Defund the IRS

Posted on 29/09/2021 by Grumpa Joe

I keep hearing the spin about the over three trillion dollars bill that will not cost us a cent. Perhaps it is the Democrat version of new math, but what it means to me is that we the people will be taxed beyond our wildest dreams. Oh yes, we will hear the spin masters claim that they will only tax the rich and we the people will not be affected. I did the math about ten years ago when this same type of talk was going on, and the answer is there are not enough rich people to tax that much. In fact my math told me that even if we take all the money away from the rich there will not be enough to feed voracious appetite of our government. This new bill will swallow the rich as though they were a drop of water. One question I ask is why does the bill need money for the IRS when it is not going to cost us a cent? The IRS is currently collecting record amounts of revenue with the meager staff of 93,000. I’d say that if they were as good as Amazon we would need less then a third of the people they currently employ. Modern technology is certainly capable of making the IRS more efficient than it is.

Another scary part of this trillion dollar beauty is the part about giving the IRS the responsibility to look into our private bank accounts to make certain that we the people don’t fall into the rich territory. They portend to see all of our statement charges of $600 or more. I contend that that amount is getting into our wallets for sure. Recently I almost had a stroke at the checkout counter of my local grocery store when the bill came in at $350. Sure we bought many items that were big dollar items and we were restocking our pantry but that was inflation striking me in the heart, and that was before we had officially recognized that inflation is happening. Now that prices are skyrocketing I fear going shopping for anything. I am considering buying a new smart TV which will no doubt cost me over $600 dollars. As inflation continues to rise, how much sense does it make to report grocery bills that exceed $600? Somehow reporting that to the IRS doesn’t make sense to me except they want to know just how much I spend so they can then squeeze me harder.

The bill started as an effort to fix our aging infrastructure, like roads and bridges. It was my contention back during the Obama years that he could have replaced every bridge and road in America with the shovel ready stimulus package he lobbied for and got. It has been several years since then and I haven’t seen any bridges being replaced in my solid blue state. The infrastructure portion of the bill is less than a trillion dollars, the remainder is pure graft. I can rationalize infrastructure as an investment in the country which would benefit our economy, but the remainder smacks of under the counter pay-off money for politicians to squander.

Here is my recommendation: Instead of supporting the increasing murder rates across the country by defunding the police, I opt that we defund the IRS instead. The money we save can come back into our empty pockets to spend on things we want and not on the things our politicians think we need. Never has any Alderman, State Representative, Congressman, Senator or local Village trustee ever asked me what I needed or desired. Yet, each year they continue to raise the taxes to pay for what? Nobody ever looks at the city ledger to determine how they can reduce the budget, but they always spend any surplus and ask for more.

While I’m at it I also recommend we defund Education. Why do we continue to pay for poor performance in inner city schools, and for teaching the communist way? At the rate America is going we won’t need any college educated kids to be picking up our trash or cutting our lawns. So why do we continue to pay colleges for professors that spread socialism to making our problems worse?

This post is way too long and I am rambling wildly about how bad things are when I should be cooking my supper. The idea of eating supper is more appealing than getting all fired up about the sorry state of our union. I can do something about supper, but I can’t do anything about the union.

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Day 22-Quarantine-Too Many Bad Memories

Posted on 08/04/2020 by Grumpa Joe

Today, I woke up and told myself that this day is dedicated to Uncle Sam. Yes, it is the day I finally do my income taxes. Over the years I have whittled down the amount of time it takes me, but I still spend eight to ten hours compiling data for the dreaded IRS 1040. I will say one thing, I didn’t think or obsess about the COVID-19 virus. Instead, I sorted receipts, credit card statements, doctor visits, drug purchases, charity giving, anything deductible that I could find, big or small, to reduce the amount of tax I have to pay.

