Chatting with Billie

“Warren Buffett,” I said to my neighbor Billie across the street; “you know who Warren Buffett is?”
“Right.”
Billie, like me, is retired, but in his 70s. (I’m only 67.) He lives in the home of his parents, both deceased.
Buffett said it’s about time the hyper-rich contributed to reducing the nation’s deficit, instead of always being coddled by Congress.
He was decrying the fact the hourlies often pay twice as much in tax-rate as the hyper-rich.
I saw this in the Canandaigua YMCA Exercise-Gym on the silent wall-mounted “plasma-baby” tuned to CNN.
“Plasma-baby” is what my blowhard brother-in-Boston, who loudly badmouths everything I do or say, calls all large flat-screen TVs, and the YMCA Exercise-Gym has a few.
Other technologies for wide flat-screen TVs are available, but he calls them all “plasma-babies,” an early flat-screen technology.
The TVs at the YMCA are closed-captioned — silent.
Anyone who reads this blog knows I’m anti-Conservative (Gasp!), not necessarily liberal (greater gasp!), but sick of all the noisy bombast and lies from the Right.
Particularly all the fevered blustering from Rush Limbaugh and his imitators, and the intolerant goosestepping of Annie Coulter.
This of course makes me of-the-Devil to my siblings, the subject of fervent prayer.
My siblings are all tub-thumping Conservatives.
“I think them rich people deserve all they got,” my neighbor said; “and the government shouldn’t be taking any more from them.”
“Right,” I said. “They got there by exporting all our jobs overseas, and laying off their hourlies — the ones that made their businesses viable.”
“You increase the taxes those businesses pay,” he said; “and they start laying off.”
“They’re no more gonna create jobs with a tax-break,” I said; “except maybe a job-or-two at a private jet manufacturer, or a job at the local Mercedes dealership.
They’ll line their pockets first.”
“Oh, he doesn’t buy into all that,” my wife said later. “He never worked for a large corporation.”
“Many buy into it,” I said; “.....led to Conservatism by a second-rate actor cued by his wife.”
And the hyper-rich fat-cats take advantage of it.
They play Conservatism like a violin, because it allows them to get excessively rich.
“Our nation isn’t broken; Washington is broken,” says Texas Governor Rick Perry, recently entered into the presidential sweepstakes.
Indeed Washington is; beholden to the fat-cats: “my way or the highway!”
Joe Sixpak triumphs, but in so doing kills himself.
“What I’m afraid of,” I said to Billie; “is the fat-cats ending Social Security, stealing all we put in so they can build mega-mansions in Palm Beach or Hollywood.
“In which case they’d have a revolution on their hands,” he stated. “Old folks depend on Social Security.”
“Yeah, but I’m told Social Security is an entitlement (dread!) — freeloading. Those collecting ain’t workin’.
I can just see it: aging geezers marching the streets and rioting.”
“Right! I got a 12-gauge and a 44 pistol.”

• I work out in the Canandaigua YMCA Exercise-Gym, appropriately named the “Wellness-Center,” usually three days per week, about two-three hours per visit. (“Canandaigua” [“cannan-DAY-gwuh”] is a small city to the east nearby where we live in Western NY. The city is also within a rural town called “Canandaigua.” The name is Indian, and means “Chosen Spot.” It’s about 15 miles away. —We live in the small rural town of West Bloomfield in Western NY, southeast of Rochester.