06/29/01 : Why Liberal Billionaires Approve of Inheritance TaxLogically, one would instinctively believe that individuals with annual incomes in the hundreds of millions of dollars and paying out tens of millions of dollars in federal taxes every quarter would be firmly against their estates paying a 55% 'Death Tax' when they eventually venture into that 'undiscovered country'.  But if one actually ponders it, these Soros and Gates and Turners have never had to deal directly with pedantic, uncaring, pension and benefit driven government agents.  When the IRS shows up at their Italian marble doorsteps, these billionaires dispatch a squad of accountants bolstered by a team of tax lawyers. When the NRLB stops by, they troop out their labor law lawyers. When they don't like drug laws, they throw millions of dollars into referendum elections (as George Soros did here in Arizona) and legislate changes in the drug laws. So, on the one hand these incredibly wealthy individuals, such as Soros, Buffet, Turner and Gates, never see the tax man, or the NRLB-man, or the EPA-man and they have also never had to and never will receive any of the supposed services and meager benefits the Feds dole out. To sum it up these billionaires 1) Never deal directly with the rude, ignorant, proud and lazy government employees us everyday grunts are confronted with. 2) Never have and never will receive any benefits or services to experience first hand how little and laughable they actually are. 3) Even with a 55% tax on their death, these super-elites estate's, will continue to be gorged with hundreds of millions of dollars which would in turn enable only their progeny to ". . . have large fortunes passed from generation to generation forming ever larger pools of money and accretion of power" which is exactly what Bill Gates claims he is opposed to! and 4) In their hubris, in their incredible pride, these ultra-rich liberals, believe they alone are worthy of deciding that the mere less-than-billionaires would not and could not and don't deserve the opportunity to establish estates that would spend their fortunes as they see fit. These prideful, and oh so astoundingly ignorant pseudo-Solomon's (Shlomo's for my Jewish readers) actually believe that private fortunes are better spent by the D.C. demi-gods than the families who, with their sweat and blood earned them.
06/27/01 : Greenspan Pisses in Wind, Wall Street sees Gold Braid
06/24/01 (11:14AM) : McCain's 'Patient's Bill of Right's' would Kill H.M.O.s
06/22/01 (11:57AM) : Citizens to Fry While Govt. Cools Heels
06/15/01 (12:28PM): Smoking Bush "More Liked"
06/08/01 (8:55AM) : McCain Maverick Only to Media
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This afternoon the Federal Open Market Committee lowered the federal funds rate by one-quarter percent. And in typical fashion, I'm sure, Wall Street prices will move up in anticipation of the good times ahead. However, Martin Mayer writing for the July/August 2001 issue of Worth magazine, suggests today's actions by FedHead (not to be confused with Deadhead) Alan Greenspan and his band of merry bankers actually have much less pull on the economy than is imagined. Mr. Mayer pens that back in the 1950s, when banks handled three-fifths of all financing, a decrease in the federal funds rate would show up fairly quickly in improved economic conditions. But nowadays, with autos, credit cards, mortgages, and "the working capital of large corporations" being funded out of the stock market, with only one-fifth of the nation's financing coming from banks, the market sets the rates, not the banks or the feds. So why does Greenspan have so much influence? I'm too uninformed to state positively, but I'm sure the vision of easy money and its attending prosperity just around the quarter, er, corner has a lot to do with it.
He was championing his and Teddy Kennedy's misnamed 'Patients Bill of Rights'. If truth-in-advertising applied to Washington bullshit the bill would be titled 'The Trial Lawyers Goldmine' with a subtitle of: 'The Final Step towards Socialized Medicine Bill'. The DeMedia obviously has no inkling of how a free-enterprise system functions between willing sellers and buyers. However, all the honorable Senator McCain need do is to ask Mrs. Cindy McCain, majority stockholder of the Budweiser franchise for all of Arizona, about how businesses stay profitable and in business. I was rocked back in my chair when Senator McCain responded to Tony with, "We've had some good negotiations with the White House." WE? We? what is he a Democrat? Why is anyone waiting for him to announce he actually is a Democrat? If it quacks, waddles, pulls worms and craps on the golf green it's a duck! 
A duck is a duck even though it may think itself a chicken hawk simply because they both sport feathers. Like most missinformed Americans, Senator McCain confuses H.M.O.'s (a formerly somewhat affordable healthcare product designed with Congressional input) with insurance companies. While an H.M.O. may be owned by an insurance company, an H.M.O. is not an insurance company, it is a Health Maintenance Organization designed to provide adequate, affordable care and premiums while returning the highest profit attainable for its owner's. H.M.O.'s accomplish this by hiring or contracting with the lowest cost professionals, clinics and hospitals it can locate. H.M.O.'s keep premiums low and profits high by promoting wellness and by contractually limiting services, choices of medicines, doctors and hospitals to the insured. What a 'Patient's Bill of Rights' (S.1052) can accomplish is to force H.M.O.'s (in a proactive move to avoid being sued in federal court) to provide additional costly services and patient options and/or, in order to pay-off million dollar awards against them (with the trial lawyers taking 40%) is to rocket up their premiums by 50% or more. These higher premiums would force currently H.M.O.-covered individuals and employers to drop health coverage entirely.
Because they were with an H.M.O. in the first place, because it offered a lower premium than traditional health insurance (i-n-s-u-r-a-n-c-e)! AND understand this: apparently, as most of the pending bills are written, there is a chance that the employer of an aggrieved and 'mistreated' H.M.O. client, aka an employee, can turn around and sue his or her own boss! As a former small-business owner, I can instantly inform you, that if my cadre of lawyers informed me there was the slightest chance of an employee suing my corporation over a dispute involving his H.M.O. coverage, I would drop the policy faster than Gary Condit dodging a question about Chandra Levy!
In a June 2nd, 2001 article in the Arizona Republic (Valley cities inch office temperatures) we find that city of Phoenix employees are being asked to put up with two to four degrees warmer temperatures. Scottsdale and Tempe are also "considering" and "studying" such steps. City of Mesa administration desires a two degree increase, but some employees are grumbling, so, since the city owns sixteen 800 kilowatt generators, their frosty thermostats will probably remain untouched, with the added costs buried somewhere in the budget. In Scottsdale, "The West's Most Western Town", apparently they don't even know where the thermostats are set because the article reports they run anywhere from "75F(23.9C) to 78F(25.6C) degrees" ! And what is Mr. Wonderful's back office thermostat, where I do all my typing and composing, set to? 85F(29.4C) degrees! With the remainder of my John McCain-sized guest house set at 82F to 84F degrees. I'm a native Arizonan, so high temperatures don't phase me. I prefer to do my gardening around noon every day. Hell, my first summer job was working in a incredibly dusty, dirty, and hot, 100F(37.7C) degree or more, 5,000 square foot warehouse with one dinky swamp cooler. I finished 16 bottles of Pepsi® a day and have lived to tell about it. If the majority of the residents of this Valley had to endure the inescapable heat us natives did in the 1950s, Phoenix would still be a very nice place to live, because they would have all vanished faster than the Anasazi's chasing an open bar in Las Vegas.
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However, in McCain's case the stand he takes is the stand of the other group ! That group being the liberal Democrats. The crimson-faced Sedona-Summering Senator has coupled with Ted Kennedy (a disturbing picture, eh?) on the 'Patients Bill of Rights', with Feinstein on 'Campaign Finance', is teamed with the Democrats on closing the 'Gun Show Loophole', and he voted against the Bush laughably little 