The Tax Man Cometh

Thanks to COVID-19 and the accompanying market crash my fixed income is drawing from a much smaller pool. The thought of draining the pool before death is not comforting. Instead it brings on thoughts of how the virus might be an advantage. Catch virus and die, then leave something for the kids. The opposite is catch the virus, don’t die, and run out of money to live on. The kids will visit you living in a tent city under an overpass. Morose. Of course, I should feel guilty about my high taxes in light of the fact that the government just threw two-trillion ($2,000,000,000,000) dollars at the economy to save it from obliteration. I should feel patriotic and happy to be donating to the cause.

Uncle Sam brought me an unexpected benefit today, grief. As I sorted records, each one brought back memories of life over the past year. Most of the expenditures were for health-care items bought to bring Peg some comfort. As I reviewed them, my mind returned to the situation that incurred the expense. Most were not happy times. Like the last visit of the podiatrist who trimmed Peg’s toenails and inadvertently irritated one of her toes into a wound that we could not heal. Or the rental for her pneumatic mattress that was designed to keep her from getting bed sores. Her skin was so broken down that it was too little too late. These are all the kinds of memories I can do without. I am afraid they will haunt me in my dreams. My prayers will be to never see another pressure sore for the remainder of my life.

Tomorrow, I will wrap up the details of my data and send the pile to my tax man. He basically pumps the numbers into a neat program and it spits out the results. He’ll have it completed within four hours. There is something wrong with that picture, I spend ten hours compiling data so it is nice and neat and he spends less than half that time entering the data, and he gets paid. This is the last time I can claim Peg as a dependent and next year my taxes will be much higher, I can hardly wait.

The weather was fabulous today, but the only time I set foot outside was to gather the mail. Tomorrow, I will spend time in a ZOOM meeting with the support group for sight impaired. All I can vision is a bunch of blind people staring at a computer screen waiting for something to happen. It’ll be interesting for sure.

In the meantime, I found a grocery store that actually gave me a delivery date, get this, it is the local grocer that I go to all the time. My previous attempts were with huge stores like Walmart, Meijers, Shipt, and Target. I don’t even get an acknowledgement from them, but my local gave me a date for next Monday a full week out. The company called Shipt is an online delivery service that will shop for you from any of the major stores and bring it to your door. Their problem is they can’t deliver either. Wow, I wouldn’t want my brainstorm of an idea to blow up on me like that. I guess I can live on my crumbs until then. The downside is the selection of items is about one quarter of what it was in the big box stores. It is a famous trick for companies to sell what you want at a very low price when they don’t have any stock.

It is time to turn on Homeland and fill my brain with violence and terrorism before I retire to have nightmares about Peg’s bed sores and her death.

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An Answer to an Answer

Posted on 10/07/2014 by Grumpa Joe

Time to REboot2

The situation in America has me losing sleep. The only recourse I have to the situation is to write letters to my Senators and Congressman. Last month I wrote to them to stop the madness of allowing all these kids swarming into the country over the nonexistent border between the USA and Mexico. If there is no border where does one start and the other end? An insecure border is an abdication of our sovereignty. We might as well annex Mexico or Mexico should annex the USA. Without borders why do we need a Federal Government? Why are they necessary? Oh, I remember we still need someone to oversee the real government consisting of the EPA, IRS, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Education, etc. all of which are useless money squandering entities. Forget the office of the President his only job is to protect us by enforcing laws but he has abdicated that responsibility along with every other supposed responsibilities he has. The same goes for Congress. They respond only to big money groups like LaRaza, and CAIR. Even the Supreme Court has degenerated into a political arm of the Progressive, Socialist, Communist party of the United States. Their responsibility is to decide if the laws passed by Congress are true to the Constitution, but they chose to re-write the Obama Care law to make it work for them. They should have bounced it to Mars and told Congress to fix it. Using the same example, laws requiring expenditures are written by the House of Representatives. The Senate penned Obama-Care.

