I am the Saucy Vixen and I am a Weight Watchers message board addict.
I cruise the boards and dole out advice. I provide encouragement to those who feel discouraged by their small increments of weight loss. I suggest healthy-eating ideas and low-POINTS-value tips. I make snarky observations and castigate the few who deserve it (and since I'm really a softy on the inside this doesn't happen often). I learn about high-fiber options to add to my daily diet that will keep me regular. I take down recipes for nearly-fat-free chicken cordon bleu that I will never prepare, as I do not cook.
One of my favorite pastimes on the message boards is reading posts from folks who whine about how many daily POINTS they are allotted. When I started Weight Watchers, I was allowed 21 POINT in addition to my Weekly POINTS Allowance of 35 (that's 35 POINTS to use during the week however you please; a POINT is calculated based on calories, fat and fiber content of any given food; on average, a POINT is about 50 calories, give or take).
Every now and then, someone whines and moans about how her daily target POINTs is only 18. And when that happens, I am reminded of rich Republican folk.
Rich Republican folk, in my experience, tend to be very concerned about the Government taking their money. They don't like paying for programs. They don't want poor people receiving welfare, or -- God forbid -- appointed counsel, if it means that their hard-earned money will be stolen via income tax. They get very aggravated when their income is reduced by thousands of dollars because of taxes.
My take on the tax issue: I wish I had their problem. I wish the Government were taking thousands of dollars from me. Because if they were taking that much money from me, that'd mean that I had a lot of cash. High taxes means high income. I don't see the cause for complaint.
People on Weight Watchers who are allotted 18 daily target POINTS have either lost a lot, or started out weighing a little. Eighteen POINTS is as low as it goes; it's the bottom. You can't get any fewer than 18 POINTS per day. And so, when I hear people whining about how few POINTS Weight Watchers gives 'em, my perspective is the same as when rich folk complain about paying too much in taxes: I wish I had that problem.
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5 comments:
What works Republicans like me up is people like Ted Kennedy, with wealth that is not taxed, telling people like me that we are greedy because we want to keep more of what we earn.
I often wonder how much a wealthy person is supposed to give before he is free to ask others to give. I am not wealthy, but I am upper middle class. Maybe Ted kennedy deserves the hit, but I bet he, and his family, have given a lot to others over the years and pay their taxes as required. Sometimes I ask, "if a person has earned $10,000,000, how much should he be allowed to keep?" I have found that that depends on who you are talking to. If your talking to his peers, they say all of it. If your talking to someone like me, enough to live well-$2-5,000,000. If you talk to the very poor, they may say almost none of it or, maybe, all of it. Does a wealthy person have to reveal how much he keeps, gives away, and pays in taxes in order to justify his actions and words and thoughts? Will you tell me how much you earn, give to charity, and to taxes? How do you spend your money? Do you see how difficult the question is?
The point is, Paladin, that Ted Kennedy wants to use the force of government to take what I have earned, as if I somehow haven't been taxed enough. Whether he has "given" is not really the point, is it? Moreover, who the hell is he to make moral judgments on whether I am greedy simply because I don't want to pay more than what I do? The fact is that the tax system in America is already very unfair to wage earners, who are usually people not born into tremendous amounts of wealth. While people may not care about how much I pay in tax, I would point out that people like Dick Cheney, who make far more than what I do, and have far more accumulated wealth than I do, pay a much lower rate of tax than I do. The same is true for people like John Kerry. In one recent tax year, he and Teresa paid less than 20% on $5,000,000.
I can make rational arguments about high tax rates and how they hurt wealth creation and the economy. I can also point out that the idea that people think that they should get to decide how much one should get to live on is a mite arrogant. But the charge that I am greedy is pretty nasty, and I don't particularly care for it. Nor do I particularly care for the idea that I should be happy no matter what they take because someone else would like to have my problem.
These are really not difficult issues. It's really about how we view the government and society.
Message Boards are becoming an addiction for sure. You should see the compulsive posting by men on boards about their "hobby," prostitution: http://www.emiliedice.com/compartments/?page_id=12
NICE!
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