EDIT Too Bad it Doesn’t Draw Attention From Your Dick-Shaped Head… | (Originally posted quite a while ago; consolidating content. I wanted to update this one, though. No, I’m not flip-flopping.)

I really don’t have anything against a person becoming successful or wealthy, within reason. (Well, except for professional athletes, but I’ll get to that later.) If someone works hard enough throughout life, they should be able to reap the benefits, to a reasonable extent. And I think people should be able to spend the money they take home on whatever they want, be it a six-thousand-dollar golden shower curtain (snkkkt… “golden shower”) or a diamond-studded, german-engineered platinum dildo or a birthday party that costs more than the price tag on a small island country or whatever the case may be. That is, of course, as long as it’s THEIR MONEY It may be ridiculous, and it may make me feel awful that a person could be so utterly wasteful when I’m all poor and starving and such, but it’s theirs with which to do as they please.

But [circa the original publication of this article] there have been many emerging stories of criminal-level greed in corporate business. People are fallable, and the problem that arises is that once they POSSESS and OWN, they want MORE. It’s not like any of the recently-accused corporate execs or CEO’s were hurting for money. It’s not like penis-headed Dennis Kozlowski (pictured below) couldn’t have very easily afforded a $6,000 shower curtain without having to steal from his company.

Oh fuck yourself, you grinning faggot.

I don’t understand why people with hundreds of millions of dollars are stealing money to buy things. Hell, compared to these guys, my yearly income is a fraction so pathetic it need not even be measured, and I still don’t go out and steal things. And it’s not like they need more money, it’s that they want more money. They like hording the shit. I mean, I’m certainly not saying “spend all the money you make as fast as you can”, and I can understand saving up for future plans, or setting up a savings account so you can know that you’ll be financially secure and your children won’t be digitally penetrated by the Invisible Hand, but when you get to be close to the “billionaire” category, that’s when the hording starts to become almost sickening. It doesn’t do anyone but the owner any good for it to sit in vaults and various banks just accumulating more wealth.

These people are sick, and should be ashamed of themselves. They bitch and complain about not taking home enough money, but can you imagine how little money would be left in circulation if these people could horde as much as they’d like? They don’t want money to fulfill material desires, they want money just to have money. It’s fucking disgusting.

I know it sounds like I’m contradicting myself by saying that Dennis bought a $6,000 shower curtain, but that he’s not spending money, but the thing is, the $6,000 curtain and the $2,000,000 birthday party for his wife weren’t bought by him, they were purchased with money he stole from Tyco. He didn’t want to spend his OWN money, because he wanted to horde it. He could’ve easily thrown his wife a $2,000,000 birthday party out of his own personal holdings, but instead he chose to rob his shareholders and the business of which he was the CEO of company money so that he wouldn’t have to use his own.

I’m up for some corporate-rape sloppy seconds if anyone wants to give me Dennis’s old job.

So they all have shitloads of money and steal even MORE money just so that they can horde the tons that they have and not have to spend any, but at the same time, they bitch about how awful the current tax system is for taking so much away from them. Some asshole makes, say, twenty million in one year. Let’s say for the sake of argument that taxes take away ten million of that. Now, assuming that this guy doesn’t make any huge purchases like a bathtub made of gold-plated pope skeletons or a city in some foreign country or whatever, let’s say he spends about two million of that money for a year’s worth of expenses. Point the First: can you imagine what you could buy for two million dollars over the course of a year? Point the Second: they still have eight million left over. So if we were to cut their taxes back so that they end up with fifteen million instead of ten, they have thirteen million dollars that they aren’t going to spend, and every middle-class family in the U.S. has to cover for the five million that some upper-class jerkoff didn’t have to pay, just so that he can horde it with his other millions.

What they’re proposing is what’s known as a “flat tax”, where everyone pays the same percentage of their income, regardless of how much one makes. That idea sounds wonderful to them, because everyone will be paying the same percentage and they, the rich, won’t have to pay as much. But it’s a hell of a lot easier for a guy making, say, two million dollars a year to go without, say, $500,000 than it is for a guy making $20,000 a year to go without, say, $5,000. What would eventually happen would be an increase in the lower class and a tightening of the grip of the upper class. According to our own government, that gives rise to despotism!

The truth is, if you take away the, say, $1 million a year that someone making around $2 million or so is giving to the government in taxes each year, you either have to raise everyone else’s taxes to cover for that (and if you add up the millions and millions of dollars in taxes that the rich won’t be paying, it means the taxes of each and every middle-class family are going to have to be significantly raised to make up the difference), or you have to start cutting back government spending. So you end up either screwing the middle class, or screwing everyone out of certain government programs that would get cut due to lack of funding (i.e. most of the middle class and all of the lower class), all so that the minority elite can horde several more million dollars apiece.