Under the Constitution, each of the three branches of government are equal but separate. Currently we see a huge imbalance between the power of the President and the Congress. Congress is taking it in the shorts. Congress should do everything in its power to curb the Presidential power plays of using Executive Orders to write laws, or the Bureaus like the EPA to write regulations that are worse than laws. If you break a law they arrest you and you get a chance with a trial. If you break an EPA regulation the EPA fines you and takes away your paycheck via garnishment and they don’t have to go to court to seek it either.

Anyway, Here is a copy of the response I received this week from Senator Dicky Durbin followed by my rebuttal.

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140710-P2-DurbinIMGFinally, here is the letter I posted today. A copy of the letter Durbin is responding to is here. Well, it the same letter only to my Congressman.:

Senator Richard J. Durban

711 Hart Senate Building Washington,

DC 20510-1304

Dear Senator Durbin:

Thank you for responding to my letter of 10 June 2014 regarding the swarm of children flooding into the country without Visa’s. I appreciate the insightful response and gained some valuable information about our system. What I didn’t get is an answer to why we allow these kids to cross the border in the first place. Where is our secure border? Why is it not secure? Why are these kids not being sent back to their home country immediately? We spend money to bus them, and fly them from one US City to another but not to their homes? What could be more humanitarian than to return a child to his parents?

As my Senator, I expect you to be urging, counseling, and even scolding the President to show example to the world by enforcing the laws we have about the rules for coming to the USA. President Obama has recklessly abandoned and choses to disregard the laws for sending VISA-less immigrants back. Yet he sends millions of dollars through HLS to Central American countries to advertise them not to come because of the terrible penalty they will meet. What penalty? How bad is it to be given a court date two years out to state your case, and then be allowed to assimilate into the population living off the system with their incredibly resourceful ability to find Social Security Cards and shirttail relatives?

Since I have not read any news about you communicating strong messages to the President to enforce our laws, I can only assume it is because you agree with the President’s policies making you just as guilty of lawlessness.

In your letter you stated how none of these VISA-less kids is to receive benefits under the laws you cited., but the President is appealing to Congress to approve his request for 3.7 billion dollars for humanitarian aid to these kids. Please clear something up for me. Congress approved a trillion-dollar bailout of the banks to save the country from destruction. Yet, I hear that the banks have paid back the money with interest. Just where is that trillion dollars now? It seems to me that there is a trillion-dollar slush fund hidden somewhere within the buildings surrounding the Washington Mall. My suggestion to you, and the President, is to find this money and use some of it for humanitarian needs within the country.

Also in your letter you very sympathetically state that “Many of these children are escaping their home countries because of the increasing threat of gangs and violence, family abuse, exploitation, and lack of education and economic opportunity “. . . I also suggest you pay attention to the situation in your home state specifically Chicago, where your exact words apply. Where will we send the Chicago kids? To which country will we send our local kids to find a better situation?

Senator Durbin, it is time for you to retire and give the position to someone who will have new enthusiasm for solving problems with ideas that work.

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Boyz Night Out

Posted on 23/11/2013 by Grumpa Joe

Deliver (Oak Ridge Boys album)

On Thursday, I had the pleasure of meeting with four very old but close friends. Our ages range from seventy-two to eighty-three. We enjoy a monthly get together to drink some adult-beverage and to swap tales while sharing a meal. We met on this evening at the Ashford House on 159th Street in Tinley Park, a midway point between our homes.

We sat drinking, and explaining where they were when the tornado ripped through the area. The storm had different effects on each of us. Sherman lives in a heavily wooded area and one of his mature trees blew down and ripped through the back wall of his house. A large branch from that same tree pierced the liner in his garden pond. I laughed, only because this summer he completed repairs to the pond liner caused by a ground-hog that burrowed up from the bottom and chewed his way through the liner to get at Sherman’s collection of bog plants. His further inspection revealed that the tornado ripped the  bark off his Linden trees. Al cut in, “that’s a class-four storm when the bark gets stripped from trees.”

