Rick Raw: IRS Madness Choking the Life Out of Seniors

By Rick Grant rickgrant01@comcast.net www.rickatnight.com

In 1993, the Clinton administration passed a bill that taxed senior citizens earning Social Security and worked either part-time of full-time. The insidious bill was buried in other legislation to get it passed. Before that, seniors earning Social Security could make as much extra money as they wanted. The new law put a terrible burden on seniors who wanted to work and draw Social Security to make ends meet.

In 2006, I went on Social Security but I was also working a full-time job. Since I was an independent contractor working from my own business, I ended up feeding the IRS beast substantial installment payments. I couldn’t afford to send them quarterly estimates. However, with penalties and interest, I was swimming up stream. Even with my monthly installments, the amount I owed was steadily rising. Today I owe the bastards $12,000 and have added most of it to my Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

The IRS is a vast bureaucracy of fiendish debt collectors who will stop an nothing to collect their money. They are our country’s Gestapo–a mindless goose stepping army of sniveling weasels, preying on seniors and ordinary Americans. Their mission: Collect the money owed by any means necessary–even if it means ruining peoples lives. Google "IRS horror stories" to read the incredible tales of the Gestapo’s mental torture and sadistic tactics. In some cases like Redd Foxx, the Gestapo’s overkill methods actually kill people who die of heart attacks when the Gestapo barges into their homes with guns drawn like murderous home invaders. The IRS made a big example of Redd Foxx, going into his home and throwing all his possessions onto his lawn. It was a grandstanding media play to show the public that this is what will happen to you if you don’t pay the IRS. Foxx died a few months after the IRS made their big play. The stress of the IRS’ strong-arm tactics caused Foxx to have a massive heart attack.

During my time in debt to the IRS, they continually threatened me, inundating me with bundles of computer generated letters which threatened to levy my possessions, garnish my pay, and to throw me in jail. Hey, I’m small potatoes compared to big time IRS debtors. I just needed extra money to supplement my Social Security and pension. Even with the extra money, I was barely getting by. Why? I was paying the IRS large sums of money. I figure I had paid off my principle debt, but the IRS’ usurious penalties and interest piled up and I was feeding an insatiable Jabba the Hutt. The truth is, I could never pay them off at the IRS’ high rate of interest and penalties.

Because of the IRS’ stranglehold on my life and the beast’s continuing harassment, I decided to retire and get by on my wife’s and my Social Security payments as well as our respective pensions from former employers. I simply can’t afford to work and pay the Gestapo at the same time. In my income class, working and paying the IRS is a losing proposition. Clinton pushed through surreptitious dealings that make money to pay off Bush Senior’s national debt. But, it was a mistake to burden seniors with this responsibility. Tax the rich, not poor seniors. Interestingly, Obama has promised to repeal this law that taxes seniors.

This leads me to commentary about the dire need for another way of collecting income tax. Many candidates for president have suggested a flat tax, which to me, is fair. If you’re wealthy and you can afford luxury goods and services, then you pay a higher sales tax on every piece of merchandise or service. On necessities, like groceries, everyone, rich or poor, would pay a nominal sales tax. The method is fair because if you can’t afford luxury items, then you simply can’t buy them and you are not carrying the burden of paying taxes for the wealthy to live high off the hog. And best of all, the government gets their money up front.

Sadly, no one has lobbied to make a flat tax happen. The great IRS monster is firmly embedded in Washington, hunkered down in countless nondescript buildings with thousands of employees.
The IRS has great power to snuff out anyone trying to kill it. In many of the horror story cases, the IRS is guilty of reckless disregard for human life and should be prosecuted. They have literally ruined people’s lives and left them broken, sick, or dead. The Gestapo is America’s Evil Empire that needs to be terminated with extreme prejudice. Why has this criminal enterprise been allowed to exist. Why, why, why.

Rick Raw: Heart Tests Inspire Mystical Experience

By rick Grant rickgrant01@comcast.net www.rickatnight.com

As a result of suffering chest pressure for a week, which I couldn’t explain, I decided to go get checked out by a cardiologist, Dr. Constantin, associated with St. Lukes Hospital,. The tests consisted of a gamma scan of my chest, an ultra sound scan of my heart, and a stress test on a treadmill hooked up to a heart monitoring machine. Dr. Constantin’s clinic is modern and high tech. The personnel are friendly and efficient, which was a change from my usual medical office experience.

