The site I linked to was an article from a site dedicated to tax advice and it stated clearly that zip +4 was not an accurate way to determine taxable location and the article went into detail explaining why.
One small problem with this is that in almost all European countries lobbying is illegal....
Wait, are you saying that in Europe your not allowed to call your representative and tell them which way you would prefer they vote on pending legislation? That is what lobbying is. Or to use a slightly more stringent definition, you are saying that a group of you cannot get together and ask one of your number to keep track of what laws are being considered and contact the members of parliament to tell them what your group thinks of those laws.
The problem with using the Florida 2000 election as an example is that the result of that election was within the margin for error on a count of that number of people. There is no way to create a system involving a large number of people acting voluntarily that has a margin of error of less than.01%, which was the margin of victory in Florida.
So, how many elections do you hold every year? In America, even if we only voted for one person at every level of government that would be no less than three elections (one for federal, one for state and one for local, or to put it in terms for Ireland, one for EU, one for country, one for local). Or don't you get to vote for who is the mayor of your town/city?
Well, that addresses that issue. However, since you provided that, I decided to see if zip code +4 would actually solve the problem and guess what, according to site, it isn't that simple.
ZIP codes and postal data were developed for delivering mail and are not accurate for establishing a customer’s tax "situs," or taxable location.
B&N is not trying to get out of the e-reader business. B&N is looking to spin that business off so that they can raise more money to invest in that business. They believe that they could raise more money to invest in the e-reader business by spinning it off than by keeping it in house. I think that would prove to be a strategic mistake, but I understand the logic behind it.
Except that Microsoft is being hush hush about what patents are involved, meaning that even if the patents in question are valid Microsoft is trying to hide them from others so that those others cannot find a way to avoid infringing on them. That does not help innovation in any way (the purpose of patents in the US).
Additionally, the fact that B&N has chosen to fight Microsoft on this suggests that there is something wrong going on here. B&N is the only company that MS has approached so far that has no particular interest in building a device (either presently, or in the future) that runs a Microsoft OS, which suggests that the other companies have settled in order to keep relationships with Microsoft on a positive footing, rather than because the MS patents are anything worth mentioning.
Considering that B&N chose to fight, I think it is more likely that the reason is #4, the companies that settled want to do business with Microsoft in the future (or do so already and want to continue to get good terms).
The argument for safety belts in cars is that without safety belts people suffer more injuries that cost other people money (insurance companies, primarily) than they would with safety belts. I don't happen to believe that safety belt laws are good laws. The main reason for safety belt laws is to condition people to the government regulating behavior that impacts anyone other than the specific individual who does or does not wear the safety belt in a very peripheral way.
I have issues with a lot of what Lovelock has written, but this particular insight makes him worth paying attention to. James Lovelock proposed that we could tell if there was life on a planet by looking at its atmosphere. If the atmosphere is completely reduced or completely oxidized, there is no life on the planet. It is only in the presence of life that an atmosphere can be maintained in an equilibrium somewhere in between those two extremes and life will necessarily cause the atmosphere to be maintained in some equilibrium between the two extremes.
Except that politicians (and others) have been justifying tobacco taxes on the basis of additional costs for medical care for tobacco users, when in fact it seems that tobacco users cost the taxpayer less (this may not be true, but the only studies that actually compare the total lifetime medical costs of tobacco users to non-tobacco users suggest this).
Additionally, I do not believe it is the government's function to mandate people's behavior for the purpose of maximizing those intangibles. Once the government starts regulating peoples lives in order to maximize intangibles, where do you draw the line?
Using analog modems at 1200 baud was the last time that AT&T managed to keep up with the data flow. It went downhill from there....
Yes, but that was not the same company as the one that is called AT&T today. that was a company that was actually competent at what they did (although it was no better at customer service than the current company of the same name...maybe even worse, if you can imagine that).
In the U.S., you can only sue the government for things that Congress has passed laws specifically allowing the government to be sued for (actually it is a little more complicated than that, but that is a good synopsis of the situation). It is interesting that Ireland does not have sovereign immunity.
The thing about that number is that someone did an analysis of it and called it bogus because smokers on average die at a younger age and, even when you take into account the things they die from (that are often caused by smoking). this results in them costing the government less than those who live healthy lifestyles.
