States Mull Taxing Drivers
By MilePosted By: First Lady on 2/15/2005 1:22:12 PM in TAXES http://www.goofigure.com/UserGoofigureList.asp?forID= "(CBS) College student

Jayson Just commutes an odometer-spinning 2,000 miles a month. As CBS News Correspondent Sandra Hughes reports, his monthly gas bill once topped his car payment. "I was paying about $500 a month," says Just. So Just bought a fuel efficient hybrid and said goodbye to his gas-guzzling BMW. And what kind of mileage does he get? "The EPA estimate is 60 in the city, 51 on the highway," says Just. And that saves him almost $300 a month in gas. It's great for Just but bad for the roads he's driving on, because he also pays a lot less in gasoline taxes which fund highway projects and road repairs. As more and more hybrids hit the road, cash-strapped states are warning of rough roads ahead...Tax-by-mile advocates say it may be the only way to ensure that fuel efficiency doesn't prevent smooth sailing down the road." (CBSNews.com 2/14/05)

Toilet Paper TaxPosted
By: TBird on 3/11/2005 10:43:12 AM in TAXES
http://www.goofigure.com/UserGoofigureList.asp?forID= "TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -

Florida's Legislature is flush with good ideas. Sen. Al Lawson's involves a 2 cent-per-roll tax on toilet paper to pay for wastewater treatment and help small towns upgrade their sewer systems.The Democratic lawmaker's pay-as-you-go bill has been the source of many jokes - bathroom humor you might say - but he says the issue is a serious one, especially in some of the fast-growing Panhandle coastal counties in his district." (David Royse/MyWayNews.com 3/10/05)

Still no Armor for Soldiers

WASHINGTON - Nearly a year after Congress demanded action, the Pentagon has still failed to figure out a way to reimburse soldiers for body armor and equipment they purchased to better protect themselves while serving in Iraq.
Soldiers and their parents are still spending hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for armor they say the military won’t provide.

“Your expectation is that when you are sent to war, that our government does everything they can do to protect the lives of our people, and anything less than that is not good enough,” said a former Marine who spent nearly $1,000 two weeks ago to buy lower-body armor for his son, a Marine serving in Fallujah.

The father asked that he be identified only by his first name — Gordon — because he is afraid of retribution against his son.

“I wouldn’t have cared if it cost us $10,000 to protect our son, I would do it,” said Gordon. “But I think the U.S. has an obligation to make sure they have this equipment and to reimburse for it. I just don’t support Donald Rumsfeld’s idea of going to war with what you have, not what you want. You go to war prepared, and you don’t go to war until you are prepared.”

Soldiers and their families have reported buying everything from higher-quality protective gear to armor for their Humvees, medical supplies and even global positioning devices.“The bottom line is that Donald Rumsfeld and the Defense Department are failing soldiers again,”

Crime Against the People

WASHINGTON - A Texas grand jury on Wednesday indicted Rep. Tom DeLay and two political associates on charges of conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme, forcing the House majority leader to temporarily relinquish his post. A defiant DeLay insisted he was innocent and called the prosecutor a “partisan fanatic.”The indictment accused DeLay, 58, of a conspiracy to violate Texas election law, which prohibits the use of corporate donations to advocate the election or defeat of political candidates. Prosecutors say the alleged scheme worked in a roundabout way, with the donations going to a DeLay-founded political committee, then to the Republican National Committee and eventually to GOP candidates in Texas.

Education Myths
By Jay P. Greene

Much of what people believe about education policy is simply not true. An examination of the evidence reveals that many common claims about education are as mythological as anything found in Homer or Aesop.

For example, many people believe that schools are desperately under-funded. In fact, public K-12 spending is approaching $10,000 per pupil — double what it was three decades ago, adjusting for inflation. And total school spending is approaching $500 billion — more than we spend on national defense ($454 billion) and more than the entire GDP of Russia ($433 billion).

Many people believe that teachers are horribly underpaid. In fact, the average elementary-school teacher makes $30.75 per hour, more than architects ($26.64), mechanical engineers ($29.46), and chemists ($30.68).

Many people believe that student achievement has been deteriorating for decades. In fact, today's students perform about as well as their parents in terms of standardized test scores and high school graduation rates.

Why is education so prone to myths?

Part of the problem is that almost everyone imagines himself an expert about schools. Everyone has been through school, most people have had children in school, and many people have worked in schools or know someone who has. We tend to generalize from our direct experience even when our perspective may be narrow or distorted. In other policy areas less familiar to us we are more likely to rely on systematic evidence but in education we think we already have all of the evidence we need.

