September 2008

Who’s ‘elite’?

John McCain’s claims that Barak Obama is ‘elite’ are old news now. As we’ve heard, his credibility for making these claims is brought into question by his marriage to a multimillionaire, not knowing exactly how many houses he owns, and saying that earning $5M per year constitutes his definition of being rich.
However, I just read an article that contained some McCain biography, and I learned that his claim to being ‘elite’ goes well beyond a fortunate marriage. Some excerpts:

He was a privileged, but rebellious scion of one of America’s most distinguished military dynasties – his father and grandfather were both admirals.
…
Through Ross Perot, [McCain] met Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California.
…
Meanwhile McCain moved to Arizona with his new bride immediately after their 1980 marriage. There, his new father-in-law gave him a job and introduced him to local businessmen and political powerbrokers who would smooth his passage to Washington via the House of Representatives and Senate.

You learn something new every day.

By Stan, ago

Till Tampering

cash_register.gif A New York Times article discusses software for altering cash register data to cook the books in order to pay fewer taxes. Interesting.
Locally owned businesses seem to have a long history of reducing their recorded income. When I was a teenager, I worked in a family owned restaurant in the Texas hill country. I remember that the owners would pay me from the cash register usually. When I receive my Social Security summary, I see that the owners did report some of my income, but the numbers are in the report are much lower than my actual income those years. So, it appears that a certain percentage of the owners’ business (income and expenses) just never got recorded.
A small family-owned restaurant that I frequent here in Austin is pretty brazen with their cash siphoning. You pay for your meal at the register, and I’ve noticed that about half the time I pay, they simply open the register and make change, not recording the transaction at all. Until recently, they only accepted cash, so it was pretty easy to do that. Now that they take credit cards, I don’t think they can manipulate the portion of their payments made by credit card–at least not as easily.
(Via BoingBoing)

By Stan, ago