Month: August 2023

Island Living: Vanuatuan Taxes

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

The FAIRtax folks, who advocate for replacing income and corporate taxes with a unified national sales tax, posted an interesting piece about the remote Pacific nation of Vanuatu (“FAIRtax in Vanuatu?“).  It discusses how the archipelago boasts incredibly low taxes:  a 15% value-added tax (“VAT”), and a business license fee of 5% (presumably, 5% of a business’s total annual revenue).

I’m personally agnostic on the adoption of a national sales tax in the United States.  I do believe it would be much better than the income tax, which I absolutely loathe, and which requires a complex and oppressive bureaucracy to administer.  I also resent sending the IRS all of my personal information every single year, including how many miles I drove and what sheet music I purchased (although those are great for those sweet, sweet tax write-offs).  If it were practical, I’d much rather see a national sales tax, or even a return to old-school tariff regimes.

The problem is that, should we ever adopt a national sales tax, it will likely accompany the national income tax.  A national sales tax also places a great deal of strain on States and localities.  Good luck having a 10% national sales tax and a 6% State sales tax (as we do in South Carolina) and a plethora of local-option sales taxes (about 2% here in Darlington County; higher in neighboring Florence County).  Tack on hospitality taxes, and it adds up fast.

For example, in neighboring Florence County, eating out automatically comes with a 10% sales tax:  the 6% State sales tax, plus local sales and hospitality taxes, totally 10%.  If we had a conservative 10% national sales tax on top, your $5 footlong (already gone—part of America’s mythological past) becomes $6 immediately.  20% sales tax means $1 of taxes for every $5 spent.  A $500 item would cost $600.

I still think that’s preferable to the income tax, and instead of creating a disincentive to work, it would create a disincentive to spend.

But I digress.  For a small nation like Vanuatu—population of around 300,000—a national sales tax makes sense.  It’s a small enough area geographically and demographically that it the national sales tax is, essentially, akin to a State sales tax.  As the article from FAIRtax.org notes, the island has something of a clean slate:  no welfare, no government pensions, etc.  Most people are subsistence farmers, and tourism is the major industry.

Read More »

TBT^2: Preserving Old Varieties

The Portly Politico6 Comments

Recently, I had the opportunity to catch up with an old friend of mine from college.  He has turned the backyard of his cookie-cutter suburban house into a veritable Garden of Eden—or, at least, an impressive little homestead.  He’s managed to grow everything from blueberries to squash to melons and more, to the point that he can substantially impact his grocery bill—and that’s with three energetic sons!  The boys have already stripped the blueberry bushes clean.

He takes great joy in being able to feed his sons and his wife from his garden.  Sure, they still have to buy groceries, but they enjoy delicious, fresh fruits and vegetables throughout the year.  My friend also takes particular care to save seeds for future plantings, and has an impressive compost pile in a dark corner of the yard.  He tells me that about once a year he’ll dig to the bottom of the pile and find pure, black, nutrient-rich soil.

He even raises his own worms!  He tells me it’s incredibly easy to do, a “low effort, high reward” project that helps to keep his garden’s soil rich and aerated.  His young sons also love helping out in the garden, and the worms are a fun, crawly project for them all.  They even have a dill plant with monarch butterfly caterpillars, which he has had to cover with netting so the birds don’t gobble up the beautiful larvae.

It’s truly inspiring seeing this kind of backyard agriculture first-hand, and my friend’s dedication to preserving heirloom varieties while also feeding his family is impressive.  He gave me some corn kernels for planting, which I’ll save for next spring.

I did not arrive empty-handed, though.  The broccoli plants that I so disgracefully let wither managed to survive!  I had one, impressive, beautiful plant return.  Rather than gobbling it up, I let it flower.  The little buds we see on supermarket broccoli will, if left to grow, blossom into gorgeous yellow flowers.  Over time, seed pods will develop after the petals fall; those pods and their stems turn brittle, and eventually fall to the earth.  Either the second broccoli I planted made a comeback, too, or I have had a new plant rise up from fallen seeds.

Regardless, broccoli produce tons of seeds, and I was able to take my friend a bag full of them.  As for my plant, I’m going to let nature take its course and see what happens next.

Here’s to letting a thousand broccoli flowers bloom!