Of all the tests, the ultra-sound scan was the most interesting. Ultra-sound technology has come a long way from the blurry black & white images of yesteryear. Today’s ultra sound is digitized on a computer screen. There I was, looking at my own beating heart, watching the valves open and close. I was fascinated and mesmerized by this strange pulsating organ. "It’s alive–it’s alive!"

Soon, as the tech moved his K-Y Jelly coated wand around my chest, I pondered the big questions of life and death. As I viewed my hard working heart, I realized that it could suddenly stop, and I’d find out what was on the other side. In my mind, seeing my heart working justified getting the tests.

My half-brother died of a catastrophic sudden-death heart attack. He was only 65 years old. He had just retired from the police force and had been playing racquetball. He was sitting on a bench cooling down after a match and he just keeled-over and died. At 67, soon to be 68, I’ve passed that milestone. Still, the chest pressure that drove me to he doctor felt like Mike Tyson was holding me down by pressing my chest. It freaked me out. Dr. Constantin said that I did the right thing getting it checked out. The doctor will study the data from the tests and I’ll see him on July 30 to get the results.

The heart is nothing more than a pump, composed of muscle which pumps blood throughout the body, beating an average of 72 times per minute for every minute of our lives. My regular heartbeat is 84 bpm. On the treadmill, the highest I could get it up to was 110 bpm. The technician was frustrated that I couldn’t get it higher. She turned up the treadmill’s speed and nearly killed me. Finally, my knees gave out, but 110 bps was the highest it would go. Like all muscles, the heart needs exercise. We run, walk, or do other aerobic exercises to make the heart workout by forcing it to beat faster, thus making it stronger.

Seeing my beating heart also made me think of how fragile I am. I tried to imagine how many times my heart had to beat over my 67 years. What if I lived to a hundred? Then I thought about the electrical system that generates the power to keep the heart working. This led me to my lifelong studies of quantum physics, which tells us that everything in the universe is connected. And, we humans are connected to the higher energy–God as it were.

To me, spirituality is secular, since all humans have direct access to the higher energy. I call on it often. Some call it prayer, but it’s just semantics what we call it. Some people like to wrap it in the Biblical symbolism of organized religion, which gets you to the same place. Just turn on that switch in your head and you’re connected to the higher energy. Ask and it shall be given!

Yes, a person can actually die of a broken heart, which emotionally wrecks the heart. Our heart can ache for lost love ones. Thus the heart does play a role in our emotional life–literally and figuratively. When we fall in love, our heart feels good as it beats with healthy verve. It’s our engine that drives the bus that is us.

Seeing my heart working had profound effect on me. It was a mystical experience that verified my belief in the higher energy to which we are connected. My heart, like all the beating hearts in the world, is part of the whole –the great pulsating and expanding universe.

Rick Raw: The Dumbing of American Youth–Generation Stupid

By Rick Grant rickgrant01@comcast.net www.rickatnight.com

Could Jay Leno’s "Jaywalking" segment really represent a disturbing trend of the dumbing of America’s youth? Leno goes out on the street and randomly interviews young people testing their knowledge of current events, government, and history. I wondered if these people were shills (plants) purposely acting dumb for the shock value. According to Leno, the people and their stupidity are real. He swears the random interviews are not staged.

Then I delved into this subject more deeply and discovered that recent statistics revealed that reading has declined, not only among the poorly educated, but 67 % of college graduates do not read novels or non fiction books for pleasure. In contrast, it could be argued that the Internet is a vast unlimited source of knowledge and this is where today’s youth do the bulk of their reading and research.

Interestingly, though, the statistics agree with Leno’s straw poll because many of his street interviews are with college students or recent college graduates. The questions are so simple it’s ridiculous, like Leno holding up a picture of Condolezza Rice and asking the person who she was? A young woman, who claimed to be a recent college graduate, didn’t know. Incredibly, most of Leno’s interviewees are dim-bulbs. One young woman, who said she is attending college, couldn’t identify a picture of George W. Bush or his Vice President, Dick Cheney. And so it goes.

