Thread: Stop Coddling the super Rich

I knew Buffet was an asshole when he said we should rich people should pay more... Seems that he should at least pay what was owed to begin with.

This one’s truly, uh ... rich: Billionaire Warren Buffett says folks like him should have to pay more taxes -- but it turns out his firm, Berkshire Hathaway, hasn’t paid what it’s already owed for years.

That’s right: As Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson notes, the company openly admits that it owes back taxes since as long ago as 2002.

Mark Levin

There also seems to be a lot of other "rich" people that are close to Obama that haven't paid jack shit..

Originally Posted by headbanger

I knew Buffet was an asshole when he said we should rich people should pay more... Seems that he should at least pay what was owed to begin with.


Mark Levin

There also seems to be a lot of other "rich" people that are close to Obama that haven't paid jack shit..

Good find, which makes his loss leader of bailing on America's future promises as his #1 agenda stand out even more.

Obama's quite the tool and he protects his Wall Street and corporate buds from having to pay taxes.

Originally Posted by Stangler

Your point is that Reagan instituted policies that resulted in a massive increase in the income gap between the top 1% and the rest?

I am impressed to see you coming around.

So what? They're paying more than they did. You want them to pay less?

Originally Posted by Stangler

Wait, powerful people know one another?

Since when?

Networking is how things get done. However when it appears that the business associates get special benefits from a position of power ... like protection from legal prosecution for example ... it might not be so appropriate. But then that's how government works and its expected that we should accept such shiftiness. Also if these buddies don't have to pay taxes, why should our small businesses have to pay taxes?

I guess its just knowing one another.

Eight of the 10 firms not only did not pay taxes; they received large refunds. The 10 companies scored combined U.S. profits of $26.8 billion.
Immelt made $15.2 million last year, with GE's $3.3 billion tax benefit accounting for more than half of the 10 companies total tax benefit.
Cote scored $15.2 million in pay last year, while Honeywell secured a $471 million tax benefit.
International Paper CEO John Faraci made $12.3 million last year, as his company scored a $249 million federal tax refund despite bringing in $198 million in pre-tax U.S. profits. Obama invited Faraci to travel with him to Brazil this year for the signing of a preliminary trade deal.

People who rely on their portfolios relish the symbiotioc relationship; morality and legality have nothing to do with it.

The greatest way we coddle the wealthy elite ... failed free trade policy, Americas economy killer. Which killed Britains economy in the 1800's.

/www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-fletcher/free-trade-us-unemployment_b_945805.html

Free trade may have been the cheapest move for Portuguese consumers in the short run, but it was a dead-end in the long run. This is why every single ex-Third World nation -- a category ranging from England 200 years ago to South Korea today -- has been protectionist.

Britain, prior to her adoption of free trade starting in the 1840s, was the world's leading economic power, birthplace of the industrial revolution and center of a worldwide empire. But she had attained this position not by practicing free trade, rather under a now-largely-forgotten protectionist policy that has come down to us under the name "mercantilism."

But after Britain embraced free trade beginning in 1846, this all began to fall apart, and Britain entered her long economic decline that has since reduced her to a minor economy heavily indebted to former colonies.

The rising powers of this era? Protectionist nations like Germany, the United States, and later, Japan.

In 1703, in the Treaty of Methuen, Portugal exempted England from its prohibition on the importation of woolen cloth, while England agreed to admit Portuguese wines at a tariff one-third less than that applied to competitors. This treaty merely switched suppliers for the English, who did not produce wine, but it admitted a deluge of cheap English cloth into Portugal, which wiped out its previously promising textile industry.

America right now is being inexorably stripped of its most valuable industries by its naïve embrace of one-sided free trade. Here's the Harvard Business Review's list of industries we have already lost:

Fabless chips; compact fluorescent lighting; LCDs for monitors, TVs and handheld devices like mobile phones; electrophoretic displays; lithium ion, lithium polymer and NiMH batteries; advanced rechargeable batteries for hybrid vehicles; crystalline and polycrystalline silicon solar cells, inverters and power semiconductors for solar panels; desktop, notebook and netbook PCs; low-end servers; hard-disk drives; consumer networking gear such as routers, access points, and home set-top boxes; advanced composite used in sporting goods and other consumer gear; advanced ceramics and integrated circuit packaging.

