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about This, that and the other
Fri, May 24, 2013 - 08:34 PM
testing 1,2,1,2.
i was wondering why my last comment wasn't posted ?
Fri, May 24, 2013 - 05:26 PM
Amen, and I agree! We have served our country in two branches of the military, and w [...]
Fri, May 24, 2013 - 09:55 AM
So your publically stating that the Herald Gazette made this statement up as noted i [...]
Thu, May 23, 2013 - 08:50 PM
A'ja - I'm so proud of you! Mrs. G.
Thu, May 23, 2013 - 07:51 PM
yes folks go to church on Saturdays, Wednesdays, Sundays and other days and I can't [...]
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What runs business out of town? Taxes!
What's government wanting to do now? Tax Increase!
What will the result be? Fewer workers, less tax revenue, more people in the take line than the contribute line.
Next year - now many dollars will it take to purchase one pesco? ( ?? )
...and the same crew that worked to get Obobo elected, pulled their same tricks in the Atlanta Mayor election!
Better make sure you have plenty of guns and ammo when those zombie welfare types come calling after the checks stop.
Soon, very soon.
If you say taxes run business out of town, then does that mean you favor the local IDA giving tax abatements to local business in order to keep or attract them?
Just asking for you to clear up your view point
But to answer your question I would have to say that offering tax incentives for business and industry to locate in Lamar County is the best way of promoting business and industry. The only thing is not to give a lifetime of abatements.
Business and industry will bring jobs.
There is nothing wrong with offering decreasing incentives to attract business and industry. However, how much of an incentive and when to stop it must be included in the legal language. No one should or would expect a lifetime of free tax rides. Additionally, the terms of any abatement should include language that protects the citizens granting the initial abatement, meaning, should the business receiving the abatement decide to relocate or close when the terms of the initial abatement mature, all taxes and incentives provided during the abatement period would come payable immediately with interest and penalties. Under absolutely no circumstances should a second, and so on, abatement be negotiated.
I would really like to have your own viewpoint and why.
I think you have a good topic. Maybe everyone should offer their view. I'm sure members of the IDA read these comments from this site.
Maybe Bush just screwed things up that bad..if you want to talk about do-nothing presidents (we had one for 8 years).
It is the same illogical individuals that voted Bush into office that are trying now to judge how long it is going to take to clean up his mess. Be quiet and eat crow. Have a nice day!
In times of depression or recession the normal way out is government programs and spending. That's a historical fact.
Also, unemployment lags the recession by a few years. That's a historical fact also.
Finally, you keep saying you want to cut taxes but you never say what services you want to give up. What programs do you want to cut? I've offered some suggestions for corrections.
One is work-fair to replace welfare. Another is to get illegals out of the country, or make them have real SS numbers and pay taxes. We should also tax money that is exported. We should also stop tax discounts for businesses that move offshore. Another is an import duty on goods from China and other countries to adjust their labor to match our minimum wage. Another is to get a uniform flat rate income tax and stop all deductions.
Why not suggest something useful so we have something to discuss instead of just repeating the same old song and dance? Where does you income come from Gary? Is part or all of it government based? If it is, maybe we should cut taxes by firing you. :-)
Funny; that just about everything you said, I have already said too. Right here on this site in the past. Did it go anywhere? NO! Is it going anywhere when you say it? NO!
The problem is not with offering suggestions. The problem lies with getting the right people to listen and act on it. You and I both are preaching to the wrong people but it helps me vent a little to tell folks how I feel sometime. That’s also why we identify ourselves. We are both looking for an educated debate on the subject. I’m also sure our senators and representatives know me well. I written to them so often I can imagine what they think when they get another letter from me. It wouldn’t surprise me to get a visit from the secret service if leadership comes to town.