With that, here is 11 August 2022’s “TBT: Preserving Old Varieties“:

Read More »

Offensive Poems: With Pictures Preview: “Cute But Offensive Extraterrestrial” & “Space Frog”

The Portly Politico10 Comments

The following is a re-posting of this past Sunday’s edition of Sunday Doodles (Sunday Doodles CXCV), which is normally a perk for $5 and up subscribers to my SubscribeStar Page.  The post serves as a preview, of sorts, to the kind of content that will make up (I hope!) my third book, tentatively entitled Offensive Poems: With Pictures.  I thought I’d bring it to the masses—you, my beloved free subscribers and daily readers—to get feedback—and to let you in on this new project.  —TPP

Typically, Sunday Doodles is reserved for the classy $5 and up subscribers, while $3 a month gets the first Sunday of the month to gawk at doodles.  However, I’m opening this post up to all subscribers.

That’s because this weekend’s edition of Sunday Doodles features a preview of my current book project, Offensive Poems: With Pictures.  This project started almost by accident—I was doodling at an open mic night on Tuesday, 18 July 2023, and started sketching people around me.  Two nights later—Thursday, 20 July 2023—at another open mic, I drew “Cute But Offensive Extraterrestrial”; he prompted me to write the haiku “Learn to Code.”

That got me thinking:  what if I wrote a red-pilled haiku for every doodle?  I was already toying with the idea of writing poems to accompany each doodle, but I wasn’t thinking of making them a satirical commentary on the strange times in which we find ourselves.  Now, I can’t stop coming up with pithy verses about the various sacred cows and empty bromides of our time.  It’s remarkable how many Leftist slogans are seven-syllables, which works great for that second line of each haiku.

Why haiku?  I like the challenge of stating a complex sets of ideas in seventeen syllables.  The structure of a haiku—five syllables in the first and third lines, seven syllables in the second/middle line—means I have to be extremely efficient with words.

And, to be totally honest, I just find haiku easier to work with than other poetic forms.  It offers enough flexibility in terms of rhythm, meter, etc., for a hedge-poet like myself to play around with.  Once I have to worry about iambic pentameter, for example, and stressed and unstressed syllables, it’s a bit too much for yours portly.

That said, I wanted some form, as I find most free verse to be too loose.  There is something to be said for structure, as it forces me to think intentionally about every word.  Also, I find that much free verse quickly becomes indistinguishable from prose.  Much of it seems like prose writing with random or mildly clever line breaks.

So!  Enough rambling.  Let’s get to the doodles!

Read More »

Monday Morning Movie Review: Oppenheimer (2023)

The Portly Politico8 Comments

If Sound of Freedom (2023) is the must-see film of the year due to sheer moral imperative, Oppenheimer (2023) is simply the must-see film of the year due to its technical and artistic brilliance.  If means and availability allow, see it in IMAX.  The visuals and the sound are a massive part of this film, and feeling the sound of the first successful test of the atomic bomb really drives home the impact—and the implications—of this terrible new weapon.

Read More »

Lazy Sunday CCXIV: D.C., Part II

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

I finally slapped together the concluding installments of my Washington, D.C. Trip series, which may or may not make it into a future collection of travel essays.  Based on sales of Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures, I’m not exactly hot to rush out another collection of such essays, but we’ll see after I have my book signing (rescheduled so I could deliver the baccalaureate sermon, but the date is still TBD), which should increase the book’s profile a smidge.  I do, however, have an idea for my third book, and it’s going to be something completely different from either of the first two.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Back-to-School Update 2023

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Yours portly is not quite back to teaching just yet, but I am back to work.  That means I’m entering into this odd period of quasi-work before the storm of the school year begins.  It’s a kind of ramping up to the main event, but I’ve been teaching for so long, it feels a bit more like spinning my wheels.

Whatever the case, I’m no longer allowed to enjoy leisurely mornings, and have to be somewhere other than home during an arbitrary stretch of hours that another person dictates.  In other words, I’m doing what everyone else does year-round.

With school looming, some of my projects and their output will slow down a bit, but I do have a few updates to share with subscribers, some of which will interest them greatly (or, at the very least, slightly), including my next book project idea.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

August 2023 Bandcamp Friday: Bandcamp Friday Returns!

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Well, here we are again:  another Bandcamp Friday, which means I hope you will consider pitching in a few bucks to buy my music—or my second book!  After a long hiatus over the summer months, this celebration of indie musicians is back.

The first Friday of a bunch of months in 2023—February, March, April, May, August, September, October, November, and December—will feature this pro-indie music observance, a day on which Bandcamp waives its usual 15% commission on sales.

In other words, when you buy my music, almost 100% of it goes to me, instead of almost 85%.

