POLITICS :: Just checking in... some thoughts on tax reform while I am here.

 

It's about 10pm where I live... as I start my post.  Sometimes it can take awhile to get to the end of my sharing.  :-)  Not much for me to say tonight... I browsed a few posts and articles but the whole thing seems to be in limbo still.

I will say I looked at an election map, but it seems to be published by a Democrat source as they are calling everything for Biden.

I vaguely remember the Florida dispute with Gore, and something about Hilary Clinton's run, so the energy around this same issue is obvious... several election cycles now.  

I had no idea, until recently, that 15 states have tried to ratify some kind of amendment to make the popular vote the final word for the future.  I tried to share my own discovery that the popular vote doesn't reflect the actual attitudes of the nation... mostly, it reflect the urban areas, the big cities.  That is really fraud territory... lots of votes in one small space.

I think the old history of vote manipulation, in places like Chicago and New York because of the gangs that existed then, is taking on a new process because of technology.  I'm just saying that it exists, somewhere, because criminals don't just give up their territories without being killed or arrested... and I hear getting arrested doesn't stop the criminal process.

This is the world... now.

I am just one person.

Ordinary people don't have the ability to affect these kinds of things.

We are the victims of those who "want to rule the world."

America has a lot of problems to figure out if we want to continue being a strong global power.  Raising taxes is not the answer.  Getting our national debt down is part of the solution... it would give us some breathing room for the disasters that will come in the future, whether we have the funds for them or not.

I just don't know WHY God doesn't give me the money I need to get these things changed!  :-)  

It is a multi-year process to do anything related to government change.  I would love to see an amendment that would permanently LIMIT the government's ability to tax its citizens.  I have written about this before, but no one reads my stuff anyway, so I will say it again...

ONE TAX.

A permanently limited SALES TAX that would be set at 10% and distributed like this ::

• 3% for FEDERAL needs
• 3% for STATE needs
• 3% for COUNTY needs, and then 
• the final 1% dedicated to INTERNATIONAL expenses we have to contribute to, like the UN.

This would eliminate ALL other taxes... including INCOME tax, ESTATE taxes, PROPERTY taxes, CAPITAL GAINS taxes, etc.  

It would make taxing a fair responsibility because rich and poor would pay their share based on what they purchase.  I haven't figured out how to deal with wholesale and retail taxes. This might get troublesome in rental properties and things like that, but I know the legislators will have their own ideas about that!

There wouldn't be "loop holes" and tax reductions or tax credits, etc., we would all just pay that 10% when we purchased things over the course of time.

This would also eliminate a lot of government jobs associated with taxation, which means less labor costs and other expenses.  Naturally, we know the government would ease any change into place, probably over twenty years so they can keep it going a bit longer and try to find ways around it.  BUT, if we think about the PRINCIPLE of taxation, it isn't meant to be an ever-increasing part of the citizen's income.  I tried to think of what a fair tax amount would be for citizens, and 10% seemed fair to me - plus, it divided perfectly.

If we don't do something, the government will continue to "NEED" more and more of every citizen's money until the government is the owner of it all, and citizens begin working for the government.

After I realized the SALES TAX was the only tax that can be applied evenly to everyone, everywhere, I just began seeing all kinds of benefits to that being the ONLY TAX we pay.

In our technology, this would also allow the government to collect taxes immediately, and they can be adjusted as needed as well... like for refunds, etc.

All of this would force the government to focus on what is really needed, not creating more and more programs that cause new taxes and budget problems.

Really, taxes are meant to pay for the operations of government as it PROTECTS its citizens... military, mandated offices, and whatever else there is that can't be eliminated.

This would divide the responsibilities of the various levels of government, create the need for partnerships with BIG projects, and make a lot more decisions into local choices.

This is also a global option in our age, if someone decides to make it one.  

For me, that is another step toward the Antichrist, but there really is no way to stop him from happening.  We may as well see it as something that benefits us now by organizing and reducing the impact and authority of the government in our individual lives.

I have been on Welfare.  I learned that any time the government is involved in providing money to you, it requires complete access to your life.  By changing to a SALES TAX ONLY form of taxation, we change from an individual focus to a business focus.

The government will gain access to business records and oversight for sales activities...if it decides there is a problem.  That would mean an audit of a business but no audits of personal spending.

It sounds like people will be able to become better criminals in some ways, but remember, if they sell drugs or anything illegal, and don't report the taxes, it is still a crime.

For those of us who sell online, the websites will become responsible for collecting and remitting the taxes per sale, or refund.

I haven't found a really bad part of this concept yet... for us, individual people.  Businesses MIGHT not like it, but I doubt it.  They will save all that other tax income, too.

Imagine your life without all the different taxes the government spreads out and collects under different umbrellas.  That would be an economic stimulus in its own right.

