Sure the cars are heavier, since the safety Nazis have demanded that they crash safely at something just short of relativistic speeds. Improve the tech, and then sabotage it with extra weight. Succeed and fail, all at once.
The solution is: Don't crash.
The way to not crash is: Pay attention! Most of the accidents come from not paying attention.
Want to raise the tax on gas, and save the economy at the same time? Pass the Fair Tax. The Fair Tax dissolves the IRS, repeals all the income taxes, and just uses a tax on retail goods, combined with a "prebate" sent to all Americans to cover the costs of the necessities of life. The Fair Tax is 23% inclusive / 30% exclusive. So, your $4.00 / gallon of gas goes to $5.20, but you've got ALL the salary you made in your pocket, without having to pay income tax witholding, so you can afford the gas tax... unless you're driving excessively. Then you either get a car like the Chevy Volt that gets infinite mpg for 40 miles and then 40 mpg after that, or you car pool or ride the train, etc.
BTW, the Fair Tax proponents claim 3% unemployment within 2 years because of its business friendly nature, so it doesn't just help cars to do the right thing.
Want to save automotive transportation? Get SOMEBODY to invent the magic battery so's everyone can use electricity to get where they're going. Again, the Volt uses 8 KwH to go its 40 mile electric car range. That's 20 KwH per 100 miles. How much is 20 KwH in $$$? Around here it's $1.70. Now, compare that to a 20 mpg car paying $5.20 / gallon. It takes that car $26.00 to go 100 miles. So, quit spending $26 on gas, and spend $1.70 on electricity? Yeah, I like those numbers.
All is not lost, we just need the RIGHT tech and the RIGHT tax structure.
Hey, all U that know what's wrong with the theaters, build one that is "right." Fer instance, there are treatments for walls that block radio signals, so you have instant "The text don't work" and "The phone don't work." Then station someone in each theater to specifically report the blabbermouths and throw them the H out. That'd fix 90% of the problem people have with going to the movies. People eating popcorn? Well, some folks are never satisfied, and popcorn is about 50% of the reason I go to movies. Of course, I see most everything too stupid for words (things like Pet Detective, Dumb and Dumber, Brothers, etc.) As for the box office being down, well hey, you have to give us some movies. Earlier this month, the string of opening movies practically dried up, and the "new" shows that were opening locally were "Moneyball", which I had already seen weeks before but was being brought back for some reason, and another one I can't remember, but the same situation, it had already run its course weeks earlier. What's up with that? Of course I didn't go back and see them again. Stuff I see again is like "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" that is truly good, and has know actors and actresses. Rooney Mara is great, and of course Daniel Craig is Daniel Craig. Then I went to TinTin this afternoon and... was bored. I think I hate all animations, save maybe Madagascar and Ice Age. I just didn't care, and the string of happenings that would surely kill all involved but didn't, 'cuz it was in the script, was just too much to keep me caring. My one thought throughout was, "Why do I care?" and the answer was, "I don't." Only thing worse than the average animation is the movie based on a video game - they almost always suck. No, I didn't go to the latest Transformers movie. Etc. Lots of reasons to not go to movies, but I tend to get there 3 - 4 times a week, anyway. Love the popcorn... and the movie experience.
Get a clue - we don't much use oil to produce electricity. We use coal. We have all the coal we need, it needs no military to go somewhere out of the country to ensure the supply.
The only thing "renewable" that deserves consideration is solar-thermal, that can be stored in hot molten salt to be able to go for a few days of no sun and still produce electricity, thus lessening the necessity of a lot of base load generation to back it up. Everything else that needs gov't subsidization needs to be killed, since our gov't is broke, and further spending is just increasing the National debt.
We're talking John Kerry $70M yachts and John Travolta Boeing 737's,. tho, not Netflix.
You're right, they do a masterful job of appearing to have no income, which is another reason that the income taxes aren't working, and are taxing the poor and middle class more than the rich. But with a consumption tax, the rich, even those that have no income but just sit on a very large pile, and break off a piece every year and live on that, will get to pay taxes to the US Treasury, possibly for the 1st time.
If you want to see testimony on this by economists in the House Ways and Means committee, go to:
The fix for education is to get the Federal Gov't the H out of it, dissolve the Dept. of Education, and let the local school boards educate kids like in the 50's and 60's, when the products of those schools took us to the moon. The more the Feds are involved, the worse it is going to be.
>WTF are you smoking, son? The income tax was instituted a hundred years ago. If there were any cause and effect, the effect would have come more than a HUNDRED YEARS LATER.
Well... duh, when you keep raising your corporate income taxes, and the rest of the world keeps lowering theirs, a fairly recent ting, then yeah, the business is going to go where the taxes are lower.
>>Then there's the regressive nature of the corporate income taxes
>Regressive nature? I don't think you know what "regressive taxes" means. Corporate tax doesn't impact the poor.
And then you fail to reproduce my former explanation of it. You know your goose is cooked in this debate, but just to repeat, the CUSTOMERS, that include THE POOR, are paying about 22% of the price of any American-manufactured item as expenses arising from income taxes. The poor get taxed about 37%, when you add the 15.3% taxes that are the Social Security / Medicare taxes. 37%. That's a regressive tax, when Warren Buffet is bragging about paying 10%.
