Happy Freakin’ New Year…
January 4, 2013
Time to Pick-up The Tab…
Well, America. You re-elected him. Now it’s time to pick-up the tab.
Obama said: We’re just going to tax the ultra-successful. (I don’t like calling them “rich”.)
Archie said: But listen here, O-man, there aren’t enough ultra-successful people. Even if you taxed all of them out-the-wazoo, that won’t work.
Of course, he already knew that but that didn’t matter. He was just trying to win an election. So now it was time to deal with the fiscal cliff. A cliff that we should have driven over. Instead, it was time to wheel & deal. And, although the ultra-successful will absolutely be paying more – so that they have less money with which to create jobs, everyone will be paying higher taxes in 2013. If you make between $50K and $75K, you’ll be paying about an extra $1000 this year. If you make more, guess what? Yup – you’ll pay more. That should cover just about everyone who reads this blog. You pay more, you pay more. Oh and you – you pay more.
By the way, for all of you who voted for Obama because he supports same-sex marriages (every now and then), even though the President has absolutely no influence whatsoever on whether or not your state allows same-sex marriage… For you, I call this The Gay Marriage Tax Increase. Now when your gay friends get married, you’ll have $1000 less with which to buy them a nice gift.
So who will be paying higher taxes,you ask? Answer: 77% of Americans!
Isn’t anyone besides me thinking, “Liar, liar.. Pants on fire?”
What do you suppose Prez O is going to do with all the cash?
I know whenever I have big debts and I get a bunch of cash in, I try to pay everything to zero. Even if I can’t get to zero, I still try to pay down my debts. After all, it shows that I am responsible with my money and it cuts down my interest charges. Surely, our fearless leader will be doing the same… Yes/No?
Actually… Uh… No.
Actually, actually… Obama’s plan is to keep spending. In order to avoid a fiscal catastrophe, we’ve now agreed to spending an extra 4 trillion dollars, which will require another raising of the debt ceiling – just as soon as Obama gets back from vacationing in Hawaii. In reality, we’re already over the debt ceiling – we hit it on New Year’s Eve. So right now, we’re basically over our credit limit but we’re still borrowing & spending using US Treasury Department trickery.
So what was this cliff we avoided?
My guess is that most people didn’t even understand what the Fiscal Cliff was about. First of all, there was no cliff. It basically consisted of two things. 1) The Bush Tax cuts were to expire and 2) $109 Billion in Federal Tax cuts went into effect. Uh… These both sound like good things.
Obama wanted to tax the ultra-successful more and, as any democrat would tell you, the Bush Tax Cuts were mainly tax breaks for the ultra-successful. So why not let them expire, then go back and reinstate some tax breaks for the middle class? Answer: Because Ben Bernake nicknamed the coincidence of these two events a potential Fiscal Cliff. That gave our government the fuel they needed to make it sound catastrophic and requiring immediate action. After all, our government doesn’t want to spend $109B less this year. That would be overly smart and responsible. Instead they want to spend more. Awesome.
That gets us back to…
Four (4) trillion dollars…without any agreement to reduce any government spending!
$4,000,000,000,000
Holy crap that’s a lot of cash. Doesn’t anyone worry about this?
I guess we could just ignore it. Like the Greeks did. What could go wrong?
Well, at least Obama isn’t just giving money away to big corporations…
Oh, wait a minute. What’s this? I thought those ultra-successful Wall Street bankers were bad guys, Mr. President. So why did we extend the “special financing” tax cuts to these guys? That costs $9 Billion dollars every year. $9 Billion!!!
Then there’s the “Liberty Zone” tax-exempt financing, which, on the surface, sounds like tax free financing to fund reconstruction around the former World Trade Center in NYC. But, upon close inspection, where is this money actually going? Oh… It’s a $1.6 Billion tax break for Goldman Sach. That makes sense. After all, people from Goldman Sachs were at the White House all last week and eventually announced that a small tax increase for all Americans was probably good idea. I guess I’d say that too if I could then get $1.6 Billion in tax breaks for my new cool offices in Manhattan
Socialist Hate Crime?
OK, so, I don’t normally promote morons by naming them here on my show (blog) but did you hear about Thom Hartmann‘s rant last week? Well, this socialist yo-yo, who apparently has his own radio talk show, suggested that being a billionaire should be illegal and that all wealth beyond $1 billion should be confiscated “to help those of us who have less”. In fact, he went on to say, “You can call it redistribution of wealth, that’s fine, I am perfectly comfortable with that language. I think we should outlaw billionaires.”
Seriously? I don’t even know what to say.
