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09-16-2010, 10:01 AM   #16
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Gene,
Yes I can hit a button twice when I think once.
Parallax,
Uh uh bama is a graduate whose area is public speaking. You're supposed to unlearn those behaviors. Apparently the messiah was asleep on those days.
Mr Bones,
I know. I wasn't making fun of

---------- Post added 09-16-10 at 09:06 AM ----------

studders but the fact he all of a sudden talks like Winston Churchill on prepared material. Many studders also do the same. Like singing, they don't do it.
Oh yeah, politicians and celebrities are fair game. Look at how if you make a cartoon of Bush as a

---------- Post added 09-16-10 at 09:07 AM ----------

chimp nothing happens. But show an employee working the line, you get sued and lose.

09-16-2010, 10:09 AM   #17
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QuoteOriginally posted by troglodyte Quote
Gene,
Parallax,
Uh uh bama is a graduate whose area is public speaking. You're supposed to unlearn those behaviors. Apparently the messiah was asleep on those days.
.........
Okay, got it. It is acceptable to make fun of people for things that they choose to do (or not do).
09-19-2010, 08:21 AM   #18
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Some more color on the "Hurts Small Business & Costs Jobs" argument about the top tax bracket.

QuoteQuote:
Despite that emotional appeal, Internal Revenue Service statistics indicate that only 3 percent of small businesses would be subject to the higher tax, and many studies of previous tax increases suggest that it would have minimal impact on hiring.

According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, 97 percent of all businesses owners do not earn enough to be subject to the higher rates, which would be levied on income of over $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for families.

Even among the 750,000 businesses that would be subjected to the higher rates in 2011, many are sole proprietors — a classification so amorphous it can include everyone from corporate executives who earn income on rental property to entertainers, hedge fund managers and investment bankers. Because 80 percent of America’s 32 million businesses are sole proprietorships, 90 percent of the tax cut would be derived from businesses without employees.

Trade groups lobbying to extend the tax break for wealthy Americans argue that when hobbyists and home-based enterprises are removed from the equation, the total number of businesses affected is closer to 8 percent. Those companies are responsible for nearly half of all business revenue generated in the country, and according to the conservative American Enterprise Institute, would be less likely to invest or hire if subjected to higher rates.

But much of the research over the last two decades has found that increases in top tax rates can lead to an increase in the formation of small businesses, as wealthy individuals apparently begin start-ups to avail themselves of the more generous tax breaks offered to businesses.

“Higher taxes may lead individuals to seek self-employment because the opportunities for tax evasion and avoidance are greater,” according to a report released this month by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, which surveyed more than 20 studies on the effects of taxes on hiring.

The intensity of the debate is a testament to the place that small businesses hold in the culture as a symbol of American ingenuity. That reverence has grown stronger in recent decades, as the decline of large manufacturers has made the economy rely on start-ups and small businesses to create jobs and entire growth industries.

But the way the I.R.S. classifies small businesses is vastly different from the public perception of the neighborhood dry cleaner or the small tool-and-die shop. A report released by the Joint Tax Committee in July found that many of the tax returns categorized as small businesses were actually filed by wealthy taxpayers who earned business income through limited partnerships or S corporations to allow their firms to avoid paying corporate taxes.

The study found that in 2005, 19,000 of those small businesses had revenue of more than $50 million.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/18/business/smallbusiness/18smallbiz.html?_r=...torship&st=cse
09-19-2010, 09:59 AM   #19
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QuoteOriginally posted by Nesster Quote
Some more color on the "Hurts Small Business & Costs Jobs" argument about the top tax bracket.



http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/18/business/smallbusiness/18smallbiz.html?_r=...torship&st=cse
No, no no more FACTS.......... those tax "cuts" to the 3% will create BILLIONS of high paying, benefit rich, pension packed jobs........ can't you see how it worked the last 10 years.......



Last edited by jeffkrol; 09-19-2010 at 01:26 PM.
09-20-2010, 06:38 AM   #20
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QuoteOriginally posted by jeffkrol Quote
No, no no more FACTS.......... those tax "cuts" to the 3% will create BILLIONS of high paying, benefit rich, pension packed jobs........ can't you see how it worked the last 10 years.......
NPR had a very interesting story exploring this last week.