And you don't know S*** about the Fair Tax - the poor don't pay a penny of the Fair Tax. Or maybe you do know about it, and are just propagandizing everyone else here with disinformation because the Fair Tax frightens you for some reason. Are you one of the rich, that would get hammered by the Fair Tax? I'm suspecting yes...
Wealth tax? The Fair Tax works the same way, that is it really sticks it to the rich when they buy their toys, but it doesn't rob them at the point of a gun (or prison time.) The rich's profligate spending will be more than enough to ensure that everyone else's taxes go down, while their's goes up. This also nails the rich who don't have incomes, and those that have income from the half-taxed capital gains taxes, that will nail them to the tune of $21M when they buy their John Kerry $70M yachts, or mansions, John Travolta's Boeing 737, and lets not forget Nick Cage, who spends every penny. They will be mostly financing America, and the rest of us will have LOWER taxes. I like that formula.
And the reason for all that? Income taxes. Income taxes, the 2nd worst mistake the USA has ever made, right behind slavery, has been making our manufacturing too expensive, so it has mostly all moved overseas, along with its high-paying jobs. What's left is crappy retail jobs, and equally low-paying service sector jobs - just the things that cannot be exported overseas.
The answer? The Fair Tax. The Fair Tax calls for the abolition of the income taxes, all of them, and replaces them with a consumption tax - a Federal sales tax. You get to keep all your money you earn, unlike the extremely regressive income taxes that, via the payroll taxes for social security and medicare, tax the poor at 15.3% from the 1st dollar they earn to the last, while Warren Buffet brags about paying a 10% income tax, and his share of the SS and medicare, taxes for which are capped at around $100K, amount to peanuts for him. Then there's the regressive nature of the corporate income taxes, and other taxes that the businesses incur, that amounts to about 22% of the selling price of anything manufactured here. So, when a poor person buys a light bulb manufactured here, 22% of its price is from income taxes of all forms. Add that to the 15.3% for social security and medicare, and we're taxing the poor at about 37%. Nice regressive tax, and the reason that the poor have difficulty "getting ahead."
Yeah, labor is expensive in the USA, but that's not the reason manufacturing has mostly left, because most manufacturing is not very labor intensive any more due to automation. A few people can now take care of a factory that used to employ 1000's. Those few people, getting paid big bucks to do the things machines can't, such as repair themselves, install themselves, etc. can be paid well, and the company can still make a serious profit if it is not hampered by the USA's astronomical corporate income tax, at 35%, plus and average of 4.5% more than that in state corporate income taxes, making the USA the 2nd-highest corporate tax rate in the world, behind Japan and then only by a few tenths of a percent.
Like Bill Clinton's "It's the economy, stupid" campaign slogan, "It's the taxes, stupid" applies...
W. Edward Deming, the guy that went to Japan and showed them how to beat up our auto industry, had a theory of driving fear out of the workplace, one feature of which was to not have performance reviews.
Just logically, APR's emphasize hero programming in an environment that is inherently a team effort. If you want your people to share and cooperate for best results, you probably shouldn't try to set them against each other to compete for the biggest prize (bonus) awarded via an APR.
No sense studying for or taking a computer job in the USA any more, 'cuz they're just going to can you and ship the job to India anyway within the next few years. You know it, they know it, and end of story. Best to become the best welder you can be, or machinist, etc. and open a shop that sells to the public, or contracts. There are no steady jobs any more, and won't be as long as we keep raping all our industries with the 2nd-highest corporate income tax on the planet...
The problem with the study is that it lumps texting (always dangerous) with talking on the phone (something you can learn to do safely.)
I used to follow someone and maintain a low profile on the Interstate while using the phone, but after practicing with the phone, I can now be fully aware of everything going on around me and carry on a conversation too. It just takes practice, and a determination that driving the car is priority #1. I can ask the other person to repeat something, or tell them to "standby" if there is a traffic threat I have to deal with and use both hands, and in a pinch, I can just drop the phone and worry about the call later. But you have to practice this stuff.
Same thing with GPS. 1st GPS I mounted in the car, I crossed the center line while staring at the dang thing. Now I know how to do that and intermittantly look at the road for as long as it takes to change whatever needs changing or reading, etc.
Texting, OTOH, I don't think is possible to do safely, as I don't think there's any way to do it efficiently enough to make it worthwhile without taking your eyes off the road for too-long a time. I'd only use it if it had, say, speech recognition so I could send something without keyboarding.
Income taxes are not progressive. Poor people pay 15.3% of EVERY dollar they earn to the social security and medicare payroll taxes, while those taxes have a cap so that the rich do not. That is incredibly regressive. Also, income taxes embedded in the US cost of doing business here are responsible for about 22% of the price of all goods manufactured here being composed of income taxes, which are paid at 22% by the poor as well as 22% by the rich. We are really hammering poor people at tax rates up to 37.3%, which would totally go away under the consumption tax known as the Fair Tax.
People buying goods overseas still owe the tax, and a $70M yact is a whole lot harder to conceal than a Swiss bank account.
You are simply wrong about the rich not spending their money. Who do you think are buying those $10M mansions and $70M yachts like John Kerry's?
