Another $300M Down the Drain at DoD

Other than the Constitutionally guaranteed bits, no, nothing. The framers weren't stupid.

Obviously. It is now.

That's simple, after you're dead. A lot cheaper that way, no lingering expenditures.

Jamie

Yes, and the large corporations are publicly owned. You may own some yourself if you have market investments. The corporate profits go to the shareholders who pay capital gains tax, and income tax on dividends. What is the big deal about corporations using loopholes to reduce taxes? Those savings go to the stockholders who simply pay more tax on the increased dividends due to the loopholes. So, the government gets it either way, directly from the corporation, or indirectly from the shareholder, or both.

-Bill

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It distorts the market, encouraging investment in the businesses that can exploit the loophole, and thus discouraging it elsewhere. This is

- of course - the argument used by the lobbyists who get the loopholes written into irrelevant legislation, but the support goes to businesses who are big enough to afford effective lobbyists, which isn't any guarantee that society needs them to get more than their fair share of investment money.

The government does fine, but the free market isn't - any longer - directing investment into the areas that can most productively use it.

There are certainly situations where the free market is a little too fixated on short term profit over long term advantage, where tax loop- holes and directed taxation can be useful - Australia is implementing a "carbon tax" at the moment to encourage industry to invest more in renewable energy sources and less in exploiting fossil carbon, but the lobbying that has been going on has all been aimed at keeping the fossil-carbon extraction industry as profitable as possible for as long as the extraction industry can get away with it; pretty much the Australian branch of the denialist propaganda machine.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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FICA (payroll tax) is used to pay current SS benefits. Technically it's a tax, but politically it's a retirement contribution. It's only defined as a tax because the USSC ruled in 1937 that involuntary contributions was a tax. Otherwise it would have been ruled unconstitutional.

-Bill

In my limited experience, a day or two. I did have to wait about six weeks in the Netherlands for the real-time X-ray imaging of the blood circulation in my coronary arteries, but that was squeezed in between the people who had just had heart attacks and needed it urgently - when my brother in Australia went to his doctor complaining of pains in his chest on a Monday, he got the cine-angiography on the Thursday, and the quadruple by-pass on the following Monday.

My cardiologist's letter of referral to my heart surgeon started off "The patient isn't sick" so I was in the non-urgent queue.

But cine-agniography is pretty invasive, so you need a tolerably large and well-trained surgical team to do it. You don't want them standing around idle, waiting for customers, for any extended length of time, so a couple of weeks worth of non-urgent patients waiting in the queue is useful to smooth out peaks in demand .

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Even in the UK, where they don't have any more installed capacity than they really need, urgent cases get dealt with quickly. Non-urgent cases do sit in queues. Thatcher tried to make the queues long enough to encourage anybody with money to buy private medical insurance, and it took the Labour government that replaced her a few years to build the National Health Service back up to the point that the non-urgent queues were less than six months.

I saw this in action in Cambridge in the late 1980's when Thatcher was still in power - a colleague needed a coroanary by-pass, and was sitting in a long queue, until one of his arteries block up a little further and urgently needed fixing, at which point he promptly got whisked away. The queue for the non-urgent cases had just got one operation longer, but my colleague got his operation before he was at any significant risk of dying.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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I live in the Netherlands, where my taxes look after the widows and orphans. There aren't that many widows and orphans in our immediate vicinity. In the UK our next-door neighbour lost her husband while we were living there, and I did help her from time to time. Her sons lived miles away, so I got called in to fix things when they broke. She didn't need more help than that, and would have been affronted if I'd suggested that her family and friends weren't looking after her properly - they were, though they weren't all that good at fixing things. The physicist who lived in Bristol wasn't too bad, but he didn't bring his tool box with him when he drove over to Cambridge, in part because he knew he could borrow my tools if he needed them.

..

You are allowing your imagination to run away with you. It isn't a reliable guide. The house we sold earlier this year went for roughly $1,500,000. The car I drive is now ten years old and would sell for perhaps $3,000 if I were minded to sell it. It didn't cost $50,000 new, and we bought it when it was two years old for quite a lot less than $50,000. It does have air-conditioning, which is a luxury.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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You do defend your oil interests around the world. Your enthusiam for installing right-wing puppet regimes in Persia gave us the ayatolla's and in Saudi Arabia gave us Al Qeada.

