0613blog

Obscenity and Wealth

Things I will never understand: How something that weighs many tons can fly like a bird; cryptocurrency; nuclear fusion; quantum physics, quarks, black holes, white holes; paintings by Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock; a $995 Prada volleyball, a $650 Prada Frisbee, a $185 Prada sterling silver paper clip; why Jan Roche never liked me; and lastly, rounding out my list of the unexplainable, mythological, indecipherable. reprehensible, inexpiable and inexcusable, the U.S. tax code.

The tax code in this country has created evil wizards who look like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk whose long arms reach into smoke-filled castle chambers, where, guarded by fire breathing dragons, our esteemed lawmakers make laws that keep the likes of Bezos and Musk rolling obscenely in more dough than you or I can even think of in our wildest dreams. I would love to wipe that self-absorbed, egotistic, solipsistic grin off of Bezos’ face and smack him in his bald head and I hope with all my heart that Bezos and his Blue Origin spaceship get hit by a rogue meteor, spreading forever his egomaniacal soul throughout the cosmos.

That’s a little rough but I do have great outrage at a system that allows the uber-rich to get uberer-rich just by sitting on their fat tushes while the IRS will hound me if I am a month late on my payments that continue to inflate to loansharkish numbers because of the obscene and repugnant interest rates.

The latest sop to the 1 percenters, of which many are private equity venture capitalists, was when the Treasury Department passed new rules that will further help these moneybags from paying taxes, as if they needed any more help, but remember we are talking about people like trump whose greed is insatiable and Blackstone Group’s CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman, who earned more than $610 million last year while paying practically diddly squat in federal taxes. The average American earns $68,000 a year, so it would take that average Joe 8,820 years to earn $600 million and if he started today, he’d make that amount in the year 10,841 and it’s highly unlikely that Joe will be around then but then again, Stephen A. Schwarzman and trump also will be long gone, which is a good thing.

And here is where you have to give trump another gold toilet because in his final days on the throne, he pressed the treasury department to pass a new law to make the rich richer just a day after trump followers, who worship their everyman trump, ran amok in the capitol.

So why are the politicians so nice to the really, really rich people who own private equity companies? Is it because they care? Is it because they want the world to be happy? How do you spell lobbyists and how do you spell campaign contributions that totaled nearly $600 million in to the campaign coffers of elected officials who then make new laws to benefit their benefactors.

So, why doesn’t the Internal Revenue Service go after the fat cats and make them pay their fair shares so that schlemiels like you and I can save a few more sheckels. It’s because the IRS is following the laws that have been passed to allow cash-dripping lobbyists to fill the wallets of the fat cats who in turn pass laws to tighten the straightjacket around the IRS. So my fellow stooges, it is more likely that you will be hit by a meteor than that officials will do what they were elected to do and that is to protect the common man and how quaint that is. And that is why people buy a $995 Prada volleyball, a $650 Prada Frisbee and a $185 Prada sterling silver paper clip.