How do I know they are listening? Why they respond with a form letter cleverly written to address all inquiries from the people. That shows arrogance by our elected officials. Sending a form letter is the same as throwing the dog a bone. It is intended to shut them up. However, if I’m not satisfied with the answer I receive and I write to tell them the answer was unsatisfactory, 50% of the time I’ll get the same response. Everyone gets the same response. Proven – A group of us wrote to one of our congressmen individually regarding oil prices. We all got the exact same letter. Therefore you might be able to say that our leadership never sees our suggestions or concerns. It is all handled by the staff. Does that mean the staff is actually running government?
You can bite my head off about a topic or vise-versa. The only way we are going to get any action is if we run for the office and get elected. Then we must dodge the party to work for the people by giving government back to the people by listening and acting on their behalf.
OK Tom. Do you want to be a senator or a representative? Who do you want? What’s holding you back? When will you put your name on the ballot?
Tom: We have three options. 1. We can continue “repeating the same old song and dance” or 2, we can run for the office and get elected and work for change. And 3, we can shut up all together and play the cards dealt. I’ve been considering my options. What about you Senator Rauch. The worst thing that can happen is that you will lose. But at least you will honestly be able to say that you really tried to make a difference.
The last three major manufacturers I worked for closed because of foreign trade in combination with health care and retirement costs, not taxes.
One place my wife worked at closed because they shipped things off to foreign companies where per-hour employee costs are much lower, not because of taxes.
All of the lesser educated workers take lower paying jobs or go on welfare. When they take lower paying jobs they charge more, and they default on loans more often.
To keep our economy going we lowered the loan requirements (bipartisan supported)so people who should not charge can charge more.
This is a bipartisan issue, and none of it has anything to do with taxes. None of our problems today are or were caused by taxes.
The reason new businesses don't chose Lamar has nothing to do with taxes. It has a lot to do with what we have here for resources. If we wanted a bunch of good clean businesses here, we should have started working on schools and parents years ago. We should have started getting higher tech small core businesses in here and built out.
Instead we cut taxes to get businesses that emit odors and noxious gasses and create 20 low tech jobs. How's that Greenco doing? Everyone happy? Can't wait for the big power plant Kenny and the boys brought us and the mayor blindly supports. When they are dead and gone our children will be stuck with their bad choices.
I'm afraid it is past time to put the party rhetoric aside and look factually at what causes our problems. We always look for short term instant gains so we look or feel good, but don't consider the future at all.
By the way, here is a nice read about Palin:
http://www.adn.com/opinion/comment/story/1052988.html
Tom
I know that you are an intelligent individual. I’ve agreed with you on almost all IDA related local fiascos. However, I don’t agree with you on everything. For you to say taxes play no role in driving away business is ludicrous.
I know that a combination of reasons cause industry to leave and contrary to whatever you think taxes will be at the root. Regardless, I’m not going to argue with you.
In my opinion you are no different than all the other Washington hypocrites. You speak out but you are unwilling to listen. Why? Because you already know the problems therefore you are unable to here any other individuals who speak out on them. You would fit right in.
I would like to thank you on one point though. You see, reading your comments have allowed me to step back and look at myself. Lots of times I am the same way too. We try to use words to influence while we lack the ability to listen to everyone. It’s possible that the most uneducated, been beat down by society, haven’t got a penny person may hold the answer to our most difficult questions. We just have to take the time to listen to what everyone has to say about it. That means we must listen to all the people, not just those holding degrees, power, and money.
I’m going to start working on myself to develop a better ability to here what others have to say. I’m sure I’ll have difficulty at times too. I said it once and it’s good enough to say it again. We can vent and offer all the suggestions we want on this site. But if we really want to prove we are concerned and want to do something about the problems the country is facing, we need to step up to the plate and run for the office to make a difference. So the questions is – when are you going to announce your political plans and what office will you challenge?
I can speak with some authority from a business standpoint because I've either owned, partnered, brokered, moved, setup, or managed manufacturing businesses since the 70's. I have several patents, including patents in the medical electronics industry both domestic and foreign.