Lou told us his neighbor had a very large Ash tree about fifty feet tall that died from an invasion of the Emerald Ash borer. The tree was dead, and Lou worried that the tree, which leaned toward his house, would someday come crashing through his bedroom. Lou reported the neighbor had the tree removed on the day before the storm hit. He lucked out. Rod, who also lives in a wooded area saw no damage to his property, but picked up many blown down branches. Al reported losing a single butterfly bush planted just three years ago. Al lives on twenty plus acres of trees. Joe told of a roof being blown off at the Mobile Home park just south of town, and the roof of the muffler shop on route thirty raised up several feet then dropped back in place.

Four of us ordered the Thursday night special, a five dollar hamburger the size of a dinner plate, with soup, salad and fries. Sherman had lamb chops.

As we ate we began kibitzing and telling more stories. Joe began by relating a sudden desire to hear the Oak Ridge Boys in concert. They perform in Branson at this time of year, but Joe didn’t have the opportunity nor the cash to go. Just for fun he searched the I-net for the concert schedule and learned that the Boys who were at Branson on Friday would be at the Holiday Star Plaza theater in Merrillville, Indiana on Sunday.  For more fun, he checked the ticket availability; they had eight tickets left in the mezzanine at seventy dollars a piece. “Okay,” he said, “sign me up.” By the time he paid taxes, fees, and seven-fifty to download the tickets to his printer his bill came to $194.00. He did it anyway because it was cheaper than driving five hundred miles to Branson to see them. A twenty-dollar CD would have been even cheaper.

Al chimed in next. “I was talking on the telephone with my sister in Amarillo. One of her good friends wanted to borrow some money, but she didn’t have enough in her bank account. I joked with her that I had invested five dollars in a Mega Million lottery and expected to win that night. At 7:00 a.m. the next morning, I sent my sister an e-mail saying that I had won the Mega-Million lottery and a check would be in the mail to her.

At 7:20 I received an e-mail from the NSA congratulating me for winning the lottery. The e-mail claimed it was from all NSA employees.

At 8:30 a.m. I received another e-mail, this time from the IRS. It said that a normal tax amount would be deducted from my Mega Million winnings, but they knew that I had sold 2 million dollars of houses this year, so I would owe a high percentage of taxes on the gains from the property sales as well as any other income I had.They requested that I pay an extra $100,000 in taxes within ten days, and another $100,000 by January 15.

Later in the morning, I opened an e-mail from the ATF. They said they had verified that I was stocking up huge stores of food including twenty-four frozen turkeys on sale at forty-eight cents a pound at Jewel.

I answered the ATF that I purchased the food for the Frankfort Lions Club annual food distribution to the needy at Thanksgiving. The ATF responded almost immediately wanting me to give them a complete list of names and addresses of the Frankfort Lions and the recipients of the food delivery. Also, I am to include an inventory of weapons possessed by everyone on the list.

Early in the afternoon, The DEA e-mailed me that they knew I recently had $400,000 in my personal bank account, and since I had no job, this was likely drug money. They said their drone had inspected my 21.3 acres of land and found many unusual, as well as some suspicious plants growing inside my house. They said if I was innocent, I would allow them to inspect my property and home. If I didn’t allow an inspection they would get a subpoena to do so.

Later that afternoon I mailed my sister two dollars and told her it was one-half of my lottery winnings.”

A moment of stunned silence overcame the group as they digested what they just heard. Al bust out laughing and confessed that none of the above actually happened but that it could happen today in the big government world we live in.

And that folks, is how Boyz night out goes.

Filed under: Biography, Characters I knew, Conservative, family, Garden, politics, Pond | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Frankfort Terror Threat Shot in the Back

Posted on 18/09/2013 by Grumpa Joe

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An Very Recent (September 18, 2013) Example Of Obama Care In Action.