Another part of the problem is that education policy involves children and anything involving children evokes strong emotions. Those emotions ensure our attention to education issues but they can also cloud our reasoning. For example, because we really care about children, it is difficult to question claims that we need to spend more money to educate them. We wouldn't want others, or even ourselves, to think that we were stingy about providing children the services they need.

But the most important reason myths are so prevalent in education policy is that there are special interest groups promoting them. Unfortunately, teachers unions, school-board associations, and others with a financial stake in education policy take advantage of our vulnerability to myths about education. While most of us feel comfortable entrusting our children to their teachers at school each day, the special interest groups that represent them and their schools do not warrant our trust. Teacher unions and the rest of the education establishment, like other special interest groups, will support claims that advance their agendas regardless of whether those claims are based on facts or myths.

This special interest-group behavior is not unique to education policy. For example, everyone recognizes the role that interest groups play in promoting sugar price supports or in the construction of roads. The sugar industry and construction lobbyists, like teachers unions, are relatively indifferent to whether their arguments are supported by evidence as long as they further their interests.

We usually recognize these special interest groups for what they are and take their claims with a large grain of salt. But in education policy our emotional commitment to teachers and children blinds us to this self-interested behavior of education interest groups. We want to believe that education policy is not governed by the same crass political horse-trading that sets the government price for sugar or determines which congressional district will get a new bridge.

Our desire to believe that education policymaking is exceptional — that it is fueled by the love of children rather than the maneuvering of organized interests allows education myths to proliferate. These myths cause real harm. We can't improve public schools without a proper understanding of what ails them. We need to place less trust in our own experiences, our emotional impulses, and the organized-interests pretending to be advocates for children.

We need to put more trust in the evidence.

— Jay P. Greene is Head of the Department of Education Reform at the
University of Arkansas and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where Marcus A. Winters is a senior research associate. They are authors of Education Myths, published by Rowman and Littlefield.

The Teacher-Pay MythSeptember 22, 2005

By Jay P. Greene and Marcus WintersFEW cliches permeate our culture more thoroughly than that of the underpaid schoolteacher. In fact, many people would say that if they know anything about public schools it is that teachers deserve far more money than they actually get. Thus, many will sympathize with this week's vote by the New York City teachers union to hold a strike vote in a few weeks if stalled contract talks continue to deny them a raise.But the idea that teachers are underpaid is a myth. When we discard our presuppositions and look at the evidence, it turns out that teachers actually are better paid than many people realize.As of 2002, the average salary for teachers nationwide was about $44,600. That does seem modest. But we need account for the relatively few hours that teachers actually spend working compared to other professionals.Teachers have long vacation periods, several personal and sick days and work a shorter day than most other professionals. We can only properly understand these hours away from work as a benefit of the teaching profession. That is, a teacher who earns $45,000 to work for nine months is clearly better paid than a nurse who gets the same salary for working 12 months.Since teachers' work schedule distorts direct salary comparisons with other jobs, we need to look at hourly pay.According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the average public elementary school teacher in the United States earns about $30.75 an hour. The average hourly pay of other public-service employees - such as firefighters ($17.91) or police officers ($22.64) - pales in comparison.Indeed, teachers' hourly rate exceeds even those in professions that require far more training and expertise. Compare the schoolteacher's $30.75 to the average biologist's $28.07 an hour - or the mechanical engineer's $29.76 or the chemist's $30.68.Whose hourly pay is competitive with that of teachers? Computer scientists ($32.86), dentists ($35.51) and even nuclear engineers ($36.16).Note, too, that these hourly figures exclude benefits, such as health coverage and retirement accounts, which are typically more generous for government employees, such as teachers, than for private-sector workers.New York City's teachers are especially well paid. According to the state's school district profile, the median teacher in the city earns $53,017 a year. Unfortunately, information on the number of hours worked by the average teacher in the City is not readily available. But, if we make the generous assumption that the average teacher in New York works the maximum 6.6 hours a day allowed by the union contract for the full 181 school days, that works out to $44.38 an hour.So, if teachers are underpaid, then workers in other professions are badly underpaid, too. But there's no clamor to raise the pay of computer scientists, dentists or engineers.But don't teachers spend a great deal of time grading papers and creating lesson plans while away from school? Some do - but the comparisons here are still fair - because other professionals do work away from the office, too. Engineers and computer scientists are certainly no strangers to long nights working at home.Nor do teachers spend all of their time at school in the classroom. In fact, teachers spend fewer hours actually instructing students than many recognize. Stanford's Terry Moe worked with data straight from the nation's largest teacher union's own data - and found that the average teacher in a department setting (that is, where students have different teachers for different subjects) was in the classroom for fewer than 3.9 hours out of the 7.3 hours at school each day.With several hours set aside at school for course-planning and grading, it strains plausibility that on average teachers must spend more hours working at home than do other professionals.The myth that teachers are underpaid is a significant hurdle to educational reform because it helps prop up the falsehood that schools in general are underfunded. In fact, taxpayers spend more money on public K-12 schools than they do on national defense, even more than the Gross Domestic Product of Russia.Yet, despite this generous investment, student outcomes as measured by standardized tests and graduation rates have been stagnant since the Ford administration.If we are to improve public schools, we must understand that the facts don't always square with our impressions. The story that on average school teachers are underpaid compared to other professionals is as widely told as anything from Aesop, and is just as mythical.Jay P. Greene is head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where Marcus A. Winters is a senior research associate. They are authors of the book "Education Myths."

