1) Married people filing jointly pay a lower rate, but by combining two single earners into one entity, the new entity (in theory) doubles its income, so it's a wash.
2) As for the second question, neither is particularly fair. No taxation system is going to be fair- someone, somewhere, is going to be able to say "I'm getting screwed" by even the most fair of systems. Why do I, a single male with no dependents, pay more in taxes for the same income than someone with lots of kids? Their kids are sucking up more resources from the government, they should pay more. But I don't have all those mouths to feed, so *I* should pay more.
The real answer is that corporations should no more have to pay income taxes on money they use to cover expenses than should an individual have to. Which is kind of how it works now, if you look at the progressive taxation system from another perspective: that the income tax rate IS 35%, and you get discounts (the lower brackets) for money used to pay living expenses. But it sure doesn't seem like that when lower income families are paying 10-25% of their incomes, and never actually profiting from anything.
To really be fair, as I see it, the feds would need to enact something more like Herman Cain's 999 plan. (No, I'm not crazy.) Obviously, his system was terrible. But the corporate income tax is terribly inefficient, and obviously not an effective way to fund government. So, you kill than and enact a sales tax system that skims a low percentage off most transactions. That covers the "everyone should pay their fair share" aspect of taxation. Then you change the income tax to have a much higher standard deduction (like, at least the poverty rate) and eliminate the distinction between capital gains and work income. You change [something] in order to eliminate the ability of people to funnel their personal income through a corporation to avoid taxes. I'm not entirely sure how you'd do that. Maybe that's where a VAT would be useful- money can only flow out of a corp in one of three ways- as salary, taxes paid by the individual, as dividends; taxes paid by the recipients; or a "other" with a VAT attached.
In terms of taxes, "tax avoidance" is figuring out legal ways to pay less tax. "Tax evasion" is doing so in illegal ways. The terms become less clear when you look at things like using your power and influence to change the laws to make something that used to be evasion mere avoidance.
There were some stories where businesses in Chicago, even small businesses, were "moving" their headquarters to Kankakee (less than an hour's drive) post office boxes and funneling all their sales through there, paying the much lower Kankakee city and county sales taxes. Same game.
I don't doubt that's true. But if you do it right, your stocks continue to appreciate (hopefully) while you get the money now. Say I own $1m of stocks, and I need $1m in cash. I could sell the stocks and end up with $850,000 after tax. Or I could borrow $1m, and in two years when the loan is due, my stocks have appreciated to $1.3m. I sell the stocks, pay the loan, interest and cap gains and net out to zero. One way, I got $850,000 after tax, the other way I got $1m after tax.
Further, because I have control over when I sell the stocks, I can sell them in a year when I've suffered some other loss and not have to pay ANY cap gains tax. I can effectively run my life tax free, and my only "tax" is the interest I pay to the person making the loan.
Further, further, I can take out the loan from a friendly entity, and they can forgive the accrued interest. They can write off the loss (which helps them offset some gain). Sure, I'll owe income taxes on the forgiven interest, but 2% on $1m is only $20k in income. Even at the top marginal rate of 35%, I only owe the feds $7000, rather than the $150,000 I would have owed them if I had paid cap gains on the $1m in stocks.
It doesn't matter, because the tax happens at the same time the cap gain is realized. They are denominated in the same inflated dollars. In other words, the inflation happens to both sides of the transaction. You might owe a lot of dollars that are worth less than they were in 1970, but you also got paid with a lot of dollars that are worth less than they were in 1970. It is meaningless, the same way this is: "damn the government! before the converted to metric, I only had to walk 2 miles to work. now I have to walk over THREE kilometers to work!"
The problem isn't that companies are taking the incentives, it is that governments are allowed to give them. (Slightly circular, I know.) But it leads to big companies extracting tax breaks from governments because they have the bargaining power. "Hey, we'll go to Nevada if you don't cut our taxes." Meanwhile, smaller businesses are stuck paying full freight. My condo association is prohibited from giving people discounts like this, why shouldn't my government?
So, zero tolerance is ok for bad neighborhoods, but not ok when you run a yellow? Other people should put their ass on the line for what is right, but you couldn't be bothered to go to a court date for something you claim you would win? Good lessons.
No, you just forfeit on the loan and "settle" by turning over some of the stocks. No tax, no interest, and probably free money if the stocks had appreciated a lot since you first got them.