It seems funny that two days after attending a Tea Party meeting that blogger Grumpa Joe is shot in the back. The Department of Homeland Security branded veterans, and right-wing bloggers as home-grown terrorists, so it is not surprising to me that Grumpa Joe is a target.

This morning at 10:45 two escorts led me into the office of PCC (Pain Centers of Chicago) in Joliet. A Tea Party Patriot in pain is a terrorist, and all are warned to steer clear of a patriot in pain. Joe waited in solitary confinement for forty-five minutes before the door burst open by a tall slightly balding man of fifty-years dressed in a collarless green pull over shirt with green draw string pants to match. He relentlessly questioned Joe until he extracted a confession.  “I recommend you get shot,” he said, and left the room.

A dark-haired woman about five-foot-two entered and handed Joe a pen and a paper on a clip board. “Read this and sign.” Joe read the document and signed in his most readable penmanship. He did not want the PCC to misunderstand his dedication to this mission.

She left the room and left him in solitude once again. Five minutes later the door opened, and a faceless voice called out “Please follow me.” He jumped out of the chair and poked his head out the door, yes there was the dark-haired woman calling him to the next chamber. He followed her rather submissively into the chamber.

The chamber lights were bright and hurt his eyes, but he could make out a padded table with a ring like pillow at one end. A large machine displayed an x-ray like image of a spine from the neck to the tip of the coccyx. What kind of torture is this going to involve he wondered?

“Put your glasses and other pocket items on the table and unfasten your belt, then lay on the table face down.” “Yes ma’am,” and  Joe did as she commanded. He would have been the model Jew during the holocaust. He followed orders willingly thinking that the PCC had only his interest in mind, but what if they didn’t? What if they were an arm of the IRS out to kill Tea Party Patriots? Think positive he told himself.

The man wearing the green suit reappeared but Joe could only hear him. He yanked Joe’s trousers down to the middle of his buttocks and raised his shirt to the neck. “This will be fast and cold,” Joe flinched as the big guy smeared his back with alcohol. “Now you will feel three small pricks to numb the area.” Pow, pow, pow, Joe flinched three times as small-caliber shots pierced his back.  “Here comes the big one.” Joe wrapped his arms around the table and found a hose to hold on. He buried his face into the hole in the pillow and began taking deep breaths. Pow! He felt what seemed like at large AK caliber hit him in the back just under L3. He tightened his gluteus maximus and raised off the table as the missile burrowed its way toward the spine, then another POW! this time the missile directed to L4, a third Pow, the last slug of chemical directed at the center of the spinal cord. Each time his ass tightened and raised off the table as the sensation of the charge plowed through flesh, bone and cartilage to the target. True, he didn’t feel pain, but he felt the charges passing through him.

“It’s over Joe. If you feel this was too much, then next time, you may want to consider sedation, I’ll see you again in a month.” NEXT TIME, there isn’t going to be a NEXT TIME big guy, he thought to himself. Joe may just want to live a life of pain and not undergo the PCC treatment again. Only time will tell.

Joe put himself back together and looked at the computer screen. He asked the dark-haired woman, “Is this a picture of my back.” “Yes,” she replied sweetly. “What are these three dark lines here?” Those are images of the large-caliber missile-track the big guy poked into your back. “They are almost two inches long for Pete’s sake.” “But he had to get to the target,” she said.

“See these dark lines along the bottom of each disk,” she asked while pointing at a line? “That is arthritis.”

“Crap,” Joe replied. All of Joe’s vertebrae showed arthritis. “That means the next time I’ll be shot in seven cervical, twelve thoracic, and five lumbar vertebrae for a total of twenty-four times.”

“I highly doubt that,” she said.

“Are they working on spinal transplants yet?” he asked while walking out to set up his next visit to solitary.

“No, but Medtronic makes a pain killing drug pump that will take care of unbearable chronic pain.”

“I’m sure Obama, the PP-ACA death panel, and the IRS will see to it that a pain killing pump will be denied to a Tea Party Patriot.”

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