You spun a yarn without even a shred of fact to back it up.
We call that "reasoning". It's what people do when interpreting facts.
I can do that too
You've never demonstrated the ability to make a reasoned, logical argument in the many years that I have seen you on Slashdot. In different words, I doubt it.
Peer reviewed? That's a technical report, and a politically motivated at that. Even if it were peer reviewed, that would tell you little about its accuracy.
No, it's not. The claim is bullshit because it computes meaningless numbers for a meaningless group of people. And even taken at face value, it doesn't tell you anything about who is responsible for keeping wages down (as I was saying, it's mainly government policy, plus some competition from abroad).
Yeah, I looked it up:
Again, you point to data about average actual direct corporate taxes paid. I told you why those numbers are irrelevant. What matters is the effective marginal rate, and that is the combination of maximum marginal corporate taxes plus maximum marginal capital gains taxes.
Here is a Politifact analysis of the US corporate tax rate that doesn't even take into account the capital gains tax:
We have some of the highest corporate tax rates before and after deductions.
The loopholes in the US tax code should be eliminated. But, politically, many of the people complaining about low average corporate taxes are the same people who put in those loopholes. That is, the combination of low average corporate tax with high marginal corporate tax is even worse than a uniformly high corporate tax.
You need to add capital gains and corporate taxes if you want to know how much the US government actually gets from every dollar earned by a corporation:
Furthermore, corporate taxation doesn't come from some mysterious pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it comes from all shareholders, and a large part of those are direct or indirect retirement investments. The higher you make corporate taxes, the less people money people will have to retire on.
The US needs to sharply lower corporate taxation and capital gains taxes, otherwise both corporations and investors will increasingly go overseas, a process that obviously has already started.
The papers and news reports you point to are bogus; they compute effective corporate tax rates on worldwide earnings, which isn't relevant to anything.
Many professional associations lobby for laws that benefit them all, eg the AMA making sure there is not too much labour in their profession, which would drive down the wages.
Yes, professional associations engage in rent seeking and political corruption; their target is government, and their lobbying is damned harmful. That is not the same as collective bargaining for wages and working conditions between private sector unions and private employers. (Public sector unions are yet different and aren't even "unions" in the usual sense.)
Are you really saying that professional sports has no way to measure "who is the best performer"?
That's a different sense of the term "professional". Sports "professionals" are mostly the equivalent of blue collar workers: interchangeable physical laborers with shortened careers and medical concerns.
More than forty percent of all workers in the US are making less than $15/hr.
That claim is such utter bullshit that it isn't even worth for a citation. Use your head, man. I mean, how utterly ignorant can you be?
The real, effective corporate tax rate in the US is less than 13%:
What you point to gives the average corporate tax rate. Average rates are irrelevant, because they are ill defined and, in any case, simply reflect all the corporate cronyism that politicians engage in by giving tax breaks to their favorite industries. Tax exemptions for corporations due to political favoritism does not help business in general, it makes it even worse.
The effective corporate tax rate is the sum of the capital gains tax and the corporate tax rate. And it's the marginal tax rate that matters for investment decisions. In addition, when comparing internationally, you need to compare likes with likes, and the fact is that the US has one of the highest effective corporate tax rates in the world (go look it up).
401k plans shouldn't contain significant amounts of company stock. None of the 401k plans I ever had even offered company stock. And courts take an increasingly dim view if they do. If this was really a problem, it could simply be legislated against. So, that's a silly argument against 401k plans.
Many professionals have unions, often under different names. Medical Association, Bar Association, Actors guild, various engineering associations.
Professional associations don't engage in collective bargaining over wages or working conditions. So, no, they are not "unions under different names".
There are only a few professions where the workers don't have a stacked deck against them and where it is clear who are the best performers.
It is never clear "who is the best performer". That is precisely why unions don't make sense because they negotiate as if labor was a commodity like iron or wheat.
You think and talk like a wage slave. No wonder you want a union to wipe your ass for you.
It will just run automated factories to wipe out all the jobs
That would be wonderful: all basic human needs met without any backbreaking work. You really have to be quite misanthropic to think that that is a bad thing.
So let's see here, OH, it looks like corporate profits are at an 85 year high and wages are at a 65 year low!
The fact that "corporate profits" are a higher percentage of GDP, a prioriy, only means that more private businesses are organized as corporations, hardly a big problem.