But I’ll take a crack at it… Dear Mr. Hartmann, Have you stopped to consider that there are only 425 billionaires in the United States and that they average about $4 billion dollars each? This means that if you took all the money from every billionaire in America, you might be able to keep the US afloat for about 12 months. That is, of course, just the debt borrowing needs of the country – we haven’t even helped anyone yet. If you distributed this money among all other Americans, everyone would get about $6K.
Note: I’d spend my $6K on expensive booze and cheap women.
Although, not necessarily in that order.
Then we’d have no billionaires and all the same problems we have today. Granted this is still a better plan than giving it to the government. If we did that, they’d blow about half of it first. Then we’d each get about $3K. Then we’d have no billionaires and all the same problems.
Too bad no one can think of a plan whereby billionaires could create jobs, put people to work, and generate countless dollars in payroll taxes. I guess socialist just don’t think that way. That’s right. i don’t usually do it. But I had to call this guy a socialist….
I am perfectly comfortable with that language.
But my big question is… Why isn’t getting on the air and professing that you hate billionaires a hate crime? I understand that billionaires are not a “protected group” but maybe they should be. If someone got on the air and suggested that they hated the poor, there would probably be a public outcry. Hmmm… Well, maybe Oprah will buy this guy a new car and he’ll shut the hell up. But then, I guess if all I did was have a little crazy “far left” radio talk show so that I could promote my socialistic ideas, I’d probably hate billionaires too.
And then there’s gun control…
And then there’s gun control… Did I say that twice? So please don’t think that I am accusing the democrats of planting nutty people around the country who “go off” and start randomly shooting but somehow, I wasn’t that surprised at that recent school shooting. I was somewhat expecting it and I think we can expect more of them. I think there are some looney people out there who are just crazy enough to pull the trigger on others and then on themselves so that Obama and his gang can point at them and say, “see…we need better gun controls”… and that worries me.
Here’s another thing that worries me. Gun control advocates are idiots and, in the name of safety, they’ve turned our schools into the perfect place for a looney shooter. Everyone knows that there are no weapons at a school. In other words, there’s no one there who will shoot back at you. How stupid is this?
We protect our money with armed guards, we protect our borders with armed guards, we have armed air marshals on flights. Whenever something really needs protecting, we have armed guards there – but we protect our children with unarmed guards. Does that make any sense?
Even our President, Mr Gun Control himself… He is protected by armed guards. I say when Obama disarms his guards, I’ll disarm mine. In the meantime, let’s get some armed “school marshals” trained and placed at every school in America. There – I just created some jobs.
Then there’s these mega yo-yos at Journal News in Clarkstown, NY. They published an online interactive map showing all handgun permit holders in Westchester and Rockland counties. How awesome is that? Now criminals can see exactly which house don’t have guns. This is brilliant.
But here’s the best part… After the newspaper then received some non-threatening yet somewhat concerning emails, they hired armed guards!!! I can’t make this stuff up. I’ll repeat… The big anti-gun newspaper hired guys with gun when they felt that they needed protection.
Isn’t it ironic… Don’t you think?
So every last one of the biggest anti-gun voices in the country now have people with guns protecting them. What is that, if not hypocritical?
OMG! I think my head is going to explode.
I need something to calm me down. Let’s switch to something fun. How about….
Blonde of The Week. What?
Unrolling a giant scroll, he began to read…
“And now, by the power vested in me by the states of Florida, California, and Tennessee, and the fine people of the British Virgin Islands, technically including Foxy, the guy who owns Foxy’s Bar and Her Majesty, The Queen, I hereby pronounce 2013 the year of the non-redhead.”
[Rejoicing is overheard from the crowd gathered outside the palace, predominantly consisting of hot chick blondes and brunettes.]
“But be forewarned my follow citizens”, he continued. “2014 will once again be a year of the redhead. Years that end in 4 always are.”
Remembering the ancient “Rule of 4’s”, the crowd acknowledged that their time to shine was limited but collectively resolved to make the most of the next 12 months.
So, who will have the honor of being the first non-redhead of the week? Much thought was given to this. As if an entirely new world had been opened up to them, the research department spent countless sleepless nights away from their usual rigorous schedule of porn downloading, so they could familiarize themselves with blondes, brunettes, and others…
…but at the end of the day, the choice was mine. My first thought was to avoid some of the usual criticisms by selecting someone “more my age” – but that’s just silly. Instead, I decided to go with a young punk in her mid-20’s. You know, before she hits then big Three-Oh and becomes to old for me. I’ll feature someone more-my-age next time.
