Enlightening tax information After watching a focus group of democrats that watched the democratic debate the other day in Vegas, I needed to comment. For the most part, all of them bashed Bush over and over again on how he is out for his millionaire friends and the big oil companies and he has totally forgotten or disregarded the little guy. So being an ex-IRS employee, I decided to look back on the tax tables to see if there is any truth to what they said and the media keeps stating as fact, "Bush is only out for the rich in this country. Based on using the actual tax tables (see link below), here are some examples on what the taxes were/are on various amounts of income for both singles and married couples… so let's see if the Bush tax cuts only helped the rich. http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/151.htm

If you want to know just how effective the mainstream media is… It's amazing how many people falling into the categories above think Bush is hurting them and Bill Clinton was the greatest President ever. If any Democrat is elected, all of them say they will repeal the Bush tax cuts and a good portion of the people that fall into the categories above can't wait for it to happen. This is like the movie the Sting with Paul Newman, you scam somebody out of some money and they don't even know what happened. Now this is effective (maybe not honest) marketing or maybe a better description might be brain washing.
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Shop at Home Depot, Walgreen, Wal-mart, Saks, Lord & Taylor and a number of other stores and you may be falsely accused of shoplifting. Once this happens, according to a Wall Street Journal article (February 20, 2008 page 1), you can expect to be contacted by the attorneys firm Palmer Reiffler and Associates or others and be informed that if you do not pay a large sum of money, you will be sued in civil court. Rudge had $6,000 demanded of him. The drill bits cost $8.00 and he had a receipt proving he had paid for them. Three teenaged girls in Novi Michigan at Lord & Taylor were accused of stealing a $50 pair of sunglasses. Two of the girls were released after surveillance tapes revealed they had nothing to do with the crime. The third girl who had actually shoplifted the sunglasses had the charges dropped after she did community service and attended theft deterrent classes. Lord & Taylor didn't drop the matter. They went after all three of the girls threatening litigation if they did not pay $200, each, within twenty days. When they didn't pay, Palmer Reiffler contacted at least two of them again, increasing the demand to $435. Lord & Taylor put the undamaged sunglasses back on the shelf and sold them.