I was general manager directly under the president at one of the largest aftermarket automotive test equipment and instrumentation manufacturers. We made meters and gauges for everything from lawn mowers to golf carts to yachts. We made battery charger meters, strobe light triggers, timing lights, tachometers, dwell meters, ignition systems, voltmeters, ammeters, power meters, and virtually all the test equipment sold by Sears, Snap-on, and others. That's big business.
Taxes had nothing to do with the downsizing of that business. The sole cause was bad foreign trade deals that started with Reagan and earlier.
I started, owned, and sold a business doing commercial communications systems. Merce Boiler was one of my customers, one of the ships we serviced at Merce was the Edmund Fitzgerald.
My wife and I used to socialize with the owners and skippers of Great Lakes ore carriers, so I had hours of education about the shipping and steel industry troubles.
I saw Great Lakes communications business coming as the iron and steel was moving to Asia, so I sold my business to an employee. Taxes had nothing to do with my getting out. The steel industry went overseas.
I started Powertech and sold it to a South Korean friend who built and sold power supplies. Taxes had nothing to do with that. Young could build things in Asia with under $1 an hour overhead cost. The government would have had to have paid 90% of employee wages before I could compete with nearly free Asian labor.
Our government is too stupid to tax the incoming goods at a rate that makes the foreign labor match minimum wage, and no one in this country is going to work for a dollar an hour and be able to eat.
I was a product design engineer for a division of Zenith. Part of that was dealing with production costs. I worked closely with product line managers. Zenith's failure in the consumer electronics market was a result of dumping and government subsidies to Japanese electronics companies. Taxes had nothing to do with it.
In the 1990's I helped purchase and move electronics companies for an investor. Part of that included negotiating with "authorities" for special tax and wage deals. We used to go to dinner with politicians and government employees desperately wanting to show people how they were bringing jobs and money into the area. We would manipulate them into giving way more than they needed to get us to move in. On the way home we would laugh about easy they were to handle.
None of their tax abatements or leasebacks made or broke any operation, but we would play like we couldn't manage without more incentives. The incentives were just a few percent of extra free money for a few hours of work.
As soon as we could get a manufacturing operation or subassembly significantly cheaper in some other country, we would move it there. We never cut the price to American consumers, because the market set the price...not our margins.
I found the whole thing morally corrupt. I realized where this was taking our country long term, so I got out while I had a stomach left.
Having been on the front lines of manufacturing and having watched good companies go down the tubes, I've yet to see it happen one time from taxes. If a business is teetering that close to the edge, it needs to close.
Health care costs, wages, brains, energy, slack workers, and cheap foreign imports are killing us. What kills this area, at least for high tech, is the lack of supporting high-tech industries and skilled people. It certainly is not taxes.
Taxes are what people complain about when they can't grow financially for some other reason, or when they want to rally a flock of sheeple.
I can give very specific examples and cases Gary. This isn't something "a friend told a friend" or "I saw on the news". I've been right there in the meetings. In person.
You claim to understand taxes and jobs. How? What have you done in industry or manufacturing?
I’m sorry, but I have never been the elaborate guru of business and industry like you, and I’m not going to try a pass myself off as such. But I have spoken with people holding degrees in economics regarding the very topics we are discussing.
Please allow me to start with your resume but please understand I’m hoping you won’t think that I trying to be derogatory in any way. Our subject is taxes.
You say that you owned and operated a commercial communications business doing business with ships operating in the great lakes but sold it to an employee because the steel business went overseas. You say taxes had nothing to do with it.
You owned a business but decided to sell it. That is an everyday occurrence in the USA. However, I’m sure the ships are still doing business and unless your employee was brain dead, he/she wouldn’t have purchased a dead business. Therefore, I assume your new employee owner is still operating too. On the other hand, did you pay your capital gains taxes or reinvest to avoid them?
