finknottle

Supposed to do? Isn't that why the shareholders and owners pay income tax? Or are they also supposed to distribute cash directly to the consumers? I'm guessing you have a job. When you get a raise, do you offer to give some of it back to your employer?

Bush faced the dot-com bubble followed by the 9-11 attacks, and the accompanying uncertaintity. How can you be so sure that the Bush tax cuts didn't prevent a collapse of the economy? You know, create or save millions of jobs?

I think I see the source of your confusion. Corporate profits are supposed to go to shareholders and owners, not consumers.

It's the 24-7 training. Gaming appears much more mainstreamed there. Kids can earn 100k gaming professionally, there are gaming TV channels which show the stars playing, and in the cities there are seemingly gaming places on every block. Whenever you read a news blurb about excesses of gaming - some kid going 72 hours straight, for example - its usually in Korea.

South Korea's gonna rule the world. Hands down.

Not part of the NEA at all. The teachers in question are the Atlanta Federation of Teachers, Local 1565, part of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The AFT is the second largest education union after the NEA, and is a broader union. They represent a greater variety of education-related groups outside of K-12 teachers such as bus drivers, graduate students, etc, and are historically more militant. For the record, AFT raised questions at the end of 2005. http://www.ajc.com/news/volume-3-conclusions-why-1000781.html

Too late, California is already looking 3rd World. The exodus to Texas of the employable has already started. And New York to the South has been underway for decades.

This is like calling up your credit card company and screaming "Raise my credit limit already! Don't kill my lifestyle to 'save' it!"

Nonsense - the players themselves have more than enough money to start their own league, with equity as salary. They would be playing in lousy stadiums, but so what? And a television deal would not be hard - they wouldn't get any money at first, but they would get great national exposure. And if they could keep it together for 5 years, the money would come. The problem is that they would soon find out just how important they really are to the NFL. It would be them, in new teams and minor league stadiums, against the historical NFL franchises, run by actual businessmen and restocked with the latest shiny new players from the college ranks. I think they would be finished in two years and they know it.

To make it painfully clear, if your rich uncle ever dies and leaves you a sports franchise, you'll need to raise $350 million dollars to pay the taxes. That's alot of money to borrow. The team better be pretty darn profitable, because interest alone will cost you at least $15 million dollars a year.

I just watched the debate on youtube. I generally prefer the early debates, as they tend to be freash and a bit more interesting. My thoughts (ignoring policy specifics): The two 'establishment' candidates (not exactly an accurate label. Maybe 'seen as semi-viable' might be better) were Pawlenty and Santorum. I thought Pawlenty was uninspiring, and his repetitive references to his upbringing only made him come off like a stereotype politician trying to force a narritive. Santorum was a bit better, showing some fire when defending his social conservatism. But still nothing to get excited about. The fringe candidates all performed better. I think its no accident this year that they are all liberatarians of competing stripes. Ron Paul was, well, Ron Paul. He toned down the gold-bug hyperventelating, and came off reasonably well. Johnson was particularly interesting. He was so relaxed and informal as to be very off-putting. But when you got beyond that, he had genuinely interesting things to say. The big surprise for me was Herman Cain. Good speaker (even when fumbling over his words), and he effectively drove home his business-approach theme. I thought the debate itself was excellent. The questioners (Fox News) challenged each of them hard on their records and their viability, without playing gotcha or offering softballs, and pressed them on answers to the questions asked.

Why is that an exorbitant profit? What should its profit be? Let's do some basic math. The company is currently valued at $424.5 billion. It made $10.65 billion last quarter. If it can keep that up for a year, it will have earned $42.6 billion. That means it makes a 10% profit this year. A very good return, but hardly exorbitant. Tell me: if you bought a business for $500,000, would you consider an annual profit of $50,000 exorbitant? Would $5,000 a year be fairer to you and the consumers? Complaining about profit without reference to the size of the company is absurd.

