Rise in Sales Tax

Rise in Sales Tax

I know this is a little delayed, but it is something that I have been upset about for quite some time.

Nope, this is no April fools joke. Our wonderful state of California decided to raise sales tax here in our great state. The decision was made by our elected officials to raise the sales tax 1 percent across the state. Not bad right? only an extra penny per dollar, or an extra dollar per 100 or 10 per 1000. So if I were to purchase a new car next week for $30K instead of paying $2175 in tax I will get to pay $2625.

I don’t know about your book, but in this recession that we are in I'm pretty sure that $450 is quite a bit to me. Not to mention that the state also added an extra .25% on to your personal income tax. But please don't stop reading yet, your registration fees will also be going from ".65% to 1.15% of the value of the vehicle"(California DMV).

So, Other than this meaning that you will:

1. Pay more for every non-grocery item you buy

2. Raise your personal income tax (doesn’t the state still owe us money from last year?)

3. Almost double your registration fees,

you will also be a part of a deepened recession due to our states horrible decision making efforts.

You ask, "How would this deepen our economic recession?"

Lucky for you, I know this answer (I learn't it in Scool).

1. By increasing sales tax, you increase the cost of every item in stores and you run the risk of people slowing their purchasing. Which if this raise in taxes reduces sales by just 1.1% the state will be loosing even more money and also causing more businesses to loose sales thus deepening the recession.

2. By increasing personal income tax, spending by consumers will decrease and cause a furthering of this recession.

3. Doubling registration fees, well, the same thing happens. Less money for the consumer to spend, thus furthering the recession.

But you say to me, "Zach, do you really expect me to believe that YOU, not even a college graduate could catch something like this and the state of California could not?"

But my reply to you is this, "oh, they caught it, They just don’t give a shit."

"I don't think there's any doubt it will aggravate the recession further, but given the state of California, there just wasn't any choice,"- Gino Dicaro

"Given the state of California"???? what is that supposed to mean? With the seventh largest economy and already one of the highest sales tax rates in the US we are not pulling in enough revenue? Bullshit! We don’t need to increase taxes; we need to fix the inefficient system. Just like we need to let inefficient businesses fail so that self-sustaining ones can take their place, we need to get a new system in place here in California!

So, help me out and do us all a favor and write Sam Aanestad, your elected official who is supposed to be representing you and find out what he is doing to help get us out of this recession.

Sam Aanestad

State Capitol, Room 3063


Sacramento, CA 95814

Go now, what are you waiting for?

http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/newsrel/newsrel09/2009-12.htm

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hhQvjHcsAkJugUGfTWWrlR6daGTwD979CA500

http://gotplates.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/california-dmv-announces-vehicle-registration-fee-increase/

Ohhhh Yeaaaa!

This weekend was pretty crazy, actually as I'm writing this it is not yet over. I am sitting at BJ's in Roseville waiting for Pattie to be released from that place that calls itself an Italiano restaraunte.  Here's a little recap for you:

Friday- I picked up a shift at night and worked from 3:40 until 9:35. I made decent money but had to give a good portion of it to my bookie (Ken) for my lost Super Bowl bet (damn Steelers). After work when I got home, I made the mistake of running into Joey and he convinced me to go to the casino with him where I ended up loosing another 20 bucks at the roulette table (are you noticing a pattern of gambling and loosing? me too) When I finally got home that night I was really tired and ended up falling asleep at around 2am, which wouldn't have been that bad had I not been required to attend a pointless meeting at The Lobster the next morning at the beautiful hour of 9am.

Saturday- Woke up at 8:20am to get ready for the day and go to that above-mentioned meeting. Friday night at work Ryan and I decided that we didn't want to wear our uniforms to the meeting and that a good alternative to this would be to wear suits for it. Yes, we went to our Red Lobster meeting fully suited up. We are awesome. After sitting through the most pointless meeting of my life for 1 hour I was able to go back home and pack for the rest of my weekend.

After packing I left for Anderson to meet my wonderful girlfriends Father for lunch. I was really nervous for it, but it ended up going really well, he had some really good advise for me that I plan on implementing into our relation.