The emulsifying you are talking about wasn't the problem so much as was the leverage and the short information horizon. An investor could buy one mortgage and take on binary risk- it pays off, or it fails. That's a lot of risk. So he can pool his money with a bunch of other people and buy 1% of 100 loans. The risk of any loan failing is spread across all the investors. That, in itself, is a good idea, it is just basic diversification.
The leverage problem was that they didn't just split the loans equally like that, they split the loans into tranches, or classes, of investor. The risk averse investor bought the high quality tranche, and for that got a higher guarantee of payment in exchange for a higher price (lower yield). The lower tranches were sold to suckers with the promise of potentially high rates of return. But as the individual loans started failing, the way the package was levered, the higher investors ended up getting paid, and the lower investors got nothing.
A quick example of the information problem was the practice of the 80-15-5 mortgage loans. Conventional wisdom says that when someone takes out a mortgage with zero down, that mortgage is more likely to fail. So again, conventional wisdom says that in order to hedge for that increased potential failure, you need to charge a higher interest rate. For some reason, and I agree it was probably lack of regulation, someone figured out that you could split the mortgage into three portions- standard risk (the 80%), higher risk (the 15%) and highest risk (the 5%). In the documents for the 80% loan, you could then say that this loan had 20% down, and you'd get the good rate. Then you do the same with the 15% loan- "hey, this loan has 5% down, give us the OK rate". Then you would only end up paying the super high risk rate on 5% of the balance of the mortgage instead of the whole thing. The problem there was that the whole loan had the high risk, but the investors in the 80% and the 15% didn't know it.
It wasn't even just that, it was that they made the mistake of assuming that the higher interest they were getting from the risky loans was pure profit, instead of a hedge against the higher risk. If my portfolio of loans has a 10% chance of not being paid back, I would have to charge at least 10% interest to break even. They did that, but they booked and distributed the profit before the loans started to fail. It was basically a gross profit versus net profit mistake.
Then there was the failure of the CDS market. Companies made investments, then bought insurance policies to hedge their losses on the loans. But when the loans started to fail, the CDS/hedge couldn't be paid back (cough AIG cough) and they were fucked. I think that will eventually come out as being the ultimate failure- too many layers of reinsurance.
I think that was theoretically possible on older drives (like the old MFM drives and maybe old mainframe drives), but certainly not any more. And even if they did, they wouldn't tell anyone. They would just use it to quietly gather information from unsuspecting targets, and then "git" them through some other method.
I've taken apart a lot of hard drives (their aluminum carcasses being fairly valuable at the recycling center), and I've never seen a platter made of glass. Do they even use glass anymore? I'd have to think not because of the speeds involved.
I heard the woman on the radio yesterday. Seemed like a sweet woman, but sounded very much like that Aunt we all have whose mind cannot be changed by anything, and who speaks in nothing but implication. "Wellll, she WAS in Uganda, and she DOES have these red bumps. I don't THINK it's monkeypox, but I'm going to keep saying monkeypox until you believe it's monkeypox and overreact, and then I can say that I told you it certainly wasn't monkeypox. Monkeypox."
He called it the socialist party to get the people on board. But by pretty much all accounts, there was nothing socialist about it.
Left and right are unclear ways to describe people's political tendencies. You have to add in a second dimension, that of "use of the state" or libertarian versus authoritarian. Left and right describe "how things are", and authoritarian and libertarian describe "what you are going to do about it".
Left and right, according to one definition, says that the right believes in the various social structures, and that they are there for a reason. The unfortunate are that way for a good reason. The left would say the unfortunate are that way for not a good reason, and seek to change the social structures. Authoritarian people would use the power of the state to further their left or right goals, and libertarian people want to limit or destroy the power of the state.
Hitler was right wing, authoritarian. Use the power of the state to cleanse the social structures of people and institutions that were messing it up.
Body fat isn't just globs of lard. It's a cellular structure whose cells contain the fat molecules. If the fat in them wasn't melted, our bodies (and those of sheep) would be solid.
Slashdot Mirror
That seems like a design flaw.
1) Married people filing jointly pay a lower rate, but by combining two single earners into one entity, the new entity (in theory) doubles its income, so it's a wash.
2) As for the second question, neither is particularly fair. No taxation system is going to be fair- someone, somewhere, is going to be able to say "I'm getting screwed" by even the most fair of systems. Why do I, a single male with no dependents, pay more in taxes for the same income than someone with lots of kids? Their kids are sucking up more resources from the government, they should pay more. But I don't have all those mouths to feed, so *I* should pay more.
