The American Worker - Skin in the Game

I alluded to God. He said, 'I want a tithe.' He didn't say, 'If you don't have any money, don't give me any tithes,' and he didn't say 'if you're the richest man in the world give me triple tithes,' so proportionality, that's what's really fair.  A percentage.

- Ben Carson

[21:1] As he looked up, Jesus saw the rich putting their gifts into the temple treasury. [2] He also saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins. [3] "I tell you the truth," he said, "this poor widow has put in more than all the others. [4] All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on."

Gospel of Luke, Chapter 21, Verses 1-4

Only 65% of American households end up paying any federal income taxes. The rest of us either don't earn enough to have taxable income or we get our taxes back through credits and deductions, and more than a fifth of non-payers are retirees.  When you see videos like the ones linked here from a Fox News anchor or the one quoted from HUD Secretary Ben Carson talking about Americans needing to "have skin in the game" in national tax policy, that's the basis of their argument.  So let's take a look at how the government is funded:

The American Worker - Preface

Preface

The world - at least the one on tv - seems a match strike away from self-immolation. As we step into the next two years of political coal walking, objectives will prove useful lest we barrel over one another on the way to our "Publish Post" hysteria buttons, and leave it at that. Others rightly rush to the guard lines of civil, reproductive, and 1st Amendment rights. I want to talk about the American worker.

Letter to the Future - Agents of Joy - XVI

Agents of Joy
6 February 2017



To Future

A great gift of growing, Future, is the slow understanding that life - no matter the degree of its cruelty or misery - comes drug forth by Agents of Our Great Faculties. They are people you'll name. Wisdom will scar his hands on the rope, Courage will throw her back, but damn if they won't rig, rivet, and frame a world around you.  One by one these people will gather themselves, as if to drip from cloud, into your life.  They'll be made before you and you'll know their power.  They're likely sweat-covered and out of breath, smiling sideways while they walk abreast your stride, pulling the world along with them.