More important to me is the PRINCIPLE involved.  How much tax is enough !?!  To permanently limit taxes at this point in history would be a huge change in direction and I think it would require something like a national amendment.

I would like to share one more story about our government.

When I became an official senior, my food benefits turned into a cash benefit.  I also became aware that the government would be keeping a "tab" of expenses to collect after I die.  I am trying to make an annual check on this "tab" but have only requested one so far.  They don't send you an itemized billing, with an explanation of what the charges are and why they are considered debts to be collected.  My view is that the person in charge of the estate will have no way to argue any amount that is requested.  I can't even dispute a charge because they weren't defined.  This is one reason I wonder if all my food benefits are now going to be debts on my estate.

I should also add that I once suggested the government provide "loans" to poor people, like me, who are trying to change their income futures, that can be paid back later on.  My reason was that Welfare was never enough to live on  --  it destroyed our lives every time I tried to make it better.  

The loan would have to be large enough to make a real change.  

It could also become an investment for the government if it, instead, took a small percentage of ownership if it is available.  Again, the special number is 10% because I discovered the SEC allows investors with a ten percent ownership stake to have a seat on the Board of Directors to protect their investment.  

This investment focus would also bring future income into the government if it was successful.  I'm sure the government would be protecting its money with the SBA and other involvements.  :-)

I'm out of steam now... I'll let you think on those suggestions and you can share your comments with me.  I probably forgot some details of my plan because I haven't thought of it for awhile.

I was hoping to work on these issues with my own income, but that hasn't happened.

My hope for Trump being the President was that he would find new ways for the government to create income that are not a tax.

I have a ton of my own ideas based on my life and experiences with the government.

I guess that's all,

Until next time,

In Christ,

Deborah Martin

http://work2gather.us

and more...

Campaign Issues :: Solutions 2016 :: Welfare

http://political-rehabilitation.blogspot.com
http://work2gather.us
21 JULY 2016 - about 9pm PST



This post is on the Welfare chapter in the Heritage Foundation report called Solutions2016.  The purpose of their report is to encourage reforms in government and in the next election -- it is their way of trying to save America in its financial crises and, I suspect, in the lives of those who fund it.  Below is the statement used in the report to define what Welfare is ::

Today, the federal government operates roughly 80 means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care, and social services to poor and lower-income Americans.

There is no description of the programs included in the 80, or what makes them "means-tested" for funding purposes.  Later in the text there is a reference to food stamps and public housing, to cash grants (Called Aid to Families with Dependent Children when I entered the system, and changed to TANF in 1996 I think, when there was a welfare reform event.)  Personally, I don't know all of the aid programs that are available, only the ones I accessed or heard about.  I am aware of General Relief, WIC for pregnant women and their young children, several different housing programs that may even include homeless shelters, and community clinics for those who don't have regular state medical policies or need items not on the approved lists.  These may be some of the programs being referred to, but there is no way to know because nothing is said about them.

I am sure the reference to 80 programs is to say there are too many welfare (entitlement) programs available.  My concern is the details of those programs.  I would want to know the list content... the name and purpose of each "means-tested" program.  It could be they are a variety of programs that meet the needs of very different recipients, from infants to disabled veterans.  It could be one is for eye glasses, another for hearing aids, some for food, several for housing options, etc.  We know that all of the people who are in need are not cared for, so are these programs efforts to do as much as possible for as many as possible, or is a small group benefitting by all of them?  It is an important difference. 


Welfare is an important topic for me because it was the only survival resource we had as a single-parent family over the years.  If you read my blog bio, you will see that I entered the US welfare system in 1975.  I have been associated with it in some way for most of the years since...through a large variety of circumstance, but always trying to find a way out, suffering when I did try, and learning that poverty is a terrible pit that is not easy to escape. 

Solutions for "entitlement programs," in the eyes of conservative Republicans, always seems to be the same one ::  "...these people just need to work!"  (That's my paraphrase of their views, no one actually said that - to my knowledge.)  Work is good, but it isn't always a simple solution.  There are very complicated issues attached to poverty. 

To my knowledge, Welfare programs were started to help struggling families of soldiers who died in WWI or II.  In that time of our country's history, women were often housewives that had never worked outside of the home.  The children in these fatherless households were becoming juvenile delinquents and costing the government a lot more money than the costs of a Welfare program would.  I believe they wanted to help mothers stay home to care for their children as a preventive measure. 

That part of poverty hasn't changed.  Single-parent households are still troublesome.  It is still better to have one loving parent home with their children than to have them raise themselves while their parent works, or grow up in daycare settings.  Naturally, it would be better to have a nuclear family, with father and mother raising their children, but that hardly exists anymore.  As a nation, as a world, we are dealing with the effects of our family structures disintegrating.  Welfare may help people to survive, but it doesn't solve the real problems.