The real answer is that corporations should no more have to pay income taxes on money they use to cover expenses than should an individual have to. Which is kind of how it works now, if you look at the progressive taxation system from another perspective: that the income tax rate IS 35%, and you get discounts (the lower brackets) for money used to pay living expenses. But it sure doesn't seem like that when lower income families are paying 10-25% of their incomes, and never actually profiting from anything.
To really be fair, as I see it, the feds would need to enact something more like Herman Cain's 999 plan. (No, I'm not crazy.) Obviously, his system was terrible. But the corporate income tax is terribly inefficient, and obviously not an effective way to fund government. So, you kill than and enact a sales tax system that skims a low percentage off most transactions. That covers the "everyone should pay their fair share" aspect of taxation. Then you change the income tax to have a much higher standard deduction (like, at least the poverty rate) and eliminate the distinction between capital gains and work income. You change [something] in order to eliminate the ability of people to funnel their personal income through a corporation to avoid taxes. I'm not entirely sure how you'd do that. Maybe that's where a VAT would be useful- money can only flow out of a corp in one of three ways- as salary, taxes paid by the individual, as dividends; taxes paid by the recipients; or a "other" with a VAT attached.
In terms of taxes, "tax avoidance" is figuring out legal ways to pay less tax. "Tax evasion" is doing so in illegal ways. The terms become less clear when you look at things like using your power and influence to change the laws to make something that used to be evasion mere avoidance.
There were some stories where businesses in Chicago, even small businesses, were "moving" their headquarters to Kankakee (less than an hour's drive) post office boxes and funneling all their sales through there, paying the much lower Kankakee city and county sales taxes. Same game.
I don't doubt that's true. But if you do it right, your stocks continue to appreciate (hopefully) while you get the money now. Say I own $1m of stocks, and I need $1m in cash. I could sell the stocks and end up with $850,000 after tax. Or I could borrow $1m, and in two years when the loan is due, my stocks have appreciated to $1.3m. I sell the stocks, pay the loan, interest and cap gains and net out to zero. One way, I got $850,000 after tax, the other way I got $1m after tax.
Further, because I have control over when I sell the stocks, I can sell them in a year when I've suffered some other loss and not have to pay ANY cap gains tax. I can effectively run my life tax free, and my only "tax" is the interest I pay to the person making the loan.
Further, further, I can take out the loan from a friendly entity, and they can forgive the accrued interest. They can write off the loss (which helps them offset some gain). Sure, I'll owe income taxes on the forgiven interest, but 2% on $1m is only $20k in income. Even at the top marginal rate of 35%, I only owe the feds $7000, rather than the $150,000 I would have owed them if I had paid cap gains on the $1m in stocks.
It doesn't matter, because the tax happens at the same time the cap gain is realized. They are denominated in the same inflated dollars. In other words, the inflation happens to both sides of the transaction. You might owe a lot of dollars that are worth less than they were in 1970, but you also got paid with a lot of dollars that are worth less than they were in 1970. It is meaningless, the same way this is: "damn the government! before the converted to metric, I only had to walk 2 miles to work. now I have to walk over THREE kilometers to work!"
The US GDP is something like $14 trillion. The 2011 Fed budget is something like $3.5 T. A 2% tax rate might be nice, but it won't pay the bills.
The problem isn't that companies are taking the incentives, it is that governments are allowed to give them. (Slightly circular, I know.) But it leads to big companies extracting tax breaks from governments because they have the bargaining power. "Hey, we'll go to Nevada if you don't cut our taxes." Meanwhile, smaller businesses are stuck paying full freight. My condo association is prohibited from giving people discounts like this, why shouldn't my government?
So, zero tolerance is ok for bad neighborhoods, but not ok when you run a yellow? Other people should put their ass on the line for what is right, but you couldn't be bothered to go to a court date for something you claim you would win? Good lessons.
No, you just forfeit on the loan and "settle" by turning over some of the stocks. No tax, no interest, and probably free money if the stocks had appreciated a lot since you first got them.
The emulsifying you are talking about wasn't the problem so much as was the leverage and the short information horizon. An investor could buy one mortgage and take on binary risk- it pays off, or it fails. That's a lot of risk. So he can pool his money with a bunch of other people and buy 1% of 100 loans. The risk of any loan failing is spread across all the investors. That, in itself, is a good idea, it is just basic diversification.