The "they" in corporate personhood still drills down to the employees paying those taxes through lower wages and the customers paying those taxes through higher prices, and the stockholders paying those taxes through lower dividends. And, all those people are us.
The right wing are mostly the ones supporting the Fair Tax. Its the left that seem to be dragging their feet. Hey, don't ask me... maybe they want their constituency to remain poor and looking to them for gov't help?
Lets talk American labor. The auto companies said, all over the news programs when they were going bankrupt a few years ago, that their labor rate is $78 / hr. That's because of all the benefits and the retirees' expenses. And here:
we learn that it takes 30 - 33 labor hours for the big 3 here to build a car. That's about $2500 in labor.
The Fair Tax people, long before this article came out, have calcualted that, on average, about 22% of the price of all American goods is composed of income tax expenses incurred by American companies manufacturing things here. That's corporate income tax, employees' individual income tax that makes their labor more expensive, that also includes the payroll tax that the employees pay at 15.3% for medicare and social security that again, makes their labor more expensive, the embedded income taxes in all their raw materials and machine tools and everything else they buy, and so forth.
Imagine now a $40K SUV. It is reasonable to expect that the embedded income tax expense is around $8800. Compare that with the $2500 that goes into the labor of building the $40K SUV. An SUV would get dramatically cheaper with income tax gone as opposed to making slaves of all the workforce and shafting the retirees of all their pay.
As for the manufacturing coming back, a survey commissioned by Bill Archer, former house ways and means chair, asked 500 foreign CEO's what their reaction would be if the USA passed the Fair Tax. 400 of them said they would build their next factory in the USA. The other 100 said they would move their company HQ to the USA.
As for the Factcheck people, imagine how long they took to consider this question, and then note the testimony of 2 PHD economists familiar with the Fair Tax before the house ways and means committee earlier this year:
If you scroll down to the bottom, bring up the video, and jump to the 1 hr and 36 minute mark, you find that these economists, under oath and threat of perjury, have testified that everyone's lifetime tax outlook goes down EXCEPT the very rich, who will pay more than they have been paying, because the Fair Tax hits them harder because of all their spending outstripping what their current tax burden is, which is greatly avoided through loopholes that they're very good at exploiting.
These PHD's have spent quite a lot of effort modeling the Fair Tax, and I am much more likely to take what they say about the Fair Tax bringing back prosperity rather than a website like FactCheck who, again, likely considered this for a couple days to a week.
And although the economists didn't say explicitly, imagine how many rich just don't have income taxes because they don't work. They sit around and break off a piece of cash from a very large pile of it that belongs to them and live on that each year, as well as the taxes on capital gains which is necessarily much lower than the income tax rates, or you'll kill invenstment if you try to raise them.
And that's the point - the income taxes are and have been killing the US industry for 50 years, ever since the US lost its consumer electronics to Japan starting in the 60's, and are losing the intellectual employment to places like India even today. When it _all_ goes overseas, we'll have just the thing that absolutely MUST be
Corporate tax happens on the SUPPLIERS to the corporation that are making the hard drives, too. It doesn't matter that the hard drive mfgr is only breaking even and paying no corporate income tax, he is in fact paying it in the elevated prices of all the components he buys from his various suppliers. Need a supply of raw material for casting hard drives? That will be supplied by a company making a profit, because if it wasn't, it'd be out of business. And, the HDD mfgr here will be paying the cost of that supplier's corporate income tax.
And if we want corporations here to make no profit just to avoid killing taxes, that is a killing philosophy that has already sent most of our jobs overseas, esp. the blue-collar jobs.
Why not seek to allow corporations every chance possible to make money in America? If that works, we should be up to our ears in newly-employed people. Right now, our unemployment compensation is costing the US Gov't, or more precisely "the rest of us", $100 million a year. Food stamps come in at $70 million a year. Those expenses could be brought down considerably if we could have several 10's of 1000's of new factories, and therefore new jobs, that would enable people that can weld and wire and install and maintain machinery in factories to get off that sort of gov't assistance. Growing the economy has to happen, or we're going to go bankrupt, I believe.
If they end up paying zero taxes, its only because they've paid almost as much as the taxes to lawyers and accountants to guide their every move in the direction of least tax exposure. But the bottom line on that is that their products are very nearly as expensive as if they'd just paid the taxes, because of the necessity to pay those high-priced lawyers and accountants. The whole income tax system hurts the companies that either pay the taxes, or pay the lawyers/accountants to avoid paying the taxes, and its really expensive either way. We cannot have the highest labor rate on the planet and the 2nd-highest corporate income taxes on the planet and expect to compete.
What we should be doing is to try to make things as cheap for industry as we possibly can, so that there will be more profit and therefore more industry, which means employment will be more plentiful. Automation or not, the factories still need people to install those machines, repair those machines, move them around, wire them up, supply them with compressed air or hydraulic power or chemical supplies such as paint and so forth. While such factories won't employ the 1000's that factories of old did, we can still make it up on the volume by building many more factories.
