City of Portland wants a leaf district at tax payer expense.

I was reading in the paper that the Mayor elect of Portland wants to create a leaf district (to clean up leafs in the street). Now I do not live in Portland but just felt I had to comment on this idea. This is a classic example of government waste and a need to create a bigger government at tax payer expense. There are only a small percentage of people who push their leaves into the street and instead of cracking down on them their idea is to make everyone pay for this.

Now where I live for example, my street has 17 houses on it 11 have yard recycling and 2 have landscaping crews that take care of their yards. 5 of these houses have no trees or bushes (no leaves) of the 12 remaining houses only one does not take care of his leaves. This is about 7% of the people on my street. Why in the world should we all pay more in taxes for just 7% of a problem? Why can’t the city go to these idiots and make then clean up their own leaves. This is just another stupid attempt to get more tax money and hire more city workers.

The end result will be more people will push their leaves into the street. After all if I am paying taxes to clean up the leaves then why should I do it myself? Then what’s next? Why not put my tree trimmings in the street or better yet my grass clipping. We could all cancel our yard recycling and just dump it all in the street sense we would be paying for it. it is time that we all step up and be responsible for ourselves and not expect someone else to pay for our messes. A good example is the auto industry, banking industry and AIG. We all need to take pride in our neighbor hood, counties, cities, states and country.

Now like I said I don’t live in Portland so this will not effect me but you know once it happens in one city others won’t be far behind if they think they can get more taxes.

Social Security

I thought the best place to start is the begging, what is Social Security. Social Security was originally set up to supplement our retirement. It was never suppose to be a full retirement fund. People always say it is a horrible investment which it is because it is not an investment. It is designed to provide you with basic need for living such as a roof over your head or basic food. To long people have looked at Social Security as their retirement and then when they retire they are unhappy with how much they have. People need to start taking care of themselves and putting money away for their own future. Look at it as an insurance policy you pay for. If you are not putting some of your money aside every month into something for your future such as an IRA, 401K or even a savings account then you are part of the problem. We need to get everyone to start taking responsibility for their own future and not rely on the government.

With that said Social Security is in sad shape because of the draw on it now. My understanding of how it works is this. What you pay in now goes to pay for those who are collecting it now. When you retire the people still working will be paying for your benefits. The first problem is we will soon have all the baby boomers retiring. There will soon be more people drawing benefits then are working so there will be more money going out then coming in. the government over the past years has slowly increased the age at which you can get Social Security to try to slow this down. This also is not a go choice and is unfair to the people putting their money in. when I started working I could get full Social security at 62 and Medicare. That has changed to 65, and now 67 and they are talking about making it 70. I have been working almost 30 years and if they make this change it will be like taking away 8 years I have worked. How would you like your bank to come to you after you have been paying on your house for 20 years and tell you, I know your loan was for 30 years but we are short on money so now you have to keep paying your mortgage 8 more years for a total of 38 year? They would be sued because that is illegal but yet the government thinks they can change the rules after you have already agreed to them.

Right now you pay Social Security on the first $96,000 of income after that you pay no Social Security. I think we should change that, maybe not for the tax payer but make the businesses that hire these CEO’s for millions of dollars keep paying on what they pay. They keep talking about helping the middle class and yet Social Security is a tax on middle income America. Just look at the payroll for Baseball. The averages salary for a player is now over a million dollars a year so they are paying Social Security on less than 10% of that. The average team salary is over 100 million which means Baseball has a total payroll of over 2.5 billion a year and Social security is collected on less than 10% or 250 million. Now if you only take the 6.2% that the employer pays on the remaining 2.25 billion it would equal $139.5 million dollars into social security and that’s just for baseball. There would also be basketball, football and all those hi paid heads of companies.

The next thing is they make everyone pay into social security even if you have a retirement plan from your work but if you are an elected official or state employee you don’t these people have some of the best retirement plans around. Let make them pay into social security like the rest of us do. This would also ad millions of dollars to Social Security ever year. It would also give our elected officials an incentive to fix Social Security.