Your "defense" isn't contributing to anybody's welfare, except perhaps the US oil companies who don't have to worry about trade union activists in their over-seas oil refineries, and their short-term advantage seems to be bought at the expense of promoting long-term political dissatifaction in the areas they exploit.

If you managed to get your State Department to thing of anything beyond the short term advantage of US companies with political clout you could - at the moment - do things that would increase everybody's welfare, but that's not what your political system was set up to do. The people that own your country run your country, to their own short term advantage, because they are too pig-ignorant to see that this conflicts with their long-term interests.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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That IS his style.

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Defending our oil interests around the world is defending the devil we know verses defending the devil we don't know. If we abandon Saudi Arabia, who will take over? It might be some Muslim fundamentalist who wants to kill us with oil economics, or suicide bombs. We don't like that idea, so we keep the old devils in power.

-Bill

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No-one is suggestign that you abandon it, but encouraging an orderly transition to a slightly more representative form of government might defuse some of the dissatisfaction that created and sustains Al Qeada and would probably work to you long term advantage.

The devils you know are a bit too demonic to actually serve your long term interests.

But the old devils in power generate a lot of dissatisfaction in the population as a whole, and this plays into the hands of the Muslim fundamentalists. You went through this whole scenario in Iran and don't seem to have learnt a thing from the way that played out.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

There is a statement without any basis.

Dan

This may be true, but the statement that you quote above does have a basis - it followed this argument

It distorts the market, encouraging investment in the businesses that can exploit the loophole, and thus discouraging it elsewhere. This is

- of course - the argument used by the lobbyists who get the loopholes written into irrelevant legislation, but the support goes to businesses who are big enough to afford effective lobbyists, which isn't any guarantee that society needs them to get more than their fair share of investment money."

which you snipped without marking the snip, or making it obvious in any other way that you were indulging in blatant text-chopping.

If you wanted to argue with my reasoning you could have done so, but instead you chose to make an invalid - and essentially meaningless - claim about an isolated snippet of text.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

As if - after eight years of Dubbya - the US needed another lesson in why you shouldn't elect a right-wing nit-wit .

Granting the Rich seems to want more of the same, it can't be denied that some elements of the US electorate will never learn. Experience is a hard school, but fools will learn in no other.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I think there is basis - the fact of what USA's best-and-brightest are going for.

Investment is going into where businessmen think they can make money. Not much of this is manufacturing, and that's because USA has higher labor costs including its custom of employer-paid health insurance, along with intimidating environmental regulations and an intimidating lawsuit climate.

One way to address some of these issues: Simplify the regulations, make them easier to comply with, then enforce them strongly. Many lawsuits result from companies violating regulations and gambling on low enforcement that they lobby for.

And, USA is losing manufacturing jobs to even Canada, where employers are not burdened with health insurance payments and management.

Also, corporations in USA that lack lobbyists to get them tax breaks pay the world's second-highest corporate tax rate. No wonder so much effort goes into lobbying and tax avoidance tricks.

Another obstacle to industry in USA is NIMBYism and chemophobia. Many Americans like to oppose any planned industrial facility producing or handling any chemical or form of radiation suspected of not existing in the Garden of Eden, as well as facilities that handle trash. It can take several years for USA's snail-paced appeals processes to give final approval or denial of something that some locals don't want a mile away or anywhere in their state.

How much would it cost to make an LED and the die (chip) in it in California nowadays? There was a time only a couple decades ago when most of the LEDs existing in the world were made in California. Now, most of the ones in California came in from across the Pacific.

=A0 Dan

Apparently "the gov't [has done] fine" if their policies have chased away industry, markets are free when gov't drives investment behavior, and fleeing =3D "distortion".

It's bizarre.

We ought to just put everyone in camps. That way The People Who Know Better can make them do whatever's in their best interest.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

=A0 Dan

Here is America a right here! - wtf do you expect :

Some of the semi-retired engineers should be able to answer this:

After paying in lots of money to social security over your entire career, how many quarters would you draw social security benefits before you would take OUT what you had paid in?

Some people who actually tracked what they paid in vs. what they take out have reported they recovered all of their money from social security within about 2 years.

Considering the average life expectancy now, a typical retiree will draw at least TEN times what they paid into social security, yet pride will not convince people that despite their contribution it really is welfare.

FICA is a tax/fee charged to contribute to the cost of unemployment benefits. Employers are charged a rate for this also. Employers pay a rate based on their history of firing people. If they fire too many people the rate they are expected to pay to contribute to unemployment goes up.