And think of the boost to the global warming efforts to have AMERICAN factories which will, naturally, run on natural gas or wind, as most new electrical plants are gas-fired, and 100's of new electrical plants would be needed as 1000's of new factories are built, and this would TAKE AWAY the work from the factories in India and China, which are digging coal as fast as they can. We can get our energy from 1 carbon atom and 4 hydrogen atoms of the methane molecule, about as clean a deal CO2-wise as you can get with fossil fuels, and we will likely be the first to convert all that to solar and geothermal as soon as it makes economic senses to do so. Until then, we have oceans and oceans of natural gas, more than 50% more than the next-most-plentiful supply on the face of the earth, Russia.
The reindustrialization of America is a win on many fronts, but we're going to have to abolish the income taxes to make it happen.
As we get factories springing up like mushrooms across the land to employ the millions of unemployed, labor will become scarce, and competition for those workers will become more intense. Employers will have to offer good working condx in order to lure those that can weld, wire, pipefit, milwright, machine, etc. into their factories. If you want to see the extreme example of this, note the wooing of software developers with lavish campuses for workplaces that contain tennis courts and weight rooms and swimming pools and everything you could want in pleasant working conditions.
Helping that along _could_ be unions, if things were to go in the direction of medieval torture dungeon - UAW workers make more than $100K with overtime at time and a half, with Sundays at double time, all negotiated by the unions. That sort of protection can spread if need be, but if employers have learned anything at all, they won't abuse people to the extent that a majority of them would vote for a union.
And no, we don't need to completely remove environmental regulations, although getting a bit more reasonable might help a lot. Spending billions on the last 0.002% of some pollutant isn't necessarily cost effective if the misery caused by the economic recession resulting from most of our jobs moving overseas is more expensive to the American people.
You are missing the fact that the well-to-do's spending on their toys far outstrips what they've been paying in income taxes, and especially since they are so masterful at hiding their income from the taxes. You also have to study the Fair Tax to know that no poor person pays a penny of Fair Tax. Also good to know is the fact the the income taxes are highly regressive, starting with 15.3% of the 1st dollar that the poor person makes, in the form of the payroll taxes (social security and medicare) and are further compounded by the hidden income tax in the price of all American-manufactured goods, which amounts to, on average, about 22% of the selling price of those goods. Add everything together, and the poor are being crushed by up to 37% taxes on their income right now. The Fair Tax would reduce that to zero via the mechanism of a prebate, which is essentially the gov't giving every social-security-number-carrying American enough money each month to pay the Fair Tax on income up to the poverty level. So, if you are making the poverty level, you pay no tax. If you are making less than the poverty level, you get a bit of a subsidy. If you are making millions, you're going to be sending millions to Washington when you buy your next $70 million dollar yacht.
As for the middle class taxes rising, my own taxes would fall about $2K, and at somewhat less than $100K income, I'm square in the middle of the middle class. The testimony of 2 Fair Tax experts before the house ways and means committee earlier this year stated the fact of the rich's spending outstripping the middle class's tax burden. It;s here:
And if you go down to the bottom of that page, you can call up the video of the whole testimony and get those statements in real-time, on video. Unfortunately, I think that comes at about 1 hr and 36 minutes into the testimony, if I remember right.
Stop trying to keep people from having a knife or gun on airplanes, and specifically permit and encourage it. The loyal citizens on the plane will put down any terrorist attempts, and it won't cost the taxpayers a dime. OK, it might still be a good idea to inspect packages for bombs, but this wanading and metal detector nonsense, and long lines and shoe-removing and person-violating would cease.
HD's and a lot of other stuff. No, its not the labor rates, its the taxes. We can't do squat as long as we have a 35% corporate tax rate Federally combined with an average 4.5% state tax rate to give us the 2nd-highest corporate tax rate on the planet. All we need to do is abolish the IRS and the income tax, totally, and we'll have an economic boom of biblical proportions. And, we'll make hard drives, too. Its called The Fair Tax. It abolishes the IRS, and taxes consumption instead. It will reindustrialize America.
Because in the end, cars are still the best answer for getting from point A to point B. That is, a car is the only thing that is not going to go anything but the shortest road distance from where I am to where I want to go. Everything else is going to need to go miles out of the way to get to a departure point and stop its service at a termination point, from which I have to arrange further transportation, also probably a car.
The day is coming when a car is going to be the most efficient way to travel. This rail line is 520 miles long. The roadway from SF to LA is 359 miles long according to Street Altas USA. If I am starting from the south side of SF or the north side of LA, I'm actually having to drive the opposite direction, in all probability, to get to the train station. If not, then there are likely many train stations, with this multi-1000-ton train alternately accelerating and decelerating from and into them, another waste.
20 years from now, robot drivers will be able to take cars up to 100 - 150 mph, tailgate to get fuel-saving NASCAR drafting effect, do it safely, and do it on electricity probably generated by solar electricity. Problems solved. Therefore, our best course of action is to continue to improve the roads, NOW, and be ready for the future that still belongs to the private automobile.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure the cars are heavier, since the safety Nazis have demanded that they crash safely at something just short of relativistic speeds. Improve the tech, and then sabotage it with extra weight. Succeed and fail, all at once.
The solution is: Don't crash.
The way to not crash is: Pay attention! Most of the accidents come from not paying attention.
