Help me annoy my Bush-loving brother

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Warning: I am trying to put together the most hyperbolic story ever written. I’m not looking for a debate, but I am looking for factual advice on how to make this story better.

Backstory: My brother and I have been engaged in an e-mail debate for a few days. I said that McBush’s plan to suspend summer gas taxes was a bad idea in the long run. He responded that it’s not, and that I’m a liberal who wants to take money from the hard-working rich and give it to the lazy poor. (total non-sequitor, BTW, but I decided to run with it.)

This is his last e-mail to me (not counting the one with a bunch of pictures of Obama’s paternal family.)

Over the last hour or so I have concocted the following story while drinking beer. I would like for help (mostly factual, but pure hyperbole is requested as well) in making it better. Here is what I have so far:

Let’s take the case of a CEO who makes $100 million a year, and another guy who makes $8 an hour ($16k a year). It’s probably not fair that the CEO, who has spent years in college and works hard making tough decisions, has to pay $38 - $50 million in taxes, while the other guy basically breaks even, tax-wise. What would be more fair would be for them both to pay 30% (ie. the CEO keeps $70 million and the worker keeps $11.2k, instead of all $16k). The problem with that is that it’s really hard to feed a family on $11.2k, and the CEO’s family isn’t going to starve if he only brings home $50 mil.

“You shouldn’t have kids if you only make $8 an hour” you might say, and I’d say you are right. But the Republicans don’t like people having abortions, and the girl that he fell in love with happened to have been raped by her own father. She would have gotten an abortion, but since she was 16, that required parental consent. Daddy decided that no girl of his was getting an abortion, because they were good Republicans who hated abortion and niggers as much as they love Jesus.

But she met Jimmy, and he treated her and her baby well, so they got away from her father and got married. [because they happened to be of opposite sex, they had that luxury, at least.] After a few years, they decided to have another baby, because he was making $15/hour and looking at a promotion. He also had health insurance, because Clinton forced his company to give it to him. Halfway through the pregnancy they found out that the fetus was most likely going to have Down’s Syndrome. But because Republicans had declared that 2nd term abortions are illegal for any reason, they had no choice but to have the baby.

They were scraping by. Their company’s insurance program refused to pay for any medical care for the baby, because, it turns out that having DS is a “pre-existing condition”. There were social programs (setup by Democrats trying to destroy the country) that helped care for the baby that helped them scrape by.

Then Bush II got elected, and the economy promptly went to sh*t. His boss, (the afore-mentioned CEO) decided to outsource 1000 jobs, including his, to India. That saved the company $20,000,000 a year, and the CEO was rewarded for his stewardship with a $5 million bonus, of which the poor guy had to pay nearly half of in taxes.

At this time, Jimmy’s only option to feed his family was to join the Army. He went to Iraq, and after a few months, he stepped on a land mine. So he got sent back home, and was discharged from the Army, with no medical care. He got a job that he could do from a wheelchair (working in a gas station) making $8 an hour.

The irony of the situation is that the CEO actually works from a wheelchair himself. (Not because he can’t walk, but because he decided that he’s too rich to have to. He pays a guy, who still has legs, $8.50 an hour to wheel him around.)

2

This is the Director’s Commentary section of the story.

Paragraph 1 (P1): I was thinking that the highest tax bracket was 28% or 38%. But the Fair Tax proposal (IIRC - no research done here) was at 30%. So that’s where I got the 30% number from, and I assummed that it was currently at 38%.

P2: I officially apologize for using the N-word.

P3: I have no idea at what point during the pregnancy Down’s Syndrome (or any other condition) can be detected. This kind of stuff is what I’m looking for factual help on.

P7: I personally just think that this part is hilarious. Just patting my own back here.

3

I can’t help you write it, but I thought it was hysterical, FWIW.

4

Dear Mr. Know-It-All MBA:

Warren Buffett, the third-richest man in the world, has criticised the US tax system for allowing him to pay a lower rate than his secretary and his cleaner.

Mr Buffett, who is worth an estimated $52 billion, said: “The 400 of us [here] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you’re in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.”

Mr Buffett said that he was taxed at 17.7 per cent on the $46 million he made last year, without trying to avoid paying higher taxes, while his secretary, who earned $60,000, was taxed at 30 per cent. Mr Buffett told his audience that US government policy had accentuated a disparity of wealth that hurt the economy by stifling opportunity and motivation.

Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, acknowledged in an interview yesterday that there were justified concerns about the huge profits generated by private equity firms and that he worried that income inequality was “poisoning democracy”. He also said that he would be voting for the Democrat candidate at the next election. Mr Blankfein is the highest-paid executive on Wall Street, earning $54 million last year.

Mr Buffett, who runs the investment group Berkshire Hathaway and is widely regarded as the world’s most successful investor, said that he was a Democrat because Republicans are more likely to think: “I’m making $80 million a year – God must have intended me to have a lower tax rate.”

Mr Buffett said that a Republican proposal to eliminate elements of inheritance tax, which raises about $30 billion a year from the assets of about 12,000 rich families, would broaden the disparity between rich and poor. He added that the Republicans would seek to recover lost revenue by increasing taxes for the less prosperous.