There is definitely something to be said for shopping only in small, locally owned businesses.
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The Walmart Distribution Center objected to Truck Drivers having bladders in Seymour Indiana. Trucker Bob reports that Walmart Distribution Centers, generally do not allow the truckers to use the restrooms at their guard shacks. The trucker is required to keep a fixed appointment for deliveries or pickups at these centers. The driver may well be on the road non-stop for 8 to 10 hours to keep these appointments. Often, when they arrive they have a desperate need for a toilet. All the guard shacks at their distribution centers have toilets with signs reading, "No Public Restroom." They refuse to allow the truckers to use their bathroom. At the guard shack in Seymour, Trucker Bob reports seeing a lady trucker drop her drawers right in front of the guard shack and pee in the driveway. They had her arrested. Trucker Bob says, "I don't shop at Walmart."
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The Clintons have these cute buzz expressions; "sending a message," and "straight from the play book of…" When Bama Orama reminded Hillary of her statement that under her health care plan, all Americans would be required to BUY health insurance and that anyone refusing would have their wages tapped, she said he was lying. She said such tactics are straight from the play-book of Carl Rove. When Obama accused her of once supporting NAFTA, she said he was lying. It seems to me that this tactic of accusing people of lying who point out her conflicting positions is taken straight from the play-book of John Kerry. Obama, on the other hand, when reminded that he wanted to hold John McCain's feet to the fire, using only public funds for campaigning, refused "locking" himself into an agreement. Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal quotes Todd Harris (Republican Strategist), "This should be a warning to anyone caught up in Obama rhetoric. When that rhetoric meets political expediency, it's not the rhetoric that wins." I guess Hillary is sending a message that anyone who remembers what she said yesterday is a liar. This sort of makes me remember Vince Foster, who blew his brains out in his office. He then drove twenty miles to a shopping center in heavy Washington D.C. traffic, walked a hundred yards into a field and dropped dead. Somehow, along the way, he managed to lose his gun. The "suicide weapon" has never been found. The Clintons have quite a "play book."
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Florida Bureaucrats are still screaming about Amendment 1, doubling the Florida Homestead Exemption, adding an exemption to non-homestead property and giving small businesses a break. The seventeen million dollars St. Johns County is claiming to be losing appears to be in the tax increases they will now not get. According to reports in the St. Augustine Record, tax revenue to St. Johns County doubled in the last four years (2003-2007). Now, good Heavens, it may take eight years to double again. Non-homestead real estate taxes have become so high that residential rental property now has taxes that exceed market rent in some cases. One house downtown I know of has a market rent of about $1,000 per month and real estate taxes of over $6,000. Figure it out, the government is getting over 50% of the property's income, and taxes aren't high enough yet, according to the brainless bureaucrats that run things around here.
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For many years, truckers have called Philadelphia, Filthydelphia. Now there's a whole new reason AND they are changing the name to Felatiadelphia. The Filthydelphia city council voted 5-1 to kick the Boy Scouts out of town. The way they're doing it is to begin charging market rent on a large office building the Boy Scouts have leased from the city since 1928. The building has been enlarged and substantially decorated by the Scouts. Over the years the Scouts have worked hard on improving the city, enlarging and improving parks, keeping kids off the streets and all manner of good works. Now, because the Boy Scouts of America refuse to hire homosexuals as Scout Masters and Leaders, the City has decided to raise the rent to a level the Boy Scouts can't pay. The City of Philadelphia is raising their rent from $1.00 per year to $200,000.  This is in effect, sexual discrimination against a renter.
Right or wrong, the Boy Scouts are certainly to be admired for standing by their principles. Maybe Felatiadelphia and Pennsylvania need to take a look at their principles. California is right in your face with this stuff. Elementary School children now have a text book titled "My Two Mommys." Pennsylvania is still sort of "in the closet." Only the four commissioners in Filthydelphia who voted for this outrage have "outed" themselves.

Join the Chigger and its loyal readers against the City's action by copying the Filthydelphia and the Felatiadelphia Petitions to your email program, signing the pettions and forwarding them to your address list.  Instructions on the petitions say when there are 1,000 names, to send the petition to feedback@thechigger.net.  We will use them to embarrass Philadelphia and maybe make them back off on their decision to oust the Boy Scouts.

Since this was posted, we have had hits from all over the world, including Hong Kong, Italy, Germany, Mexico, Canada, the U.K. and others.  This effort has been tremendously successful.  Please contribute by signing and forwarding our petitions.  Thanks.  -- Red Bug
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Health Care in the United States is undergoing a crisis. There are numerous causes at the root of the matter. A fundamental cause is malpractice litigation. A few years ago, a surgeon friend of mine told me he paid over $40,000 annually for malpractice insurance. I'm sure the figure is much higher now.
The State of Florida some time ago, began a "three times and you're out" policy on violent crimes involving a firearm. That is to say that when convicted of a third crime with a firearm, the sentence is hard time. A "three times and you're out" policy would be a nice replacement for this high malpractice insurance the public ultimately pays for. When a doctor significantly injures someone through stupidity, the doctor should be required to personally pay with his own money and criminal penalties.
Depending on an insurance company takes the sting out of paying for mistakes. What's a mistake? A friend of mine had her colon ruptured during a colonoscopy and nearly died. Another friend of mine had his colon ruptured during the same procedure performed by the same physician and DID die. The doctor is still performing that procedure.
Another friend of mine had a carotidendarterectomy (Sp? I'm not a medico) (that's cleaning out a blocked carotid artery) and the doctor operated on the wrong side, damaging the patients optical nerve. That man is now blind in one eye because of the doctor's screw up. How many medical degrees does a person have to have before they learn the difference between RIGHT and LEFT? That malpractice insurance will cover that doctor's butt and leave him free to continue blinding people is simply wrong. The case has not yet been settled, but rest assured that injured patient will never have to work again. Who is paying for that? You and I are paying for it in the form of elevated medical fees used to cover malpractice insurance.
The Chigger suggests:
1. No Malpractice insurance. The doctor has to pay, personally.
2. After the third screw up, the doctor is no longer permitted to perform the procedure he screwed up on.
3. If the doctor does perform the procedure again, he gets jail time.
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Florida:

Bill padding has become such a common practice among health care givers that some are even beginning to openly admit that they do that. After the parent of a friend of mine died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital and arrived dead on arrival (DOA), the hospital conducted nearly $20,000 worth of tests on the dead body. The insurance paid for it, of course.
A friend of mine recently had cataract surgery. The surgery was performed at an out patient clinic. My friend was in the clinic for less than a combined total of two hours for the two operations. That includes the time to recover from the anesthesia, each time.

Both Eyes:
Doctor Bill $3,400
Anesthesia $1,520
Out Patient Clinic $12,525. ( I have copies of the bills. This is a fact!)

The insurance company paid it without a whimper. Still wondering why your health insurance is so high? I checked on major medical insurance recently and discovered that the premium totaled in some cases, more than I earn monthly. I wonder, if Hillary becomes our be-knighted leader and mandates that everyone in the United States purchase health insurance or she'll garnish our wages, where she's going to find the shortfall for me? Of course, that was yesterday. Today she never said that.
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Nursing homes are becoming another one of health care's travesties. A patient load of 35 doesn't sound all that bad until the ramifications are considered. Thirty five patients getting five or ten pills twice on each shift can't get their medication at the times specified by their doctors because there simply isn't enough time for one care giver to handle that. An aged person, taking ten pills, one at a time, takes a while. One nurse admitted giving a patient all the medication she was supposed to have at 5:00 P.M. and again at 9:00 P.M. all at once at 5:00 because of time limitations. This is illegal and criminal. If passing out the medication were the only responsibility the care giver had, there still wouldn't be time to do it with thirty five patients. But there are other responsibilities. They are supposed to check on every patient every two hours to monitor changes in the patient's condition, check blood sugar and vital signs from time to time. New admissions bury the nurse in paperwork taking him or her away from other necessary tasks. The pace to keep up, pass out medication in a timely manner and stay on top of all the other responsibilities results in mistakes, accidents, mixed medications. Sometimes the wrong person gets medication intended for another. This kind of screw up can have horrendous results, even death.
The State of Florida regulates and monitors the behavior and practices of nursing homes, but the homes know about when the state investigators are going to show up. They don't know exactly, but the state is regular enough in its practices that if they haven't been around for a few weeks, it's well known that they ARE going to show up soon. When it's time, the homes put on an extra nurse or two, they bring in the more expensive equipment like safety needles, things they don't use unless they have to. When the State is going to show up, they have to. We need tighter regulation of Nursing Homes - all of 'em.

The nursing homes say they can't afford to give better care, but let's take a look. The one nursing home I took a close look at has about 70 patients who pay about $3,000 per month each. That's $210,000 monthly income. Here's an estimated daily labor cost.

$4,898 daily comes to $146,940 in a thirty day month. Other expenses including electricity, water, taxes, insurance, reserve for replacement are probably easily covered by the $63,000 they have left after paying labor. They can afford to add another two nurses. Gee, this sounds like a pretty good business. Maybe I should consider opening a nursing home.
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Wide Spread Real Estate Appraisal Fraud

It mystifies me that no one has yet uncovered the ground root sources of the current housing crises. Articles in the Wall street journal a few weeks ago touched on it, but missed the point. This is what happened. I was there. I watched it. My peers and I predicted it (the fox is really loose in the hen house now!), but no one stepped in and fixed it, addressed it, or even recognized that there was a problem.

