There are regulations in place on Joe Freedom reselling food products. However, they are put there by the government and apply to all resellers of food products, not just the resellers of Evil Corps Foods products. If for example Evil Corps Foods puts an expiration date of 30 days and the government says that the product is good for 60 days, Joe Freedom is allowed to sell it up until 60 days. I know this to be the case because most manufacturers of soft drinks put expiration dates on their products, when the local health inspectors inspect a retail outlet, they check the expiration date on milk in the cooler, but not on soft drinks.
If you are correct, why has there been a significant decrease in the number of companies going public, and a significant increase in the number of public companies going private? There may be another explanation, and I am willing to consider it. However, I have not heard an alternative explanation.
Most companies used to pay dividends. Some time in the 80's this stopped because the capital gains tax went down, but the tax on dividends didn't. This meant that if someone was an investor, they paid less tax on increased value if it was a result of an increase in stock price than they did if the money was paid out in dividends. As a result most companies stopped paying dividends. If the dividend tax rate was the same or lower than the capital gains rate, investors would prefer dividends. If companies pay dividends, the benefits of the Enron style of accounting are significantly less, the "millions" aren't there to be made. That additional corporate credit shows up on the balance sheets.
What I am arguing is that paying a dividend eliminates the reward for cooking the books the way that Enron and Worldcom did.
Ultimately, what I am saying is that if the tax laws do not distort the market, the sort of problem that SOX is designed to prevent, don't happen because market forces prevent it.
If I read the Supreme Court ruling correctly, these guys will lose their cases. The Supreme Court ruled that it is perfectly legal for you enter into a contract with a retailer that as a condition of them purchasing your product the retailer will not sell said product for less than a specified amount. This doesn't mean that you the manufacturer of said product can force people who get the product without signing such a contract to charge your the rpice you selected. I don't think any of these cases will hold up.
Neither Enron nor Worldcom would have been able to cook their books the way they did if they were paying out dividends. Several years ago I saw a detailed analysis by an investment expert showing the nature of both of their accounting tricks and why they would not have worked if the company was paying dividends. Part of the explanation has to do with the cash for the dividends and part of it has to do with the way that available cash would have been reduced. Basically the gist of it was that they were already using their cash flow to disguise what they were doing, if they had to pay dividends out of that cash flow as well, it would not have been big enough to hide what they were doing.
SOX was intended to protect the small investor. It has resulted in fewer opportunities for the small investor (fewer companies going public, profitable public companies going private). SOX is a bad law. I am not familiar with the K-H Amendment, but every law that I am familiar with that was passed quickly after some major event (because Congress "had to do something") has been a bad law.
It wasn't supposed to stop a tax scam. It was designed to stop companies from cooking their books to make their stocks the company appear more valuable than it actually was(oversimplification). In other words companies were playing games with their books so that people would pay more for their stocks. These games don't work when the company is paying a dividend. If the tax rate on capital gains is less than the tax on dividends (which it was throughout the 90's) then investors prefer for the company to reinvest in the company rather than pay a dividend. The investor will make his profit off the sale of the stock. If the tax on dividend is the same or less than the tax on capital gains, many investors will prefer a dividend so that they can redistribute their profit and still maintain their "position" in a particular company. You can't pay out a dividend every year if your profits are all generated by shifting debt around.
Check the facts, as per capita income goes above $5000 per year, the amount that people are concerned about the environment goes up. BTW, there are worse things than plastic bottles washing up on the beach, like say chopping down every thing that even resembles wood to use as firewood to cook with. Those products may be harmful, but not as nearly as bad as the situation in countries where people will kill anything they can catch so that they have something to eat.
Yes, Congress can act rapidly. Unfortunately, it almost always results in a bad law. Sarbanes-Oxley is a great example, it costs a lot more than it saves. The most efficient way to prevent the problems it is designed to curb is by keeping the tax on stock dividends at the same as the tax on capital gains. If a company gives a dividend, it cannot play the accounting games that lead to the abuses that SOX was designed to stop.
"Are the tar sands located under a forest in Canada? What will happen to that environment? Shouldn't we list that forest as a cost?"
I don't know, I wasn't on the accounting team that worked out the costs. However, it is important to point out that country's with higher per capita incomes generally take better care of their environment.