A small brick and mortar store only needs to collect sales tax for one location. It is not terribly complicated to keep track of the correct sales tax for a single location (although sometimes the government makes even that much harder than it should). Keeping track of the sales tax of every taxing jurisdiction in the entire U.S. is extremely complicated.
The issue is not getting the updates to the tax table. The issue is paying for those updates.
As someone points out, oxygen is the oxidant because it supplies the electrons for the reaction (the term "oxidant" is derived from the fact that oxygen was the first chemical that we understood to havethis function). The "fuel" is the chemical that releases energy in the reaction. Hydrocarbons release significantly more energy than oxygen molecules. So, even in a hydrocarbon atmosphere, hydrocarbons would be the fuel as the term is used in English. Of course, if we lived in a hydrocarbon atmosphere we might have a significantly different perspective on the reactions and not consider the source of energy to be all that significant at early stages of language formation.
Why should I have to pay an annual fee to someone to manage my business finances, on top of paying an accountant? This is not going to be once and done software.
You seem to be saying that because the government already makes it hard for people to go into business for themselves, it's no big deal if it makes it just a little bit harder. You seem to be overlooking the fact that in addition to tens of thousands of different tax rates to keep track of, there are also a multitude of variations in what items sales tax applies to.
I don't actually think the AT&T/T-Mobile case is the rightcomparison for that anti-trust case. I think that the Kodak case is a much more clear case of government meddling (this is not to support the government position on AT&T/T-Mobile, just to point out that people can support that decision and still have a problem with the Kodak decision). In the case that you linked to the only market that Kodak had a monopoly on was the one for replacement parts for equipment they manufactured. Kodak did not have a monopoly on the equipment those parts were for, they weren't even the biggest player in that market.
That being said, your basic point is correct. It seems likely that the government action in the case you referenced had significant influence on Kodak's failure to get into other business lines (whether because it weakened their attempt to move in that direction or because it led them to be hesitant to make other attempts to get into the business imaging business in a big way).
Every minor cost you add to doing business decreases the ability of small players to compete. Actually, it is worse than that, even without any competition, it reduces the incentive for even doing business in the first place. Increasing these small costs creates two, supposedly unintended, results. One, it discourages a significant number of people from attempting to start their own business. Two, it encourages a number of others to look for ways to evade these costs. The second creates and environment where "everybody" knows that the only way to get by is to flout the law.
Yes, additionally when making that comparison one needs to do it based on the state (in the US) that one is talking about because the difference between gross and take home pay varies widely between states.
The thing is that sales and marketing guys are not necessarily that way. However, many sales centric enterprises tend to learn to be that way.
I will use as an example some friends of mine who are in the car business. They had learned that sales was about sticking it to the customer, so whenever their company made a lot of money, they saw it as having "pulled one over" on the customer. The classic example was where the dealership they worked for had gotten a car cheap for one reason or another and then sold the car for slightly less than its current market value. To use some numbers, let's say that a particular car had a blue book value (the blue book you have to be in the industry to get your hands on) of $13,000 but somehow the dealer had gotten their hands on for $2,000. If the dealer sold the car for $10,000, these people thought that the dealer had taken the customer. They had trouble understanding that the customer had gotten a great deal, they had gotten a $13,000 car for $10,000. If anybody had been taken, it was the person who sold the car to the dealer for $2,000 (and that is not necessarily the case because there could be reasons why someone would be getting value for selling a car for that far below the "going" price), not the customer who bought it for $3,000 less than what he would have had to pay elsewhere.
The point here is that they were so used to the idea that they were trying to "beat" the customer that it never occured to them that both parties could win in such negotiations. I was finally able to get one of them to understand the point here. I think it has made him a better salesman as he no longer views every sales interaction about trying to "win", but instead sees it as an attempt to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement (his dollars per sale are down, but his total sales are way up).
Historically, federal revenue has never risen above 20% of GDP, yet current spending is around 25% of GDP. I am quite confident that if the federal government were to eliminate everything it currently does that is outside of its Constitutionally mandated powers it would come in well below that 20% of GDP figure. If you think the items thus eliminated are important government functions (and some of them are), get your state government to do them. That is how the system is designed to work. The Framers of the Constitution intended that many of the things now being done by the Federal Government would be done by the individual states and their understanding of the way they wrote the Constitution prohibited the Federal Government from doing so.
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So, there isn't only one choice after all.