And so, our first Non-Redhead (Blonde) of The Week is… Jemina Pearl
[Spoken like Butthead (from Beavis & Butthead)]
“Hey, baby…”
So… “Where do we know Jemina from”, you might ask?
Well, you may have heard that I love time-traveler bands. You know, bands from now, who could have fit in, in the 80’s, who like like a girlfriend, that I has in February of last year…?
Well, one such band was Be Your Own Pet and JP was their lead singer. Be Your Own Pet was like a late 80’s early 90’s Garage Punk Band. They were awesome fun and with Jemina as their front person, they were also easy to watch. Unfortunately, BYOP is no longer together. 😦
So what is this lovely creature doing now-a-days?
Well, when she’s not hanging out with Archie (which is pretty much all the time), she’s working on a project called Ultras S/C. After some minimal listening, however, I don’t think I like Ultras S/C. So far, what I’ve heard, sounded like a Dead Kennedys experiment gone bad. But hey, I’m diggin’ the longer hair…
Ah, but we’re not done with her yet.
That’s right… This week’s Musical Guest… Be Your Own Pet.
So many good one to pick from, which shall it be?
OK, here’s BYOP performing Adventure.
Don’t you love her?
Well, I do… and that’s what matters around here.
I usually have to pause that video right around 1:30 just to check out her cute face
And what was that guy, a giant bunny… Who hunts giant bunnies?
I guess if you hunt giant bunnies, you have to make sure you get his girlfriend too.
Hmmm… Now that I’m thinking about it, I probably shouldn’t have featured her in a blog post where I totally bash the democrats. It’s hard to imagine that a 25-year old female punk rocker wouldn’t be a democrat. I won’t even bother with a “call me, maybe”. 🙂
Just in cased you’re reading, JP. I’m NPA, baby… No Party Affiliation! I actually don’t like either side. They both suck for their respective reasons. I think they keep our country divided and prevent us from moving forward. Maybe, we should write a song about that?
Well…no matter. I gotta run.
So, that’s it for this week.
See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya!
And, oh yeah… Happy Freakin’ New Year!
We’re off to a great freakin’ start, aren’t we?
<smootches>
– Arch
Save it for the blog, Alice…
July 29, 2011
Greetings and salutations…
Cabo San Lucas
A few of my more astute readers noted that I talked a lot about Todos Santos and not very much about Cabo San Lucas, and that’s because Cabo was “just OK”. I mean, the place where I stayed for my business portion of the trip was absolutely top notch. Here are some BlackBerry quality pictures to prove it…
And, at The Wal-Mart, they had Burger King branded Aros de Cebolla. That’s right, Rings of Onion. Some kind of a BK orchestrated, Latin American, Funyuns rip-off.
But at the end of the day, if you were to take away the incredible oceans views, rock formations and other natural beauties surrounding the city, it was just another, Mexican tourist town. I loved the fish tacos at Alexander’s (at the Marina), all the sailboats in the area, and the Mexican people…but I think that my need for fancy resorts and big cities is on the decline. Todos Santos was definitely more my speed these days. Of course, that won’t keep me away from New York City next week… I have a date with David Letterman.
And actually, I think a little Dave Mason would be appropriate here…
Sometime, if I feel like ranting and raving, I’ll tell you about my trip back. This would include details on the my latest round of ridiculous encounters with TSA people and why I think we should be slashing their budget in half. Which brings me to…
I guess the BIG topic this week should be The Debt Ceiling.
But you know what really bugs the crap out of me?
Well, other than that guy’s name is Boehner. <Heh, heh… heh.>
Most people have no idea what this whole debt ceiling thing is about, why it’s important or even relevant, and/or how any of it could affect the average person. The reality is that most people just want this sort of thing to go away. Why should we care if the national debt goes up? It’s already at 14.3 trillion dollars and, as far as we can tell, that hasn’t affect us in the least, so why not go for broke. Make it an even 20 trillion. Right?
So, let me take a stab at this. First off, there are people who think that having a debt ceiling is silly. Why don’t we just get rid of it? The debt ceiling is nothing more than a made up number that says that the U.S. will not borrow anymore than than this amount of money. It’s like having a credit card with a credit limit, except we get to set our own legal credit limit. Although doing business could certainly be easier without that ceiling, not having a debt ceiling would just allow for unlimited borrowing without anyone really noticing our looming troubles …and looming, they are, in a big way. Our country has been, basically, having to raise the debt ceiling about every six months (or so) for years.
What no one realizes is that, global governmental spending works exactly like your own household finances, just with more zeros at the end. Let’s pretend that you have a credit card that you use sparingly, mostly for times when you don’t have cash. Then, every month, when your bill comes in, you pay it off and you have some money left for other things, like paying your mortgage, your car and having a little beer and tequila. Good stuff. You are living the life.