Our current energy problem will be solved with solutions that were developed during the last energy problem (late '70's). Things like tar sands and oil shale. The problem with them the last time around was that the cost to exploit these sources is at least $60 a barrel. By 1980, everyone knew that oil prices were not going to be that high in the near future. Now that oil prices have reached the point where they will almost certainly stay above $60 a barrel, people are starting to develop the facilities to produce oil from tar sands and oil shale. It will take about 5 years for them to come on line.
Fortunately, the courts have started overturning some things that are "justified" under the Commerce Clause. I think the last one I heard was a federal ban on guns in school zones, the Supreme Court said Congress had no authority to pass such a law...that if the Commerce Clause allowed that it allowed anything. The law was overturned.
Congress does a lot of things that are not authorized in the Constitution..Social Security, Department of Education, and on and on. Many of them are "good" things. Personally, I heard a suggestion a couple of years ago that I think would be a great idea: before Congress can consider any Bill, it must contain a clause which states where in the Constitution Congress is given the authority to legislate on this particular topic. This would eliminate a lot of laws from even being considered and make it easier to determine the Constitutionality of a law. If said clause of the Constitution does not actually extend said authority, the judge can readily declare it unconstitutional and if Congress wants to authorize it based on some other clause of the Constitution, they can start over.
Except the leaders of left wing movements are almost never working or middle class...Teddy Kennedy, John Edwards, John Kerry. If you check the political opinions of the working and middle class you usually find that they tend to be more conservative.
The problem isn't the ads, it is reading my files and reporting their contents to MS. The latter results in a clear violation of HIPAA. If I was IT for a doctor's office, I would be concerned with the degree to which Vista currently does this.
And it is working by doing that and not making a single strike of any military significance they have almost convinced Americans it is not worth fighting (just as Osama predicted would happen).
"Hormel is amused with the term spam for junk mail. I guess you've never looked at their site huh?"
That may be now, but a few years ago they sued a number of people for violating thier trademark by using the term for junk email. They lost but the gist of their argument was that people were implying that Spam was undesirable thus damaging the value of the brand that they had built up.
If they ever implement this no one in the medical profession would be able to use a MS OS. This is a clear violation of HIPAA. Personally, if I was the IT for a medical company I would be looking for what OS we were going to run when XP no longer worked (probably Linux) because I think that Vista is border line for HIPAA compliance.
The problem is that Americans have forgotten the lessons of Sherman's March through Georgia. There are many people who are sympathetic to the terrorists/guerrilla fighters because the cost to themselves is low. This provides various benefits to the irregular (terrorist, guerrilla, etc)fighters thus prolonging the conflict. If the general populace finds the results of irregular combat unacceptable (an attack is launched from town A, town A is bombed into rubble)they are more likely to cooperate with those trying to eliminate the irregular combatants. I'm not sure where the line is, but evidence suggests that our strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq is actually too gentle on the civilian population.
The important difference being that there is good reason to suspect that MS chose to name OOXML in a manner that would be confusing. There is little reason to think that a Democrat office holder(in an overwhelmingly Democratic county) intentionally designed a confusing ballot. Making the connection is a completely unwarranted insertion of partisan politics into what is otherwise a discussion in which one's political party affiliation is irrelevant.
Yes, but those supposedly confusing voting cards in Florida were designed by...wait for it....the Democrats. So for this situation to be similar to Florida the FSF would have had to choose the name for Microsoft's OOXML. You are right that it seems likely that OOXML is intentionally designed to confuse people only vaguely familiar with what is going on. My problem is that you somehow drew a parallel to Florida 2000 where Democrat voters were confused by a ballot created by Democrat politicians.
Yes, that was terribly evil of George W. to restrict what he would fund, since before that they could study any cell line they wanted and use NO government money at all. George W. Bush (that Fundamentalist) decided to change the policy on a politically controversial subject from Bill Clinton's enlightened philosophy and fund some stem cell research, oh that evil man He would have been better off to follow Bill Clinton's example and not fund any stem cell research.
I am not sure why American researchers have a hard time doing stem cell work, except that the government only funds a limited number of cell lines. If you want to work with other cell lines you need to find another funding source...Boo hoo.