I was working in Real Estate Appraising in those days. Just for the record - I am an SRA (Senior Residential Appraiser), and became a Florida "General Real Estate Appraiser #RZ-0001261." I later became a real estate appraiser instructor, owned a school, wrote and taught courses for the continuing education of Florida's Real Estate Appraisers. None of my licenses are currently active. I got out of it when the job began to include the requirement that I be a habitual felon to survive.

Around 1989, under Bush the first, The Real Estate Foundation was established and laid out the footwork for this disaster. Under Clinton, the First, the Appraisal Foundation was given jurisdictional power over the real estate appraisal industry and this is what happened around 1990 to 1992.

The Appraisal Foundation:
A. The Appraisal Foundation received the federal mandate to govern the appraisal industry. That required State Certifications.

B. The mandate included that no lender could require more education than "State Certification."
C. The "Uniform Standards for Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP)" replaced "Professional Ethics."
D. All appraisers who wanted to continue in the appraisal business had to get "State Certified," by 1992, so we all went and did that.
E. All hell broke loose…

In the past, before the Appraisal Foundation, to make a living in the appraisal business, we had to work for an accredited appraiser and earn a professional designation, such as SRA, SRPA, SREA, MAI, RM, offered by the Society of Real Estate Appraisers and the Appraisal Institute. There were other professional appraisal associations but these two were the only ones really recognized by the lending industry, so they were the only ones worth working with. To obtain a professional designation from one of these two organizations was a real hassle. I had to take two courses for my SRA. I went to Purdue University and got one course, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison for the other one. Considering I live in Florida, you can understand the hassle.

To qualify for my SRA I had to do 50 or 100 residential real estate appraisals (I forget which), that were reviewed by other SRA's and SRPA's in the area. They went further. They interviewed my neighbors and business associates. They interviewed my customers to make sure I was the kind of person they wanted to be a member of their club. They were interested in my integrity, my attention to detail and my accuracy as an appraiser. They were serious about that. Without their endorsement, I could not get my professional designation and without the professional designation, I could not get work as an independent appraiser.

To top that off, I had to do a demonstration appraisal, a written narrative of a residential property. My demonstration appraisal was initially over 300 pages including aerial photography. I got the SRA designation in 1989. It took me a total of five years, not counting the years as a real estate broker's agent and as a broker. Before that, to be a real estate appraiser, I had to get a real estate salesman's license, work for a real estate broker for two years and then get a real estate broker's license (in Florida).

After 1991, to work as an independent real estate appraiser I no longer needed any experience in real estate, no salesmans's license, no broker's license and no experience. I had to take two courses sponsored by the state. I had to work for two years for a real estate appraiser and after that I could hang out my shingle. The integrity test was gone. The background check was gone. The FED further mandated that lenders could not require more education than state certification for approval by the lender. The Fox was Loose in the Hen-House. The FED went further. They made it possible for the loan officer to do an appraisal using tax assessments or insurance assessments for their basis.

Aside for the non-appraisal literate:

Most states regard appraising as "An Art and A Science." The art gives the appraiser lots of room for "opinion." Opinions include such ideas as quality, appeal, economic life, functional utility, to name a few. Every residential appraisal requires at least three comparable sales upon which most of the weight of the appraisal conclusion is based. The value of the subject property is then "adjusted," from the comparable properties based on many opinions of the appraiser comparing the property, using these opinion based ideas. It's easy to scew the value opinion by scewing the opinions of the comparable values in these areas. I realize that to the layman this is a confusing statement. Consider this. The subject has a swimming pool. All three comparable sales have swimming pools. If the appraiser wants to scew the appraisal value he can say the subject's swimming pool is "nicer" than the comparable's swimming pool and adjust the value by $20,000. It's an opinion. The appraiser can say the comparable property has inferior value because of the number of trees or the appeal of the lawn, or the size of the garage, or the functionality of the floor plan. The list is endless. The basis is the integrity of the appraiser. This is how unscrupulous appraisers can scew an appraisal.

