My nephew was selected at 18 months- but they let my sister go with him. [He had a one way ticket.]

A friend was flying with her Shih Tzu, and the dog was selected. [I didn’t know dogs could, but apparently if they fly in the cabin, they have boarding passes and are subject to special security as well.

So these aren’t urban legends, these are friends and family.

I suspect lots of folks have had similar problems flying.

I’ve never heard of such insanity. Obviously if that happened to a loved one of yours, all of our hearts would go out to you. That makes no sense and actually sounds very very illegal. I can’t imagine anyone taking a child away from a mother unless the mother was charged with a crime and they took the child to protective services. That said, someone wearing clothing that can conceal bombs should be scrutinized. And that person should be thankful for the safety that we require from our government. It just drives me crazy when people from a totalitarian society use the freedoms of our society against us. You’re right. Right now red light runners are more dangerous. There may be a reason why.
As for this ss. I’m heading to google. I’ve heard of little ol’ ladys. Which is ridiculous. But a 7 year old?

I have five myself, and would like to see them enjoy the freedoms I have.

We have gone so nuts in our persuit of terrorists that we do things like select small children for “special security”. My tiny seven year old niece was once taken for SS and my sister was not allowed to go with her. She was crying buckets as they were frisking her. That is terrorizing our children as far as I’m concerned- and I doubt America is a safer place because we do it.

“Reasonable” is right. My children are far more in danger statistically speaking from red light runners than from terrorists- but do we ban all cars to prevent this from happening?

I’m not for ignoring the problems, but a “do anything to stop them” approach has it’s own issues.

I respectfully disagree. When you see them targeting children and anyone else that’s vulnerable to their sociopathic ways you’ll take a 2nd look also. If I had children(I don’t) and some freak in a burka, with concealed bombs strapped to herself, blew up a gathering of children including my child I would do very bad things. We all need to apply the reasonable person theory and get off all this feel good stuff. It’s real easy to take the high road now. But it’s coming.

If we allow ourselves to turn into an Orwellian society in an attempt to stop terrorists, they have won.

As my son pointed out to me once-

We now spend hours and hours in lines at airports to “protect us” from terrorists. If you consider a lifetime in terms of hours, we are losing more “lives” standing in line than we did on 9/11.

One of the dangers of living in a free society is that people are more free to be involved in terrorist activities.

I won’t do “anything” to stop terrorists. When we hit that point, we have become one of them.

[Igor says "bummer"]

I’m all for doing anything to stop terrorists. Regretfully they are the ones with the rights.

George, while reading your book I developed a morbid fascination with gin. Please help me stop.

First, we want to install cameras everywhere with face-matching software, but just to look for “terrorists” of course. Now, we want to be able to listen to your phone calls and read your email without even so much as showing a judge why we should. (Remember – a judge will issue a warrant for probable cause, so if they don’t want judges involved, it’s because they know they’ll be using the system when there isn’t probable cause.) Now, we want to know every single thing you buy, ever. In all seriousness, how far are we away from 1984? Not far, IMHO. Certainly a damn sight closer than even the old soviet union was, because they lacked the technology to really watch in the way our government is starting to do now.

Igor says: annoyed

OK George. I’m getting it. Banks are the Government.

First thing I do when I go to work for the IRS is find your IP address and hit you with an audit and mebbe about 8 gajillion superfluous actions. Have a great Friday
Hahahahahahahahaha

Secondly, this information is already available to the IRS. I work for a bank and if the IRS wants to come in and look through credit card transactions and get the names of the buyer/seller they can. This bill just makes it manditory that companies pass the info along and sort it for the IRS. It just makes us an extension of the IRS in a sense.

Finally, provisions like this get stuffed into bills all the time. It’s unfortunately how our government works and fortunately, in my opinion, it actually works this time

I think he’s just showing off his HTML- he knows I’m hopeless without an editor.

John’s HTML is far superior to mine as well- but he’s more humble about it. : )

I agree, in the electronic age, there are too many transactions without a paper trail. The bill will definitely help collection efforts.

I also think we need to stop thinking of the government as “them”. “Saving is good for the individual, but bad for the short-term economy” – if we are dependent on the government to be the employer of last resort, America is gone. Raise taxes on high-income earners (oooh, I hate to say this, but, “The Obama Plan”), DRASTICALLY reduce military spending, put some means testing on other government programs, and the resulting dollar strength and movement towards a balanced budget will help us at least make an effort to get out of the long-term cesspool we are in. Otherwise, welcome to the Roman Empire.

Supposedly, this bill is costing 40 Billion Dollars, yet it raises the debt ceiling by 800 Billion Dollars. This indicates that they are planning on spending (over time) 800 Billion Dollars, not 40.