The claim that "the statutory top corporate tax rate in the United States is 35 percent" is a half-truth, because the effective corporate tax rate in the US is actually closer to 50%, one of the highest in the world.
And the fact that "total wages and salaries last year amounted to $7.1 trillion, or 42.5 percent of the entire economy [...] lower than in any year previously measured" is also hardly surprising: given that the US government keeps on piling mandates on employers, employers are satisfying those mandates in lieu of raises.
If you want wages to rise again, stop piling regulations and mandates on employers.
Finally, the fact that "there are myriad tax credits, deductions and preferences available" is, again, a huge fault of the same politicians who whine and complain about "falling wages" and "rising corporate profits", since they are creating all those "tax credits, deductions, and preferences" in a vain attempt to steer the economy and satisfy special interests.
Hrmm, where DID that wealth go?!?
A lot of it went to the federal government and spending on crony capitalism like bailouts and healthcare reform. The rest went to the middle class, mostly in the form of huge handouts and employer mandates that don't show up as wages.
Remember all those fairy tales about the jinn that grants you three wishes, and how they never quite work out the way people think they do? It's the same with economic policy.
This consumer wants to keep his AMERICAN made good stuff but is stuck with Chinese made crap - and it's all crap - because my I cannot afford more.
Well, you can't get American made stuff at Chinese prices because Americans (like you) are not willing to work for Chinese wages and under Chinese conditions. Americans even voted to prohibit their fellow Americans to work for "too little" money.
Nor is that a bad thing. The fact that the Chinese are toiling in factories assembling iPhones means that many Americans now can work in jobs like software development and web design, jobs that are both nicer and more lucrative.
Thanks in part to my education loans. CS degrees are NOT a guarantee to a decent life.
Nothing ever is guaranteed in life. You should have thought about that before you took out a loan to pay for your CS degree.
Right now, unless you happen to live in one of the few states where companies are required to offer you more than simply at-will employment, or you're one of the few people still in a union, you pretty much have few protections against the company deciding to fire you tomorrow,
Ah, yes, because that's exactly what skilled people want: getting paid and hired/fired not based on how good they are or how much they contribute to a company, but based on criteria like seniority and other kinds of b.s. that unions come up with.
And yes, as much as people decry unions, and the abuses that comes with unions, that's your answer in terms of balancing the power. One person alone just doesn't have the power, unless they're being hired for an executive/C-level position.
Software developers, engineers, and other professionals have no problem negotiating good working conditions for themselves. Union membership is down to 11% of the workforce in the US, for the simple reason that almost nobody wants to be a member of a union. You'd get laughed out of the room if you tried to unionize the software developers where I work; and if you succeeded, probably half of them would just leave.
says workers in the U.S. are caught up in a "one-way honor system," in which workers are beholden to employers.
The idea that US workers are "beholden" to employers is ridiculous; it isn't company loyalty that keeps employees with the same employer, it's the cost and difficulty of changing jobs. A big part of why it is so costly and difficult to change jobs is government regulations and government-mandated benefits.
How you gonna protect yourself from illegal aliens and skittle brandishing chocolate people if you aren't allowed to have your Parrot packin'?
Wow, the stereotyping is strong with you. You just can't live with the idea that people would like laws to be followed, want to be protected from aggressive thugs, and don't want their private property being violated and invaded. It's people like you that made me leave the Democratic party (I'm and independent now).
Probably the best solution to this is to get a drone yourself for your home and equip it in a way in which it can take down other drones. It shouldn't take much: a trailing net, a trailing string, or even just dropping something.
There has never been an actual conviction and yet the assets were seized. It was extraterritorial, extrajudicial enforcemnet of holywood lobbyist whims.
Yes, in accordance with the agreements between Hong Kong and the US.
That's not remotely equivalent because google has operations in France via a subsidiary.
A subsidiary is a separate legal entity. France is free to enforce its laws against the subsidiary, not against the people who happen to own it.
Keep in mind that these draconian international copyright agreements were pushed for by Europeans back in the day when Europeans actually still produced art, literature, and music. Now that Americans produce most of the worthwhile culture and Europe produces only shit, they are calling sour grapes.
Copyright is covered by international treaties; that is, it is mutually recognized everywhere. It is under those international agreements that Hong Kong agreed to cooperate with the US.
The equivalent here would be for France to ask the US government to help with enforcing France's privacy laws against a US company operating outside France. But the US government obviously has no interest in aiding France in implementing its hare-brained and draconian laws.