After the integrity check was eliminated, my little town of St. Augustine Florida went from three appraisal offices to twelve in just two years. I suddenly had many competitors who were going to my clients (the lenders) and saying they would hit any number the loan officer wanted. This was and is important to the loan officer because the loan officer is a commissioned salesman. If the loan doesn't close, the salesman doesn't get his commission. More-over, the loan officer was the only person empowered to order the real estate appraisal. See what I mean by 'the fox is loose in the hen-house?'

My job, before state certifications, was to protect the lenders and the United States' economy by making sure that the lenders had solid collateral. An appraisal was defined as "an independent, objective opinion of value." State Law requires objectivity, but now there's no way to monitor it. After state certifications, my job became to close loans.

In 1990-1992 (I forget which year), I went to a loan officer at a large national bank in Florida and spoke with the VIP there, trying to get on their approved appraiser list so I could get work from them. The VIP said to me, "Gee Bob, you're an SRA, aren't you?"

I said, "Yes. I got my SRA designation in 1989."

He said, "Doesn't that mean that you have to follow a professional code of ethics?"

I replied, " of course," thinking that would be a positive thing for him. A professional code of ethics meant his bank would be well protected against fraud and bad collateral.

He said, "I need more control over my appraisers than that."

I can't prove that this happened, but it did. He and I were alone in that meeting. This is how it went in those years. I quit the appraisal business in 1995 because I couldn't compete as an honest appraiser in context with the myriad of liars and whores who had become my competition.

In 2000, I resorted to teaching real estate appraisers continuing education. I spent some time in 1999 writing courses, submitted them to the state of Florida and was gratified that all four of the courses I wrote were approved on first reading. I taught the courses in 2000 and was astonished that I had appraisers readily admitting in class that they colluded with loan officers on value before accepting appraisal assignments.

What surprised me, and I have no idea why it surprised me, but it did; the problem was nation-wide. New appraisers everywhere, were exaggerating values. It didn't really grab momentum until around 2003-2004, but by then, all the appraisers with any integrity had left the business. Today, the nation's economy is at the mercy of commissioned salesmen who own appraisers.

If you check what I said, you will find everything I said here to be absolutely true. I can give you a list of appraisers who left the business because they couldn't compete without selling their souls. I'm one of them.

In 1992, I wrote a letter to the chairman of the Florida Real Estate Appraisal Board (FREAB) and explained the same things I'm explaining here. I received a letter a few weeks later, smugly asking me if I was "confessing." A few months ago I wrote a personalized form letter to 48 Attorneys General of the 48 contiguous United States. In this letter I pointed out the problem of this wide spread real estate appraisal fraud. I particularly thought Marc Dann of Ohio would be interested in possibly allowing me to come to Ohio and teach his people how to spot and prove real estate appraisal fraud. I chose Dann because he had been noted in national news for prosecuting this crime.

All of the States place real estate appraising under the jurisdiction of a state appraisal board. Their job is to govern appraisal ethics. Defrauding a federal institution, however, goes way beyond professional appraisal ethics. It's a federal crime punishable with prison time and huge fines. Over the weeks after I contacted the attorneys general I received their replies. Without exception they referred me to their state's appraisal board.

The appraisal boards aren't equipped for this sort of thing. For the most part, their investigators don't even have appraisal training. In Florida, they are so hard up for arrests, that they fine people for signing names wrong. (The state specifies the LEGAL abbreviations for the state designations. If an appraiser misses a period in one of the abbreviations he can be fined $50.00.)

One bank and only one bank, that I know of, has taken steps to stop this madness. Compass Bank now has its appraisals ordered by a disinterested third party. If all the lenders went to that practice, and stopped allowing their commissioned salesmen - loan officers - to do their own appraisals, the lenders would once again find that they have safe collateral for their loans. The people who contributed to this should be punished, starting with the fools who established The Appraisal Foundation.