You speak of other business ventures over the years but you neglect to mention drastic changes to the market place. My opinion is that you are locked into an isolationism mentality (again not meant to be derogatory) and trying to delete the fact that we are dealing with a world market economy, not just the USA.
Taxes are a driving force. When capital gains are high there is less money to invest and the economy shrinks. People will not invest when so much of their risk goes to taxes when their investments pay off. Less investments equals less business equals less jobs equals less tax revenue equals more social programs equals more unemployed equals high unemployment equal more people seeking handouts from the government equal higher taxes to pay for those government programs because less jobs are available to the unemployed. That’s not rocket science.
Our corporate tax rate in the USA is 39.5%, second only to Japan as the highest in the world. There are no write-offs to shrink our corporate tax rate. However, one of the fastest growing economies in the world is Ireland with a corporate tax rate of 12.5% and lower as doing business write-offs are allowed. The rate should be as close to zero as possible.
I’ll ask you. What major company wouldn’t consider moving away from government legalized theft?
Less tax and less government equal investments in business and industry equals growth in business and industry equals jobs to run the business and industry equals more employed equals less unemployment equals more people paying into the tax base equals less money spent on social programs equals a growing economy stimulated by the people living, working, and spending their earnings.
You can disguise a wolf to look like a sheep but under that disguise still lays a wolf ready to eat the sheep. Companies may appear to be flocking overseas for cheap labor but that would be a false assumption. Our high taxes are passed along to the consumer driving our cost out of the competitive edge of the rest of the world. You must never lose sight that we are doing business in a world economy and that will never change, and our extremely high taxes imposed on business by government is all but destroying any business in the USA the ability to compete in this new world economy.
I don’t know if I said it right but that’s the way I understand it. The people we elect to preserve our way of life are actually the ones guiding us to self destruction. Uncontrolled spending and high debt with increased taxes, not save us. It will only prolong the freebies until all the money runs out. Never forget! The money government spends must come from the people. There is no magic money tree growing in the backyard of the Whitehouse or the Capital. The more the mint prints, the less of what we have now is worth.
I take it from your response you can't show any example of industries or businesses that have failed because of taxes, and that your opinion is based on some numbers you have heard others kicking around.
I recently incorporated to reduce my taxes. I can assure you I pay nowhere near the 39.5% you throw out as a number.
The S-corp rate, as far as I know, varies from 10-35% on net profit.
The C-corp rate varies from 15% to 39% on net profit.
This is on actual PROFITS, not gross income. Chrysler for example paid only a few thousand dollars corporate tax.
Anyone going broke from taxes or moving to Ireland needs to hire a new accountant.
I actually incorporated to save money on taxes. It isn't the big rain cloud you claim.
Some of your comments remind me of the BS surrounding "Joe the fake unlicensed plumber". he claimed he could not buy the unlicensed plumbing business he worked for if taxes went up because the business "made over $200K a year". Joe was obviously not only unlicensed, he (and the Republican party) didn't understand taxes. The proposed "tax increase" that triggered his mental meltdown was a few dollars on a NET income, not gross, over $200K. It never would have even remotely come close to affecting him or his "business".
This "over-taxed" stuff is largely a big game to divert our debate from critical issues that actually affect us.
Additionally, I didn’t say companies are going broke and moving to Ireland. Perhaps you should brush up on your reading comprehension skills. I said Ireland had the fastest growing economy in the world due to the very low corporate taxes and how they apply them. You, in my opinion, are attempting to mask previous words in efforts to influence another’s chain of thought. The specific question was “What major company wouldn’t consider moving away from government legalized theft?”
I’m ending this conversation and will say no more after this post. However, I will tell you that in the course on our dialog I consulted with an individual holding his degree in economics and history. At the very start he said to me that the person I was commenting with definitely had no understanding of economics or politics. I defended you as an intelligent and educated person who really cared for the condition of US politics and the economy. You then go on to say that my opinion is based on numbers that I’ve heard others kicking around. Perhaps I should be asking myself if I have been defending a person who acquired his basic understanding of business and economics playing games like Life and Monopoly while taking risk rolling the dice in the game of Risk.