QuoteQuote:
It turns out that the expiration of the tax cuts would affect only about 2 percent of small businesses. But, most small businesses are very small — a hot dog vendor, a housecleaner, a guy selling T-shirts on eBay. They don't make anywhere near the $250,000 income threshold.

But when you look at small businesses that actually hire sizable numbers of workers — 30, 50, or 100 people — many more of those businesses would see a tax increase.

The National Association of Manufacturers says 73 percent of its member companies file taxes as individuals. Their average profit is close to $600,000. So many of them would see their taxes go up. By another measure, about 50 percent of all small-business profits would be affected by the expiration of the tax cut.
It seems like what they are talking about is s-corps, maybe it will be more attractive to re-incorporate as an LLC or regular corporation.

An interesting statistic that I once came across in a business textbook was the proportion of businesses broken down by type (Sole Proprietorship, Partnerships, Corporations) and profits in America. I can't look it up now so here are the ball parks.

Proprieterships were ~80% of businesses but reported less than 10% of all profits
Partnerships (traditionally lawyers, accountants, and doctors) were ~15% of businesses and reported ~30% of profits
Corporations were only 5% of businesses but reported ~60% of profits

QuoteQuote:
No Ferraris In The Parking Lot

The vast majority of the business' profit does not go into the owners' pockets, Donnelly says. That's because they constantly need to buy new technology and equipment to stay ahead of competitors in China and around the world. Donnelly points to one giant machine after another around the factory floor, which cost $300,000 to $400,000 each.

"Well, there's your profits," Donnelly says. Carl Pasciuto agrees: "It's not like we have any Ferraris out in the parking lot."

The brothers keep far less than the $250,000 limit. But since their business' paper profit gets lumped in with their income, the business would still see a tax hike.

"It may be the difference between adding on to your workforce next year or making it smaller," Michael Pasciuto says.
Businesses like this might do much better in another form or with some tax planning, so I do wonder whether this story is accurate or whether these guys haven't consulted an accountant. I also wonder if anyone at the CBO projecting the numbers on personal income tax rates has accounted for businesses transforming their legal status in their revenue models.

These guys could easily be a corporation, pay themselves whatever salary they choose to pay themselves, and leave the retained earnings in the business at a 34% corporate tax rate up to $10 million. If they are buying $300K pieces of equipment they can either capitalize it and depreciate it over time or they can expense it. I think that increased personal taxes will definitely be a headache for some small businesses like this, but in no way will it affect them as adversely as the politicians pretend it will nor will it be as negligible as some of the liberal press pretend it will be.

In the end the people that will benefit the most from this is probably tax lawyers.

Whither Small Businesses? The Debate Over Tax Cuts : NPR
09-21-2010, 02:56 PM   #21
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Newest editions 2 point plan

The whole thing is worth reading carefully........

QuoteQuote:
The case against a tax-rate freeze

The opposing view is that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for the top-earning 3 percent of Americans won't affect their spending and investing enough to drag down the economy.

Obama, also in Ohio recently, argued that middle-class Americans need a tax break more than the wealthy do. "These families are the ones who saw their wages and incomes flat-line over the last decade. You deserve a break," he said.

Obama maintained that job creation worked fine under President Clinton, with the same top tax rates that the White House wants to return to.

Some opponents of a tax-rate freeze also reason this way: If a core problem for business leaders is uncertainty about future policy, a two-year hiatus from tax changes is at best a partial fix. CEOs making long-term decisions would still be unsure about taxes for Year 3 and beyond.

Ms. Rogers argues that the best confidence boost on the tax front will come from deeper tax-code reforms, rather than a wholesale embrace of the tax cuts. "The Bush tax cuts are far from the best kind of stimulus," she says. "How does that instill confidence for [Obama] to turn around and say, 'That's my tax policy too?' "