Then I drove to Joe's house to find him sitting on his bed all loopy from the medication that he is taking right now. It was fun, and it was his 2-year-old cousins b-day so we got to eat Elmo cup cakes.  After this I headed up to Redding to get my hair cut by Andrea Goold. She did an excellent job; you should come see how good I look! If you are ever in Redding and need a haircut give me a call and I will get you her number so you can get a great cut. (By the way, for you lady readers, she is a color specialist)

After getting all of my hairs cut I went to Raley's and picked up some brews for Thomas and I to drink later that evening. I went with the Kona Longboard Ale (Always good). I then proceeded to Thomas and Nikki's house to hangout for the night. We got in some really good and very needed chatting. I also got to play with their son Aiden, he' s a dang cute little kid. After a bit Thomas and I went and picked up some pizza and brought it back. Some more people came over, including my sister, Joe, Rachel, Cory and Kristin (Hey Joe, I got the spelling right!).  We all played Settlers of Catan together, I won, naturally.

Sunday- At about Midnight I left the O'conner residence and headed toward Cottonwood. Mid drive I remembered that today was my mothers birthday so I stopped and picked up a card for her. It was in espanol (I though it was funny). Then I continued my drive to my parent’s house and went to sleep shortly after arriving there. 

This morning I woke up around 10 and sat around the house with my parents for a while and my Dad made breakfast around noon. At around 1 I headed down to Cameron Park for a meeting for Disciples Church. It was a long drive and I drove way to fast because I knew I was on a time limit to be able to see Pattie before she left for work. I made it with 10 min to hang out with Pat. Then she left for work. During the afternoon, Stu and I went over some financials; we played Excite Bike, ate In 'n Out and hung out with everybody. It was good.

Somewhere around 7:30 I left and came over to where I am now, BJ's, to read a very dry textbook about Financial Theory Applied to The Market System: Intermediate Economics.

Then I got bored and started typing this while I'm waiting for Pat to get off of work. We will probably hang out for a little bit and then I will get to make my trek back to Chico. YAY!!!

Well that is all for now, I apologize if you made it this far because you just wasted a good 15 min of your life that I can assure you that you will never get back.

With Love from the greater Sacramento area,

Zach Bay

Dreaming is overrated

Here I am, sitting on a bench between the library and Glenn hall munching on craisins and walnuts waiting for class. If you haven’t gone outside today, shame on you. It is absolutely beautiful out. The sun is sitting high in the sky with no cloud cover and there is a slight breeze from the east that isn’t quite moving the leaves around but is kind of giving me a slight chill. I think the only thing that could make this situation better is if I had a close friend right next to me to chat with. But instead, here I am with my MacBook Pro talking to close friends by other means.

Today seems like a good day for dreaming. I’m not sure what I want to dream about today but I want to dream big. Maybe bigger than I have ever dreamt before. This dream will probably not be about lavish things like cars and homes but more about the simple things, happiness and love. This dream will make me want to be with the people who cause this, the people who know all about this so called “happiness and love.” So, about this dream, I’m not really sure what I should dream of. But what I am sure of is that I want this dream to be real, I don’t want to dream it at all. If there is something that I want to live my life by it is the idea that no dream is to big to live. In my opinion, if you don’t think your dreams are possible you are being negative, and negativity is not an option. Im not sure, but I don’t believe that the most successful people (in all walks of life, including success of being happy or success financially) are negative. These people dream big and they act on these dreams, pipe dreams are not an option for these people. I want to be one of those people. So, no more pipe dreams for me, no more dreaming of something amazing and then doing nothing about it. I will live my dreams!

Love,

Zach Bay

Fun financial times

Do you ever wish that you understood more? I sure do. I guess that it is a part of growing up but I have started to realize that I really don’t know a whole lot about much. I do know a little about quite a bit of things but I don’t really have a specialty. I’m not sure if I think it is better to be like this or if it would be nicer to have one specific thing I was good at. I guess I will never really know, but I should be happy with what I have.

Something that I have grown partial to studying is Financial things, be it learning more about how the stock market works, what causes fluctuations in the market, why stock prices rise and fall, or any number of things like that.  In this twisted economy I guess these are good things to know.