The cash amounts and other related benefits of Welfare have changed over the years, too.  When I entered the system, I think the benefits available were small amounts of cash primarily for housing and utilities and general living requirements, food stamps for groceries, and Medicaid for basic medical needs. 

It is hard to remember all the details now, after so many years, but I know I struggled to make it through every month.  What you may take for granted as normal, poverty households may have to do without.  You may have a washer and dryer, poverty households use a Laundromat, and that costs money, which they sometimes don't have. 

There were no funds for childcare back then.  No transportation (bus passes) help.  I remember there was sometimes a single emergency grant a year.  I believe that was for housing costs if you were being evicted because your money didn't make it that far, or utilities that were in jeopardy of being turned off because you let the bill go too long so you could get food, or school supplies, or clothes, or Christmas or something normal households could afford.  Eventually these "programs" were added to the Welfare formula.  Things like WIC didn't always exist.  Yearly utility programs for the high costs of winter didn't always exist.  It may be these are part of the "80 means-tested programs" that were referred to earlier.

In the early days, you had to report every penny you acquired by any means every month.  They had home visits to make sure you didn't have any saleable assets to provide for your own needs...that you lived where you said you lived...and that no one "extra" was living with you.  Monthly reports were required, signed to allow for fraud proceedings if needed.  If something happened to your report, there was no check to pay rent, which sometimes led to evictions, which led to no house to live in if there wasn't an emergency fund.  It was a difficult life.  Today you are encouraged to make money and don't have to report it until you reach a certain amount... your poverty rate I think.

I didn't mean to get into all this detail, but I hope it gives you some perspective on what the definition of Welfare programs are.  Today, with computers and internet access, receiving benefits from the government means you give them total access to your life, to any information that may exist about you.  You don't have a choice in this requirement if you need to survive with Welfare funds.  They will also have access to information about anyone on your application.

The problems of poverty are not easy to fit into a government form. Women alone often take men into their family's life that shouldn't be there.  Looking for help, for a whole family, for love, for security and safety, women seem to choose men that become financial burdens to them instead of helpers, or they become perpetrators of crimes against them or their children. 

This Heritage report asks for reforms that would not penalize families with a married and committed man and woman who seek help from the government.  I was always a single parent, so I don't really know all of the penalties for couples they are referring to, but I do know that part of the conversation was the difference in grants for single parents and married couples...  it caused some parents to split up so they could receive more Welfare resources to better care for their children.

This report also shares that most of the funding for poverty programs is mostly from federal taxes, and this creates a lack of accountability in State oversight of poverty programs.  Heritage Foundation believes the burdens of Welfare responsibility need to be transferred wholly to the States.  In our current way of doing taxes, this would give the federal government more money to spend elsewhere... the real motive I am sure.

In my mind, taxes are taxes, and there are too many taxes already.  Each government entity wants to raise their taxes or fees, create new ones, make "temporary" taxes that never go away, and continually expand their control of the domain they have.  The realization that the same citizens are paying all of these different taxes seems to elude their attention.  The burden that is crushing the government right now is not Welfare, it is the entire government structure and the way it has failed to consider those citizens by being more careful with the funds they had.  People who are poor have become the easiest target to blame, and a revolving legislature makes it hard to hold anyone in government accountable for the mess we now face.

I think I will end this with some comments on one of the "Facts and Figures" cited at the end of the chapter, as an example of misleading information that you really have to think about before becoming frightened by the "statistics" they share.

Today, the U.S. spends 16 times as much on welfare as it spent in the 1960s -- about four times the amount needed to pull every poor family out of poverty -- yet the federal poverty rate remains nearly unchanged.

I have made bold the main parts of this statement I want you to think about.  There are some variables that aren't defined in this statement, but it gives you the idea that spending has grown while poverty has not.  I tried to understand where this statement came from, and then I thought about population changes from 1960 to the present and I thought about the effects of inflation on the amounts being cited.  The number of programs that are funded might somehow affect Welfare spending, too.

One of the huge problems I noticed in my years of poverty, struggling to find a way to make it meet our daily needs and help us to get away from that kind of life, was the issue of inflation.  The grant amounts never rose to meet the inflation rates, so you got the same amount of dollars, but couldn't buy as much with it... year after year after year.  This is part of the pit of poverty and government programs that try to change its effects.

I was surprised that the poverty rate hasn't changed.  I am not sure how it is computed, but I assume it is a percentage.  If the population increased and the number of households in poverty increased during the same time period, would the poverty rate be the same?

One more point needs to be included here because it refers to food stamps as "one of the largest and fastest growing of the government welfare programs."  This growth in recipients of food stamps is another sign that the economy is in distress... serious financial distress. 

I keep trying to share that housing and food are critical to any interventions we make.  Housing and food will help a family to survive until they can find a way through their crisis.  People can survive without housing, but they cannot survive without food.  Hungry people do desperate things.  It would be a wiser thing for the government to build up the reserves for the food stamp program than to eliminate it. 