Currently, my entire discography of ten releases is $9.50, a savings of 45%, which is not bad for ten releases.  That’s $0.95 per release—not too shabby!  To purchase the full discography, click on any release, and you’ll see the option to purchase all of them.

You can also listen to a ton of my tunes on YouTube (and it’s free to subscribe!).

I’m also selling all of my paintings for $10, with free shipping in the United States, regardless of how many you purchase.  They’re one of kind, so once a painting is purchased, it’s gone.

I’ve also joined Society6, a website that lets artists upload their designs, which can they be printed onto all manner of products (like this throw pillow, or this duvet cover).  Why not get a bookbag with a mouthy droid on it?

I only get 10% of the sales made there, but some of the stuff looks really good—I really want these notebooks with my “Desert View” painting on it (now SOLD!).  Some of them are straight-up goofy, like this church doodle I made celebrating the presidential pardon of Roger Stone (the description for the piece is “Anger your friends with this doodle commemorating the presidential pardon of America’s most dapper political operative“).

I have a few new paintings from my highly unsuccessful foray into selling at the Lamar Egg Scramble, and I have two new doodles for just $5 each:  Robo Talk 23 No. 1 and No. 2.  I’m also working on quite a few more doodles for Society6, which will also end up here.

My first book, The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard: The Ultimate Flatfoot, is $10 in paperback, and just $5 on Kindle.

My second and newest book, Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures, is $20 in paperback and $10 on Kindle.

Thanks again for your support!

Happy Friday!

—TPP

TBT^4: Back to the Grind 202[3]

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

All things must come to an end.  That includes sleeping in, taking naps, and being well-rested.

Yes, it’s sad, but true:  the endless freedom and fun of summer is over, at least for yours portly.  Today, I am back at work.

I’ve noted before how the return date for teachers seems to inch earlier and earlier into August.  Last year, we went back on 5 August 2022—a Friday.  That seemed almost intentionally spiteful on the part of my administration:  “nope, you’re not going to have one full week left with fun weekend plans; you need to sit through the employee handbook again.”

Now it’s 3 August 2023, a Thursday.  That seems even more spiteful.  Why not give us one last, full week?

Readers might say, “Hey, you’ve been off for eight weeks; why are you complaining?”  Or, alternatively, “Well, if the start of school is imminent, maybe you need to go back today.”

Wrong—wrong!  Classes do not resume until Wednesday, 16 August 2023, almost two weeks from today.  Four days next week are tied up with student registration.  So we’ll have three days of mind-numbingly bureaucratic meetings—during which I’m sure we’ll learn of some new, onerous burden that we teachers are to bear—followed by a bunch of kids buying textbooks.

But I must adopt a positive attitude.  While I am not thrilled to be going back to work, the routine will certainly do me some good.  I am beginning to understand why people die six months after retirement.  Sometimes, the free time can be overwhelming.

I mean, not for me, but I can see how it could be for some people.  We get so used to working nonstop, it’s hard to slow down.  Fortunately, yours portly enjoys his afternoon naptime as much as the next octogenarian.

I digress.  The school year does bring with a pleasant rhythm—and more music lessons.  July is the leanest month of the year for those, and while teaching twenty-ish lessons a week in addition to my normal course load is grueling, it brings in the bacon.

Of course, my skin flint readers (that’s you!) could also pitch in a few bucks each month (thanks to those of you who do!), but I know budgets are tight.  Why send $5 a month to a cool dude you know and love when you can spend it at some soulless corporation that wants to use your corpse for dog food?

Goodness!  That escalated quickly.  Can you tell I’m a tad irate?

With that, here is “TBT^2: Back to the Grind 2020“:

Read More »

The Return of the Cinema?

The Portly Politico19 Comments

After years of declining box office totals and the closures of The Age of The Virus, it suddenly feels like moviegoing is back.  Four major releases seem to be driving folks to theaters in droves:  Barbie, Sound of Freedom, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, and Oppenheimer.  Even with relative flops like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and the woke Pixar flick Elemental, everyone seems to be flooding back into theaters, almost out of nowhere.

To be fair, box office receipts for Summer 2022 were up, likely on the strength of Top Gun: Maverick (2022).  Perhaps I didn’t darken the door of a theater in 2022 as frequently as I have in 2023 (there’s something about being single and dating that drives me to the movies frequently), so my admittedly anecdotal observations are skewed.  But, dang, it sure does feel like folks are flooding back into theaters.  In my mind, that’s a good thing.

Read More »