I don’t know what you’ll be doing tonight, but I’m shredding old bank statements and making room for my 2008 files in my filing cabinet. This is an especially big day day for me, because for the first time I now have more than the legally-advisable seven years of old tax documents, and I can shred the eighth year back.
The other big news this week was that we got a new vacuum cleaner.
Yeah, I’ve basically given up.
I saw in the Northeast Venture Capital Funding and M&A Activity blog today (yes, I read a lot of blogs) that Kayak and SideStep merged. The first sentence describes them as “popular travel search web sites…” and that’s pretty much where I stopped reading.
Correction: Popular would be Orbitz, Expedia, or Travelocity. You, good sirs, are in the “unpopular” crowd.
The petition to end the income tax in Massachusetts misses a lot of things, like inflation. But if we take at face value their claim that the government can continue to run with a 39% reduction in revenue, what do you think will get cut?
First, we’d have a hiring and wage freeze for all state government, of course. And state aid to individual towns would be gutted. Rich towns could then raise money themselves, but poor towns would start hurting.
At the same time, we’d probably start dismantling everything cultural the government does. State parks, say. Museums. Arts funding. UMass.
What little highway maintenance we do would probably just cease.
We’d cut community outreach for at-risk youth, and things like that summer jobs program for teens in Boston. We’d join Arkansas in failing to keep up with our flu prevention efforts. Any kind of AIDS and drug abuse prevention efforts, certainly. Everything helping the homeless and immigrants (they don’t vote, so why spend meager resources on them?) would have to go.
And of course any agency the legislature has a grudge against would get run over with a fine-toothed comb. Massport? The Turnpike authority? Everybody will be gunning for them.
Next, we could expect to see some new fees and fines. To make up for missing state aid, we’d see cities increase the cost of parking tickets. RMV fees would go up. General merchandise sales tax, excise tax, gas tax, cigarette tax, alcohol tax, licenses for filming, parking, special events, restaurant openings, inspections…. way up.
And they’d legalize all the gambling you could possibly imagine. You thing scratch-ticket fever is bad now? Wait til there’s a video poker machine in every bar in town. Or at least every bar in town that can afford the outrageous license fee.
I’d love to see the state legalize and tax prostitution and marijuana. That would both save money on jails and bring in huge amounts of revenue.
Far more likely, the legislature would pass a new law, reinstating the income tax exactly the way it was.
I hope the fences we mended
Fall down beneath their own weight
And I hope we hang on past the last exit
I hope it’s already too late
Newspapers are supposed to refrain from voicing opinions, but sometimes you can tell they care, at least a little. Or maybe I’m projecting. For example, some guy in Weston built an enormous house. Enormous even for Weston, I mean: $21M to build, 20 rooms, 21,000 square feet. Yes, each room costs about a million dollars and is approximately the size of my entire apartment. Why would the Globe point out that kind of wretched excess if not to instill shame in its creators?
Nets would stop this from happening, but they’d block the view, so it keeps happening. They did take the time to install some emergency phones of course… but they occasionally break.
This one’s going around like wildfire: University prof points out that a significant number of his students think Iraq blew up the World Trade Center.
I wonder if these constant “oh shit, our youth are ignorant” surprises are a way for grownups to feel better about themselves, or if undergrads really are that dumb.
I found a bat in my home last week, and accidentally touched it. That was the biggest thing that happened on this blog ever: Nine comments so far, and only two from me! One guy has been encouraging me to seek medical attention in case the bat I touched had rabies, and it scratched me without me knowing it, and the scratch gave me rabies. Hey, MA residents are required to have insurance, so why not use it?
Yes, I have insurance. But to be honest, I’m so sick of dealing with them that I would rather die of rabies than fight with them over a hospital visit. I know that’s incredibly stupid, and that it’s giving in to the primary way insurance companies reduce costs. (They make it too much of a hassle to deal with the medical establishment, so people skip care they think might not be absolutely necessary. Some people die because they make uninformed decisions and defer necessary care, but in aggregate it saves a few bucks for the insurance companies. Sick and evil, but economically logical.)
I don’t want to go into my own medical problems because they’re pretty minor. And yes, I’m lucky to have insurance at all, and incredibly lucky to be able to afford the occasional surprise on the bill. Nonetheless, I’m really determined not to go to the doctor again this year, and I’ve spent all I care to on medicine this year, and if that means I get rabies and die, fine. At least then someone else will have to deal with the insurance paperwork.
Elsewhere writing: I’m relatively pleased with this bit of speculation about the commensal relationship between Will Smith and Tom Cruise.
And I’m very proud of my driveby insult titled “Rachael Ray Devours A Small Child.” Yeah, sure, she’s an easy target, but it’s still kind of funny.
And Co-Worker Joel says that my post linking “Kid Nation” to the decline of the US Dollar and the increase in global sea piracy is funny. So that’s an accomplishment today.
Nonetheless, I find myself identifying with robot comics an awful lot. Maybe it’s time for my daily dose of staring at kittens.
But sadly, they didn’t catch anyone entering or leaving the porno shop over on Mystic Ave:
Secretly Ironic 