Mr. Wonderful Comments:

On the soon-to-be-banned talk radio waves, author David Cay Johnston sounds like such a reasonable man, but that sounding  is simply to sell his books. This man is a socialist and must be in hog heaven this April 18th, 2009 with a socialist in the White House who, instead of having his appointees go through the highly visible congressional vetting and approval process, simply appoints "Czars" to go about destroying the evil capitalism that has made things so unfair for so many for so long in this country.

His book has all the graphs and statistics explained so that even Mr.Wonderful can understand them, however I must admit some of his numbers did not make sense to me.

And I do truly understand that there are tens of thousands of incredibly wealthy U.S. taxpayers not sending their fair share to the I.R.S.

Hell, even some not so incredibly wealthy Americans, such as the current Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, don't pay their personal income taxes until it is widely exposed that they did not.

However in Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everybody Else I see author Johnston failing to include the dollar value of the 'poor's' welfare, free social services and health care in their income. For after all, if someone else, i.e., the taxpayers, (those of us who actually pay our taxes), are paying for items and services the 'poor' receive, it should be counted as their imputed income just as the personal use of military jetliners should be included in Nancy Pelosi's income.

But what really torqued me off was the constant, never-ending, drum beat that the 'poor' are poor because other American's make so much more money than the 'poor' do. And Mr. Johnston's whining about the fast foods we buy and the other people we hire to do things for us simply exposed him as someone who wants our choices determined by, say, a Czar.

If I labored my 2,080 hours per year alone, even after almost a decade with the same employer, I would still only be grossing about $22,000 annually. But, instead, I work hundreds of hours of overtime each year.

I am what I term 'poor', having at one time earned far more than that $22,000 on one single payday. But I am not poor because of the people I typically work for are worth many millions of dollars, I am poor because I don't go out and get a decent job.

I am also certain there are 'poor' people who are in that economic situation through no direct fault of their own, but I highly doubt they are in the 'poor' predicament because of the fact that other people have more money than they do.

Begun: 04/16/2009
Stopped Reading: pg 48