Speaking of financial things I had a finance teacher today named Robert Haney Scott who made a solid point about stimulus packages (which I don’t really like the idea of) today in class. . He explained the stimulus packages differently to me than they had ever been explained to me before, he pointed out the reason for their being a stimulus package is to increase spending in our economy (which is obvious). But where does this money come from? It comes from taxes, which come from taxpayers. Which only limits the amount of money that those taxpayers would be able to spend.  So if anything, these stimulus packages are pulling money out of the economy by having to fuel the government to disburse the package itself. Does this make sense? I’ll rephrase that:

In order to create a stimulus package the government must increase taxes and take away from the taxpayer to spend money that the taxpayer would have spent anyways.

So anyways, this sounds like a waste of money to me. That is how I feel about this new 900B dollar stimulus package that Our President wants to release and about the ridiculously large stimulus package that the Bush administration released last year.

Oh, and just so I go on the record saying it, I don’t think we should be bailing anybody out of anything. Bad management of firms got these companies in to huge financial trouble and these firms should be forced to dissolve. That is how capitalism works. The strong and smart survive while the weak and bad decision making die. I understand that this type of action (or lack there of) would cause this recession to last longer, but it would make sure that all of those firms that made bad decisions are not around to see another strong economy and make bad decisions to tear down our economy again.

Good Night and Good Luck!

With Love,

Zach Bay

My life as of late

Wow, quite a bit has changed since the last time you have heard from me. It has almost been 3 months. First of all, I have moved to Egypt to pursue my life long dream of living in a pyramid. Also, I have started to tame a small chimpanzee to be my life long friend who will accompany me into the dark rainforests of Brazil and trek the high plains of Nigeria with me. His name is Stan the Chimp and he is a classical pianist. His favorite bands include the Mars Volta and George Thorogood. You will find out more about him in the future…

Now onto my second life that I live vicariously through a robot that looks, acts, and feels on my behalf.

Everything is freaking wonderful here. As some of you may know, I am now dating my long time friend Pattie Peterson, she is wonderful. As you may have guessed this has made my last couple of weeks pretty crazy. I have been trying to get down to Sacramento as much as possible to see her while juggling work and my internship. Because the universe loves me, it decided to start school today only to make my life that much more fun. So as of now my life consists of going to school for 18 units of upper-division core classes, working 24-30 hours a week at the Lobster, spending at least 15 hours a weeks working at my internship and spending as much time as possible with a beautiful girl who lives 81.2 miles away from me.

But this will only be my life for another 5 months, in 5 months I will be the first Bay to have graduated college and I will have a whole new chapter awaiting me. I will be done with 17 years of schooling that has attempted to prepare me for the dog eat dog world out there. I just hope that it has.

Speaking of the dog eat dog world that is waiting for me, I have come to notice that I am much more friendly than many of the worlds other people. I smile and compliment people on things, hold doors and say hello. From what I see, they scowl and criticize. From what it looks like there are a lot of people who are quite miserable.  Nobody smiles, nobody holds doors and people just look at you funny when you say hello. What in the heck is their problem? Ehh, screw em. Im going to keep smiling and holding doors until somebody says thank you, I think it is really important to do those little things. Enough with that rant.

Well I think that is all tonight. I hope  you have a wonderful day and an even better tomorrow.

Love,

Zach Bay

"Obama Hater"

Most of you know how I lean in my political views. If not, I will tell you. I have a very conservative mind, be it with my views on tax, government control, gun control and social programs. Also, I will be the first to proudly tell you that I voted for the McCain Palin ticket. I did this because the plans that they had with tax, government control over business, gun control and social programs were closely aligned to mine. 

What I DID NOT DO is vote for them because I am an "Obama Hater."

In the last few days and I am assuming in the days to come I will once again be called an "Obama Hater."

But this is where you are wrong. I do not hate Obama. I feel that he is a very upstanding man, very close tom becoming my president. I only disagree with his tax law, government regulation law, gun control, and social program proposals that he wants to implement into our system. 

But as I can see, the majority of America wants to see this happen, so as a responsible American citizen who respects the democratic way of elections I am able to sit back and know that according to the American people, the right man was selected as our president. 

Now for all of you actual "Obama haters" out there. Stop with all of the "Obama doesn't wear a flag pin", "Obama is a Muslim terrorist" and "Obama doesn't salute the flag" crap. Are you really that ignorant? Show some respect to the man. He is YOUR President. 

Fundamental America can not exist without balance, it seems as if Barrack Obama is our balance.