The current system isn’t perfect, of course, just like the current legal system and many other current government systems aren’t perfect. It’s becoming more and more common for people to make around, say, $100,000 a year, and in the areas in which they live, after taxes have been taken out and all of that, it’s really not as much as it seems. I live in the U.P. of Michigan, where the cost of living is significantly lower than practically everywhere else in the U.S. A family making around, say, $30,000 a year can live pretty comfortably. (When I was in high school, my mom made under $20,000 if you include child support. She didn’t really have to pay taxes, and typically got back all of what she paid in federal tax. (She’d have to pay state taxes, however, because our governor was a republican douchebag who said that “single mothers choose to be single, so they don’t deserve head of household breaks on taxes”. Fucking prick.) If we’d have had to have paid, say, $5,000 instead, like what would probably end up happening under a “flat-tax” system, we’d have been so horribly, miserably fucked and I probably would not only not have a computer on which to run this website right now, but we wouldn’t be able to afford electricity to run the computer or even rent for the home in which we live.) But in one of the nicer areas of, say, Chicago, you’d find yourself paying $25,000 in rent alone for a year. It’s all relative, but to a certain point. There are very few places where a person making about $250,000 (after taxes, which equates to probably around $500,000 pre-tax) a year can’t live very comfortably. I can understand people in higher-cost-of-living areas making $150,000 a year pre-tax bitching about having, say, ~40% of their money taken for taxes (which, um, doesn’t happen), but when people making a couple million dollars a year are bitching about how they can’t afford the second Porche this year and still have millions left to horde because “the government is stealing [their] money”, it’s just plain stupid and almost sickening, especially when you realize that they want us poor folk who certainly can’t afford it and are giving all we can already to cover the difference for them. But, of course, it doesn’t really matter anyway, because if they’re like a lot of the CEO’s and execs and corporate big-shots nowadays, they’ll just steal enough company money to buy the things they want without having to spend any of their own money and hope it all passes by under the radar.

The whole “flat tax” thing is just a pageant of faggotry and fucktardedness, when it all comes down to it. It’s a plan for the rich to get richer, and the un-rich to get fucked with incredible force in the anus. I suggest you read an article by Mark Rosenfelder, called “Why the Rich Should Pay the Most Taxes”. He has fantastic insight on the whole “flat tax” thing, and I grow weary of forming a coherent argument out of this old article I wrote several years ago.

* As a side note: For fun, I decided to paste bits of zomp’s argument against the “flat tax” into IRC channel #S&M in an attempt to get pooze, the ultra-conservative of the channel, riled up. If you’d like to check out the conversation, read The Wrongness of Pooze.

To summarize, Zomp’s article is about how rich people SHOULD pay the most in taxes because they are, in fact, using more of the government programs (like police and defense) because they have more to lose. Not to mention bailouts and financial loopholes and things that take taxpayers’ money and basically put it right into the pockets of the rich. They all bitch about welfare and how they shouldn’t have to support these other people, but the truth is, while $116 billion goes to welfare programs each year, $400 billion goes to tax breaks and financial programs for the rich. If you’re going to complain about having to support people on welfare, you better do an equal amount of bitching about having to support extremely rich people and pay them to have even MORE money. Sure, welfare is abused and it’s not a perfect system, but poor people aren’t the only ones abusing government programs.

I mentioned earlier that I was going to talk about professional athletes. I’d like to start off by saying “fuck them, unlubed, in the ass, the whiny little bitchy motherfuckers”. Especially baseball players. “We’re gonna go on strike! Waaah!” Fuck yourselves, you fucking fucks. A lot of you make millions of dollars to run around on a goddamned field and hit around a ball. Even those not making millions are still making a ridiculously large amount to play a friggin’ game. You’re getting PAID because you have GOOD MOTOR SKILLS and can RUN REALLY FAST. Congratulations, you have most of America fucking fooled. Of course, that’s not really all that hard, as the majority of people living in the world are all FUCKING MORONS, but still, good job RIPPING EVERYONE OFF and taking advantage of their STUPIDITY. Folks, the only reason these people are able to make as much as they do is because YOU LET THEM. If people stopped going to baseball games and basketball games and all this other shit, even though you really wanted to see your favorite team play or whatever, it’d really put these jerkoffs in their place. But no, you sit there and bitch and piss and moan about how awful it is that these guys are getting paid to PLAY A GAME, but then you go and GIVE THEM YOUR MONEY to watch them do THE VERY THING YOU’RE BITCHING ABOUT. “SON OF A BITCH, YOU KNOW, SOME OF THESE ASSHOLES PLAYING BASEBALL ARE MAKING MORE FOR PLAYING ONE GAME THAN I HAVE MY ENTIRE LIFE. FUCK FUCK FUCK.” “Sir, that’ll be fifty-seven dollars. You’re in row F, seat 3.” “OKAY THANKS PLAY BALL!” Here’s a hint for all of you who are bitching about ticket costs and how much the players are making and everything else: DO NOT GO TO THE FUCKING GAMES, YOU RETARDS. YOU ARE THE REASON THEY ARE BEING PAID SO GODDAMNED MUCH. IF YOU STOP GOING, AND THERE ARE NO PEOPLE WATCHING THE GAMES, THEY WILL NOT BE MAKING ANY MONEY AND WILL STOP BEING WHINY DOUCHEBAGS ABOUT NOT GETTING ENOUGH MONEY TO PRANCE AROUND LIKE STUPID LITTLE BITCHES.