Over the course of this decade, allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for high-income Americans would help reduce federal debt – saving nearly $700 billion by White House estimates
Republicans' two-point plan to create jobs: Can it work? - CSMonitor.com
Hammering it home..........
QuoteQuote:
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, speaking on MSNBC on the second anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse, again insisted the government didn't have the tools to rescue the bank as he also called for Republicans to give up on extending tax cuts for families earning over $250,000. Geithner said extending tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans would cost $700 billion, which he called fiscally irresponsible, and he said the $250,000 line was one drawn by President Bush as he brushed off calls for compromise. Geithner wasn't asked about Japan's yen intervention.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/geithner-government-couldnt-rescue-lehman-2010-09-15
http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/bartiromo/2010-09-20-geithner20_CV_N.htm
QuoteQuote:
You have to judge these things against the alternatives. And what the president's program did, alongside what the Federal Reserve did, is bring a measure of stability to house prices much more quickly than people thought. If you look at where the market thought house prices would go at the beginning of 2009, people thought they might fall another 30%. And what happened is they stabilized because we were able to bring mortgage interest rates down to very low levels, and that helped slow the pace of erosion.

House prices have been reasonably stable for more than a year. Mortgage interest rates are very low. Housing is much more affordable than it's been in a really long time.

But there's still a huge backlog of foreclosures working their way through the system. Now, we can't reach everybody, and a lot of those foreclosures are people with a jumbo (mortgage), it's a relatively expensive home, it's a second home, it's an investor-owned property or it's a family that can't prove income. We just don't think it's fair to ask the American people to use their money, their hard-earned resources, to try to extend the benefits of these programs to people who ended up just living way beyond their means.

I do not agree with people who think that we should be stepping back from the housing market. That would be a mistake. It would be really unfair to all the innocent victims of this crisis.

Last edited by jeffkrol; 09-21-2010 at 07:33 PM.
09-22-2010, 07:14 AM   #22
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QuoteOriginally posted by jeffkrol Quote
The opposing view is that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for the top-earning 3 percent of Americans won't affect their spending and investing enough to drag down the economy.
My plan to cope with it is to negotiate a raise of at least 5% after tax next year if the tax rates increase.

That should help accelerate the income inequality issue that the liberals gripe about too

09-22-2010, 10:01 AM   #23
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An interesting take on all this... from the Financial Times
FT.com / Markets / Insight - Non-US groups reaped fruits of Bush tax cuts

QuoteQuote:
Non-US groups reaped fruits of Bush tax cuts

Yet in the debate, it seems of no moment to either side whether the tax cuts were effective in achieving their goal of spurring business investment and making the US economy more competitive.

Our own examination of US non-residential investment indicates that the reduction in capital gains tax rates failed to spur US business investment and failed to improve US economic competitiveness.

The 2000s – that is, the period immediately following the Bush tax cuts – were the weakest decade in US postwar history for real non-residential capital investment.

Not only were the 2000s by far the weakest period, but the tax cuts did not even curtail the secular slowdown in the growth of business structures.

Rather, the slowdown accelerated into a full decline.

During each decade from the 1950s to the 1990s, growth in real gross non-residential investment averaged between 3.5 per cent and 7.4 per cent per decade. During the 2000s, it averaged a mere 1 per cent.

Similarly, the growth rate for investment in equipment and software ranged from 5.7 per cent to 9.9 per cent in these earlier decades. It averaged 1.9 per cent during the 2000s.

Average growth in non-residential structures ranged from 1.3 per cent to 5.7 per cent from the 1950s to the 1990s. During the 2000s, it declined by 0.8 per cent.

The stated goal of cutting taxes to spur US capital investment was not achieved.
A big ouch! there... the article goes on...

QuoteQuote:
Where did the benefit of the tax cuts go?

We have maintained that an increasing proportion of the benefits of US monetary and fiscal policy are leaking outside the US.

Washington sets policy as if the US were a closed economic system and rarely considers ramifications outside the country.

The consensus regarding the negative effects of rising tax rates on US stocks suggests that investors also might not adequately consider policy leakage when formulating strategies.

The Bush tax cuts may have encouraged capital flight from the US because the dollar was weak and capital – including incremental funds in taxpayers’ pockets – tends to flow to stronger currencies.

In a weak dollar environment, US policymakers must consider whether a tax cut’s positive effects on the US economy might be muted relative to its collaterally positive effects on stronger-currency economies.

Record flows to emerging market debt and equity funds, coupled with anaemic US investment spending, suggest that this might be an issue.
QuoteQuote:
Business investment data demonstrate that the Bush tax cuts failed to achieve their goal of spurring productive US investment and that this failure has contributed to the poor performance of US stocks.