The site I linked to was an article from a site dedicated to tax advice and it stated clearly that zip +4 was not an accurate way to determine taxable location and the article went into detail explaining why.
One small problem with this is that in almost all European countries lobbying is illegal....
Wait, are you saying that in Europe your not allowed to call your representative and tell them which way you would prefer they vote on pending legislation? That is what lobbying is. Or to use a slightly more stringent definition, you are saying that a group of you cannot get together and ask one of your number to keep track of what laws are being considered and contact the members of parliament to tell them what your group thinks of those laws.
The problem with using the Florida 2000 election as an example is that the result of that election was within the margin for error on a count of that number of people. There is no way to create a system involving a large number of people acting voluntarily that has a margin of error of less than .01%, which was the margin of victory in Florida.
So, how many elections do you hold every year? In America, even if we only voted for one person at every level of government that would be no less than three elections (one for federal, one for state and one for local, or to put it in terms for Ireland, one for EU, one for country, one for local). Or don't you get to vote for who is the mayor of your town/city?
ZIP codes and postal data were developed for delivering mail and are not accurate for establishing a customer’s tax "situs," or taxable location.
Yeah, that has worked so well in Europe, which has had unemployment rates comparable to what the U.S. currently has going back to the 80s.
B&N is not trying to get out of the e-reader business. B&N is looking to spin that business off so that they can raise more money to invest in that business. They believe that they could raise more money to invest in the e-reader business by spinning it off than by keeping it in house. I think that would prove to be a strategic mistake, but I understand the logic behind it.
Except that Microsoft is being hush hush about what patents are involved, meaning that even if the patents in question are valid Microsoft is trying to hide them from others so that those others cannot find a way to avoid infringing on them. That does not help innovation in any way (the purpose of patents in the US).
Additionally, the fact that B&N has chosen to fight Microsoft on this suggests that there is something wrong going on here. B&N is the only company that MS has approached so far that has no particular interest in building a device (either presently, or in the future) that runs a Microsoft OS, which suggests that the other companies have settled in order to keep relationships with Microsoft on a positive footing, rather than because the MS patents are anything worth mentioning.
Considering that B&N chose to fight, I think it is more likely that the reason is #4, the companies that settled want to do business with Microsoft in the future (or do so already and want to continue to get good terms).
The argument for safety belts in cars is that without safety belts people suffer more injuries that cost other people money (insurance companies, primarily) than they would with safety belts. I don't happen to believe that safety belt laws are good laws. The main reason for safety belt laws is to condition people to the government regulating behavior that impacts anyone other than the specific individual who does or does not wear the safety belt in a very peripheral way.
I have issues with a lot of what Lovelock has written, but this particular insight makes him worth paying attention to. James Lovelock proposed that we could tell if there was life on a planet by looking at its atmosphere. If the atmosphere is completely reduced or completely oxidized, there is no life on the planet. It is only in the presence of life that an atmosphere can be maintained in an equilibrium somewhere in between those two extremes and life will necessarily cause the atmosphere to be maintained in some equilibrium between the two extremes.
Except that politicians (and others) have been justifying tobacco taxes on the basis of additional costs for medical care for tobacco users, when in fact it seems that tobacco users cost the taxpayer less (this may not be true, but the only studies that actually compare the total lifetime medical costs of tobacco users to non-tobacco users suggest this).
Additionally, I do not believe it is the government's function to mandate people's behavior for the purpose of maximizing those intangibles. Once the government starts regulating peoples lives in order to maximize intangibles, where do you draw the line?
Using analog modems at 1200 baud was the last time that AT&T managed to keep up with the data flow. It went downhill from there....
Yes, but that was not the same company as the one that is called AT&T today. that was a company that was actually competent at what they did (although it was no better at customer service than the current company of the same name...maybe even worse, if you can imagine that).
In the U.S., you can only sue the government for things that Congress has passed laws specifically allowing the government to be sued for (actually it is a little more complicated than that, but that is a good synopsis of the situation). It is interesting that Ireland does not have sovereign immunity.
The thing about that number is that someone did an analysis of it and called it bogus because smokers on average die at a younger age and, even when you take into account the things they die from (that are often caused by smoking). this results in them costing the government less than those who live healthy lifestyles.