Leno’s "Jaywalking" segment is funny but disturbing. But it’s just a snapshot of the problem.
Sage pundits attribute the dumbing of America’s youth to the proliferation of the video gaming culture over print media. Moreover, a rising number of college students graduate with a pedestrian grasp of geography, current events, and history. It could be the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism, causing this paradigm shift of intellect. Self-absorption and frivolous concerns, like the merits of nail polish, or reaching a high level in "Grand Theft Auto IV" seem to occupy young people’s minds.

More significantly, a shocking number of today’s youth admit they get their "news" from John Stewart’s The Daily Show, which is a parody of the news. We journalists know that today’s youth are not reading newspapers. With no new newspaper readers buying subscriptions and advertisers going to television and the Internet, print media is on life support, facing extinction in the near future. Soon newspapers will be a quaint relic of the past like drive-in theaters.

To make matters worse, attention spans are declining in direct proportion to the youth’s intellect. I know this to be true because I’m a movie critic. Over a 24 year period of reviewing films, I’ve noticed that popular movies are aimed at the short attention span culture, with less dialogue and more special effects to keep the vid-kid generation visually stimulated. Explosive action is what they crave, not dramatic scenarios. The release of so called "art films" has drastically declined in the 2000s. Even if a low budget indie film wins an Oscar, it doesn’t benefit from an Oscar bump in attendance of yesteryear. The truth is, no one cares about quality films.

The coup de grace of the dumbing of America’s youth is not only their lack of knowledge, but the fact that Generation Stupid is proud, even arrogant that they deem intellect unimportant. In high schools, bright kids are ridiculed as nerds for being smarter than a five year old. The notion of curling up in front of the fire with a good book is seen as archaic by today’s youth--part of their parents’ generation.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of talented, smart, and ambitious youth coming of age. It’s just they are in the minority. As long as vast numbers of young people spend their spare time playing mind-rot video games that glorify violence, then their intellect will decay like rotten fruit.

Rick Raw: Office Rudeness Epidemic –Civility is Lost in Today’s Cut-throat World

By Rick Grant rickgrant01@comcast.net www.rickatnight.com

Lately I’ve noticed that attorneys and doctors hire receptionists and office personnel who do not necessarily have people skills. Rudeness is epidemic. Lost on most professional employers is the fact that the first contact a potential client or patient has with their business is with the receptionist or other person who answers the phone. That phone voice creates the first impression of the business. The person answering the phone (he or she--mostly she) can drive away business just by the tone of her voice.

Recently I needed a lawyer. Most of the offices I called I got curt replies, and rude responses from women who have no idea how to talk to people in a pleasant business-like manner. Then when I hired an attorney, paying him a substantial amount of money, he was never available. So I had to talk to his assistant, who would never take my calls, claiming she was too busy. When she finally called me, she was rude and had an accusatory tone with me.

Can rude office bitches be the norm in today’s world of acrimonious communications? Well, excuse me, but pissing off your clients and patients is not my idea of encouraging long term business success. Last week, I called a cardiologist because I was having chest pressure and I was concerned I may have a blockage in one of my arteries. I got the same bitchy, care-less attitude from the woman on the other end of the phone. The first thing she did was send me a ten pages of forms to be filled out. Go to any hospital, and you’ll meet this archetype office bitch.

Wow, it’s a good thing I wasn’t having a heart attack. My primary care physician is a friendly, competent doctor, but his office personnel are a pack of bitter women who hate their jobs. By now, my medical history should be available on the Internet for me or my specialists to access, which makes filling out forms unnecessary. Man, I hate filling out forms for every doctor I see. In today’s world of instant communications, duplicating information on forms is stupid.

Yeah, I know I’m going to be accused of being a sexist prick, but I ask this pertinent question: What the hell is wrong with young women who work in professional offices? Well, the problem rests solely on the shoulders of the business owners who hire anyone off the street for a pitiful salary and expect them to be nice to their clients or patients. They get what they pay for! More significantly, having people or communication skills is not a priority when these cheap bastards hire office personnel. Of course, it should be.

