She's had so much botox, her face doesn't move. Seriously, she is getting close to matching Joan Rivers on why you don't have cosmetic surgery. If she really is pissed, then that just made my day.
I guess that means I can hold onto my BAC stock into the New Year without worrying about the tax consequences. Yeah, like that's going to happen (lol).
Oh well, the stock market is going to go up some more. The rich will get richer, and the progressives will be having a collective epileptic seizure. Do I need to be carrying a spoon or something to put in their mouth?
Everybody it's a joke. I don't need to hear from the American Epileptic Foundation.
Let's see if I have Boehner, McConnell right! We are not to tax the rich more, because that will stunt job growth. Yet, the rich are getting richer, and there are fewer and fewer jobs. And, taxing the rich is a "redistribution of wealth," yet the chasm between rich and middle-class keeps widening, both wealth-wise and education-wise.
Just as a side note, when I type Boehner, my spell-checker flags it, and gives me the suggestion of "Bonehead." I just had to laugh!
This book is filled full of sobering statistics on the subject. Willy could barely read it because it pissed me off so much.
from today's rate of 35% to 39.6% will magically fix the problem?
Bernanke is right. Only 25% of Americans have at least an undergraduate degree. They make more money, and have a lower unemployment rate. Increase the 25% rate, especially in the area of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), and you move more people up the income ladder.
You are asking me to pay more in taxes so I can subsidize programs that do absolutely nothing to fix the problem. Now, if both parties approached the subject differently, i.e. we will only use the money from the tax rate increase to help subsidize a college education, specifically in the area of STEM, I wouldn't have a problem.
You live in SoCal. Would you rather give the money to LAUSD, or the UC or CSU systems? Where would you get a better return?
Raising the rate from 35% to 39.6% won't solve much, but it would be a 700 billion dollar start. Get rid of the Reagan tax cuts, and we'll really be in business.
Education isn't going to solve the problem either. When we live in a country where we're just shuffling paper around and pretending that this country is still creating wealth, then ultimately, nobody is going to get ahead.
"You are asking me to pay more in taxes so I can subsidize programs that do absolutely nothing to fix the problem."
Not even! No matter how much you or I pay in taxes, neither of us should have to pay for something that doesn't work. Having worked in industry; the automotive and high-tech, and in research and design departments, I know that there is an amount of money you can spend on a project (not enough) and guarantee that the product will fail. That's what we do with government programs, particularly those helping the lower and middle-class. They cost a lot of money, but not enough money is spent in order to make them projects where there is a return on investment, or remedy to the problem they're meant to address.
No, we all need to get of our butts (I know there are plenty doing so already), step away from the WWIII Wresting, or reality TV, or sports or whatever, and get involved in our local governments, and keep an eye on our legislative representatives, and hold them accountable for their dumb mistakes.
Obama just announced a tax compromise that keeps the tax rates for 2 more years, including the capital gains rate @ 15%, plus extending the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Making Work Pay credit. I'll never understand the latter two. If you don't pay any Federal Income tax, you get money back from the Federal govt. That's not a tax credit, but welfare.
Oh well, the Progressive Left must be really pissed. Their view of a "just society", or "shared responsibility", or "social justice", has been put on hold for 2 years. I wonder if Bill Clinton paid a visit to Obama, and gave him a 1994 tutorial?
I have always hoped against hope that Obama would pull a page from the Bill Clinton playbook, maybe he has just done so?
Truth be told, with the slate of potential GOP candidates looking as dour as they do, I would settle for split control of Congress with a Clinton-like Obama as POTUS.
I hear Pelosi is livid. anything that pisses her off this badly has got to be good for the country. lol
She's had so much botox, her face doesn't move. Seriously, she is getting close to matching Joan Rivers on why you don't have cosmetic surgery. If she really is pissed, then that just made my day.
I guess that means I can hold onto my BAC stock into the New Year without worrying about the tax consequences. Yeah, like that's going to happen (lol).
Oh well, the stock market is going to go up some more. The rich will get richer, and the progressives will be having a collective epileptic seizure. Do I need to be carrying a spoon or something to put in their mouth?
Everybody it's a joke. I don't need to hear from the American Epileptic Foundation.
I have to confess, between QE and this pretty decent tax compromise, Obama has put himself in as "good" (relatively speaking of course) a position to get re-elected as possible.
Many people, possibly even me, will see this as a wholesale shift to the center for Obama. These middle of the road voters are the ones he needs to attract to get re-elected. The loony left will always vote Dem, regardless of how reluctantly, but they won't get the massive turnout they got in 2008. The stupid people that truly thought that Obama would fix all their problems are already completely disillusioned and won't be headed back to the polls again any time soon.
If Obama can reinvent himself as a pragmatic moderate, he can and will get reelected. WTF, he might even get my vote (ala Bill Clinton) if it looks like the GOP will control Congress.
I think, will extend the unemployment benefits a bit longer, and hopefully create a little more stability, so as to get employers more comfortable in adding to their work-force. I hope.
The problem with progressives is, few people, who they supposedly back proposals and programs for, haven any idea who they are and what they stand for.
The chasm doesn't exist because of "lack of taxes." It exists because of artificial barriers put in place legislatively that protect those already in a business from new people getting into that line of work.
Don't believe me?
Find out what it cost to start a drug, oil or chemical company in 1900 and what it would cost today in inflation-adjusted dollars.
MINIMUM cost right now to bring a new drug to market and meet FDA requirements (which even now only depend on self-reporting of ADRs) is 100M.