Can a developed nation hang onto key industries in the face of cheap-labor foreign competition? Sure. Neither Japan nor Germany, nor their imitators from Taiwan to Switzerland, have suffered our chronic deindustrialization. Our unemployment rate right now is 9.2 percent; Germany's is 6.1 and Japan's is 4.7. General Motors went bankrupt, not Toyota or Mercedes.

The causes of these nations' industrial success are complex, but one thing they all have in common is that they do not actually practice free trade (whatever they may say in public to gull Uncle Sam). They practice managed trade by a dozen different means, starting with currency manipulation and deeply embedded in the behind-the-scenes understandings their corporations have with their banks, governments, and unions. Many of their trade barriers are not actual laws, and thus lurk below the surface to casual examination. For example, in the words of commentator William Greider:

This is the way the world of international trade really works.

America doesn't need to cut itself off from the world entirely, but it does need to get wise to the fact that the rest of the world views trade (correctly) as an arena of national rivalry, and start playing the game. We don't have to play it quite the same way they do -- there are plenty of ways to skin this cat -- but our own protectionist history from Independence to the start of the Cold War gives plenty of precedents for rational protectionism.

It's either that, or continuation of the inexorable national economic decline that anyone with eyes can see has already begun.

Originally Posted by Brutus

that's right!! and still we manufacture 20% of world output, just like always, despite huge domestic wages. To boost it more we need to end liberal deficits, liberal unions, and ship the liberal illegal immigrants home.

No, to boost manufacturing output we simply redefine what manufacturing is.

To inflate the manufacturing sector and make it appear larger than it was in the past as our free trade catastrophe began to unfold, the U.S. Census Bureau redefined "manufacturing" several times.

For example:

http://www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/10statab/labor.pdf

"......in June 2003, all establishment survey employment, hours, and earnings series were converted from being classified by the 1987 Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system to being classified by the 2002 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). The NAICS conversion resulted in major definitional changes to many of the previously published SIC-based series."

A specific example of this definition change:

1997 Economic Census Reports - Manufacturing

"Prominent among the industries that are now included in manufacturing are bakeries, candy stores where candy is made on the premises, custom tailors, makers of custom draperies, and tire retreading."

Presto, instant inflation of the "manufacturing output" of the U.S. economy by including bakeries and candy stores.


“Using statistics primarily sourced from the Federal Reserve, we are repeatedly told that manufacturing isn't dead, just manufacturing employment, due to all our productivity gains. I must disagree that it's all about productivity, as did a group of economists who met last November to discuss government productivity measures, Louis Uchitelle of the New York Times reporting (via Curious Cat:

... The fundamental shortcoming is in the way imports are accounted for. A carburetor bought for $50 in China as a component of an American-made car, for example, more often than not shows up in the statistics as if it were the American-made version valued at, say, $100. The failure to distinguish adequately between what is made in America and what is made abroad falsely inflates the gross domestic product, which sums up all value added within the country.

American workers lose their jobs when carburetors they once made are imported instead. The federal data notices the decline in employment but fails to revalue the carburetors or even pinpoint that they are foreign-made. Because it seems as if $100 carburetors are being produced but fewer workers are needed to do so, productivity falsely rises — in the national statistics. ...
This is a problem that even extends, as the article goes on to explain, to the service industry. If your accountant is outsourcing some of their tax processing work to India on the cheap, this also boosts US productivity statistics. Tracking the real impact of that imported carburetor, or any other imported intermediate input (say that three times fast,) in the productivity statistics is presumed to require years of work and congressional funding.

Imported Intermediate Inputs

Courtesy also of the Curious Cat blog, some of the economists who realize that manufacturing productivity measurements are distorted do work at the Federal Reserve and wrote about it in a paper entitled, "Offshoring Bias: The Effect of Import Price Mismeasurement on Manufacturing.

Productivity" (pdf), by Susan Houseman (Upjohn Institute), Christopher Kurz (Federal Reserve Board), Paul Lengermann (Federal Reserve Board), and Benjamin Mandel (Federal Reserve Board). Emphasis mine:

... [We document] the rapid rise in both the levels and share of materials used by U.S. manufactures that are sourced from abroad. Over the ten year period from 1997 to 2007, the import share of total materials jumped roughly 50 percent, as the fraction of materials used climbed from 17 to 25 percent.

... In addition, [the Bureau of Economic Analysis] uses import and producer price indexes from [the Bureau of Labor Statistics] to construct industry-level intermediate input price indexes. BEA and BLS, in turn, use intermediate price indexes to compute industry and sector-level value added and productivity measures. If import price growth is overstated, it follows that the real growth of imported inputs is understated and industry value-added and productivity measures are overstated. Real GDP, computed as the sum of real value added across all sectors of the economy, also will be upward-biased.