A small brick and mortar store only needs to collect sales tax for one location. It is not terribly complicated to keep track of the correct sales tax for a single location (although sometimes the government makes even that much harder than it should). Keeping track of the sales tax of every taxing jurisdiction in the entire U.S. is extremely complicated.
The issue is not getting the updates to the tax table. The issue is paying for those updates.
As someone points out, oxygen is the oxidant because it supplies the electrons for the reaction (the term "oxidant" is derived from the fact that oxygen was the first chemical that we understood to havethis function). The "fuel" is the chemical that releases energy in the reaction. Hydrocarbons release significantly more energy than oxygen molecules. So, even in a hydrocarbon atmosphere, hydrocarbons would be the fuel as the term is used in English. Of course, if we lived in a hydrocarbon atmosphere we might have a significantly different perspective on the reactions and not consider the source of energy to be all that significant at early stages of language formation.
Why should I have to pay an annual fee to someone to manage my business finances, on top of paying an accountant? This is not going to be once and done software.
You seem to be saying that because the government already makes it hard for people to go into business for themselves, it's no big deal if it makes it just a little bit harder. You seem to be overlooking the fact that in addition to tens of thousands of different tax rates to keep track of, there are also a multitude of variations in what items sales tax applies to.
I don't actually think the AT&T/T-Mobile case is the rightcomparison for that anti-trust case. I think that the Kodak case is a much more clear case of government meddling (this is not to support the government position on AT&T/T-Mobile, just to point out that people can support that decision and still have a problem with the Kodak decision). In the case that you linked to the only market that Kodak had a monopoly on was the one for replacement parts for equipment they manufactured. Kodak did not have a monopoly on the equipment those parts were for, they weren't even the biggest player in that market.
That being said, your basic point is correct. It seems likely that the government action in the case you referenced had significant influence on Kodak's failure to get into other business lines (whether because it weakened their attempt to move in that direction or because it led them to be hesitant to make other attempts to get into the business imaging business in a big way).
Every minor cost you add to doing business decreases the ability of small players to compete. Actually, it is worse than that, even without any competition, it reduces the incentive for even doing business in the first place. Increasing these small costs creates two, supposedly unintended, results. One, it discourages a significant number of people from attempting to start their own business. Two, it encourages a number of others to look for ways to evade these costs. The second creates and environment where "everybody" knows that the only way to get by is to flout the law.
Yes, additionally when making that comparison one needs to do it based on the state (in the US) that one is talking about because the difference between gross and take home pay varies widely between states.
The thing is that sales and marketing guys are not necessarily that way. However, many sales centric enterprises tend to learn to be that way.
I will use as an example some friends of mine who are in the car business. They had learned that sales was about sticking it to the customer, so whenever their company made a lot of money, they saw it as having "pulled one over" on the customer. The classic example was where the dealership they worked for had gotten a car cheap for one reason or another and then sold the car for slightly less than its current market value. To use some numbers, let's say that a particular car had a blue book value (the blue book you have to be in the industry to get your hands on) of $13,000 but somehow the dealer had gotten their hands on for $2,000. If the dealer sold the car for $10,000, these people thought that the dealer had taken the customer. They had trouble understanding that the customer had gotten a great deal, they had gotten a $13,000 car for $10,000. If anybody had been taken, it was the person who sold the car to the dealer for $2,000 (and that is not necessarily the case because there could be reasons why someone would be getting value for selling a car for that far below the "going" price), not the customer who bought it for $3,000 less than what he would have had to pay elsewhere.
The point here is that they were so used to the idea that they were trying to "beat" the customer that it never occured to them that both parties could win in such negotiations. I was finally able to get one of them to understand the point here. I think it has made him a better salesman as he no longer views every sales interaction about trying to "win", but instead sees it as an attempt to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement (his dollars per sale are down, but his total sales are way up).
US income taxes are generally lower than other developed countries for most income brackets.
Really? What is the EU income tax rate?
Historically, federal revenue has never risen above 20% of GDP, yet current spending is around 25% of GDP. I am quite confident that if the federal government were to eliminate everything it currently does that is outside of its Constitutionally mandated powers it would come in well below that 20% of GDP figure. If you think the items thus eliminated are important government functions (and some of them are), get your state government to do them. That is how the system is designed to work. The Framers of the Constitution intended that many of the things now being done by the Federal Government would be done by the individual states and their understanding of the way they wrote the Constitution prohibited the Federal Government from doing so.