You want to close that gulf?
Start with the Code of Federal Regulations and effing clean house. Make it so Joe Employee has some shot at becoming Joe Entrepreneur or Joe Proprietor and the whole situation changes.
This slavish devotion to employeeism as opposed to producerism is failing to think outside the socialist box.
What companies can compete against the like of Haliburton, Eli/Lily, Kraft, etc.? They have the money and the banks backing them up in developing the technological, equipment and teams, to bid for government contracts or to dominate a major portion of a market. The smaller companies cannot compete with them, and such giants help write the legislation that develops the rules that eliminate competition.
Once we decided it was Constitutional for the fedgov to regulate practically everything from flush toilets to turn signals, it was only natural for some entities to turn to government as a way of dealing with competitors.
Do you have any idea how many car companies existed in America 100 years ago? Gobs and gobs of them. Same thing with drug companies, etc.
So now we've gone down the primrose path.
But I disagree that small companies can't compete with large. Large companies may benefit from certain economies of scale, but only up to a point. Once they exceed a certain size, the mere machinery of managing something so big adds costs and inefficiencies.
I effectively compete with some of the largest companies imaginable in a couple of realms -- but they are also realms that are largely unregulated by comparison to major industries.
One example is organic agriculture. I am able to sell my organic produce at lower cost than major corporations, without even needing to use migrant farm labor, etc.
Of course, the Food Safety Modernization Act (S 510) endorsed by Monsanto is intended to erect so much infrastructural fixed cost that I will go out of business. So stay tuned for yet more small farm destruction.
But I also compete effectively in a couple of other unrelated fields. (I never put all my eggs in one or two baskets!)
Small companies CAN be competitive because they can be more nimble, employ techniques that are more effective at a smaller scale and don't scale well to larger corporations, have lower overhead, exploit niches that can't be served effectively by a behemoth, etc.
I own a few businesses, and every one of them was started cash out of pocket. I have never sought or used a business loan in my life. I hate banks. LOL
The only thing keeping small companies from making cars, starting refineries and all kinds of stuff right now is regulations.
Now, some regulations are needed in some cases. But most of them exist just to make smaller businesses impractical. An example is the CALEA requirements on ISPs. They make it harder for smaller ISPs to be profitable.
But, I've worked in small high-tech. companies who could not get the funding to compete with giants like Haliburton, KBR, Parsons, Brown & Root, etc. If the tools are so big and expensive only the giants can get the financial backing to make them, then the small company goes looking for the crumbs the giants don't want to bother with. That's not always all bad. But, it usually means you have to work a lot harder, and with a lot smaller cushion.
I'm not sure if you are familiar with the economic philosophy of Distributism, but the gist of it is that rather than the means of production being held by a few or by a collective; they should be as widely distributed as possible so that as much as practical, each person owns his/her own "means of production."
Distributists lobbied for the creation of credit unions, for example; and also for the legislation giving tax benefits to ESOP (employee stock ownership program) companies. (Examples of ESOPs would be Bob's Red Mill and King Arthur Flour).
The core idea is that of an economy that serves the population, rather than a population that serves the economy. It supports the idea of a Free Market while counteracting the massive differentials in wealth distribution inherent in finance capitalism.
In theory, for most industries, there would be a tax setup so that the bigger you are, the more tax you pay up to the point where it makes no sense to grow an enterprise past a certain size. This would automatically leave room in the market for competition and the innovation that engenders.
Of course, some industries require investments so huge that such regulations on size would make them impossible. But such huge industries tend to concentrate wealth such that pretty soon they rule the regulators. To still allow for competition while avoiding the concentrations of wealth; industries that are essentially "too big to fail" would be owned by the state. (Not the national government, but be state governments.) This would still allow for competition between similar entities in other states.
For an example of this working well in which government-owned versions of such enterprises can be more efficient than the privately owned equivalents; please look at municipal cable and Internet companies. They tend to deliver more bang for the buck, are completely funded by revenues rather than taxes, and deliver better customer service.
A corollary to all of this is simultaneous protectionism. We cannot expect an economy oriented toward spreading ownership as widely as possible to compete in terms of monetary efficiency with systems based on child slave labor and the like.
So the economy becomes more insular, big companies get divided into smaller companies; more companies are ESOPS and many more people own the actual means of production. There is STILL a free market with all of the good that comes from a free market; while certain limits tend to abolish the worst aspects of such a market in terms of accumulation of power.
There ARE some problems with any idea, and Distributism is no exception, but it has some ideas that merit examination, IMHO.
I don't know much about Distributism, but it sounds a hell of a lot like David Schweickart's Economic Democracy model. The means of production is owned by everyone.
Participatory Economics, or PARECON is a similar model, but it eliminates markets entirely, and replaces it with democratic decision making.
Here's a debate between Schweichart and Michael Albert (one of the two developers of PARECON) that I think you'll find interesting.
like large cap industrials, and aerospace and defense. But just look at this link of venture capital firms providing initial funding for nascent companies in technology, energy, life sciences, media, and communications. Now within this list, go to the websites of Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. I think you will be very impressed by the incubation of small companies, and how they grow into large companies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_venture_capital_firms
I've always thought the purpose of a lot of our economy is to prevent competition through the establishment and maintainence of semi-monopolies.
Even looking at the corporate income tax laws, you can see how very large businesses are given tax breaks that medium sized businesses can't enjoy.
We haven't supported small mom and pop type businesses in a long time in this country, and I think it's been to our dire detriment. But that's all just another aspect of the class war.