Red Bluff Daily News

October 22, 2014

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GregStevens,Publisher Chip Thompson, Editor EDITORIALBOARD How to have your say: Letters must be signed and provide the writer's home street address and home phone number. Anonymous letters, open letters to others, pen names and petition-style letters will not be allowed. Letters should be typed and no more than two double-spaced pages or 500words. When several letters address the same issue, a cross section will be published. Email: editor@red bluffdailynews.com Phone: 530-527- 2151ext. 112 Mail to: P.O. Box 220, 545 Diamond Ave., Red Bluff, CA 96080 Facebook: Leave comments at FACEBOOK.COM/ RBDAILYNEWS Twitter: Follow and send tweets to @REDBLUFFNEWS IfmoreAmericanswereself- employed independent contrac- tors, the country would soar. Maybe I better explain. In addition to writing this weekly column, I provide profes- sional copywrit- ing services to a variety of orga- nizations. If they like my work, they give me more and I prosper. If they don't like my work, I go broke. Thus, the self-employed are at once humbled and motivated to perform their very best. Being self-employed makes people intimately aware of the negative impact of government regulations and policies. Some believe that individ- uals should not have the free- dom to exchange their services for money from organizations — some argue that these indi- viduals are being taken advan- tage of by corporations, so legis- lation was created to forbid the practice. As a result, the companies I do work for must bend over backward to prove that I am not in any way serving in the capacity of an employee. My cli- ents hire third-party firms that make me jump through hoops to prove I am not an employee. I have to submit records and invoices I've sent to other cli- ents, pay for business liability insurance, prove I have my own health insurance, prove I file my tax returns — and on and on. Such are the unintended nega- tive consequences of laws, writ- ten by politicians, that are sup- posed to help people become employees. Self-employed people know more about taxes than most. Unlike typical employed peo- ple, we are keenly aware of how much we pay. Few full-time employees have any idea of how much they re- ally earn or how much their taxes really are. Full-time employees are of- ten unaware that their bene- fits package — health, life, den- tal and disability insurance, "free" college tuition, workers' compensation insurance, 401(k) matching, etc. — is income. An employee who earns $70,000 in annual salary is probably costing his employer closer to $100,000 total. Employees are often unaware that their employers must pay half of their 12.4-percent FICA tax (Social Security and Medi- care combined). Though half of that 12.4 percent is paid by the employer and half by the em- ployee, many employees have little idea that all of the FICA tax is, in reality, coming out of their pockets. But I am fully aware of it. As a self-employed person, I pay 15.3 percent (FICA plus 2.9 per- cent for Medicaid on income up to $117,000). I pay about $1,000 a month — otherwise known as a lot — to support these pro- grams, but it is not enough be- cause Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are all headed to- ward bankruptcy. Which brings us to health in- surance. The self-employed are more aware of ObamaCare than anyone. This is because we have responsibly purchased our own health coverage throughout our careers — only to see premiums soar under ObamaCare. My pre- miums are now twice what they were a few years ago, since I have to help fund others who cannot afford ObamaCare. I got a letter in the mail a few weeks ago that said my pol- icy was being canceled because it didn't meet ObamaCare re- quirements. That was followed by a letter that said I could keep my policy after all. That was followed by another letter that said a rate hike on my policy was just approved. But I probably am not al- lowed to learn what my new rates are until after the election. In any event, CNNMoney. com says the percentage of con- tract workers is soaring. In 2005, roughly 31 percent of U.S. workers made their income as self-employed contractors. Ex- perts say that number could in- crease to well beyond 40 per- cent in the next 10 years. Which would do our coun- try good. If more people knew how government policies and high taxes are hurting us, our coun- try would finally do something about it. That's one job that really needs to be filled. TomPurcell,authorof"Misad- ventures of a 1970s Childhood" and "Comical Sense: A Lone Hu- morist Takes on a World Gone Nutty!" is a Pittsburgh Tribune- Review humor columnist. Tom Purcell Needed: More independent contractors My premiums are now twice what they were a few years ago, since I have to help fund others who cannot afford ObamaCare.. Cartoonist's take By Ron Paul Former Clinton Adminis- tration Labor Secretary Rob- ert Reich recently called on the government to force young people to spend two years ei- ther "serving" in the military or performing some other type of government-directed "com- munity service." Neoconserva- tive Senator John McCain has introduced legislation creat- ing a mandatory national ser- vice program very similar to Reich's proposal. It is not sur- prising that both a prominent progressive and a leading neo- con would support mandatory national service, as this is an issue that has long united au- thoritarians on the left and right. Proponents of national ser- vice claim that young people have a moral obligation to give something back to society. But giving the government power to decide our moral obligations is an invitation to totalitari- anism. Mandatory national service is not just anti-liberty, it is un- American. Whether or not they admit it, supporters of manda- tory national service do not be- lieve that individuals have "in- alienable rights." Instead, they believe that rights are gifts from the government, and, since government is the source of our rights, government can abridge or even take away those rights whenever Con- gress decides. Mandatory national service also undermines private chari- table institutions. In a free so- ciety, many people will give their time or money to service projects to help better their communities, working with re- ligious or civic associations. But in a society with govern- ment-enforced national ser- vice, these associations