The housing crisis is a result of exaggerating appraisals. The subjects of those appraisals then become comparable sales themselves,which are then used to further exaggerate more values. The practice snowballed into a huge housing value bubble. I emailed all my friends a couple of years ago when I saw this happening and warned to sell all their bank stocks if they owned any. I don't see a bottom to this crisis until the summer or fall of 2009. Then the market will take five to seven years to recover.
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PELOSI VS. AMERICA
Reprinted with permission from the New York Post
February 24, 2008 -- An American Civil Liberties Union loss last week is, not surprisingly, a gain for American security. But will House Speaker Nancy Pelosi get the message?
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected without comment an ACLU lawsuit over a classified federal wiretapping program aimed at foreign communications.
The Bush administration has ended the Terrorist Surveillance Program, but has always maintained it was completely legal.
The ACLU ginned up its lawsuit on behalf of Americans claiming they might have been harmed by the potential wiretapping of foreigners with whom they might've had contact. The Supremes upheld a lower court's ruling dismissing the suit because those plaintiffs couldn't prove that they'd ever been monitored.
But the decision still demonstrates once again the high court's reluctance to tie the executive branch's hands in foreign-policy and national-security matters.
Speaker Pelosi's House Democrats take a very different, more dangerous, view.
It's been just nine days since Pelosi let expire the Protect America Act, which updated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act's wiretapping guidelines. Rather than let the House pass a bipartisan Senate compromise renewing the law, Pelosi chose to send her members off on a 10-day vacation.
Happily, the law's expiration doesn't completely cripple the government's ability to conduct surveillance of suspected terrorists and hostile agents. But it is more difficult now, thanks to legal and bureaucratic obstacles put in the way of intelligence officials eavesdropping on those trying to do harm to Americans.
Most repugnant, Pelosi's Democrats are less worried about civil liberties than they are about crossing a rich source of their campaign cash - America's odious tort bar.
The trial lawyers want to kill a provision in the Senate bill that protects US phone companies that cooperated with the government in post-9/11 surveillance.
One can only hope that Pelosi's members hear from their constituents back home about their cavalier and selfish disregard for their country's security.
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University of North Carolina
Apparently the American Civil Liberties Union sacred doctrine of the separation of church and state only apply to Christians and Jews. How else can you explain why the North Carolina ACLU went to court to support the University of North Carolina's mandatory reading assignment of the pro-Islam book for incoming freshmen?
http://www.blessedcause.org/Antichrist%20ID/ACLU%20attacks%20Constitution.htm

http://www.longren.org/2006/02/23/aclu-cair-promoting-islam-while-suppressing-christians-jews/

http://www.stoptheaclu.com/archives/2006/02/23/aclu-cair-promoting-islam-while-suppressing-christians-jews/

Here is a way to slow down the Roger Baldwin's baby, the ACLU. When the ACLU brings litigation, it does so with a great deal of money involved. They will sue for millions. The defendant, like the City of Hazelton, Pa. is faced with a huge loss. Rather than take the risk in court and "throw the dice" as they say, Hazelton backed down. If we had a law requiring disinterested third parties to law suits provide an equal sum they are spending to the defendant, it would slow their ability to hurt us. Legislation forbidding disinterested third parties from involving themselves in litigation would stop the ACLU right now.  Write your senators and representatives, state and federal.  In time, The Chigger will provide addresses for all of those people. See Petitions...
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Hillary on Gun Control

Hillary Clinton, the lead Presidential Democratic Party candidate is for banning all guns in America . She is considered by those who have dealt with her as a little more than just a little self-righteous.

At a recent rural elementary school meeting in north Florida she asked the kids audience for total quiet. Then, in the silence, she started to slowly clap her hands, once every few seconds. Holding the audience in total silence, she said into the microphone, "Every time I clap my hands, a child in America dies from gun violence."
A young voice with a proud southern accent (probably Little Johnny) from the front of the crowd pierced the quiet. "Well, stop clapping, ya stupid bitch !"
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