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There are regulations in place on Joe Freedom reselling food products. However, they are put there by the government and apply to all resellers of food products, not just the resellers of Evil Corps Foods products. If for example Evil Corps Foods puts an expiration date of 30 days and the government says that the product is good for 60 days, Joe Freedom is allowed to sell it up until 60 days. I know this to be the case because most manufacturers of soft drinks put expiration dates on their products, when the local health inspectors inspect a retail outlet, they check the expiration date on milk in the cooler, but not on soft drinks.
If you are correct, why has there been a significant decrease in the number of companies going public, and a significant increase in the number of public companies going private? There may be another explanation, and I am willing to consider it. However, I have not heard an alternative explanation.
Most companies used to pay dividends. Some time in the 80's this stopped because the capital gains tax went down, but the tax on dividends didn't. This meant that if someone was an investor, they paid less tax on increased value if it was a result of an increase in stock price than they did if the money was paid out in dividends. As a result most companies stopped paying dividends. If the dividend tax rate was the same or lower than the capital gains rate, investors would prefer dividends. If companies pay dividends, the benefits of the Enron style of accounting are significantly less, the "millions" aren't there to be made. That additional corporate credit shows up on the balance sheets. What I am arguing is that paying a dividend eliminates the reward for cooking the books the way that Enron and Worldcom did. Ultimately, what I am saying is that if the tax laws do not distort the market, the sort of problem that SOX is designed to prevent, don't happen because market forces prevent it.
If I read the Supreme Court ruling correctly, these guys will lose their cases. The Supreme Court ruled that it is perfectly legal for you enter into a contract with a retailer that as a condition of them purchasing your product the retailer will not sell said product for less than a specified amount. This doesn't mean that you the manufacturer of said product can force people who get the product without signing such a contract to charge your the rpice you selected. I don't think any of these cases will hold up.
Neither Enron nor Worldcom would have been able to cook their books the way they did if they were paying out dividends. Several years ago I saw a detailed analysis by an investment expert showing the nature of both of their accounting tricks and why they would not have worked if the company was paying dividends. Part of the explanation has to do with the cash for the dividends and part of it has to do with the way that available cash would have been reduced. Basically the gist of it was that they were already using their cash flow to disguise what they were doing, if they had to pay dividends out of that cash flow as well, it would not have been big enough to hide what they were doing.
SOX was intended to protect the small investor. It has resulted in fewer opportunities for the small investor (fewer companies going public, profitable public companies going private). SOX is a bad law. I am not familiar with the K-H Amendment, but every law that I am familiar with that was passed quickly after some major event (because Congress "had to do something") has been a bad law.
It wasn't supposed to stop a tax scam. It was designed to stop companies from cooking their books to make their stocks the company appear more valuable than it actually was(oversimplification). In other words companies were playing games with their books so that people would pay more for their stocks. These games don't work when the company is paying a dividend. If the tax rate on capital gains is less than the tax on dividends (which it was throughout the 90's) then investors prefer for the company to reinvest in the company rather than pay a dividend. The investor will make his profit off the sale of the stock. If the tax on dividend is the same or less than the tax on capital gains, many investors will prefer a dividend so that they can redistribute their profit and still maintain their "position" in a particular company. You can't pay out a dividend every year if your profits are all generated by shifting debt around.
Check the facts, as per capita income goes above $5000 per year, the amount that people are concerned about the environment goes up. BTW, there are worse things than plastic bottles washing up on the beach, like say chopping down every thing that even resembles wood to use as firewood to cook with. Those products may be harmful, but not as nearly as bad as the situation in countries where people will kill anything they can catch so that they have something to eat.
Yes, Congress can act rapidly. Unfortunately, it almost always results in a bad law. Sarbanes-Oxley is a great example, it costs a lot more than it saves. The most efficient way to prevent the problems it is designed to curb is by keeping the tax on stock dividends at the same as the tax on capital gains. If a company gives a dividend, it cannot play the accounting games that lead to the abuses that SOX was designed to stop.
"Are the tar sands located under a forest in Canada? What will happen to that environment? Shouldn't we list that forest as a cost?" I don't know, I wasn't on the accounting team that worked out the costs. However, it is important to point out that country's with higher per capita incomes generally take better care of their environment.