These professional dunderheads do not realize that a receptionist is an important job. Her phone skills are very important. Yet, invariably, the person hired immediately cops a negative attitude about her low wage job. I hear it in their voices and it’s pervasive. The receptionist should be an office manager who knows a lot about what’s going on in the office. Yet, in reality, they know almost nothing about the office in which they answer the phone. It’s an extremely annoying problem.

As for me, I’m always polite and gracious on the phone. I know that dealing with the public can be frustrating, and there are many rude people who call into offices. Still, civility is lost in today’s cut-throat world of sharks and money grubbing swine. Being polite is almost a quaint idea from the past. Yet, it doesn’t cost anything to be cordial to people, either on the phone or in public. The old adage that if you’re nice to people, they will respond accordingly doesn’t apply in today’s world.

My advice: If you can’t be cordial on the phone then don’t take a job as a receptionist. Likewise, professionals should be very selective who they hire to answer the phone. Let’s bring
back civility in voice communications.

Rick Raw: Rising Price of Gas Reaching Critical Mass which Will Force Positive Change

By Rick Grant rickgrant01@comcast.com www.rickatnight.com

Traditionally, Americans adjust to changing economic situations like the price of gas and food. However, I ask: How high does gas have to reach before Americans start getting serious about conservation and alternative fuel sources for their cars. Today, at an average of $4.00 + per gallon, the price of gas it is reaching that point--its critical mass, in which Americans will shift their thinking, and start taking steps to conserve energy. In this respect, as gas rises to $5.00 per gallon and beyond, the crisis will have positive consequences. Of course, it will cause a lot of misery as well, with many businesses like restaurants and entertainment venues going bankrupt as a direct result of people cutting back on discretionary spending.

When the public starts demanding hydrogen fuel cell and electric powered cars which produce zero pollution from their exhaust pipes, then the car manufacturers will meet the market need. There is already a waiting list for Toyota’s popular Prius hybrid car that gets 50 miles per gallon. Shell is planning hydrogen gas stations that manufacture the hydrogen at the solar powered sites. Norway has a 600 mile hydrogen highway with this type of technology for hydrogen fuel cell cars.

In contrast, prestige car dealers are pushing luxury as a perk of the rich in commercials that feature an arrogant guy commuting to work in his Cadillac Escalade, saying, "It’s worth every penny." In other words, he’s so rich he could care less about he price of gas. But the buying trend in car dealerships across the country is for smaller more fuel efficient cars. The big SUVs and bulky pickups are not selling. In fact, people are trading in their gas guzzlers for hybrids and flex fuel cars. Diesel powered trucks can be converted to run on bio-fuel made from French fry oil picked up from fast food chains and sold at special fueling stations. The savings and eco-friendly exhaust offset the fact that your truck smells like a French fry.

The positive effects of rising gas prices has been reflected in the latest gas buying statistics. Americans are buying less gas than a year ago. Consumption is dropping, down from 9.4 million gallons to 200,000 fewer barrels per day than in mid-September of last year. Sadly, this will not lower the price because America is not the world’s leader in consuming gas anymore. China is now the world’s leader in gas consumption and, as a consequence, pollution.. So, the worldwide demand is going up, which is driving prices up. The truth is, petroleum plants just can’t keep up with the demand for black gold.

Global warming, caused by rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, is now a real threat to the planet has made an impact on the Zeitgeist. More importantly, the price of gas has caused a paradigm shift in the public’s collective mind-set toward eco-conservation. We have reached the point that most every American citizen recognizes the need to switch to alternative energy sources and radical new ways to get around.

Yes, the excrement has hit the fan, and people are waking up to near future catastrophes as the ocean level rises, and large coastal regions like Miami and Manhattan face serious flooding. Sometimes, we need a wake up call or a slap on the face, like the gas prices skyrocketing to absurd levels, to hurt us financially, so we are forced to consider real change to survive.

Now, America will have to face the new reality and consider transportation options like using mass transit, riding bicycles to work, or buying fuel efficient vehicles. That guy in the Cadillac Escalade commercial may feel smug in his wealth and luxury, but his mockery of the ordinary person who struggles to make ends meet could get his obscenely large fuel sucking phallic symbol trashed.. The Escalade and the Hummer are now symbols of greed, waste, and anti-conservatism.