A taxing proposition

If you’re like nearly every other adult American, you just paid someone money to get a portion of your own earnings back. Every year, the multi-billion dollar tax return industry cashes in on people’s fundamental desire to recoup every penny of what they earned that the government should have taken. This is an industry that capitalizes on the ever-increasing complexity of tax laws, and fleeces Americans for getting back what never should have been taken to begin with. Whether it is paying $15 for an online service as I did, or a couple hundred dollars as I know some people have done this year already, it is preposterous to think that the average American has to engage the services of a highly trained professional, or utilize highly specialized and time-consuming software, just to get back the money they earned.

Why I shop at Costco, and why it matters...

...well, it matters to me, at least.

In 2014, retail giant Target announced that they would no longer offer healthcare benefits to part time employees, instead directing them to the newly formed ACA exchanges. Their rationale at the time was that “by offering them insurance, we could actually disqualify many of them from being eligible for newly available subsidies that could reduce their overall health insurance expense."

At the time this decision was made, Target was still doing quite well and was profitable, though their earnings year over year had declined slightly. They hadn’t yet felt the full effect of their credit card breach, so this was not a reaction to adverse market conditions: this was purely a calculated business decision. When you look at it at face value, it makes sense for Target to do what it can to lower costs to compete in an already tight retail sector. But in reality what happened was that Target took its internal cost of providing benefits, previously paid for by consumers through retail pricing, and passed it along to everyone, not just their customers.

Playing the Trump Card

Though it was nearly twelve years ago now, I can remember it like it was yesterday. I sat around a lunch table with a bunch of coworkers in my new job and one of them picked up the newspaper to look at the election results. “I just don’t understand how anyone can vote for them?!” Them, in this instance, being Republicans. John Kerry has just been beaten handily by incumbent George W. Bush, despite all attempts to make the latter out to be the cronyist incompetent that he had become. The sentiment was widespread, and not just limited to our lunch table. But if you look at the map from that election, the widespread nature of this sentiment was limited to geographically small, but very densely populated sections of the country.

Fast forward to 2016, and those same areas of the country are bewildered at how anyone could vote for Trump in their own backyard. Let me say this at the outset – I would never, ever vote for Trump. I don’t think he’s a good human being, never mind a good presidential candidate. But deep down, I have to admit something: I understand why people are voting for him. 

The Age of Entitlement

On Facebook the other day, my cousin posted a very well-written blog entry that was a meant to be a wake-up call for an angst-ridden twenty-something who had publicly slammed and slandered her start-up’s management, all under the guise of not receiving a living wage. Not liking to take things as second-hand source material (thanks, Ms. Brewer!), I dug further to find the original blog posting. Both are must-reads. But quite frankly, reading the latter made me mad.

The Unequal Arguments on Income Inequality

There has been, for a few years now, a lot of hue and cry about income inequality. The obvious solution of those who think this is a drastic problem is to reallocate the funds of those with the most money to those who have the least. After all, they say, in the richest country in the world, why should anyone go without?

But wait – why stop there? Why can those in the richest country in the world not afford to provide for all? And by all, let us be truly inclusive. The ‘income inequality’ crowd like to crow about the 1%, but fail to acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of Americans fall within the 1% themselves. An American with a household income of $37,000 is better off than 99% of people in the world. In fact, according to a World Bank economist, the bottom 5% of Americans are still better off than 68% of the world. Yet we don’t see that same hue and cry to address this global issue from the folks on the streets wanting $15 per hour as a minimum wage. Why is that?