Want to raise the tax on gas, and save the economy at the same time? Pass the Fair Tax. The Fair Tax dissolves the IRS, repeals all the income taxes, and just uses a tax on retail goods, combined with a "prebate" sent to all Americans to cover the costs of the necessities of life. The Fair Tax is 23% inclusive / 30% exclusive. So, your $4.00 / gallon of gas goes to $5.20, but you've got ALL the salary you made in your pocket, without having to pay income tax witholding, so you can afford the gas tax... unless you're driving excessively. Then you either get a car like the Chevy Volt that gets infinite mpg for 40 miles and then 40 mpg after that, or you car pool or ride the train, etc.
BTW, the Fair Tax proponents claim 3% unemployment within 2 years because of its business friendly nature, so it doesn't just help cars to do the right thing.
Want to save automotive transportation? Get SOMEBODY to invent the magic battery so's everyone can use electricity to get where they're going. Again, the Volt uses 8 KwH to go its 40 mile electric car range. That's 20 KwH per 100 miles. How much is 20 KwH in $$$? Around here it's $1.70. Now, compare that to a 20 mpg car paying $5.20 / gallon. It takes that car $26.00 to go 100 miles. So, quit spending $26 on gas, and spend $1.70 on electricity? Yeah, I like those numbers.
All is not lost, we just need the RIGHT tech and the RIGHT tax structure.
Hey, all U that know what's wrong with the theaters, build one that is "right." Fer instance, there are treatments for walls that block radio signals, so you have instant "The text don't work" and "The phone don't work." Then station someone in each theater to specifically report the blabbermouths and throw them the H out. That'd fix 90% of the problem people have with going to the movies. People eating popcorn? Well, some folks are never satisfied, and popcorn is about 50% of the reason I go to movies. Of course, I see most everything too stupid for words (things like Pet Detective, Dumb and Dumber, Brothers, etc.) As for the box office being down, well hey, you have to give us some movies. Earlier this month, the string of opening movies practically dried up, and the "new" shows that were opening locally were "Moneyball", which I had already seen weeks before but was being brought back for some reason, and another one I can't remember, but the same situation, it had already run its course weeks earlier. What's up with that? Of course I didn't go back and see them again. Stuff I see again is like "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" that is truly good, and has know actors and actresses. Rooney Mara is great, and of course Daniel Craig is Daniel Craig. Then I went to TinTin this afternoon and... was bored. I think I hate all animations, save maybe Madagascar and Ice Age. I just didn't care, and the string of happenings that would surely kill all involved but didn't, 'cuz it was in the script, was just too much to keep me caring. My one thought throughout was, "Why do I care?" and the answer was, "I don't." Only thing worse than the average animation is the movie based on a video game - they almost always suck. No, I didn't go to the latest Transformers movie. Etc. Lots of reasons to not go to movies, but I tend to get there 3 - 4 times a week, anyway. Love the popcorn... and the movie experience.
Get a clue - we don't much use oil to produce electricity. We use coal. We have all the coal we need, it needs no military to go somewhere out of the country to ensure the supply.
The only thing "renewable" that deserves consideration is solar-thermal, that can be stored in hot molten salt to be able to go for a few days of no sun and still produce electricity, thus lessening the necessity of a lot of base load generation to back it up. Everything else that needs gov't subsidization needs to be killed, since our gov't is broke, and further spending is just increasing the National debt.
We're talking John Kerry $70M yachts and John Travolta Boeing 737's,. tho, not Netflix.
You're right, they do a masterful job of appearing to have no income, which is another reason that the income taxes aren't working, and are taxing the poor and middle class more than the rich. But with a consumption tax, the rich, even those that have no income but just sit on a very large pile, and break off a piece every year and live on that, will get to pay taxes to the US Treasury, possibly for the 1st time.
If you want to see testimony on this by economists in the House Ways and Means committee, go to:
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/Calendar/EventSingle.aspx?EventID=252676
scroll down to the bottom, activate the link:
Click here to view archive hearing video
and advance the proceedings to 1 hr and 35 minutes. You'll see an analysis of this by people that study it, and know what they're talking about.
The fix for education is to get the Federal Gov't the H out of it, dissolve the Dept. of Education, and let the local school boards educate kids like in the 50's and 60's, when the products of those schools took us to the moon. The more the Feds are involved, the worse it is going to be.
>WTF are you smoking, son? The income tax was instituted a hundred years ago. If there were any cause and effect, the effect would have come more than a HUNDRED YEARS LATER.
Well... duh, when you keep raising your corporate income taxes, and the rest of the world keeps lowering theirs, a fairly recent ting, then yeah, the business is going to go where the taxes are lower.
>>Then there's the regressive nature of the corporate income taxes
>Regressive nature? I don't think you know what "regressive taxes" means. Corporate tax doesn't impact the poor.
And then you fail to reproduce my former explanation of it. You know your goose is cooked in this debate, but just to repeat, the CUSTOMERS, that include THE POOR, are paying about 22% of the price of any American-manufactured item as expenses arising from income taxes. The poor get taxed about 37%, when you add the 15.3% taxes that are the Social Security / Medicare taxes. 37%. That's a regressive tax, when Warren Buffet is bragging about paying 10%.
And you don't know S*** about the Fair Tax - the poor don't pay a penny of the Fair Tax. Or maybe you do know about it, and are just propagandizing everyone else here with disinformation because the Fair Tax frightens you for some reason. Are you one of the rich, that would get hammered by the Fair Tax? I'm suspecting yes...