Then one day you realize that you’ve put a little too much on your credit card. You could pay it off but that would mean not having as much money for beer and tequila. Well, you’re an American. You deserve your tasty beverages and, therefore decide to, instead of paying off your debt, start running a balance. Of course, you are sure that you’ll be paying it back down to zero soon enough.
Next month rolls around and you’ve over spent again. Plus now you have to pay interest on your credit card balance from last month. That’s OK. It doesn’t appear to be too much. Your balance is small. Besides, friends are coming over, they heard you have the best tequila collection in town. Don’t worry, they are bringing the beer. So, to not change your lifestyle, you let the credit card balance grow a little more and the problem compounds itself.
After a while, your credit card balance hasn’t seen zero in a long time. Whenever cash comes in, you send it all to the credit card company. That means you don’t have any cash, so everything that you buy, you need to buy with your credit card. It’s a vicious circle.
If you let this continue, sooner or later you’ll notice that you are spending more on interest than you are on beer and tequila. Normally, I would recommend getting all of your bills paid and your credit card balances paid-off before spending one more dime on yourself but… This whole scenario could be pretty hard to face without plenty of beer and tequila. Are you following me?
Fortunately, the credit card companies, in their infinite wisdom, set a credit limit on your cards. They are saying, you can’t borrow more than this much. They are saying, if you were to borrow more than this, we don’t think you’d have the ability to ever pay it back. Gee thanks!
So this is exactly what our government has done. America has spent all of its cash and we’ve been borrowing more and more. So far our creditor have loved us. It’s like auto-pay…they get their money. All this borrowing is costing us huge dollars. Our Net Interest on Debt is now our nation’s 5th largest budget item. But we keep spending and spending…money that we don’t have, which drives up how much we pay in interest…because we’re spending borrowed money.
The scary thing is that we can arbitrarily raise our debt ceiling and agree to borrow more. However, our global creditors aren’t stupid. They know that we should, by all rights, have a credit limit and they know that we are very close to what that credit limit should be. They know that if we borrow much more, we will never be able to pay our debt down. And when that happens, there will be a whole new set of problems…
I know I’ve included this link before but… Check it out.
Just bring this up and stare at it for a little while. It’s mind-boggling.
First, our credit rating will go down, which means our interest rate will go up. I’ve always found it funny that those who can’t afford to pay, pay the most. We are obviously not a communist society. Then of course, who is? Not the Chinese …but that’s a topic for another time.
Next, at some point, no one will loan us any more money, regardless of our self imposed debt ceiling. Talk about a government shut-down. If we don’t start working towards a balanced and cash-flow positive budget, this will absolutely happen in the next 20 (or so) years. This is something no one wants. Don’t forget, we’re everyone’s best customer. What happens when your best customer has their credit lines shut off and they don’t have any cash? Salespeople? That’s right. You can’t sell them anything. So this will be bad for everyone.
We gotta fix this boyz! We have to make some tough choices. We have to stop spending. We have to eliminate our debt and return to being a debt free society. Part of how we must do this is by reducing the trade deficit. Let’s start making everything that we need right here in America, even if it costs a little more. That will keep people employed and keep our cash in the hands of Americans. We need to lose our dependency on oil. I believe the only reason we have such a dependency today is because we have been manipulated by the big oil giants and the automotive industry. Let’s start building cars that don’t require gasoline. Right now!
Let invest in companies like Cyclone Power Technologies in Pompano Beach, Florida. They’ve already developed an engine that runs on almost any fuel or combination of fuels. They are cleaner, safer, and more efficient! It’s basically a mini steam engine powered by things that don’t send our money into the pockets of Texan billionaires, Saudi Arabians, and other BP-like conglomerates.
Let’s make it easy for companies to do business in the US, if they are located in the US, so they employ our people and keep our money here. Let’s watch out for sneaky foreign companies who appear to lose money here every year, so they don’t have to pay US taxes, while the corporate offices in Japan rake in piles of cash.
In other words, let’s stop taking it up the poop chute.
Ram it, ram it, ram it, ram it up your poop chute
Ram it, ram it, ram it, ram it up your poop chute
Don’t fool yourself girl, it’s goin’ right up your poop chute
That is sick and disgusting…much like today’s topic.
Where was I…
Fortunately, I’ll be rounding up to 100 soon and looking forward to spending my days deciding where to drop anchor, how to make my own tamales, and whether I prefer rum or vodka in my guanabana smoothies.

What’s your plan?
Cheers! Love ya. Mean it.
– Arch