OIL Price Gouging

We – American Citizens that is – have been told that oil prices are high because there aren’t enough refineries available, and/or other such mumbo-jumbo. Now it seems to me that, if it cost more to pump oil (hence the higher prices), then there would not be such a huge profit available during the selling process. Yet, many are getting humungous profit margins from oil sales. I don’t know about you, but I smell something very fishy around here.

Rising oil prices are nothing short of a curse for most Americans. But they’ve been a blessing for Al Fraches, a Calgary, Alberta, florist.

While most U.S. consumers are scaling back, residents of Alberta, Alaska, Venezuela, Norway and other oil-fertile regions are enjoying an economic boom so rich that, in some cases, the government is sending checks to its citizens.

World crude oil prices, which averaged $22.74 a barrel in September 1999, are now at $58.20, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, as demand has swelled from the U.S. and China.

Government royalties from Alberta’s oil sands have already helped the province pay off its debt, lower corporate taxes, freeze tuition at universities and launch a three-year, $7 billion capital spending program to put in new roads, and expand medical centers and schools.

Venezuela, which produces 2.9 million barrels of oil a day, enough to make it the world’s sixth-largest producer. Under President Hugo Chavez’s leadership, the government has significantly boosted production and filled its coffers, extracting more money in taxes and royalties from foreign oil companies such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron operating in Venezuela.Surging revenues from Venezuela’s national oil company, PDVSA, also have helped Chavez subsidize fuel prices in his country and reduce the price of oil and gas for several of his Caribbean and Latin American neighbors.In August, the average gas price in Caracas was 12 cents a gallon, according to data firm AirInc.

Venezuela and Alberta aren’t the first lands to reward residents as the price of oil has gone up. For 23 years, Alaska has paid a dividend to each of its residents from a Permanent Fund. The fund was started with oil money, then diversified into other investments such as stocks and bonds.The fund has paid every eligible resident, including children, an average of more than $1,000 each September since 1982.

In the past two years, gushing oil prices have helped Alaska go from a billion-dollar deficit to a billion-dollar surplus, Knapp said.And now the state is looking for ways to spend its newfound wealth. Alaska Gov. Frank Murkowski recently used money from the state’s Revenue Department to purchase a $2.6 million Westwind II corporate jet, complete with a cream leather interior and in-cabin stereo system.

With refining capacity down, especially after hurricanes Rita and Katrina, some analysts expect high gas prices to eventually usher in a new economic U.S. downturn.“We are going to have a massive recession, the worst since 1907," said Peter Beutel, president of New Canaan, Conn.-based energy consulting firm Cameron Hanover. ”Consumers are just hemorrhaging money for energy,” even with some of the largest oil reserves in the globe.

FEMA is not the only Miss-Managed Agency

Five of eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters.

FEMA's top three leaders arrived with ties to President Bush's 2000 campaign or to the White House advance operation, according to the agency. A former Republican lieutenant governor of Nebraska and a U.S. Chamber of Commerce official who was once a political operative fills two other senior operational jobs.

Patronage appointments to the crisis-response agency are nothing new to Washington administrations. But, inexperience in FEMA's top ranks is emerging as a key concern of local, state and federal leaders as investigators begin to sift through what the government has admitted was a bungled response to Hurricane Katrina.