... Although preliminary, our analysis presents evidence that offshoring bias has been substantial in recent years. We find that the growth rate of imported intermediate input prices may have been biased upwards by between 16 to 35 percentage points, which in turn has led the average annual growth rate in manufacturing productivity to be overstated by 0.1 to 0.3 percentage point or by between 9 and 20 percent over the entire period from 1997 - 2007. These numbers are significant, as 0.1 percent average annual growth rate for multifactor productivity is roughly equal to the average annual contribution of capital to manufacturing growth from 1997 to 2007. ...
The paper explains that because the share of imports from developing countries has been going up, and the prices of those imported manufacturing inputs has been dropping relative to equivalent inputs from developed nations, the cost of inputs to manufacturers has also been underestimated.

What this means, the authors detail, is that because rapidly falling input prices aren't measured properly in the import price index, much of the effective value add is counted after an imported product enters the US market. In other words, the US is taking China's productivity gains and adding them to its own productivity balance sheet, falsely inflating both manufacturing productivity and GDP.”

The Mismeasure of Manufacturing
By Natasha Chart

March 1, 2010

The Mismeasure of Manufacturing | OurFuture.org

Originally Posted by 9aces

So what? They're paying more than they did. You want them to pay less?

My point is that them paying more and more is not sustainable. That an income gap that keeps growing will result in the erosion of the working class and increased unemployment.

Ohh look at our economy. Employment is a problem. It is almost like people who understand the harmful impact a growing income gap has on an economy were right.

Thanks for playing.

Originally Posted by machinehead61

No, to boost manufacturing output we simply redefine what manufacturing is.

To inflate the manufacturing sector and make it appear larger than it was in the past as our free trade catastrophe began to unfold, the U.S. Census Bureau redefined "manufacturing" several times.

For example:

http://www.census.gov/prod/2009pubs/10statab/labor.pdf

"......in June 2003, all establishment survey employment, hours, and earnings series were converted from being classified by the 1987 Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system to being classified by the 2002 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). The NAICS conversion resulted in major definitional changes to many of the previously published SIC-based series."

A specific example of this definition change:

1997 Economic Census Reports - Manufacturing

"Prominent among the industries that are now included in manufacturing are bakeries, candy stores where candy is made on the premises, custom tailors, makers of custom draperies, and tire retreading."

Presto, instant inflation of the "manufacturing output" of the U.S. economy by including bakeries and candy stores.


“Using statistics primarily sourced from the Federal Reserve, we are repeatedly told that manufacturing isn't dead, just manufacturing employment, due to all our productivity gains. I must disagree that it's all about productivity, as did a group of economists who met last November to discuss government productivity measures, Louis Uchitelle of the New York Times reporting (via Curious Cat:

... The fundamental shortcoming is in the way imports are accounted for. A carburetor bought for $50 in China as a component of an American-made car, for example, more often than not shows up in the statistics as if it were the American-made version valued at, say, $100. The failure to distinguish adequately between what is made in America and what is made abroad falsely inflates the gross domestic product, which sums up all value added within the country.

American workers lose their jobs when carburetors they once made are imported instead. The federal data notices the decline in employment but fails to revalue the carburetors or even pinpoint that they are foreign-made. Because it seems as if $100 carburetors are being produced but fewer workers are needed to do so, productivity falsely rises — in the national statistics. ...
This is a problem that even extends, as the article goes on to explain, to the service industry. If your accountant is outsourcing some of their tax processing work to India on the cheap, this also boosts US productivity statistics. Tracking the real impact of that imported carburetor, or any other imported intermediate input (say that three times fast,) in the productivity statistics is presumed to require years of work and congressional funding.

Imported Intermediate Inputs

Courtesy also of the Curious Cat blog, some of the economists who realize that manufacturing productivity measurements are distorted do work at the Federal Reserve and wrote about it in a paper entitled, "Offshoring Bias: The Effect of Import Price Mismeasurement on Manufacturing.

Productivity" (pdf), by Susan Houseman (Upjohn Institute), Christopher Kurz (Federal Reserve Board), Paul Lengermann (Federal Reserve Board), and Benjamin Mandel (Federal Reserve Board). Emphasis mine:

... [We document] the rapid rise in both the levels and share of materials used by U.S. manufactures that are sourced from abroad. Over the ten year period from 1997 to 2007, the import share of total materials jumped roughly 50 percent, as the fraction of materials used climbed from 17 to 25 percent.