Wealth tax? The Fair Tax works the same way, that is it really sticks it to the rich when they buy their toys, but it doesn't rob them at the point of a gun (or prison time.) The rich's profligate spending will be more than enough to ensure that everyone else's taxes go down, while their's goes up. This also nails the rich who don't have incomes, and those that have income from the half-taxed capital gains taxes, that will nail them to the tune of $21M when they buy their John Kerry $70M yachts, or mansions, John Travolta's Boeing 737, and lets not forget Nick Cage, who spends every penny. They will be mostly financing America, and the rest of us will have LOWER taxes. I like that formula.
And the reason for all that? Income taxes. Income taxes, the 2nd worst mistake the USA has ever made, right behind slavery, has been making our manufacturing too expensive, so it has mostly all moved overseas, along with its high-paying jobs. What's left is crappy retail jobs, and equally low-paying service sector jobs - just the things that cannot be exported overseas.
The answer? The Fair Tax. The Fair Tax calls for the abolition of the income taxes, all of them, and replaces them with a consumption tax - a Federal sales tax. You get to keep all your money you earn, unlike the extremely regressive income taxes that, via the payroll taxes for social security and medicare, tax the poor at 15.3% from the 1st dollar they earn to the last, while Warren Buffet brags about paying a 10% income tax, and his share of the SS and medicare, taxes for which are capped at around $100K, amount to peanuts for him. Then there's the regressive nature of the corporate income taxes, and other taxes that the businesses incur, that amounts to about 22% of the selling price of anything manufactured here. So, when a poor person buys a light bulb manufactured here, 22% of its price is from income taxes of all forms. Add that to the 15.3% for social security and medicare, and we're taxing the poor at about 37%. Nice regressive tax, and the reason that the poor have difficulty "getting ahead."
Yeah, labor is expensive in the USA, but that's not the reason manufacturing has mostly left, because most manufacturing is not very labor intensive any more due to automation. A few people can now take care of a factory that used to employ 1000's. Those few people, getting paid big bucks to do the things machines can't, such as repair themselves, install themselves, etc. can be paid well, and the company can still make a serious profit if it is not hampered by the USA's astronomical corporate income tax, at 35%, plus and average of 4.5% more than that in state corporate income taxes, making the USA the 2nd-highest corporate tax rate in the world, behind Japan and then only by a few tenths of a percent.
Like Bill Clinton's "It's the economy, stupid" campaign slogan, "It's the taxes, stupid" applies...
W. Edward Deming, the guy that went to Japan and showed them how to beat up our auto industry, had a theory of driving fear out of the workplace, one feature of which was to not have performance reviews.
Just logically, APR's emphasize hero programming in an environment that is inherently a team effort. If you want your people to share and cooperate for best results, you probably shouldn't try to set them against each other to compete for the biggest prize (bonus) awarded via an APR.
No sense studying for or taking a computer job in the USA any more, 'cuz they're just going to can you and ship the job to India anyway within the next few years. You know it, they know it, and end of story. Best to become the best welder you can be, or machinist, etc. and open a shop that sells to the public, or contracts. There are no steady jobs any more, and won't be as long as we keep raping all our industries with the 2nd-highest corporate income tax on the planet...
The problem with the study is that it lumps texting (always dangerous) with talking on the phone (something you can learn to do safely.)
I used to follow someone and maintain a low profile on the Interstate while using the phone, but after practicing with the phone, I can now be fully aware of everything going on around me and carry on a conversation too. It just takes practice, and a determination that driving the car is priority #1. I can ask the other person to repeat something, or tell them to "standby" if there is a traffic threat I have to deal with and use both hands, and in a pinch, I can just drop the phone and worry about the call later. But you have to practice this stuff.
Same thing with GPS. 1st GPS I mounted in the car, I crossed the center line while staring at the dang thing. Now I know how to do that and intermittantly look at the road for as long as it takes to change whatever needs changing or reading, etc.
Texting, OTOH, I don't think is possible to do safely, as I don't think there's any way to do it efficiently enough to make it worthwhile without taking your eyes off the road for too-long a time. I'd only use it if it had, say, speech recognition so I could send something without keyboarding.
I've forgotten where I read that, but the figure is about 75% of the tax expense is paid to lawyers and accountants to avoid paying the tax.
Income taxes are not progressive. Poor people pay 15.3% of EVERY dollar they earn to the social security and medicare payroll taxes, while those taxes have a cap so that the rich do not. That is incredibly regressive. Also, income taxes embedded in the US cost of doing business here are responsible for about 22% of the price of all goods manufactured here being composed of income taxes, which are paid at 22% by the poor as well as 22% by the rich. We are really hammering poor people at tax rates up to 37.3%, which would totally go away under the consumption tax known as the Fair Tax.
People buying goods overseas still owe the tax, and a $70M yact is a whole lot harder to conceal than a Swiss bank account.
You are simply wrong about the rich not spending their money. Who do you think are buying those $10M mansions and $70M yachts like John Kerry's?
The "they" in corporate personhood still drills down to the employees paying those taxes through lower wages and the customers paying those taxes through higher prices, and the stockholders paying those taxes through lower dividends. And, all those people are us.
