pay taxes like i say, not like i do

From Yahoo News:

Treasury Secretary-designate Timothy Geithner said Wednesday he was careless in failing to pay $34,000 in Social Security and Medicare taxes earlier this decade but declared “I have paid what I owed” and apologized to Congress.

It just makes me think, are you sorry you made the mistake, or are you sorry you got caught? Looks like a great guy to head the IRS… somebody who can’t even pay his own taxes.

i hope your voting experience was better than mine

On Tuesday I went to my polling location. I waited in line for over an hour to get to the registration desk. There I had to give my name to 4 different people. The first two checked a book that I was in the correct place (the second had me sign next to my name). The second two wrote down my name and ballot number (just in case you thought it was anonymous voting). Then I got my chance to head to a voting booth.

Now, I had to wait an hour. It must be that there just weren’t enough voting machines to handle the load, right? Was that because there was a problem with the machines? Of course not. When I finally got my ballot, only 2 of the 6 voting machines were in use. The entire delay was the “sign-in” process.

I figured I just hit the polling location at a bad time. As I was leaving, however, the line was twice as long as when I started. My wife voted much later in the day and had to wait over an hour. She asked one of the people working the polls about the wait time and they said it was pretty much the same all day long.

So much for picking bad times to vote. If the center has over an hour wait constantly all day long, don’t you think someone might just realize that there’s a problem? I guess that would imply competence and some level of caring. No wonder people complain about the hassles of voting. I’ve apparently become one of them.

do you want a dictionary too?

While running an errand today, I spotted this bumper sticker. I had to read it three times to make sure I was reading it correctly. Along with a picture of Barack Obama, it said:

I don’t want coins
I wan’t change

I don’t know if this is an official Obama sticker or not. It was very close to a local Obama campaign headquarters. Did anyone proofread the thing? Wan’t?!?

excuse me, Mr. Rendell, didn’t you advertise a budget surplus?

Pennsylvania’s governor, Ed Rendell has announced that he is going to request a 1% tax hike in the state’s sales tax (from 6% to 7%). Now, before you say “it’s only a penny,” think about it in percentages–that’s a 16.6% jump.
Now, as much as this, and just about everything Ed Rendell does (like why does the state need to buy advertising time on the TV to advertise free health care for children–oh, that’s right, they do that to buy votes, sorry, wasn’t thinking), infuriates me, the kicker is a quote (note: from a democrat) in the article:

“I do know we are facing a deficit that far exceeds our surplus,” Sen. Vincent J. Fumo of Philadelphia, the ranking Democrat on the appropriations committee, said Friday in an interview.

In this past fall’s election, Mr. Rendell ran a non-stop blitz of TV commercials, including one that talked about how he had produced a budget surplus and expanded the state’s “rainy day” fund. Gosh golly, now that the election is over… now we’ve magically swung into a deficit that “far exceeds our surplus.”

This is of course on top of the hike of the state income tax by Rendell (10% hike) as well as the brand new “nickel-and-dime-you and maybe you won’t notice” tax (an extra $4 to $6/month) he introduced as well.

The sub-title on that news story is also “to help reduce property taxes.” But Mr. Fumo is saying that the increase is actually handle the budget deficit (that Mr. Rendell told us doesn’t exist). Why? That’s easy… Tell everyone in the state that this will lower property taxes (cough cough) and they’ll happily embrace it since everyone is sick and tired of being gouged on property taxes.

But that’s exactly the same smokescreen they used to push through the legalization of gambling in Pennsylvania. So, now that there are casinos in Pennsylvania, why do we need an income tax hike to reduce property taxes? Oh… that’s right… it’s just another lie. Got it.

Anybody now wishing you had joined me in voting for Lynn Swann?

I guess it’s time to start making more trips across the state line into Delaware and buy stuff tax-free.