He said: “You could take that $30 billion and give $1,000 to 30 million poor families. Or should you favour the 12,000 estates and make 30 million families pay an extra $1,000?”

So, dear brother, if you have a good answer to Mr. Buffet’s comments, and feel you know more than he does, let me know.

5

it was that commie pinkie radical Bush Sr that coined the phrase “Ronald Reagan = voodoo economics”, but selling out his beliefs led to eventually finding a job for his otherwise unemployable alcoholic coke addled son as President of the US. Whist pretty proud of tossing out the phrase “tax and spend Democrats”, obviously it’s another one of those “do as I say, not what I do” type things since Dubya is a shoo in for getting a nobel prize in economics for cutting taxes and increasing spending.

Dayum, that reminds me, wasn’t that coke head also for smaller gubbmint? another one of those “do as i say” thingies.

You could also ask the Japanese what they think of supply side economics these days. The Japanese stock market peaked just a hair short of 40,000 in 1989, and is still anemically crawling around 13,000. The supply side coffin that Ronnie built, the Japanese finished, now have Bush-nomics putting in the final nails. Well done, spendid. Next time you (Bush) get the DT’s and end of world destruction fantasy, why don’t you go on a bender instead big buddy and leave manning the ship of state to someone more qualified. And no, I’m not saying leave it to a guy that went 60+ years without learning basic hunting safety.

[feel free to cut and paste anything that works for ya. this shit writes itself]

P7: you could also make fun of the CEO having so much money, he got as fat as a Saudi King and has to use a wheelchair.

6

If Jimmy already had the job with the insurance, THEN his wife got pregnant, then the Down’s Syndrome wouldn’t be a pre-existing condition.

7

If Jimmy lost his legs in Iraq, he would be medically retired from the military. He would collect 100% of his base pay for the rest of his life. (Adjusted every year for inflation)
So if he was a new private, that’s still $1500 a month for the rest of his life.
Plus all of his medical would be free. Plus all of the medical expenses for his family would be covered. Even for the child.
Hell, as soon as he decided to enlist in the Army, all of that expensive medical care for his DS child would be covered. He’d also be enrolled in the Armys Esceptional Family Member Program that would ensure any duty station he’d be sent to would have adequate facilities to care for his child.

You might want to leave the Army part out of your story because it adds an easily shot down paragraph to an otherwise valid argument. You dont want him to jump all over that and feel like he showed you how wrong you are without even addressing your main points.

8

It’s Down Syndrome. Not Down’s.
ETA: At least in the US. It British English it is Down’s.

9

I can’t really see how you could get your brother upset over Bush, when the current state of crap in this country hasn’t phased him. Save your breath.

10

“The most hyperbolic story ever written”? Isn’t that a bit of an exaggeration?

Seriously, I wouldn’t make up a story; I’d just meet your brother’s dumbass claims head-on with logical and factual refutation. Not that it’ll help.

11

It won’t help. That’s what I’ve been trying. So now I’d like to try a different route.

12

I’m sure if asked, some slave owners would have had rationales for how they were actually “helping” their slaves etc. Those unfortunate rich folks…

13

Just out of curiosity, aren’t you also someone who works for a living?

14

You=me or OP?

15

I agree with Bear_Nenno – how about instead of the Army story, have the guy hit by a drunk driver with no insurance, who gets his hand slapped and 2 months probation while our hero has a serious spinal cord injury. His insurance pays for a rehab hospital, but then because he uses up all his vacation time and his FMLA time while off from work and his bosses don’t believe in allowing his fellow employees to donate vacation days, he’s laid off and has to go COBRA on his insurance. His COBRA payments are $850 per month for his family, and they can’t afford it because his wife only works part-time as a receptionist in a beauty shop which offers no insurance, so they have to drop the insurance altogether and immediately start amassing many thousands of dollars of debt. With the changes in bankruptcy laws, he can’t even declare bankruptcy without forcing his family into homelessness.

Eventually he recovers enough to get the $8 job at the gas station that he can do from the wheelchair, and the rest is back to your story.

That was fun! And frighteningly real, too; it happens to people every day.

ETA: You might also leave the Down Syndrome child out of it and make it an autistic child instead. They would be able to receive services from the state for the child, and the child would be covered federally by SCHIP, but they happen to live in an area that has almost no services to offer autistic children and they certainly can’t afford them themselves, so their child’s condition continues to deteriorate as a result even if he still can go to the doctor for his shots.

16

Trickle down economics. I’ve only ever known one thing that trickles down, and that’s piss down a drunks leg. :slight_smile:

17

It just so happens that I used to have a job making about $15 an hour until my job got outsourced to India and me and about 500 other people got laid off. I now have a part time job that doesn’t offer insurance. I’m about to start another part-time job delivering pizza’s to help make ends meet. Nothing else in the story is autobiographical.

18

What’s wrong with loving bush?

I love bush!

Oh, you meant the president.

Nevermind, carry on then.

19

How about if the wife works at Wal*Mart, and of course has capped hours and locked out of getting insurance?

20

The OP. I was wondering why his brother blithely excluded him from the group of people who works for a living. Maybe it’s not counted as working for a living if you make less than 200 thou a year?

I also find it funny that the brother says life’s not black and white, and then immediately follows that by dividing all people into two categories.