Sunday, May 08, 2005

Taxing Fast Food

OK, this is the first real shot fired by any sort of left wing crazy liberal in their war against obesity. Admittedly this is done by the cash strapped city of Detroit, I was figuring it would happen in either San Francisco or New York city first. So now the governments willing to tax people for being fat, what's next, taxing people because they're ugly?

There's no question that this country is getting fatter you can see it every day stop at a grocery store, look around yourself at the gas station as you're pumping your paycheck into your gas guzzling SUVs tank. We have grown in diameter to the point now we need to have large SUVs just to haul our fat buts around. Here's a shout out to America get up and walk.

Saturday, May 07, 2005

Going Green and Going Bust

An article posted on Fox.com, points to a few problems in regulating building standards that are not tested. Seattle's two-year-old City Hall has been plagued with problems that is making life difficult and uncomfortable for the tenants. Some examples of failed portions of this project are, light reflecting shelves designed to reduce electrical bills create such a glare that workers complain, and oxygen producing rainwater preserving" Green roof" died and will be receded with hardier plants. Boilers exploded, the police have trouble getting hot water in their locker rooms, offices are often too hot or too cold. One report from the city of Seattle says that "tenants are uncomfortable and they are wasting money heating and cooling air that is not reaching them".

In other example from washingtonpolicy.org, points to a middle school that has not achieved the savings they were promised.
"Tacoma middle school was projected to achieve 35% energy savings. During its first year and a half of operation, however, it is actually using 25% more energy than the average middle school in Tacoma, including one school built at the same time without the green building elements."

Washington State has become the first state requiring all tax funded buildings to be green. From this experience in Seattle it looks like there's going to be some wasted tax dollars over the next few years just learning about what works and what doesn't.

Friday, May 06, 2005

Can you buy a Governor at Wal-Mart?

I was thinking about Social Security today, and President Bush's idea of progressive indexing. But Wal-Mart is just too much fun. So here's one, the Maryland Legislature has passed the bill that requires any business with more than 10,000 employees to spend at least 8% of their total payroll and employee health benefits or compensate the state's health insurance program for their employees reliance upon it.

That sounds like an interesting way of slapping Wal-Mart around, but the governor of Maryland ( Ehrlich ) is threatening a veto, it gets interesting when you find out he has received campaign contributions from our favorite company Wal-Mart.

Governor Ehrlich has benefited from a relationship with Wal-Mart, in December 2004 Wal-Mart held a reception honoring Governor Ehrlich. This event was a $1000 per person price tag in addition to this fundraising benefit for the governor he also received a $4000 donation from Wal-Mart in January 12, 2005.

The total size of the donations from Wal-Mart is unknown, so how do we know if Governor Ehrlich's potential veto has been bought by Wal-Mart is a truly honest desire to prevent a targeted tax increase against an honest business. Or the effect of the political donation, only people who know is the governor and maybe Wal-Mart.

If you're interested in telling Governor Ehrlich to return the campaign contributions from Wal-Mart this link to Wal-Martwatch.com will allow you to send him a message.

Have a great day.
Da bum