ahhhhhh

[textualdeviance]

Comfortably ensconced in our suite in Maui, recovering from the beating we put our bodies through with airports and three days of wandering around the 300 acres of Disneyland and environs (which I think we covered about four times over.)

I absolutely love it here. This is our second time in Maui and it's just a completely different world. Clean, quiet, peaceful, friendly. Very unlike Oahu, which is busier and more crowded-- more for a party kind of crowd.

The hotel is absolutely gorgeous. We'll be taking some pics later. Unfortunately the pool with the swim-up bar is closed for deck resurfacing, but that's not a big deal. We had breakfast on our lanai this morning, and a cardinal came up wanting to share. When he realized we didn't have anything for him, he pooped on a chair and then flew away. Typical redhead attitude. ;) There are also some loud mynas around, too (not the big talking kind, just the small noisy ones.)

I love traveling in low season. Few kids, few crowds, not too hot, cheap rates (no way would I have paid rack rate for this place in high season. Egad. You could buy a car for that.) I feel a little guilty about spending so much money as it is, but, damn, it's worth it.

Mike and I were joking to each other this morning that we should work on committing as many of the 7 deadly sins as we can this trip. I think we're well on our way so far. A little more lust and sloth sounds good, though.



I think I've come up with the perfect income tax plan. Taxes are, of course, a necessity of life, to pay for public services, so they have to be assesed somehow. Obviously the code as is is far too complicated. A flat tax favors the wealthy (because they pay less as a percent of disposable income), sales taxes can hurt consumer spending. But we have the data and technology now to set tax rates according to economic factors, instead of a static rate. The problem with a federal static rate tax is that it doesn't take local economic factors into account. A person making $100k/year in Wyoming is going to be in far better financial shape than someone making the same in Manhattan. So it makes more sense to create a formula for deciding the rate based on four practical economic factors, according to zip code:

Average income
Average cost for a three bedroom home
Cost of a gallon of milk
Cost of a gallon of gas (base rate, sans gas taxes) Alternatively, in order to make this factor extensible into the future, when we won't be using fossil fuels as much, we can assess it on the cost per kilowatt hour of power.

You could probably add in a few other factors, too. Maybe unemployment rate in the area, for instance. I don't know exactly how the formula would work, but I think it would make sense. Someone making $40k/year in an area where the average home costs $300k is going to be in pretty crappy circumstances, but if the average home is more like $100k, they're in pretty good shape. Also, one of the benefits of this is that it does what supply-side economists have always pushed-- gives people more disposable income. The way the tax code is applied right now, the tax burden is heaviest on the middle class, and that not only is unfair, but it takes purchasing power away from the largest group of people, which has larger economic impact. When your average family can't buy the car they need or new furniture or clothing, etc., those products aren't in demand, therefore supply is not needed, therefore manufacturing, shipping, etc. all wane, and there goes the economy. It should be telling that the biggest growth industries these days are in the luxury segment of the economy. And unfortunately, a lot of those luxury items are not manufactured in the US. (Of course, it would also help if other companies didn't farm out manufacturing and customer service overseas, too.)

So, really, we could probably call this the Disposable Income Tax. In a way, the tax code sort of works like this as it is, what with deductions for mortgage interest, but that favors people who are already homeowners, and the problem with that is that people who aren't making enough to afford a home in their area are never going to get to that point. And if people can't afford to buy a home, then they probably can't afford to move, either, so it's not fair to expect people to simply move to a cheaper area.

A few other things which should be covered in this plan:
Some sort of "super wealthy" tax. Where if someone makes, say, four times the amount of the average income in the area, their tax rate is much higher than the regular cap. Brackets would still work, too. The biggest difference, really, is the regional assessment.
The "personal exemption" amount would also be adjusted based on these factors. Right now, that amount is what's considered the bare minimum amount to keep a person alive for a year (which is why you're allowed to deduct that amount) Likewise, the amount of the per-child tax credit, too. Obviously, the current numbers for these things are way, way low for most areas, but they're probably accurate for, say, Nebraska.

Also, if it were personally up to me, I'd allow the per-child tax credit only up to four children (with perhaps an exception for multiple births.) If you're going to insist on draining the country's resources by spawning litters, you should have to pay for them yourself. The government shouldn't be subsidizing people who have that many kids. Education and health care should, of course, still be funded, but anything which helps keep people from over-breeding in the first place is a good thing, especially in areas where resources for children (schools, etc.) are being hammered in the first place. Maybe make this tax thing dependent on classroom size in the zip code. In fact, I'd even be willing to give a higher tax credit to the first two kids, and then a lower one for each subsequent child. This makes logical sense, too, because the cost of raising each child does go down the more you have, because you can hand down clothing, buy food in bulk, which is cheaper, etc.

****

And on a completely different note... something I want to think about later... much of sexual politics theory rests on the notion of active/passive, penetrator/penetratee. The notion of "invasion" of a body. But what if we were to turn that concept on its ear, and rather than theorizing the "active" partner as the one in power, we think of the passive partner as "sucking in" rather than being invaded. A black hole, a vacuum, a force drawing things inside, rather than a static receptacle into which things go.

hmmm.. there's an essay in there somewhere.

Okay, enough thinking for one day. Back to gazing at the ocean.....

Comments

[mrdorbin.livejournal.com]

If you charge people less tax for living in an expensive neighborhood, won't that trend towards depopulating already-poor areas, especially on a small geographic scale like large metropolitan areas (I'm thinking Mercer Island/Central District here, but even more drastically in like New York and Chicago)? Is that even a bad thing?