Anyway, you have all these professional athletes bitching about not making enough money, because they have “limited careers” in baseball. But, what, they can’t fucking work once they’re too old to play? “I only want to work for about a decade and make all the money I’ll need for the rest of my life in that short period of time. Oh! Also, I don’t want to actually work, how about if I… hrmm… play a game! I’m pretty good at throwing a ball around. Yeah, that’s it! I want to get paid to do a recreational activity, and I want to get paid so much that I can be rich for the rest of my life from it.” Now, I can understand the human mind enough to see where that whole idea came up, but what I can’t understand is what the FUCK was going through the head of the person who said “oh, okay” and started paying them. I mean, I can play videogames pretty well, but even if I got a whole bunch of people to watch, I doubt I could realistically work my way up to getting millions of dollars to play for a couple of hours. And that’s a “limited career” as well, because my response time is going to eventually fail as I age, and whatever. I’m sure I won’t really feel like working after I’m done PLAYING GAMES for about ten years, either. Think about it, though… same concept, really. People are getting paid shitloads of money to play games, and they actually have the balls to fucking COMPLAIN about it. So I say until these assholes stop bitching and threatening to go on strike, and complaining about how they don’t make as many million as they like to, we should all just stop going to their games and we should start writing them letters to the effect of “fuck yourself, you whiny little bitch, and get back to playing the goddamn game for far less pay than you have been because it’s completely ridiculous.”

“I made enough this game for a duffel-bag full of crack!” “High-five!”

Athletes are a bit different from regular rich people, though, because they don’t horde their money for the most part. It’s hard to put money into savings or investments with the price of crack nowadays. I’m not saying that every professional athlete is spending their money on drugs, but hell, there sure are enough of the fuckers doing it to constitute a pretty big percentage. And if it’s not drugs, it’s paying to have people killed. Or whores. Or booze. Or hardcore parties. Or lawyers to cover for all of it. Or whatever.

Like I said, though, they can spend whatever money they make on whatever they want. I’m not going to get into the morals and ethics of their purchases or anything. But don’t bitch about not making enough money, because if you spend it unwisely, it’s your own goddamn fault. Consequences of the decisions you make should be taken into effect before you act. “Gee, what’s going to happen if I buy drugs? Well, if I’m caught, I’ll probably get arrested and end up going to jail. It’ll fuck up my career in baseball. I’ll have to pay court fees, fines and other miscellaneous fees. And even if I don’t get caught, it’s still a lot of money for drugs, so should I really spend so much for a temporary, life-threatening, brain-damaging altered state of consciousness? I mean, a few million dollars is a lot of money, but it’s not going to last me forever. Should I start putting some away for the future, or should I blow it all on crack?”

But, see, they don’t do this… they don’t think. They take actions without contemplating the consequences and end up bitching because they spent all their money unwisely and now they want more.

That’s what the whole thing comes down to is thinking about the consequences. The ripple effects caused by the actions you take don’t discriminate based on how much money you have. You can’t buy away the consequences of your actions. There’s really nothing at all you can do to avoid them. Dennis didn’t think about the consequences before he made the decision to use technical means to steal money from Tyco. Daryl Strawberry didn’t think about the consequences before he bought duffel bags full of crack. There are many others in the same positions. And it’s not even just the richest people who have these problems. The key is to live within your means, no matter how much money you make. And if you can’t afford to buy something, then don’t buy it, and don’t bitch and piss and moan about taxes or wanting to be paid ridiculously larger amounts than you already are just because you want something and can’t have it. If you can’t afford to support yourself and purchase all the goods and services that you need and still live as comfortably as you’d like to and buy all the goodies you’d really like to have after all the taxes and social security stuff has been taken out, then don’t live in an area where things cost so damn much, and realize that you’re not going to EVER be able to have EVERYTHING you want. You have to make sacrifices. EVERYONE does.

If you’re taking home a million dollars a year, don’t spend two million dollars a year and bitch that you can’t live because the government is stealing your money and you don’t want to pay taxes and want people who can’t afford it to make up your difference. This concept applies to those who horde their money as well. If you take home ten million dollars a year but don’t want to spend any of it, then don’t bitch about how hard life is for you, and cut back on all the unnecessary, extravagant shit. If you take home ten million and would like to keep nine million of that, don’t spend three million and piss and moan about taxes. It’s your own decision to do with your money as you please, and if you don’t want to tap into your horded stash, then make the decision not to. It’s not the government’s fault or the current tax system’s fault that you’re deciding to live outside of your means, or outside of the budget you want to hold yourself to.

With every decision you make, not just financial, you’re forging a future for yourself, and moving things in one direction or another. There are consequences to whatever actions you take, and the effects of the things you do ripple out like when one tosses a rock into a still body of water. We evolved a highly developed sense of reasoning and the ability to contemplate for a purpose. You can control your impulses, be it with greed or spending or anger or instinct. It’s just a matter of using your brain, and not letting these things corrupt you or overtake you.