Hello dear readers. Sorry I haven't written much. If you haven't noticed, mortgage rates are about the lowest they've been since, well, ever. At least the lowest in history for our purposes. WHich means I am BUSY at work. I had to take a break for a few minutes, because I feel like I barely have time to breathe. Luckily, I happen to like this job, I like this company, and this huge rush means the company is one step closer to moving up to mortgage lender. That is, of course, one more step to becoming an investment bank, and I have high hopes of sticking around and getting a well paid position at that future point. Wish me luck, and I'll write more when I have the chance.

What's up with the Democratic party? I constantly see Democrats writing that the problem with America is that the people have given up on democracy and are allowing the Republican party to do whatever it wants. Didn't we have elections where the American people voted for the Republicans? The Democrats seem to ahve this idea that the general public agrees with them in all things. This is despite the fact that polls and elections quite frequently show the opposite. If the Democratic Party wants to win any elections, they need to do some serious maintanence on their platform. The flooring is rotting through. The boards need to be changed, new wood brought in. If the Democratic Party really wants to represent the values of the people of the United States, they should ask those people what their values are, not try to force their own values on the people.

Still don't have time to edit, but I did run across this while on hold (with a lawyer, of course). I cut this from someone at the Wall Street Journal, but there was no name attached.

More broadly, the critics want everyone to forget how steeply progressive the tax code already is. IRS data released late last year show that the top 1% of earners paid 37.4% of all federal income taxes in 2000. The top 5% paid 56.5% of federal taxes, and the top half of all earners paid 96.1%. In other words, even before President Bush started slashing taxes on the poor by increasing the child tax credit in 2001, the bottom 50% of filers had next to no federal income tax liability.

Robin Hood, a folk hero and subject of countless movies and books, was famous not just for his skill with a bow, but for his generosity in stealing from the rich to give to the poor. In his case, the rich were peasents whose lived their lives basically at the whim of the rich, the aristocracy. People like the Sheriff of Nottingham were villified for oppressing the peasents and making their already miserable lives that much worse. Robin Hood, in a way, was merely taking money that the rich had previously taken from the peasents. Some journalists, however, are equating George W. Bush's recent tax cut as the opposite of Robin Hood, stealing from the poor to give to the rich. This is grevious inaccuracy, sure to be repeated countless time by liberals who don't bother to do their homework or think about what they say. The US government has been stealing from the rich for a long time. It's called income tax, basically the result of extortion. If you don't pay such and such amount, you either go to jail, or move to a different country. That's fine, I consider it a membership fee of sorts. What's not fine is that the "poor," low income bracket pays little or no taxes, yet constantly receives money taken from the rich in the form of welfare, tax credits, earned income credtis, etc. The big uproar is that these recent cuts directly benefit the rich, and leave out some lower income brackets. This is a tax cut. If you don't pay taxes, you don't get more money back.
I'm curious to know if there are percentages on how much income tax is collected altogether from each bracket. I'm willing to bet that the people who benefit from this tax cut contribute 75% or more of the total amount of money collected on April 15 each year. Thanks to this cut, that percentage will probably change to like 73%. The much larger portion of the poulation that

Crap, gotta run, didn't even have time to finish, much less edit. I will later....

Anyone else tired of hearing how we were lied to by the Bush administration about wepaons of mass destruction in Iraq. They haven't found any yet, so obviously there never were any, Bush made it all up as a justification for going to war. Why would Bush want to go to war? Maybe to free millions of oppressed Iraqi citizens. Maybe to stop a supporter of terror. Maybe both of those. And maybe, just maybe, he was wrong about the weapons of mass destruction, in which case we should ask the UN and Bill Clinton why they said, all through the 90's, that Iraq had WMD. Bush should not be blamed for making the same intelligence errors as his predecessor and the "holy" UN. He should, however, be lauded for actually doing something, for taking action against an evil dictator, when no one else had the guts.

Sorry it's been a while. Work was killer last week, and then I woke up Sunday morning with a horrible cold. On top of that, my car's brakes have decided not to work anymore. I got them partially fixed yesterday, but I've gotta take it back to get the master cylinder replaced. Actually my Dad and I might do that ourselves, I need to check on prices. Anyway, I hope to get back to writing somewhat regularly by the end of the week, but for right now all I want to do is not be sick anymore!