Ping Larkin

My sentiment as well, but someone has to run run the country and try to balance the budgets. It would help the west if we all stopped exporting jobs to China, but you can blame global multinationals for that, who have no interest other than shareholder value. We all want free market economics, but business is now too powerfull for the good of nations. Finding the right balance is not a job I would want.

But heck, what would I know, being in europe ?...

Regards,

Chris

John's stupid-or-evil question's been nagging me.

Well, I took extensive inventory of the happenings and figured "incompetence" explains most of it--foolish wrong beliefs, accepted uncritically, and never checked. Like Pelosi's allegedly immoral insurance company profits, Obama's $50k unnecessary amputations, green jobs, broken window fallacy ($-for-clunkers), etc.

But, the House 10/29/09 health care bill? Sec. 2531(a)(4), under "Incentive Payments For Medical Liability Reform," says states get unspecified incentive payments toward health care for passing tort reform laws, provided that: "(B) the law does not limit attorneys=92 fees or impose caps on damages."

That's malice.

Oh, and ACORN's re-funded. That's malice too.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Yeah, I saw that posted to Joerg. Very clever, just like the schoolboys that look for all the interesting words in the dictionary.

What else have you found ?...

Regards,

Chris

Then elect representatives who are neither polticians nor bureaucrats.

Cut federal spending to zero. Require every household to own at least one firearm, having at least one trained operator.

Remember, it's not as important to know _how_ to shoot, as it is to know _whom_ to shoot, _when_ to shoot, and possibly most importantly, _why_ to shoot.

Cheers! Rich

No business is run as a charity. All businesses do what they have to do to compete and survive. And shareholders hire boards and executives exactly to maximize the value of their stocks; wouldn't you? So, given all that, tax policy should be structured to do the most good, which includes creating jobs so that people have earnings so that they can pay taxes.

We all want free market

Business is 100% of all economies. Business has to be powerful because it creates wealth and stuff. As long as businesses compete, the more powerful the business side of the economy, the better off everybody is. The miserable nations suffer from too little business, not too much.

John

You meant "unbalance," right?

Businesses powerful? Businesses are lucky to make 10%. So if you try to take an extra 10%, they leave (or die). Outsourcing is just capital fleeing oppression.

It's a truism, though, that the more government tries to run business, the unholier the alliance between the two becomes.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

I'm sure they pay an income tax on top of the sales tax. Technically the purchaser pays the sales tax so any gross receipts or such would be on top of that.

You don't pay your sales ("use") tax on items purchased outside CA and used inside CA? Tsk, tsk...

Just make a higher profit. There, that was easy!

Don't worry. They'll figure out how to enforce the use tax, soon enough.

Also, with all the common dissing of shareholder value one must not forget one thing: Who started the company and who sunk money into it? Right, shareholders. They take risks and, rightfully, they want to be rewarded for taking those risks. At least in America.

You don't think government has a hand in shipping jobs to China?

We already got the "why" part down pat. The "whom" is pretty clear too. "When"?

You might get scared. ;-)

A compound hunting bow might be appropriate.

Not sure what JKK is referring to but I've seen some that need no duct work, since they're mounted in each room. They usually go over a window or door, through the wall. No structural stuff there to cause problems.

Both the oil companies and the health insurance companies run ballpark

John

Our company sure does. I'm not sure that I account for 100% of my personal purchases from out of state. I'll have to be more careful in the future.

John

It's malice when politicoes want to bash wealthy people when said bashing will make working people worse off. Intelligent and wholesome public policy will gently steer the most productive people into doing the most public good, so that everybody wins.

Pelosi is stupid and evil. She practices the politics of hate. I think that Obama is mostly stupid and remarkably passive.

John

A succinct illustration of the President's stimulus fallacy:

Mr. Obama here, in today's meeting with his Board of Job Destruction Ministers, looks nervous, blinking furiously:

If you can make it through three minutes, you'll hear him say rather plaintively "It's also gonna require that we look at new models for where future job growth is gonna come from." IOW, he knows his stimulus flopped.

He sounds frightened & lost. He's way over his head, and knows it. And he has a horrible feeling that things aren't going well.

-- James Arthur

It depends on whether they maximise the long term value of their stocks by genuine management skill and organic growth or talk the price up with a well constructed pack of lies and then dump the stock at peak market leaving real long term investors to carry the can. The dot.com boom was a pretty good example of that scam.

No disagreement there. And simpler tax systems are better - but you do have to do something smart to make sure that working harder always creates a monotonically improving situation for most people.

Remind me how it was that we ended up having to bail out banks with vast amounts of taxpayers money? Heads we win - tails you lose casino banking.

The increasing volume of high frequency trades looks like it will be the next variant on the theme of too big to fail high loss city trading MFUs. Around 70% of US stock transactions are now high speed programmed trades parasitic on the businesses they purport to be dealing in. UK experts are worried that the trend will totally destabilise the markets.

They have found a new high stakes pass the parcel gambling game.

Regards, Martin Brown

Made possible by the US Congress' dabbles in business: Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. They were that casino's bank & dealer.

Before them, it made no sense to loan money you thought mightn't come back. But, once Freddie and Fannie made it a specific goal & mission to make those loans half their 'book', the market & return for those loans was, literally, guaranteed. By Congress.

I don't share this writer's outlook on home prices, but the last graph depicting the US government's share in the home mortgage market looks about right:

HFT is destabilizing. But, is it the next thing? There are so many to choose from.

AFAICT the 1st crisis isn't over, it's getting worse.

Then there's California, possibly, or some other state that's been living beyond its means:

"It's impossible for this legislature to reform the pension system, and if we don't, we bankrupt the state." --Bill Lockyer, California State Treasurer, 10/22/2009 [1]

And he's not kidding.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Most of the dot.commers were sincere in expecting success. If you don't like the risk of new-idea stocks, don't buy them.

Thank Bill Clinton and Barney Frank for that.

A little damping wouldn't hurt the system, like a 0.2% tax on all stock trades, or a bigger tax on short-term trades.

John