are likely to become more reliant on government-supplied forced labor. They will then begin to tailor their programs to satisfy the demands of government bureaucrats instead of the needs of the community. The very worst form of na- tional service is, of course, the military draft, which forces young people to kill or be killed on government orders. The draft lowers the cost of an interventionist foreign policy because government need not compete with private employ- ers for recruits. Anyone who refuses a draft notice runs the risk of being jailed, so govern- ment can provide lower pay and benefits to draftees than to volunteers. As the burden of our hyper- interventionist foreign pol- icy increases, it is increasingly likely that there will be seri- ous attempts to reinstate the military draft. General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, contin- ues to suggest that US troops on the ground may be needed to fight "Operation Inherent Resolve" in Iraq and Syria. A major escalation requiring a large US troop deployment will likely add pressure to consider a military draft. The only real way the Amer- ican people can protect their children from the military draft is to demand an end to the foreign policy that sees the US military as the solution to any and every problem — from ISIS to Ebola — anywhere in the world. Some who share my oppo- sition to a militaristic foreign policy support the draft be- cause they think a draft will increase public opposition to war. However, the existence of a draft did not stop the Amer- ican government from launch- ing unconstitutional wars in Vietnam and Korea. While the draft did play a role in mobiliz- ing political opposition to Viet- nam, it took almost a decade and the death of thousands of American draftees for that op- position to reach critical mass. It is baffling that conserva- tives who (properly) oppose raising taxes would support any form of national service, including the military draft. It is similarly baffling that liber- als who oppose government in- terference with our personal lives would support mandatory national service. Mandatory national service is a totalitarian policy that should be rejected by all who value liberty. Ron Paul is a former Congress- man and Presidential can- didate. He can be reached at VoicesofLiberty.com. Ron Paul National service is anti-liberty and un-American Another view By Dick Polman Let's take a break from our Ebola freakout and debate something a bit more benign — like word usage. For instance, why do we keep using czar? Last Friday, seemingly within seconds of Ron Klain's ascent to the new post of Eb- ola response coordinator, the press headlines were dubbing him the "Ebola Czar." Which I suppose was to be expected, given the fact that, during the past five decades we've referred to dozens of White House aides as drug czars, energy czars, sci- ence czars, climate czars, ter- rorism czars...you name it. At one point the Obama adminis- tration had an auto bailout spe- cialist, and that was fun, be- cause everybody got to call him the car czar. But seriously, let's think about this. Why have we alleg- edly civilized Americans appro- priated a word that dates back to despotic imperial Russia (its original spelling, tsar), a word that was synonymous with ty- rannical rule? If we want to be exotic, why not use pasha or sultan? Does anyone know anymore what the czars were really like? Ivan the Terrible burned down the city of Novgorod and killed all its inhabitants in an ef- fort to halt the spread of bu- bonic plague (which made him a lousy Plague Czar). Peter the Great ordered the torturous ex- ecution of his own son, and was reputedly fond of beheading people. And the 19th-century czars were particularly gifted at launching murderous pogroms against the Jews. And yet, the word somehow came westward. It popped up, apparently for the first time, back in 1832, when President Andrew Jackson's allies deni- grated banker Nicholas Biddle by calling him "Czar Nicholas" (this was during the Russian reign of Nicholas I). It surfaced again in 1866, when a political humorist denigrated President Andrew Johnson by dubbing him "Czar of all the Ameri- cas." And again at the turn of the 20th century, when a copy editor at The New York Times sought a synonym for the word autocratic in order to de- scribe House Speaker Thomas Reed. He settled on czar. That sounds about right. Czar is a handy media label that fits snugly in a headline. Real czars had the power of life and death over their hum- ble subjects, whereas Ameri- can czars are powerless coor- dinators who must cajole and coax recalcitrant agencies into getting along, but no mat- ter: Once a foreign word en- ters the language, it tends to lose its true meaning. Which is what happened five decades ago, during the 1973 oil em- bargo, when Richard Nixon tapped a guy named John Love to tackle the crisis — and Love was quickly dubbed the "energy czar." As was his more prominent successor, Wil- liam Simon. Simon's aides de- lighted in calling him "your czarship." That's when the term really took off. I guess things could be worse, like calling Ron Klain the Ebola Lord or Ebola Khan or Ebola Ayatollah. And it's quicker and niftier to say czar instead of calling him what he really is, the Ebola intera- gency implementation man- ager. Just like it's facile to say that Liz Sherwood-Randall is Obama's WMD czar — as op- posed to what she really is, the White House coordina- tor for defense policy, counter- ing weapons of mass destruc- tion and arms control. No harm done, I suppose, as long as Klain's czar tag doesn't prompt Americans to as- sume that he can merely wave a scepter and keep the death toll at one. But since we're so willing to indulge in exotic nomen- clature, I'll confess that I've long been partial to wizard. And if a future president taps someone special to honcho the cleanup of toxic waste dumps, I'm staking a claim right now. I want to be the first to dub that person The Wizard of Ooze. Dick Polman is the national political columnist at News- Works/WHYY in Philadelphia (newsworks.org/polman) and a "Writer in Residence" at the University of Philadelphia. Email him at dickpolman7@ gmail.com. Why are Americans so Czar-struck? Tom Purcell OPINION » redbluffdailynews.com Wednesday, October 22, 2014 » MORE AT FACEBOOK.COM/RBDAILYNEWS AND TWITTER.COM/REDBLUFFNEWS A6

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