 72 virgins?  This Israeli “Messiah” is happy with a mere 17.  Or maybe 30.  He’s too busy to count them, and the approximately 60 kids he appears to have fathered.  Note the Funny Eyes.

What do you do when the church says your mom is a witch?  Slit her throat, of course. (Funny eyes, again.)

The Pope warned Africans that use of condoms would increase the spread of AIDS because. . . because he’s an idiot, I guess.  There’s no other explanation.

Hasidic Jews, not atheists, staged a riot outside an Intel factory in Israel, because it operated on the Sabbath.  They attacked cars, yelled insults, and spit.  And if you’ve ever listened to them pronounce words like chutzpah and Hasidim you know they can generate serious amounts of phlegm.

A Christian Theater group, whose website says they’re “Dedicated to providing drama that is overshadowed by the truth and power of God and His Word, the Bible,”  is asking for nearly a half million dollars of taxpayer money to fund their silliness.  Evidently God is a little short of cash at the moment.

The Catholic Church, still refusing to admit their blame in aiding and abetting child rape, once again claimed that it was the fault of homosexuals, not pedophiles.  (Note: Every week there are literally dozens of new stories about catholic priests raping children and the church making increasingly lame excuses for it.  I’ve opted to bypass most of them, because there’s only so much space on my web host’s hard drives.)

Every Friday afternoon Muslims mob several streets in Paris, shutting down businesses.  They’ve even got their own faux security guards to keep anyone else out of the area.

If you’re broken someone jaw in the UK, simply find a ditzy judge who will let you go because you’re a Muslim.

If you’re Muslim, better avoid watching soccer.  If your own family doesn’t kill you the religious police might.  Atheists can watch soccer if they want to, but most American atheists don’t, because it’s lame.

If your six week old baby, who you’ve named Faith Lovemore, is crying, just stuff bible pages in her mouth until she stops breathing.  That will calm her right down.  Daddy was a religious whack job too.  (Once again, seriously funny eyes.)  Poor kid.  If she only had been born to atheist parents. . .

As always, this is just a small percentage of stories I’ve gathered since the last TADD post.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I couldn’t find enough material to do another one?