... In addition, [the Bureau of Economic Analysis] uses import and producer price indexes from [the Bureau of Labor Statistics] to construct industry-level intermediate input price indexes. BEA and BLS, in turn, use intermediate price indexes to compute industry and sector-level value added and productivity measures. If import price growth is overstated, it follows that the real growth of imported inputs is understated and industry value-added and productivity measures are overstated. Real GDP, computed as the sum of real value added across all sectors of the economy, also will be upward-biased.

... Although preliminary, our analysis presents evidence that offshoring bias has been substantial in recent years. We find that the growth rate of imported intermediate input prices may have been biased upwards by between 16 to 35 percentage points, which in turn has led the average annual growth rate in manufacturing productivity to be overstated by 0.1 to 0.3 percentage point or by between 9 and 20 percent over the entire period from 1997 - 2007. These numbers are significant, as 0.1 percent average annual growth rate for multifactor productivity is roughly equal to the average annual contribution of capital to manufacturing growth from 1997 to 2007. ...
The paper explains that because the share of imports from developing countries has been going up, and the prices of those imported manufacturing inputs has been dropping relative to equivalent inputs from developed nations, the cost of inputs to manufacturers has also been underestimated.

What this means, the authors detail, is that because rapidly falling input prices aren't measured properly in the import price index, much of the effective value add is counted after an imported product enters the US market. In other words, the US is taking China's productivity gains and adding them to its own productivity balance sheet, falsely inflating both manufacturing productivity and GDP.”

The Mismeasure of Manufacturing
By Natasha Chart

March 1, 2010

The Mismeasure of Manufacturing | OurFuture.org

To add ... whatever we do still manufacture is insufficient as the economy took a nosedive ... so one may state ... well we still manufacture x% of the worlds economy, yet that x% is still enough to stifle the economy. It's merely an excuse for the pieces of gold falling from ones pocket, at the expense of the republic.

Downward pressure on wages? Unemployment the same? No consumption when you need a stir in the economy? Where's the theory of trade openness and job creation? We boosted free trade policy to benefit a few, and they promised jobs ... where are they? Oh it's the regs, oh it a lack of confidence, oh its the President, oh its taxes.

Anybody notice the continued high profits of MNC's? Oh ... but they don't create jobs do they ... small businesses create jobs.
The US economy has been exported ... hows that working?

I've added some numbers for lame excuses for a failed economy. I'll start number one.

1. Government over regulates business.
2.
3.

U.S. Adds Zero New Jobs In August As Jobless Rate Stuck At 9.1 Percent (VIDEO)

While Silvia said he doesn't think the U.S. is in another recession right now, he said he wouldn't be surprised if the economy enters into a recession in the near future. Signs of a slow growth economy -- GDP growth of around 1 percent, falling housing prices, weak manufacturing, stagnant high unemployment -- mean the U.S. economy is volatile and vulnerable.

Small business still shrinking ... big corporations ... profits up. Keep coddling your super rich buds like Obama does. Feel free to attack liberals policy of taking care of Richie Mc Rich.


U.S. Small Businesses Cut Jobs For Third Straight Month In August: Survey

U.S. small business owners trimmed jobs in August for the third month in a row, though the rate of decline continued to moderate, a survey released on Thursday showed.

The poll by the National Federation of Independent Business found the average number of net new jobs declined by 0.08 workers per firm in August, after a decline of 0.15 in July.

On a seasonally adjusted basis, 12 percent of owners added an average of 3.1 workers per firm. But that was tempered by the 14 percent who reduced an average 2.7 workers per firm.

The remaining 74 percent of owners made no net change in employment, according to the NFIB poll of 926 respondents.

The poll comes the day before the more comprehensive U.S. nonfarm payrolls report which is expected to show the economy added 75,000 jobs in August.

"The prospects for a good jobs report are dim," the NFIB said in its report.

Originally Posted by Brutus

whats to see? The HawleySmoot trade war is one of the big reasons 90% of economists on both sides of the isle support free trade. Liberals simply lack the IQ to understand free trade.

Whatever happened to your assertion that Smoot Hawley caused the depression? Now you change and abandon your dogma, running to a backup plan ... trade is good. Any more Smoot Hawley comments?

Originally Posted by Brutus

I said union slugs are lazy, not those Americans who compete fairly in the international arena.

And what of VAT's and China's monetary policy? Fair?