finknottle
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Posts posted by finknottle
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Perpetuating the urban myth that giving the wealthy tax breaks (it is really "tax spending") somehow creates this class of "job producers", ay?
The fact that they are paying less tax than ever, making record profits, while the economy continues to circle the drain means nothig I suppose. More important to save the industry of private jets, than, say, our tanking educational system...and, let me ask, didn't Obama get a ton of **** just a year ago, for extending the Bush tax cuts? Has it helped anything? Did it help anything during Bush's tenure?:
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?
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The idea that's its Obama's policies holding back job creation is hysterical. Corporate profits are booming, the fruits of which are staying at the top and not "trickling down" to the consumers.
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I think I see the source of your confusion. Corporate profits are supposed to go to shareholders and owners, not consumers.
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Well they definitely got the internet connection. Hardware is a wash. Not sure who has the better gaming kids. However, superfast connection is something that even the fastest twitchy kid can not over come. Interesting scenario
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.
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I think the drone race is going to come down to a few things. Which countries kids are the better gamers. Who has the fastest gpu for maximum fps and the best internet connection.
South Korea's gonna rule the world. Hands down.
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NEA has a state and local affiliates...but don't/can't offer any sort of services or support to teachers w/r/t school administrators (i.e. no collective bargaining, grievance resolution, arbitration - basically, they're allowed to have offices and offer discount car insurance to members.)
That's not a union any more than we are.
In fact, the GAE goes out of their way to avoid calling themselves a "union". They're an "association.".
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
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Wow I feel my heart warming already. The only problem with this idea is that we will have yet another 3rd world country on our border. Our biggest expense will be yet more illegals. Job will be even harder considering that they won't be quite as obvious. Oh well, in comparison to the liberal welfare state has to offer this is a relatively cheap and simpler problem.
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.
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This is like calling up your credit card company and screaming "Raise my credit limit already! Don't kill my lifestyle to 'save' it!"
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Sure...no problem. Let's just go find the 32 billionaires that are willing to not only shell out the several hundred million in liquid assets to start up professional football franchises, lease stadiums, employ coaches/team doctors/trainers/marketing/etc., but also shoulder the $9 billion-and-growing debt load (as of 2008 anyway) that the NFL is operating under.
Piece of cake...when does the season start?
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.
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Nah the estate tax is back for 2011 and future years at 55%. So when Ralph passes, the team gets sold.
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.
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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.
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I dislike companies that make exorbitant profits at the expense of consumers. Someone passes gas in the Middle East and oil companies raise gas prices 12 cents a gallon. Yes I'm aware that oiil prices are increasing, and why is that do you suppose.
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.
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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/
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I heard that it sucked (as movies made from great books are wont to do). It'd be nice to have some opinions from people on here, though. Enjoy!
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.
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Like I said the other day, I've been revisiting Atlas Shrugged recently. Amazing how many parallels one can draw between a 50+ year old book and today.
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.
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The choice is not Newton vs Young.
It is Newton vs Dareus + Young. Or Newton vs Miller + Young.
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But what you put forther above is NOT what Ryan proposed. Never once was it ever even implied that the lowering of the tax rate would NOT be married with closing of tax loopholes and simplification of the tax code. Not once.
You dont "lie"....you "make up stuff."
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.
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Because health care and other things government's provide are things people like, so we will pay for them
I don't understand what you mean by 'we will pay for them.'
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So you feel as though they should have their taxes lowered right now? Are you still believing that if we keep lowering tax rates for them and for their corporations that will eventually trickle down the middle-class, etc.?? You feel comfortable with everyone else taking a hit one way or another, except 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%?
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Do we really need to spend 40ish % of the world's military expenditures? Add in Britain and France (France actually counts as a net penalty) and we are over 50% I bet.
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.
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ok I can see how the Time article confused you by jumping from average to top fifty.
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:
CEO Salaries: What is the Average Salary of a CEO?By Shanon Lyon, special to PayScale.com
In 1970, CEO salary and bonus packages were typically about $700,000 - 25 times the average production worker salary; by 2000, CEO salaries had jumped to almost $2.2 million on average, 90 times the average salary of a worker, according to a 2004 study on CEO pay by Kevin J. Murphy and Jan Zabojnik. Toss in stock options and other benefits, and the salary of a CEO is nearly 500 times the average worker salary, the study says.
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.
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Maybe this quantifies it better.
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.)
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I love this board. The usual people complaining about workers, the middle-class and others. The only group of people that is hard working and deserves anything is the wealthy right? HAHA!!
Here's something for you all to bash and say how wrong it is:
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.
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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?
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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?
Raise The Debt Limit Already!
in Politics, Polls, and Pundits
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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?