Help people to stay in their homes and help them to eat, then find the best solutions for the recovery of their lives.  It may save money in other ways, like public safety costs, court costs, jail costs, prison costs, medical costs, homeless costs, and more.

That is what I have learned in all my years of struggling with poverty and the government.

Friday, 6 MAY 2016 :: Checking in and catching up with everything

In this election cycle, how can I not check in to my political topics blog !!  We are in the middle of an election that has never been equaled in history... to my knowledge anyway.  It has everyone wondering what will happen in November... or on the road to November !!

I'm not sure the two party system is the best option for America anymore.  Elections are very costly.  I just heard this year that the primary systems are the product of the parties... and that made me wonder who pays for them !!  We don't really need a primary, we just need a run-off if there is no clear winner... then everyone can keep trying all the way up to election day !!   (Sounds good to me !!)   If taxes are paying for all these elections, we need to reduce their frequency and costs... since we have to vote on Senators every two years, maybe that is enough... everything can be put on hold until the next election.

The debt is the most devastating element of our country's life... and it is affecting every other aspect of our daily operations... we have to reduce the weight of the debt until it is GONE !!

I have been on social service programs most of my adult life, and am no a recipient of early retirement funds... I know how quickly everyone likes to blame the poor, and the poor can never fight back.  There are better ways to reduce the costs of government, including getting rid of subsidies for not growing crops, finding ownership pathways for housing (which turns it into an income source and an investment), use a revolving loan fund for the SBA instead of loan guarantees (which might be a good idea for education, too), invest in more small farms and businesses instead of the large ones... small businesses hire most of the workers we have (from what I have read), and reform the prison systems to create work and repayment programs instead of jail time for theft/robbery-related crimes.

We really need to start thinking differently... looking for things that cost less and work better.

The Bible teaches restitution for theft, which is why it seems more beneficial to create a supervised work program during the payment process and to increase the restitution as additional crimes are committed... the first time would be court costs and actual costs... the second time would be court costs and twice the actual costs, and so on.  If the program is done right, there shouldn't be a repeat because skills will be learned in the process and drug issues that may have caused the thefts can be dealt with as well.  Our prisons produce worse people than what went into them... so jail time is not the best answer.

In the (recent?) recession, I noticed that all the small banks died to "save" the big ones... that wasn't good.  Small banks are more closely tied to their communities.  They are needed to help finance things that big banks won't touch.

I have noticed in the past that big business seems to thrive on government funding of various sorts.  I have always thought that government help needs to be reserved for the truly needy, including the smallest businesses, the smallest farms, and the poorest people.  Big businesses have other options, small businesses and poor people have no one.

My tax proposal is based on sharing the 10% MAXIMUM sales tax among international commitments like the UN (membership fees) and growing global government needs -- 1%, and nationally among federal -- 3%, state -- 3%, and county -- 3% governments.  I also realized that individual products can provide for individual programs, like gas purchases for transportation needs, medical purchases for healthcare needs, etc.  By limiting the taxation to a sales tax, government authorities are forced to budget and their decisions are directly linked with the health of the economy.  I think it would eliminate a lot of the surplus spending and graft that goes on.

I have shared some of these things in other posts, but it seemed like a good time to bring them up again.  If the debt burden causes our economy to tank, in one way or another, there will need to be some budget changes.  It is easy to blame the poor, and take advantage of the seniors and disabled persons, to promote abortion as a remedy, and limit access to healthcare, but I hope that other choices will be made.

Let me know what you think...
In Christ,
Deborah Martin

http://work2gather.us

8 APR 2015 :: First Post

I am trying to secure names for blog topics I would like to comment on in the future... this is the name I was able to get for my political topics.  I hope it become a source of a lot of "political rehabilitation" in many areas... government, prisons, income, shelter, food, and more.  There is so much to talk about, so much to keep track of...I don't know how much I would be able to do, but I am always trying to share my opinions on all these topics.

As you may know, this is part of my effort on behalf of Working Together (work2gather.us), which is about saving as many Christians as possible while the End Times head toward the Antichrist. My past experiences with poverty have shown me that the American church is not prepared for what the Bible tells us is coming, and I hoped to find a way to change that.  It hasn't become what I hoped for, but I know that GOD has been using my efforts to accomplish something.

America is beginning to struggle with many severe problems, and the political arena is where a lot of the forced changes will come...and are already in progress.  We can't change what GOD has decreed, but we can do our best to fight against what we can.

I also have disagreements with the prison systems, the tax systems, and other government directions. This may be the place to share them.  I will have to find out.

As long as GOD allows me to live, I look forward to continuing my efforts on behalf of Working Together (WT), Christians, and the poor.  Everything depends on what GOD provides...