Our current energy problem will be solved with solutions that were developed during the last energy problem (late '70's). Things like tar sands and oil shale. The problem with them the last time around was that the cost to exploit these sources is at least $60 a barrel. By 1980, everyone knew that oil prices were not going to be that high in the near future. Now that oil prices have reached the point where they will almost certainly stay above $60 a barrel, people are starting to develop the facilities to produce oil from tar sands and oil shale. It will take about 5 years for them to come on line.
Fortunately, the courts have started overturning some things that are "justified" under the Commerce Clause. I think the last one I heard was a federal ban on guns in school zones, the Supreme Court said Congress had no authority to pass such a law...that if the Commerce Clause allowed that it allowed anything. The law was overturned.
Congress does a lot of things that are not authorized in the Constitution..Social Security, Department of Education, and on and on. Many of them are "good" things. Personally, I heard a suggestion a couple of years ago that I think would be a great idea: before Congress can consider any Bill, it must contain a clause which states where in the Constitution Congress is given the authority to legislate on this particular topic. This would eliminate a lot of laws from even being considered and make it easier to determine the Constitutionality of a law. If said clause of the Constitution does not actually extend said authority, the judge can readily declare it unconstitutional and if Congress wants to authorize it based on some other clause of the Constitution, they can start over.
Except the leaders of left wing movements are almost never working or middle class...Teddy Kennedy, John Edwards, John Kerry. If you check the political opinions of the working and middle class you usually find that they tend to be more conservative.
The problem isn't the ads, it is reading my files and reporting their contents to MS. The latter results in a clear violation of HIPAA. If I was IT for a doctor's office, I would be concerned with the degree to which Vista currently does this.
And it is working by doing that and not making a single strike of any military significance they have almost convinced Americans it is not worth fighting (just as Osama predicted would happen).
I'm going to by a Server OS when I am only running 2 or 3 computers?
"Hormel is amused with the term spam for junk mail. I guess you've never looked at their site huh?" That may be now, but a few years ago they sued a number of people for violating thier trademark by using the term for junk email. They lost but the gist of their argument was that people were implying that Spam was undesirable thus damaging the value of the brand that they had built up.
If they ever implement this no one in the medical profession would be able to use a MS OS. This is a clear violation of HIPAA. Personally, if I was the IT for a medical company I would be looking for what OS we were going to run when XP no longer worked (probably Linux) because I think that Vista is border line for HIPAA compliance.
The problem is that Americans have forgotten the lessons of Sherman's March through Georgia. There are many people who are sympathetic to the terrorists/guerrilla fighters because the cost to themselves is low. This provides various benefits to the irregular (terrorist, guerrilla, etc)fighters thus prolonging the conflict. If the general populace finds the results of irregular combat unacceptable (an attack is launched from town A, town A is bombed into rubble)they are more likely to cooperate with those trying to eliminate the irregular combatants. I'm not sure where the line is, but evidence suggests that our strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq is actually too gentle on the civilian population.
The important difference being that there is good reason to suspect that MS chose to name OOXML in a manner that would be confusing. There is little reason to think that a Democrat office holder(in an overwhelmingly Democratic county) intentionally designed a confusing ballot. Making the connection is a completely unwarranted insertion of partisan politics into what is otherwise a discussion in which one's political party affiliation is irrelevant.
Yes, but those supposedly confusing voting cards in Florida were designed by...wait for it....the Democrats. So for this situation to be similar to Florida the FSF would have had to choose the name for Microsoft's OOXML. You are right that it seems likely that OOXML is intentionally designed to confuse people only vaguely familiar with what is going on. My problem is that you somehow drew a parallel to Florida 2000 where Democrat voters were confused by a ballot created by Democrat politicians.
"(think Florida's 2000 election all over again!) " I don't get the connection...did the FSF pick the name for OOXML?
Yes, that was terribly evil of George W. to restrict what he would fund, since before that they could study any cell line they wanted and use NO government money at all. George W. Bush (that Fundamentalist) decided to change the policy on a politically controversial subject from Bill Clinton's enlightened philosophy and fund some stem cell research, oh that evil man He would have been better off to follow Bill Clinton's example and not fund any stem cell research.
I am not sure why American researchers have a hard time doing stem cell work, except that the government only funds a limited number of cell lines. If you want to work with other cell lines you need to find another funding source...Boo hoo.