The right wing are mostly the ones supporting the Fair Tax. Its the left that seem to be dragging their feet. Hey, don't ask me... maybe they want their constituency to remain poor and looking to them for gov't help?
Lets talk American labor. The auto companies said, all over the news programs when they were going bankrupt a few years ago, that their labor rate is $78 / hr. That's because of all the benefits and the retirees' expenses. And here:
http://www.mt-online.com/component/content/article/40-january2009/85-uptime-lessons-from-auto-manufacturing.html?directory=90
we learn that it takes 30 - 33 labor hours for the big 3 here to build a car. That's about $2500 in labor.
The Fair Tax people, long before this article came out, have calcualted that, on average, about 22% of the price of all American goods is composed of income tax expenses incurred by American companies manufacturing things here. That's corporate income tax, employees' individual income tax that makes their labor more expensive, that also includes the payroll tax that the employees pay at 15.3% for medicare and social security that again, makes their labor more expensive, the embedded income taxes in all their raw materials and machine tools and everything else they buy, and so forth.
Imagine now a $40K SUV. It is reasonable to expect that the embedded income tax expense is around $8800. Compare that with the $2500 that goes into the labor of building the $40K SUV. An SUV would get dramatically cheaper with income tax gone as opposed to making slaves of all the workforce and shafting the retirees of all their pay.
As for the manufacturing coming back, a survey commissioned by Bill Archer, former house ways and means chair, asked 500 foreign CEO's what their reaction would be if the USA passed the Fair Tax. 400 of them said they would build their next factory in the USA. The other 100 said they would move their company HQ to the USA.
http://www.examiner.com/finance-examiner-in-national/survey-shows-that-companies-would-create-jobs-us-if-fair-tax-was-instituted?render=print
As for the Factcheck people, imagine how long they took to consider this question, and then note the testimony of 2 PHD economists familiar with the Fair Tax before the house ways and means committee earlier this year:
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/Calendar/EventSingle.aspx?EventID=252676
If you scroll down to the bottom, bring up the video, and jump to the 1 hr and 36 minute mark, you find that these economists, under oath and threat of perjury, have testified that everyone's lifetime tax outlook goes down EXCEPT the very rich, who will pay more than they have been paying, because the Fair Tax hits them harder because of all their spending outstripping what their current tax burden is, which is greatly avoided through loopholes that they're very good at exploiting.
These PHD's have spent quite a lot of effort modeling the Fair Tax, and I am much more likely to take what they say about the Fair Tax bringing back prosperity rather than a website like FactCheck who, again, likely considered this for a couple days to a week.
And although the economists didn't say explicitly, imagine how many rich just don't have income taxes because they don't work. They sit around and break off a piece of cash from a very large pile of it that belongs to them and live on that each year, as well as the taxes on capital gains which is necessarily much lower than the income tax rates, or you'll kill invenstment if you try to raise them.
And that's the point - the income taxes are and have been killing the US industry for 50 years, ever since the US lost its consumer electronics to Japan starting in the 60's, and are losing the intellectual employment to places like India even today. When it _all_ goes overseas, we'll have just the thing that absolutely MUST be
Corporate tax happens on the SUPPLIERS to the corporation that are making the hard drives, too. It doesn't matter that the hard drive mfgr is only breaking even and paying no corporate income tax, he is in fact paying it in the elevated prices of all the components he buys from his various suppliers. Need a supply of raw material for casting hard drives? That will be supplied by a company making a profit, because if it wasn't, it'd be out of business. And, the HDD mfgr here will be paying the cost of that supplier's corporate income tax.
And if we want corporations here to make no profit just to avoid killing taxes, that is a killing philosophy that has already sent most of our jobs overseas, esp. the blue-collar jobs.
Why not seek to allow corporations every chance possible to make money in America? If that works, we should be up to our ears in newly-employed people. Right now, our unemployment compensation is costing the US Gov't, or more precisely "the rest of us", $100 million a year. Food stamps come in at $70 million a year. Those expenses could be brought down considerably if we could have several 10's of 1000's of new factories, and therefore new jobs, that would enable people that can weld and wire and install and maintain machinery in factories to get off that sort of gov't assistance. Growing the economy has to happen, or we're going to go bankrupt, I believe.
If they end up paying zero taxes, its only because they've paid almost as much as the taxes to lawyers and accountants to guide their every move in the direction of least tax exposure. But the bottom line on that is that their products are very nearly as expensive as if they'd just paid the taxes, because of the necessity to pay those high-priced lawyers and accountants. The whole income tax system hurts the companies that either pay the taxes, or pay the lawyers/accountants to avoid paying the taxes, and its really expensive either way. We cannot have the highest labor rate on the planet and the 2nd-highest corporate income taxes on the planet and expect to compete.
What we should be doing is to try to make things as cheap for industry as we possibly can, so that there will be more profit and therefore more industry, which means employment will be more plentiful. Automation or not, the factories still need people to install those machines, repair those machines, move them around, wire them up, supply them with compressed air or hydraulic power or chemical supplies such as paint and so forth. While such factories won't employ the 1000's that factories of old did, we can still make it up on the volume by building many more factories.
