Alpha Counter

I hate to sound like a whiny, ignorant little tax payer, but can nothing be sacred? I’m just tired of how every time money is exchanged between two people, the government insists on taking a piece of it. Technically, money given as a gift is subject to income tax. And any time someone buys something from someone (like a garage sale), it supposedly could be applied to sales tax. Even just owning shit like a car, the IRS sends me a property tax bill.

They say that taxing downloads will rake in $12 million a year. Great. That’s $12 million I’m sure will be mis-managed and ill-spent, just like all the other garbage that brought us to the point of resorting to ideas like this. How about we learn to properly spend the budget that we have first. If we can get that worked out, we can probably find about $12 million in elbow room right there. Then we can figure out if we really need to start taxing more shit.

The good news is that the plan would be incredibly expensive to organize and execute, which could be our saving grace. However, if all state governments got together or if the feds thought to get something like this set up nationwide, we’d be boned.

So today Circuit City (or as I like to call it, Jerk It City) officially announced that they were going out of business. This doesn’t surprise me at all. Not in the usual cynicism that I’m sure most people flout.

About ten years ago, I worked for Montgomery Ward, a company that months after my departure also went tits-up. Five years later, I applied for a job at Circuit City. During my interview, the hiring manager noticed Montgomery Ward on my resume and smirked. He told me that the CEO of Montgomery Ward became the CEO of Circuit City after the company fell apart.

So needless to say, I saw the writing on the wall those years ago. It was only a matter of time before history repeated itself. I remember when Circuit City was gaining success by being a large-scale Radio Shack. Then they tried to become a small-scale Best Buy and that’s what I think was their biggest error.

I’m looking forward to checking out the liquidation sales, though.