Why would they add this provision now – tax cheating has been going on for some time. Tax cheating wasn’t worth sacrificing constitutionally-protected freedoms before, why now?

Both provisions make sense (from the government’s perspective) – if one looks at the long term. Our government is working hard to maximize consumption (to prop things up) – that’s the reason for bills like this, and the “stimulus checks”.

Citizens insist on things like “saving”. Given a tax savings of X, they will go out and spend less than X – like many people who put their tax stimulus checks towards debt, or in the bank. Saving is good for the individual, but bad for the short-term economy, since our economy is built largely on people buying things they really don’t need. In other words, In order to keep spending up, the government will have to spend our money for us. They do this through direct taxes, and inflation (indirect taxes).

This bill makes perfect sense, if the goal is to significantly jack-up taxes long term, and encourage more senseless spending on depreciating assets like real-estate. The higher the effective tax rate goes, the more inclined people will be to cheat, since they have more to gain from doing so.

Put it another way – who would risk jail time to cheat a 1% tax? Who would risk jail time to cheat a 50% tax? See why this bill is important?

“Why not let them check when you haven’t done anything wrong?” has always been dangerous philosophy. There was a time when British soldiers could enter any home in the American colonies on that premise- but our forefathers decided they would rather live in a world where just cause needed to be shown first, and that’s the world I want to live in.

When you think that doing nothing wrong can keep you safe, remember your English history. Had they had databases at the time of Queen Mary, being in the database as “Catholic” would have been safe, being “Protestant” could get you killed. Later under the reign of Queen Elizabeth things reversed. A lot of people died agonizing deaths in those times for doing nothing wrong. The odds are you won’t get burned at the stake anymore, but that doesn’t mean your personal information can’t be abused and used against you.

All nations have some rulers that were better than others. I believe it safest to never give your leaders any more power than you would like the worst of them to have. Whatever you think of the current administration, the next one could always be worse.

Additionally, I don’t like tracking spending to determine income just based on my own experience. It is not necessarily accurate.

Years ago Mr. Twist had a job that required him to travel constantly, and he frequently had to entertain customers. He traveled internationally as well as domestically, so some months he spent thousands on tickets, hotels, rental cars, restaurants, etc. All of this went on our personal credit card, which was reimbursed by his company.

It was not uncommon for his monthly reimbursement check to exceed his paycheck. We often remarked that we were glad Uncle Sam didn’t see these bills- they would wonder how we managed to charge more than we made and pay it off every month.

Where do we want it to stop if our purchases can be tracked? Do we want them analyzing our purchases for potential illegal activity?

I for one believe it safer to give this sort of information to the government on a “need to know” basis- and they don’t need to know the spending habits of the majority of law abiding, tax paying Americans.

Lastly, there is the point that Johnson made-

This has nothing to do with housing, and should be a stand alone bill based on its own merits or lack thereof- not crammed down our throats in the interest of rushing to bail out Wall Street investors- I mean suffering homeowners.

This doesn’t belong in this bill.

I agree with Jordan … Tax “Credit”.. pffft. I prefer to call them Blue Sky Interest bearing credits. (Roll the money presses!) I wonder where we can find this new tradable derivative product… a Circle K POS checkout maybe? Wake me up in decade.

They may be tricked, but it’s not a tax credit. It’s a $7,500 interest free loan from the government that gets paid back at $500 each year. If you sell or rent the house before it’s paid off (15 years), you must pay it back immediately. I also still don’t see how this money could be used as a downpayment, which is the big reason houses aren’t selling.

This would never pass on its own seeing how many people & companies do cheat on their taxes.

I don’t cheat on my taxes & anyone who does deserves to get caught

The big pocketbook bailout of the federal government comes with all the regulation strings attached. This is just the beginning.

The fed is amazed that loans were only written with housing appreciating as the standard and no rules for it depreciating. There is absolutely no penalty for walking away from your mortgage debt.

Once they take over and you get a government loan for your home that won’t be the case. Like the old school loans the IRS will follow you till you die if you walk away from a federal loan. History boys and girls, front row seat.

You use the system, you need to contribute. It will be a way to target Tax Audits. Same as you never could use cash for home purchase. This is a capital community and if you are using it, you need to pay to support it.

More important to AZ real estate is on Sept 30th. Minimum down payment goes to 3.5% and DPA (down payment assistance eliminated). 80% of transactions are FHA insured.

How about Conforming limits going to 1.15% of local Median house price? Conforming limits might be dropping in AZ and going up in CA. Many will have a window of Sept 30th or Dec 31 to act.

First time home buyers will benefit with an 7,500 tax credit.

I understand that this is a common thing now. Slip an unpopular or unrelated clause in a bill that would highly get passed. What a shame.