I will continue to read your post and will give them respect. That is until you start attempting to insert the BS (again, your words) and introduce tap dancing skills into the topic. In the course of your comments relating to differing topics, don’t expect everyone to agree with you. I’m sure that I’ll be in agreement with you on some things but I’m almost sure we will clash on others. That’s what makes the world go around.
Merry Christmas
Gary
P.S. I’m sorry R.T.: I know that conversation really don’t make the world go around because you taught me science better than that. It was just a figure of speech.
The corporate tax rate is 10% to 39% depending on net profit and the type of corporation, yet for some reason you claim I said 35-39%!!!
"Joe the Fake Plumber" is relevant. He is a good example of how people get caught up in political spin and refuse to face facts, and how a political party can distort the truth about taxes and how they affect us.
Your 39.5% claim is also a good thing to look at. The real tax is on actual profits, and the rate depends on the type of corporation as well as the amount of actual profit after deductions and expenses.
What has really killed out business in this country, and what has brought us to our knees, is our inability to logically and rationally look at how we got here.
For example while Ronald Reagan was in office he essentially killed our chances of having a viable consumer electronics industry. I have a book with copies of documents showing how this happened.
When Reagan left office, he was paid 2 million dollars to give a speech to the Japanese Electronics cartel that he supported while in office.
This is the pattern of our government. It is where the problem really is at.
Here is a point for the stupid,stupid. Bush kept your sorry butt from another terrorist attack. Bush supported the US military. And, Bush wasn't an illegal alien that went to college as a foreign student. I guess once people start robbing the tax paying "REAL" citizens of the U.S., it just becomes a part of everyday life.
We ran out of easy energy, we let the Koreans have our steel, we let the Japanese have our electronics, we gave countries south of the border our textiles, and now we are letting communist China have it all. We let our schools fall apart as parents turned them and video games into daycares.
Now we have brain-dead fools who think this is a one year problem that was just set in motion, and like a one-cell brain creature we think the fix is "lower taxes". Some people are so slow witted they actually think we can undo 40 years of accelerating unbalanced trade by lowering taxes when taxes were never the problem in the first place!
Here's the real problem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_trade
We have been on a wealth-bleeding trade deficit since the 1960's. Our last very short term trade surplus was in 1991.
Around 1997 we went into a downhill free-fall on trade balance. While Europe protected itself with the Community of Europe trade agreements between equal partners, we went with much poorer nations as equal partners.
How can we employ people and have a high quality life when we spend almost a trillion dollars a year overseas? That is wealth that will NEVER come back.
http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html#questions
The only months we have surpluses with China are when they buy huge amounts of our resources. Look at where our money is really going, folks.
That map not only is programmed to exaggerate the appearance of the problem, we have to deduct one or two years from the time shown to get the actual year the problem was caused.
The common man has for some time lost its influence over both the state and federal governments, which now is in the hands of international economic interest. This is not going to change anytime soon. There is no more “We the people” but a collection of self absorbed individuals who are only concerned with their own petty self interest. “We as a people” presently lack any type of national unity necessary to recognize or initiate that which is “In the common interest of our people”. Sadly, the more the economy tanks the more pronounced this problem will be.
Many of us will spout off many ideological attitudes once broadcasted by our forefathers, but the fact is, the world has changed dramatically since then and never to return to where such ideals, if ever in the first place, were possible. The American people are going to have to start looking out for ourselves collectively instead of “I got mine you can get your own mind set. I have seen first hand how people must live in most other countries and I assure you, we don’t want to go there and if you expect congress to be looking out for your interest you’re ill informed.
GMAC
Your on the right track. Give me a call I'm in the book.
