The new Carnival of Vanities is up.

The Carnival of Vanities #21 is up and looks really great this week. I’ve only made it through about half on the links so far but I’ll go through the rest tonight. This is my first time participating in the carnival and I’m kinda excited about it. Check it out.

Got this in the mail this afternoon from Mike, thought it was interesting.

This is a VERY simple way to understand the tax laws.

Let’s put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand. Suppose that every day,
ten men go out for dinner. The bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their
bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this.

The first four men—the poorest—would pay nothing; the fifth would pay $1,
the sixth would pay $3, the seventh $7, the eighth $12, the ninth $18, and
the tenth man—the richest—would pay $59.

That’s what they decided to do. The ten men ate dinner in the restaurant
every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement — until one day, the
owner threw them a curve (in tax language– a tax cut).

“Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the
cost of your daily meal by $20.” So now dinner for the ten only cost $80.00.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes. So the
first four men were unaffected. They would still eat for free. But what about
the other six — the paying customers? How could they divvy up the $20
windfall so that everyone would get his “fair share?”

The six men realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted
that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and The sixth man would end
up being PAID to eat their meal. So the restaurant owner suggested that it
would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he
proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so the fifth man paid nothing, the sixth pitched in $2, the seventh paid
$5, the eighth paid $9, the ninth paid $12, leaving the tenth man with a bill
of $52 instead of his earlier $59. Each of the six was better off than before.
And the first four continued to eat for free.

But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.
“I only got a dollar out of the $20,” declared the sixth man, but he, pointing
to the tenth. “But he got $7!” “Yeah, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man,
“I only saved a dollar too, It’s unfair that he got seven times more than me!”

“That’s true!” shouted the seventh man, “Why should he get $7 back when I got
only $2? The wealthy get all the breaks!.” “Wait a minute,” yelled the first
four men in unison, “We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the
poor!”

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next night he didn’t
show up for dinner, so the nine sat down and ate without him. But when it
came time to pay the bill, they discovered, a little late what was very
important. They were FIFTY-TWO DOLLARS short of paying the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college instructors, is how the tax
system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from
a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they
just may not show up at the table anymore.

Where would that leave the rest? Unfortunately, most taxing authorities
anywhere cannot seem to grasp this rather straightforward logic!

I’m staying at my Grandmother’s house because the gas at my house is off, which means no heat, oven, or hot water. Also in an unfortunate turn of events my laptop has stopped working, so there most likely won’t be many updates the next couple of days.

Well today has certainly been mixed. To make a long story short: new server, Bauer Business college stuff, meeting with Chris, Human Situation discussion class—good; 120gb hard drive biting the dust—bad. I’ll be recovering for a few days, and I’ve resolved to double whatever I replace it with in a RAID setup to have backups of everything important all the time. If you haven’t, backup now. Don’t let this have to happen to you to realize that you can’t put a price tag on your data.