The State of the Onion

I tried to watch the State of the Onion thing on the tube last night but got bored after the first half hour of celebrity blather. I toddled off to bed before we got to the class warfare thing. Apparently will be the basis of the campaign this year.

I surrender. As Michelle has observed in the new book “The Obamas,” the President is way too smart for us to appreciate and we are letting him down.

I will try to do better.

That said, I did not see any specifics in the address in which I was interested, since I already pay more taxes as a percentage of income than he wants Mitt and Warren to pay, and of course the real nut of the matter is that fewer and fewer people are paying for more and more people with their hands out.

 

It is not new, and they could have run the speech from last year. Along the way, they lost me with that ?millionaires and billionaires earning more than $250K a year.? Remember that one? That seemed like the opening salvo in lunatic rhetoric, matching the insanity from the right that taxes can never ever be raised for anything.

 

Neatly segued into the informed commentary about how decisive the President was is a gleeful media chorus about the Mittster?s 13.9% tax rate.

 

Remember, the guy is unemployed. And he did pay taxes. Any way you cut it, paying $3,000,000 in capital gains trumps whatever it is that Warren Buffett?s secretary contributes, regardless of the percentage.

 

I would go on with the tirade, but I am an equal opportunity skeptic, and after all it was the President?s turn to trot out the nonsensical last night, rather than the loons on the right, and it only seems fair to express the resentment that a lot of folks feel about not having anything to actually choose from.

 

The amount of money we are spending- by the way, it has been a thousand days since we actually had a President?s Budget in this country- is unsustainable.

 

That means what we are doing cannot be continued and we have to figure out something else.

 

The alleged blueprint from last night?s speech isn?t going to cut it any more than the Tea Party alternatives.

 

We have saddled ourselves with a tax code that is incomprehensible, passed in a bipartisan manner by the criminal class that occupies Congress, and abetted by whoever happened to be occupying the Oval Office at the moment.

 

So, if we want to have a discussion about Capital Gains, we ought to do that. If we want to talk about the progressive tax structure that has idiots like me who make a paycheck paying 33% to Uncle Sugar, fine. Let?s do that.

 

But instead we are going to get hallucinogenic nonsense. It makes me cranky.

 

So, why don?t we talk about something optimistic. Like death.

 

I have spent the last two days slogging through the layers of onion that the gatekeepers at the broker?s office are inventing ways to keep me out of Mom’s account so we can pay for her passing.

 

As part of the full-employment-for-lawyers aspect of death, I have had to enlist an attorney to register our official dissatisfaction with the process.

 

I need to set up a trust of my own and get things squared away, arrange for burial issues and that sort of stuff. My experience has been that life is too busy to pay much attention to things until it is way too late. I have the folks in my library on a middle shelf, with my unit number in black magic marker on the exposed sides of the USPS shipping boxes.

 

That seems to be the logical thing to do. I had signed up for an actual in-ground burial at Arlington with my friends at Murphy’s Funeral Parlor, but on the whole, I think I made a mistake and will opt for flash-fry.

 

At the time, I wanted to avoid the Columbarium, but the last funeral I attended there was just fine, and frankly I have no idea what I was thinking. They tell me you can request in-ground placement of the cremains, too, so what the hell.

 

Just one of the long list of things to be taken care of- that and starting to lean down the crap in the apartment- make transition issues that much easier. There are so many rabbit holes to dive down in closing up the affairs of people who lived to be almost ninety.

 

I doubt if I am going to get that far, and I am perfectly fine with that. My Mom’s passing was so magical that I hope that is in the genetic code, too. Only two things in life are certain.

 

Mom peeled her onion just fine.

 

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com