In a strong dollar environment, the cuts might have encouraged incremental taxpayer savings to flow into US companies, reducing their cost of capital, boosting their return on capital and driving their stock values higher.

Instead, in the weak dollar environment of the times, the cuts leaked abroad and boosted return on capital outside the US.


By so boosting non-US companies’ return on capital relative to that of US companies, the tax cuts made US companies that much less attractive and had the opposite of their intended effect.

It is possible that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire might damage non-US investment prospects more than those of the US.
09-22-2010, 10:15 AM   #24
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The disconnect between the financial sector and the rest of the economy appears to be growing, as is the disconnect between low taxes on the wealthy and domestic economic growth.
09-23-2010, 09:29 AM   #25
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2 years ago, the economy was tanking. Gasoline was almost $5 a gallon. I watched my savings in my 401K evaporate at the rate of $500 a week at one point. With winter approaching, many people had visions of a Dr. Zhivago scene. Well, my 401K came back and has even gone up above where it was. I can afford to drive my car and heat my home. So it's mid term elections and and the "Party that screwed us all" wants us to believe it's all Obama's and the Democrats fault? I'm getting older but my memory hasn't failed.
09-23-2010, 04:53 PM   #26
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So when the rich are all poor who are you going to tax for your welfare check, who is the government going to tax to keep the airconditioning on in the white house?
09-23-2010, 05:05 PM   #27
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QuoteOriginally posted by captmacq Quote
So when the rich are all poor who are you going to tax for your welfare check, who is the government going to tax to keep the airconditioning on in the white house?
???? for the rich to be all poor the tax rate would have to be astronomical, do you realize how much we'd have to tax Gates and Buffet to get all their money (most of which isn't income and therefore not subject to income tax)???

Also, the tax doesn't = welfare check. The government is not purely a steal from the rich and give to the poor operation, you know, it does stuff like defends us, ensures our safety and liberty, pays for the courts, schools, roads... The tax increase that's spoken about will make nobody already rich suddenly poor, nor will it write $700 billion in welfare checks... it will pay down the deficits.
09-23-2010, 08:57 PM   #28
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QuoteOriginally posted by Nesster Quote
???? for the rich to be all poor the tax rate would have to be astronomical, do you realize how much we'd have to tax Gates and Buffet to get all their money (most of which isn't income and therefore not subject to income tax)???

Also, the tax doesn't = welfare check. The government is not purely a steal from the rich and give to the poor operation, you know, it does stuff like defends us, ensures our safety and liberty, pays for the courts, schools, roads... The tax increase that's spoken about will make nobody already rich suddenly poor, nor will it write $700 billion in welfare checks... it will pay down the deficits.
Or we could stop spending.

O BTW 1 year after Bush cut taxes the income to the us Treasury increased by 25%.
The same happened when Reagan did it. Now what happened to all that money.

Go ahead take all the money from the top 5% in the U.S. (they dont need it caint spend it, we have a right to take there property any way). put it up to run the goverment. you will be broke again in less than a week.
09-24-2010, 07:58 AM   #29
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QuoteOriginally posted by captmacq Quote
Or we could stop spending.

O BTW 1 year after Bush cut taxes the income to the us Treasury increased by 25%.
The same happened when Reagan did it. Now what happened to all that money.

Go ahead take all the money from the top 5% in the U.S. (they dont need it caint spend it, we have a right to take there property any way). put it up to run the goverment. you will be broke again in less than a week.
Federal revenues went down drastically after the first Bush tax cut and went up gradually after the second (not 25% after the first year), but dropped precipitously a few years later. Government Taxes and Revenue Chart in United States 2000-2014 - Federal State Local
09-24-2010, 08:07 AM   #30
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Also, as I point out here:
https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/political-religious-discussion/113357-red...ml#post1181532

tax cuts do not correlate with economic growth, and therefore the rationale that lower taxes result in much higher economic activity and therefore tax revenues is also proven wrong.

The kind of sky-is-falling thinking that a couple of point difference in tax rates for the very high earning is the same as total socialism, let's make all the rich people poor, is simply untrue and an emotional gambit designed to distract people's attention.

If Pentax raises its prices by 3%, does any rational person say: go ahead, might as well raise them 100% and take my old camera too?

---

On the other side of the deficit coin, just what and how should spending be cut? What specific programs, by how much, and by when?
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