Butt Me No Butts

The other day I was driving down the road and as I slowed to a stop, the car in front of me stopped. The driver then proceeded to roll down his window, took one last hit off his cancer stick, and ejected the still smoldering cigarette butt onto the pavement.

By this time, I was smoldering as well. It's not bad enough that we're bombarded with cigarette filth in front of stores, outside restaurants, and even in the great outdoors, but to see people blatantly disregarding the law and violating our environment at the same time makes me want to puke. No one does thing about it.

And when irresponsible smokers jettison their spent cigs along highways, the end result is too often catastrophic wildfires that cost millions of dollars in property loss, destroyed natural resources and sometimes lives. What a tragedy! All because smokers are too lazy or thoughtless to use the ashtray in their vehicles.

I'm proposing the increase of smoker littering to $5,000. We can use already installed red light cameras to help nab the offenders. Or maybe something a little more unconventional would work. How about this? What if we can pay school kids to use their cell phone cameras to catch littering smokers! Wouldn't it be something to have thousands of little private detectives helping to rid our society of this phenomenon?

Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Declare the Pennies on Your Eyes

Yes, here we are again on the eve of Tax day. Tonight, when all good taxpayers are asleep, the Tax man and all his little auditors will fly around the country, taking from the rich and giving to the poo....er, well not the poor, they'll actually give it to the government, who in turn will spend it wastefully.

The answer of course is a flat tax, but there are so many CPAs, lawyuhs, and interest groups opposed to it, that we'll probably never see it. In case your lower instestines weren't already knotted up after preparing your taxes, here's something else to digest:

12,000 = The number of additional IRS employees needed to answer phone inquiries from confused taxpayers during tax filing season. Because taxpayers will have nothing to file under a national retail sales tax, additional personnel will not be needed.

62,000,000 = The number of lines of computer code required by the IRS to manage the current tax code. A national retail sales tax will ease the IRS's ongoing computer problems dramatically.

1,420 = The number of appraisals of works of art that an IRS panel performed in order to tax the assets of dead people. Because double taxation under a national retail sales tax does not exist, the absurdity of having the IRS value art would disappear with the death (estate) tax.

1,000,000,000 = The number of 1099 forms sent out each year to help the IRS track taxpayers' interest and dividend income. Under a national retail sales tax, this requirement will be eliminated.

I'm not making this stuff up, folks. Check these facts out and more at this website:

http://www.scrapthecode.com/

Just another reminder: Walgreen's is open 24 hours if you need to buy a bottle of Maalox! Drink a toast to the IRS!!

Gastric Banding- the Next Wave of Elective Surgeries

As if we didn't have enough elective surgery being done in this country, what with all the nose jobs, boob jobs, and every other type of job, here's the next medical wave ready to hit us: gastric banding- a surgical process in which the victim's, er....I mean patient's upper stomach is retrofitted with a silicon band to limit food intake. Think of it as an internal corset.

The Wall Street Journal reports that companies like Johnson & Johnson and Allergan, Inc. are gearing up their marketing machines to reach out to all of the coach potatoes out there who want to lose a lot of weight. They see a vast market out there in TV land and want to exploit the fact that we're a nation of obese do-nothings.

My message to those people who are considering gastric banding- TiVo "The Biggest Loser" and watch it faithfully every week, start exercising on a regular basis, and stop jamming bags of Doritos into your face! Remember, gastric banding is still major surgery and can cost from $15,000-$40,ooo and few insurance companies cover this surgery. You need a lifestyle change, not a drive-thru solution to your problem.

Sure, gastric banding is probably the easier and quicker solution, but what does that say about us as a culture? The demand for a process like this should be so small that the Johnson and Johnson's of the world wouldn't even consider wasting valuable marketing dollars on mega marketing campaigns that would reach such a limited audience. Instead, we reach for the quick fix, just like we reach for the next slice of pepperoni.

Americans complain and gripe about health care costs, but spend billions of dollars on surgeries that would've been prevented with proper diet and exercise. We complain about high gas prices too, but most of us are too lazy to walk down the block on an errand. We could fatten our wallets at the same time we downsize our backsides. But no!

The media spouts on and on about the obesity epidemic but obsesity is merely a symptom, not the cause. Our real epidemic is laziness. I wonder if Johnson & Johnson has a pill for that?