And think of the boost to the global warming efforts to have AMERICAN factories which will, naturally, run on natural gas or wind, as most new electrical plants are gas-fired, and 100's of new electrical plants would be needed as 1000's of new factories are built, and this would TAKE AWAY the work from the factories in India and China, which are digging coal as fast as they can. We can get our energy from 1 carbon atom and 4 hydrogen atoms of the methane molecule, about as clean a deal CO2-wise as you can get with fossil fuels, and we will likely be the first to convert all that to solar and geothermal as soon as it makes economic senses to do so. Until then, we have oceans and oceans of natural gas, more than 50% more than the next-most-plentiful supply on the face of the earth, Russia.
The reindustrialization of America is a win on many fronts, but we're going to have to abolish the income taxes to make it happen.
Just the opposite.
As we get factories springing up like mushrooms across the land to employ the millions of unemployed, labor will become scarce, and competition for those workers will become more intense. Employers will have to offer good working condx in order to lure those that can weld, wire, pipefit, milwright, machine, etc. into their factories. If you want to see the extreme example of this, note the wooing of software developers with lavish campuses for workplaces that contain tennis courts and weight rooms and swimming pools and everything you could want in pleasant working conditions.
Helping that along _could_ be unions, if things were to go in the direction of medieval torture dungeon - UAW workers make more than $100K with overtime at time and a half, with Sundays at double time, all negotiated by the unions. That sort of protection can spread if need be, but if employers have learned anything at all, they won't abuse people to the extent that a majority of them would vote for a union.
And no, we don't need to completely remove environmental regulations, although getting a bit more reasonable might help a lot. Spending billions on the last 0.002% of some pollutant isn't necessarily cost effective if the misery caused by the economic recession resulting from most of our jobs moving overseas is more expensive to the American people.
You are missing the fact that the well-to-do's spending on their toys far outstrips what they've been paying in income taxes, and especially since they are so masterful at hiding their income from the taxes. You also have to study the Fair Tax to know that no poor person pays a penny of Fair Tax. Also good to know is the fact the the income taxes are highly regressive, starting with 15.3% of the 1st dollar that the poor person makes, in the form of the payroll taxes (social security and medicare) and are further compounded by the hidden income tax in the price of all American-manufactured goods, which amounts to, on average, about 22% of the selling price of those goods. Add everything together, and the poor are being crushed by up to 37% taxes on their income right now. The Fair Tax would reduce that to zero via the mechanism of a prebate, which is essentially the gov't giving every social-security-number-carrying American enough money each month to pay the Fair Tax on income up to the poverty level. So, if you are making the poverty level, you pay no tax. If you are making less than the poverty level, you get a bit of a subsidy. If you are making millions, you're going to be sending millions to Washington when you buy your next $70 million dollar yacht.
As for the middle class taxes rising, my own taxes would fall about $2K, and at somewhat less than $100K income, I'm square in the middle of the middle class. The testimony of 2 Fair Tax experts before the house ways and means committee earlier this year stated the fact of the rich's spending outstripping the middle class's tax burden. It;s here:
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/Calendar/EventSingle.aspx?EventID=252676
And if you go down to the bottom of that page, you can call up the video of the whole testimony and get those statements in real-time, on video. Unfortunately, I think that comes at about 1 hr and 36 minutes into the testimony, if I remember right.
Stop trying to keep people from having a knife or gun on airplanes, and specifically permit and encourage it. The loyal citizens on the plane will put down any terrorist attempts, and it won't cost the taxpayers a dime. OK, it might still be a good idea to inspect packages for bombs, but this wanading and metal detector nonsense, and long lines and shoe-removing and person-violating would cease.
If you can drive, or ride a train or bus, do it. The airlines going belly-up will end the TSA nonsense pretty quick.
HD's and a lot of other stuff. No, its not the labor rates, its the taxes. We can't do squat as long as we have a 35% corporate tax rate Federally combined with an average 4.5% state tax rate to give us the 2nd-highest corporate tax rate on the planet. All we need to do is abolish the IRS and the income tax, totally, and we'll have an economic boom of biblical proportions. And, we'll make hard drives, too. Its called The Fair Tax. It abolishes the IRS, and taxes consumption instead. It will reindustrialize America.
The cost is astonomical... obscene... etc. 188 million dollars a mile? Holy cow...
Yes, forget about this. Use the money to improve the roads, build new roads, or simply not spend it at all and help the nation's bottom line.
Because in the end, cars are still the best answer for getting from point A to point B. That is, a car is the only thing that is not going to go anything but the shortest road distance from where I am to where I want to go. Everything else is going to need to go miles out of the way to get to a departure point and stop its service at a termination point, from which I have to arrange further transportation, also probably a car.
The day is coming when a car is going to be the most efficient way to travel. This rail line is 520 miles long. The roadway from SF to LA is 359 miles long according to Street Altas USA. If I am starting from the south side of SF or the north side of LA, I'm actually having to drive the opposite direction, in all probability, to get to the train station. If not, then there are likely many train stations, with this multi-1000-ton train alternately accelerating and decelerating from and into them, another waste.
20 years from now, robot drivers will be able to take cars up to 100 - 150 mph, tailgate to get fuel-saving NASCAR drafting effect, do it safely, and do it on electricity probably generated by solar electricity. Problems solved. Therefore, our best course of action is to continue to improve the roads, NOW, and be ready for the future that still belongs to the private automobile.