The DMCA complaint is by a US copyright holder against a US corporation. Furthermore, if the US copyright is valid, it can be violated in Germany as well. And there are treaties governing copyright and DMCA issues between the US and Germany.
The reason for this international reach of copyright law isn't the Americans, it's Europeans who pushed for it back in the day when Europe still produced literature and music, instead of the Eurovision Contest.
Slashdot Mirror
We call that "reasoning". It's what people do when interpreting facts.
You've never demonstrated the ability to make a reasoned, logical argument in the many years that I have seen you on Slashdot. In different words, I doubt it.
Peer reviewed? That's a technical report, and a politically motivated at that. Even if it were peer reviewed, that would tell you little about its accuracy.
No, it's not. The claim is bullshit because it computes meaningless numbers for a meaningless group of people. And even taken at face value, it doesn't tell you anything about who is responsible for keeping wages down (as I was saying, it's mainly government policy, plus some competition from abroad).
Again, you point to data about average actual direct corporate taxes paid. I told you why those numbers are irrelevant. What matters is the effective marginal rate, and that is the combination of maximum marginal corporate taxes plus maximum marginal capital gains taxes.
Here is a Politifact analysis of the US corporate tax rate that doesn't even take into account the capital gains tax:
http://www.politifact.com/pund...
We have some of the highest corporate tax rates before and after deductions.
The loopholes in the US tax code should be eliminated. But, politically, many of the people complaining about low average corporate taxes are the same people who put in those loopholes. That is, the combination of low average corporate tax with high marginal corporate tax is even worse than a uniformly high corporate tax.
Our capital gains taxes are also extremely high:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ro...
You need to add capital gains and corporate taxes if you want to know how much the US government actually gets from every dollar earned by a corporation:
http://taxfoundation.org/artic...
Furthermore, corporate taxation doesn't come from some mysterious pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it comes from all shareholders, and a large part of those are direct or indirect retirement investments. The higher you make corporate taxes, the less people money people will have to retire on.
The US needs to sharply lower corporate taxation and capital gains taxes, otherwise both corporations and investors will increasingly go overseas, a process that obviously has already started.
The papers and news reports you point to are bogus; they compute effective corporate tax rates on worldwide earnings, which isn't relevant to anything.
Yes, professional associations engage in rent seeking and political corruption; their target is government, and their lobbying is damned harmful. That is not the same as collective bargaining for wages and working conditions between private sector unions and private employers. (Public sector unions are yet different and aren't even "unions" in the usual sense.)
That's a different sense of the term "professional". Sports "professionals" are mostly the equivalent of blue collar workers: interchangeable physical laborers with shortened careers and medical concerns.
And I explained at length to you why you are misinterpreting those result.
You aren't even worth a well crafted insult.
That claim is such utter bullshit that it isn't even worth for a citation. Use your head, man. I mean, how utterly ignorant can you be?
What you point to gives the average corporate tax rate. Average rates are irrelevant, because they are ill defined and, in any case, simply reflect all the corporate cronyism that politicians engage in by giving tax breaks to their favorite industries. Tax exemptions for corporations due to political favoritism does not help business in general, it makes it even worse.
The effective corporate tax rate is the sum of the capital gains tax and the corporate tax rate. And it's the marginal tax rate that matters for investment decisions. In addition, when comparing internationally, you need to compare likes with likes, and the fact is that the US has one of the highest effective corporate tax rates in the world (go look it up).
401k plans shouldn't contain significant amounts of company stock. None of the 401k plans I ever had even offered company stock. And courts take an increasingly dim view if they do. If this was really a problem, it could simply be legislated against. So, that's a silly argument against 401k plans.
Professional associations don't engage in collective bargaining over wages or working conditions. So, no, they are not "unions under different names".
It is never clear "who is the best performer". That is precisely why unions don't make sense because they negotiate as if labor was a commodity like iron or wheat.
You think and talk like a wage slave. No wonder you want a union to wipe your ass for you.
It's not the unions that have changed but the jobs. Unions really did make sense for the first century of the industrial age.
That would be wonderful: all basic human needs met without any backbreaking work. You really have to be quite misanthropic to think that that is a bad thing.
That same worn out tune has been playing out since the progressive era. Really, you prove again that you are a complete and utter idiot.
The fact that "corporate profits" are a higher percentage of GDP, a prioriy, only means that more private businesses are organized as corporations, hardly a big problem.