Is this an April Fools joke? Or is this our idea of Diplomacy? http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42824884/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/

Speaking as someone who was partly into his first reading of the book when I saw the movie, and enjoying it very much: I thought the movie was somewhere between disappointing and sucky. I fear that it will tarnish the books reputation. The movie missed what is for me a very important nuance. BigGov advocates were portrayed in a very obvious and cartoonish manner, with everything they said patently absurd. It should have portrayed their philosophy of justice and fairness in a more compelling manner, and they should have appeared to more genuinely believe what they say. The viewer needs to infer for themselves that the philosophy of fairness is an enticing first step whose logical conclusion is the stifling of creativity. In other words, instead of saying "BigGov types start out as well-meaning fools who altruistically sow the seeds of their societies destruction," the movie simply says "BigGov types are greedy and corrupt" with an inadequate explanation of how things got that way. As a result, the movie came off to me a bit like a Micheal Moore film, preaching to the choir. And for that reason, I fear an open-minded person is likely to discount the philosophy and take a pass on reading the book. [Note - I have not finished the book, but I find it hard to believe that the message is going to be that looters are born venal and lazy rather than corrupted by the state.] A few random comments: I thought the sets were above-budget, and the visuals quite good. The individual actors were hit-and-miss, mostly well-casted. The dialog was awkward, owing to their decision to faithfully follow it from the book.

I started reading it a few weeks ago, and it really resonates (I got side-tracked and am only 400 pages in). I am most struck by how the dialog of today's left, on issues such as justness and fairness, could have come straight out of the book. Between this link and the Boeing ruling, I'm not sure I even need to finish it.

The choice is not Newton vs Young. It is Newton vs Dareus + Young. Or Newton vs Miller + Young.

Lowering taxes is not the focus of his plan, that's the spin. He raises the issue more as a 'while we're at it we'll fix the tax code.' As you point out, Tax Reform is explicitely intended to be revenue neutral in Ryan's plan, with lower rates a by-product. Specifically: simplify the code, get rid of all the deductions, and lower the rates to compensate.

I don't understand what you mean by 'we will pay for them.'

Taking a hit = taking less money from somebody else. We are still waiting on a definition of fairness. What is the 'fair' amount of money a society should take away from its most successfull earners? 40%? 70%? 90%?

Neither want to side-track the discussion nor debate whether or not the military can be cut, but a pet peeve of mine is the use of the statistics comparing US military expenditures to those of the world. Because of currency and standards of living, it is comparing apples to oranges. The same weaponry cost the US far more than it does China or Russia built in their country. And consider how much a US soldier costs. There is salary, war-zone pay, moving allowences, health-care, etc ... all at US rates. And then there are post-service things like education and life-time VA benefits. That's all part of the US military budget. Now ask what it costs China (or indeed, a poorer country) per soldier. I read recently that China raised enlisted pay 50%, to $120 a month! And I'm guessing their forces don't get anything like the housing allowances our do. Factoring in post-service expenses, employing an American soldier probably costs a hundred times what it does in any non-European country. Put another way, China could build a military twice as strong as the US, and it would probably cost them half the price.

Easy to be confused when you are talking about two different things. Or didn't you understand that they were different? I found the excerpt quite telling: It made me curious - the idea that in 2000 CEO salaries averaged $2.2 million is preposterous, considering the huge number of companies whose total revenues are only a million or two. So I found the original Murphy and Zabojnik paper and sure enough, they were not talking about average CEO compensation but rather the 800 largest US companies (public or privately held). Their data set morphed into 'average CEO' through the reporting of media commentators such as you referenced. It appears this analytical affliction is fairly common in certain circles.

Are you kidding? That just compounds the analytical error - rather than 100, it compares only the highest 50 of one set to the average of the other. (Apologies if you were satirizing the logic abilities of the left and it went over my head.)

I clicked a graph at random, coming up with a comparison of average worker salary to that of the 100 top CEO's over time. Shocking disparity. But anybody with a brain knows immediately that that isn't a fair comparison. A fair comparison is average CEO compensation to average worker compensation. And the vast majority of CEO's are not getting millions. An the other hand, suppose we flipped things. What if you compared the average CEO compensation over time to the compensation of the 100 top-paid unionized employees - I'm guessing they would mostly be drawn from the NBA, MLB, and NFL. I'm also guessing that the charts would look pretty much the same, with the roles reversed. Absolutely shocking. Something must be done.

David Stockman is second only to Joe Biden in having staken his reputation on the wrong side of the biggest issues of his political career. Why is anyone even reading this?

I don't understand the outrage, particularly from the left. The government uses the tax code to shape the market by rewarding desired behavior. Want more electric cars? Provide a rebate. Want companies to invest in windmills? Provide a tax credit. Ok, so GE has fully embraced the governments agenda, and has reoriented themselves to do what the government wants as defined by government credits. So now the government is supposed to be mad at GE for investing in windmills?