Author Archives: Bok
Boy Scouts Want Cookies
The Boy Scouts are now open to girls. And the Girl Scouts aren’t happy. They want to know what’s wrong with a girl being a Girl Scout. Besides, what would you call a girl in the Boy Scouts?
Some people think this will lead to sex abuse in the woods. But I think it’s all about the cookies.
The Boy Scouts are beginning a hostile takeover of the Girl Scouts. James Hamblin in The Atlantic gets to the heart of the matter: “Girl Scouts sell cookies that are vastly superior to Boy Scout popcorn.”
Harvey Weinstein Revelation
Meryl Streep is shocked shocked by the Harvey Weinstein revelation. She reached out to the Huffington Post to call his behavior “disgraceful, inexcusable, and an abuse of power.”
In 2012 she called him “God.”
Hillary Clinton is shocked shocked too. And “appalled“. Weinstein has helped raise $1.5 million for Democratic candidates.
Weinstein Revelation
Holman Jenkins in the WSJ says Harvey is warning the Hollywood liberal elite that his problems are their problems:
He was a guest at the Obama White House 13 times. He gave hundreds of thousands to the Clintons. In 2016, he hosted or headlined multiple fundraisers for Mrs. Clinton with people like Leonardo DiCaprio, Helen Mirren, Julia Roberts and Sarah Jessica Parker.
Moron to Moron Talk
NBC reported that Secretary of State Tillerson called President Trump a moron. Trump called NBC “fake news”.
The Moron Thing
Tillerson strongly denied that he ever threatened to resign.
But what about the moron thing?
Stephen Paddock Face of Evil
Stephen Paddock
Stephen Paddock was a 64 year old retired accountant reportedly worth 2 million dollars. He owned rental properties, was a certified pilot and owned two airplanes. Not exactly my idea of the face of evil. But he had 23 firearms in his hotel room and shot nearly 600 people, killing 59 of them.
Face of Evil
He was also a casino gambler. He held the “highest status” at Caesars Entertainment. Does “highest status” go to people who win a lot of Caesars’ money? Did he blow his 2 million dollar fortune?
Whatever happened, it doesn’t seem like he suddenly went haywire. His killing spree was meticulously planned.
David French in National Review thinks the case is very very strange.
I’m a Taxpayer – Not
President Trump introduced his tax reform plan last week. Critics in the media labeled it “tax cuts for the rich.”
But there’s a reason for that. The rich pay most of the federal income tax.
Democrats are running against income inequality. And they’ve got a point. According to the Tax Foundation the top one percent earn twenty percent of all the income in America..
But they also pay forty percent of all the federal income taxes in the country.
Taxpayer
Half the working population can’t protest against Washington by demanding “I’m a taxpayer and ..!” That’s because they don’t pay federal income taxes. Though they do pay social security and medicare taxes.
Here’s a link to a Tax Foundation chart breaking down who pays what by percentile:
The data demonstrates that the U.S. individual income tax continues to be very progressive, borne mainly by the highest income earners.
- In 2014, 139.6 million taxpayers reported earning $9.71 trillion in adjusted gross income and paid $1.37 trillion in individual income taxes.
- The share of income earned by the top 1 percent of taxpayers rose to 20.6 percent in 2014. Their share of federal individual income taxes also rose, to 39.5 percent.
- In 2014, the top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97.3 percent of all individual income taxes while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 2.7 percent.
- The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (39.5 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (29.1 percent).
- The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 27.1 percent individual income tax rate, which is more than seven times higher than taxpayers in the bottom 50 percent (3.5 percent).