The claim that "the statutory top corporate tax rate in the United States is 35 percent" is a half-truth, because the effective corporate tax rate in the US is actually closer to 50%, one of the highest in the world.
And the fact that "total wages and salaries last year amounted to $7.1 trillion, or 42.5 percent of the entire economy [...] lower than in any year previously measured" is also hardly surprising: given that the US government keeps on piling mandates on employers, employers are satisfying those mandates in lieu of raises.
If you want wages to rise again, stop piling regulations and mandates on employers.
Finally, the fact that "there are myriad tax credits, deductions and preferences available" is, again, a huge fault of the same politicians who whine and complain about "falling wages" and "rising corporate profits", since they are creating all those "tax credits, deductions, and preferences" in a vain attempt to steer the economy and satisfy special interests.
A lot of it went to the federal government and spending on crony capitalism like bailouts and healthcare reform. The rest went to the middle class, mostly in the form of huge handouts and employer mandates that don't show up as wages.
Remember all those fairy tales about the jinn that grants you three wishes, and how they never quite work out the way people think they do? It's the same with economic policy.
Well, you can't get American made stuff at Chinese prices because Americans (like you) are not willing to work for Chinese wages and under Chinese conditions. Americans even voted to prohibit their fellow Americans to work for "too little" money.
Nor is that a bad thing. The fact that the Chinese are toiling in factories assembling iPhones means that many Americans now can work in jobs like software development and web design, jobs that are both nicer and more lucrative.
Nothing ever is guaranteed in life. You should have thought about that before you took out a loan to pay for your CS degree.
Ah, yes, because that's exactly what skilled people want: getting paid and hired/fired not based on how good they are or how much they contribute to a company, but based on criteria like seniority and other kinds of b.s. that unions come up with.
Software developers, engineers, and other professionals have no problem negotiating good working conditions for themselves. Union membership is down to 11% of the workforce in the US, for the simple reason that almost nobody wants to be a member of a union. You'd get laughed out of the room if you tried to unionize the software developers where I work; and if you succeeded, probably half of them would just leave.
Huh? What does a 401k plan have to do with "executive stock compensation"?
The idea that US workers are "beholden" to employers is ridiculous; it isn't company loyalty that keeps employees with the same employer, it's the cost and difficulty of changing jobs. A big part of why it is so costly and difficult to change jobs is government regulations and government-mandated benefits.
You should worry about what you have going on, because you seem to be both bigoted and ignorant.
Wow, the stereotyping is strong with you. You just can't live with the idea that people would like laws to be followed, want to be protected from aggressive thugs, and don't want their private property being violated and invaded. It's people like you that made me leave the Democratic party (I'm and independent now).
Probably the best solution to this is to get a drone yourself for your home and equip it in a way in which it can take down other drones. It shouldn't take much: a trailing net, a trailing string, or even just dropping something.
He was referring to the drone owner trespassing in person after trespassing with his drone.
Personally, I think a garden hose would be a better solution both for the drone and the guy.
Only a small fraction of startups succeed. Obviously, if yours doesn't, your options won't be worth anything.
And, yeah, planning to launch features that you haven't hired the engineers for yet isn't a lie, it's planning.
Yes, in accordance with the agreements between Hong Kong and the US.
A subsidiary is a separate legal entity. France is free to enforce its laws against the subsidiary, not against the people who happen to own it.
Keep in mind that these draconian international copyright agreements were pushed for by Europeans back in the day when Europeans actually still produced art, literature, and music. Now that Americans produce most of the worthwhile culture and Europe produces only shit, they are calling sour grapes.
Copyright is covered by international treaties; that is, it is mutually recognized everywhere. It is under those international agreements that Hong Kong agreed to cooperate with the US.
The equivalent here would be for France to ask the US government to help with enforcing France's privacy laws against a US company operating outside France. But the US government obviously has no interest in aiding France in implementing its hare-brained and draconian laws.
Viviane Reding doesn't look very friendly to me; more kind of like an angry old woman.
The DMCA complaint is by a US copyright holder against a US corporation. Furthermore, if the US copyright is valid, it can be violated in Germany as well. And there are treaties governing copyright and DMCA issues between the US and Germany.
The reason for this international reach of copyright law isn't the Americans, it's Europeans who pushed for it back in the day when Europe still produced literature and music, instead of the Eurovision Contest.