The leverage problem was that they didn't just split the loans equally like that, they split the loans into tranches, or classes, of investor. The risk averse investor bought the high quality tranche, and for that got a higher guarantee of payment in exchange for a higher price (lower yield). The lower tranches were sold to suckers with the promise of potentially high rates of return. But as the individual loans started failing, the way the package was levered, the higher investors ended up getting paid, and the lower investors got nothing.
A quick example of the information problem was the practice of the 80-15-5 mortgage loans. Conventional wisdom says that when someone takes out a mortgage with zero down, that mortgage is more likely to fail. So again, conventional wisdom says that in order to hedge for that increased potential failure, you need to charge a higher interest rate. For some reason, and I agree it was probably lack of regulation, someone figured out that you could split the mortgage into three portions- standard risk (the 80%), higher risk (the 15%) and highest risk (the 5%). In the documents for the 80% loan, you could then say that this loan had 20% down, and you'd get the good rate. Then you do the same with the 15% loan- "hey, this loan has 5% down, give us the OK rate". Then you would only end up paying the super high risk rate on 5% of the balance of the mortgage instead of the whole thing. The problem there was that the whole loan had the high risk, but the investors in the 80% and the 15% didn't know it.
It wasn't even just that, it was that they made the mistake of assuming that the higher interest they were getting from the risky loans was pure profit, instead of a hedge against the higher risk. If my portfolio of loans has a 10% chance of not being paid back, I would have to charge at least 10% interest to break even. They did that, but they booked and distributed the profit before the loans started to fail. It was basically a gross profit versus net profit mistake.
Then there was the failure of the CDS market. Companies made investments, then bought insurance policies to hedge their losses on the loans. But when the loans started to fail, the CDS/hedge couldn't be paid back (cough AIG cough) and they were fucked. I think that will eventually come out as being the ultimate failure- too many layers of reinsurance.
HA! That's awesome.
I got some real nice ones out of some 2.1 gb 1.6" server drives that were laying around. The things were like 8mm thick.
I think that was theoretically possible on older drives (like the old MFM drives and maybe old mainframe drives), but certainly not any more. And even if they did, they wouldn't tell anyone. They would just use it to quietly gather information from unsuspecting targets, and then "git" them through some other method.
I've taken apart a lot of hard drives (their aluminum carcasses being fairly valuable at the recycling center), and I've never seen a platter made of glass. Do they even use glass anymore? I'd have to think not because of the speeds involved.
That's because current matte screens have a sort of grey look to them, and the glossy screens look blacker.
I use the Rain-X wiper fluid too. It does eventually build up and act like a normal application of the stuff.
I heard the woman on the radio yesterday. Seemed like a sweet woman, but sounded very much like that Aunt we all have whose mind cannot be changed by anything, and who speaks in nothing but implication. "Wellll, she WAS in Uganda, and she DOES have these red bumps. I don't THINK it's monkeypox, but I'm going to keep saying monkeypox until you believe it's monkeypox and overreact, and then I can say that I told you it certainly wasn't monkeypox. Monkeypox."
4) 200 years later..., "Obviously not."
Brilliant!
The good news it, I'll finally be able to access my bank's website by it's real name: clownpenis.fart
He called it the socialist party to get the people on board. But by pretty much all accounts, there was nothing socialist about it.
Left and right are unclear ways to describe people's political tendencies. You have to add in a second dimension, that of "use of the state" or libertarian versus authoritarian. Left and right describe "how things are", and authoritarian and libertarian describe "what you are going to do about it".
Left and right, according to one definition, says that the right believes in the various social structures, and that they are there for a reason. The unfortunate are that way for a good reason. The left would say the unfortunate are that way for not a good reason, and seek to change the social structures. Authoritarian people would use the power of the state to further their left or right goals, and libertarian people want to limit or destroy the power of the state.
Hitler was right wing, authoritarian. Use the power of the state to cleanse the social structures of people and institutions that were messing it up.
If God is omnipotent, why does he need the glory? And why does he seems to need everyone to love him?
Because he's not getting any pussy.
Double wrong. Fuel tanks always pull from the bottom.
Body fat isn't just globs of lard. It's a cellular structure whose cells contain the fat molecules. If the fat in them wasn't melted, our bodies (and those of sheep) would be solid.