Many agencies, at almost every level of government, hire family, friends, and large donation contributors rather than experienced professionals to run key government institutions.

There is not a State, County, City, or Village exempt from this abominable behavior. How many other tragedies are lurking that unqualified people will try to manage?
My guess is; MANY...

The New Orleans fiasco was not an issue of race. It is an issue of mismanagement, incompetence, and leadership failure.

Would you like 5 million dollars ?

Which would you rather have? $900 billion dollars to go to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by the year 2010, or $5 million dollars in your own pocket?

The Senate recently voted to give President Bush $50 billion more for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. military efforts against terrorism, money that would push total spending for the operations beyond $350 billion. In a 97-0 vote, our Senate signed off on the money as part of a $445 billion military spending bill for the budget year that began Oct. 1.

None of this money is earmarked for newer and better equipment for our soldiers.

The Congressional Research Service, which writes reports for lawmakers, says the Pentagon is spending about $6 billion a month for Iraq and $1 billion for Afghanistan, and war costs could total $570 billion by the end of 2010. This is in addition to the already spent $311 billion. All told, by the end of the year twenty ten, over $900 billion dollars will be spent on these wars. A Trillion US Tax dollars spent on lies.

Think about this – Our government could have given each and every United States citizen $5 million dollars each, for what it is costing to run these ill-conceived wars.

Which would you rather have?

Teacher Pension Reform

The average teacher in Illinois and many other states, who retires after 34 years of working, retires with a pension worth well in excess of a million dollars cash. Geez, wouldn’t all we working stiffs love that?

Each Teacher’s 8-percent contribution over 34 working years compounded, at 6 percent, adds up to about 15 percent of their pension. The other 85 percent comes right out of our - the taxpayers’ pocket.

This means that we taxpayers are contributing about 40 percent of the teacher’s salary to their pension plan. How does that compare to your company’s 401(k) contribution?

Congressional Corruption

Before you read the following with shock and disgust, ask yourself this – Why do rich politicians spend millions of dollars running for public office when the position they are trying to win does not pay very much money?

Congressman Randy Duke Cunningham seemed to be laughing all the way to the bank. Now, there are new details on just how deep the man had his hand in the cookie jar. Look at some of the payoffs he took for steering defense contracts to his local cronies:

$200,000 condominium in Arlington
$140,000 for the yacht
$35,000 for antiques
$13,000 towards the purchase of a Rolls Royce
$2,000 for his daughter's graduation party.

This list goes on and on.
Duke Cunningham was caught, but the question many Americans are asking is, how deep is the congressional cesspool? Six members are currently under investigation for possible crimes and ethics violations, and some reports say the number could go as high as 60.

But it won’t stop there – what about Wives’ of these scumbags?

According to Zuckman: “Well, it's possible that contractors or lobbyists were either steering business to some of the congressional wives' own firms or just giving money to them on the side, as a way of influencing their spouses in Congress. There are all sorts of things.”

What in the heck is going on in the nation's capital?

Congressional representatives make the rules. They have this unique system so outsiders cannot complain. The rules of the body are that they are meant to police themselves. They do not follow the rules, because they don't have to, because nobody in their political club hardly ever gets called up on charges, because you have to be inside the political club to actually file charges against somebody else inside the political club.

When politicians have this much power, they start to believe that they are entitled to certain luxuries in life. After all, they paid their millions to get elected and now they get to make the rules. When you are a politician, you don’t have to buy your own meals – lobbyist will pay for your meals. Politicians never have to drive a car, limos ferry them around free of charge. And the saddest part, the longer politicians remain in office, the more they think they are owed. Rolls Royce’s, mansions, condos, yachts. What a deal? and if you play your cards right, you will never have to pay for a anything, because there's always a lobbyist or someone there who wants to buy you something in order to bend your ear a little bit on how they would like you to vote on a certain bill.

The lid is about to get blasted off of the crime and ethical abuses that many of our nations leaders have been participating within and encouraging, for many-many years. So, when you hear the stories and see the political figures heading to courthouses all across the country, don’t be shocked – instead get angry. And then start looking at political offices closer to home. If this abuse is occurring at our nation’s capitol, you can bet it is happening in your states, cities, villages, and school boards. Political crime against the people is rampant in our nation, and it is time for the people to put an end to it. These actions are treasonous to the citizens of our country, and the full weight of the Patriot Act should be applied to send these politicians to prison for the remainder of their natural lives.

United Citizens of America