Most of the problems we have now are related to energy and the price of oil, and the alarming increase in foreign consumer goods. These problems really started 40 years ago.
Look at this page and the links on the page:
http://useconomy.about.com/od/tradepolicy/p/Trade_Deficit.htm
The graphs on this page might help you out also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt
So far as assigning blame, look at a graph and remember the numbers generally lag the actual cause by a few years. Think of the economy as a great big heavy ship floating in water. It takes a long time for a strong pull on a rope to get it moving. The response is very sluggish.
Our debt was at 70% of our GDP while the last Bush was in office. It isn't fair to blame Bush either, because the sharp rise started in the 1980's. You can see the up-tic in the graph:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Federal_Debt.png
If you look at WWII, we were in very bad shape then also. We recovered from that one because of foreign trade.
If you want to see it by president, look here:
http://zfacts.com/p/318.html
This time will probably be different because of our huge trade deficit. We have little we can sell to the rest of the world to earn money to pay our international debts. This means as a nation, no matter what we do, we will be much poorer compared to the rest of the world.
If you want to see when our country fell apart for trade, look at this graph:
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/01/us-trade-deficit-graphs.html
When you read graphs, it is important to look at the slope of the graph. A steeper slope means a rapid change in some direction. The start of a steep slope generally indicates where the problem is. The start of our serious trade deficit problems occurred around 1990. That would indicate something that happened around the end of Reagan or the start of George HW Bush triggered the bleeding of our wealth to overseas.
In fairness we can't exclusively blame George HW Bush or Reagan, almost every leader since the 1960's has had a role in this mess. What Reagan didn't do to mess things up (although he did a lot) Clinton did.
It is all there for you to figure out for yourself if you look at the graphs closely.
In fairness to Obama, he came in while the big heavy ship was already heading toward the rocks. I don't worry about his mistakes because we are unlikely to pull out no matter what anyone does. We really can't sell anything overseas to pay the money we owe the rest of the world. We might as well run the international debt up and enjoy life.
It will all adjust itself someday and our international debt will be written off. Even if we stop our national internal debt, we can't pay the international debt. So why worry?
Look at your share of the National Debt and remember it is really twice that because 50% pay no taxes!!
ttp://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/images/4/2008/10/US_National_Debt_crop.jpg
http://www.sustainablemiddleclass.com/Income-inequality.html
Dont be fooled by those that tell you there is no money for healthcare reform. We live in one of the richest countries in the world (although that would be only 1% of our population). Its just that the right people are not being tapped for the bill. They would rather buy their 15th house on a remote island somewhere.
Its time we make politicians work for the people and not for corporations.
now it's time to change...
Americans, each of US, MUST take ACTION:
Be responsible for our choices today
and hold those elected responsible.
Get away from dependency on government to solve our challenges or problems, we as individuals are the solution to make our nation what it will become, it starts with each of us to make America great, again.
Create self-disciplined lives to live within one's means to support our needs, not our wants only to support a deficit lifestyle.
Sustainable living that uses only what it creates, balance of inputs/outputs providing whole lifecycles that do not need foriegn indebtedness, in other words,
truely "carry your own weight" and work, play & live within your abilities, or help others.
America was formed by God fearing independents and only freedom from "corporate communism" and government dependency can save us from future servitude. Trust God and yourself.
Get FREE from coporate control of your lives by freeing yourself & family from NEVER ENDING INCREASING "RENTAL" PAYMENTS for everything from cell phones payments to dirty fuel for our transportation that presently cost our soliders lives, supports tyranny, and is insidiously shifting control of our lives to government and foriegners with OUR money!
START TODAY to be the SOLUTION by leading our children to believe that they have a future and can make US, AMERICA, truely free, again.
With FREEDOM comes GREAT RESPONSIBILITY by one and for ALL who believe we CAN BE FREE, again!
BE the SOLUTION, WE are FREE AMERICA.