The law wasn't meant as a frame-up, but like most compromise-laden stuff it is flawed. The real killer was not letting them jack up rates.
Remember that the narrative of it being a Republican frame-up is mostly flawed. Two of the three bill sponsors were Dems, and the bill passed with a lot of Democratic support.
Well, sure - a monopoly. It's a bit of a tangent, but I see a utility monopoly as impossible without government regulation. Whether you agree or not, I think we can agree that a private monopoly is not very efficient.
We had a gas explosion in California, not because of regulation but because the company didn't do the inspections and falsified the paperwork (both before and after regulation was added).
And our government accidentally dropped nuclear weapons on North Carolina. I don't think either incident proves a point in isolation.
MATLAB is an obvious choice unless the license fee becomes an issue. I would caution against doing a GUI in MATLAB, though. (That said, I'm doing one right now...)
Python is nice, but in my experience fewer people are familiar with scientific computing in Python than in MATLAB. I think if I didn't have that roadblock, I'd use Python (NumPy, SciPy).
At my office, we are all required to inhale the office air, but exhale through little snorkels placed throughout the office which exhaust to the outside.
It depends what you are looking for. Some things don't require fast change. Some things have considerations other than efficiency.
Also, I suspect some of the companies you consider "private industry" are probably a lot more like government than you think. No one likes their utility companies, which are heavily state regulated monopolies. It might very well be similar to having the state just run them directly.
I'm no lawyer, but I read 802.2B not as a date for computation, but the date through which the new computation must be done, on an annual basis. In other words, if I rewrote it in English, it would say: "Each year, the office shall recompute the postal surplus or liability. This shall begin the first fiscal year after Sept 30, 2007 and stop in the fiscal year ending Sept 20, 2038. Each year, any surplus shall be carried over into the next year. If there is still a liability at the end of 2017, then an amortization schedule must be worked out to retire the liability by 2043."
In other words, they must pre-pay that whole thing to a safe fund for the workers but then they must loan it to the general fund where it becomes subject to default. That doesn't sound at all like a prudent financial move or like rules as strict as a private corporation would face.
Yes, this is a terrible provision. It also makes the funding more expensive because treasuries pay out virtually zero interest.
Anyway, the pension obligations were one thing - the Postal Service actually had been funding those. It is the health coverage pre-pay that broke the bank. In your link, that is section 803. Look at the payments! Yikes...
Yes, but right now we have multinationals who headquarter here because the taxes are (if you are big enough to have the accounting department and lobbyists) low.
In any event, I don't think it would matter. Companies would still see to it that they don't pay 30% of their profits to taxes - they have demonstrated this over and over again over decades. I'm not optimistic that this will change without serious political reform, which I don't think is realistic. If you can get it done, you have my vote, cynic though I might be.:)
They were required to pre-fund pensions for anticipated employees who have yet to be born, much less hired.
That's not really true - but was frequently repeated by opponents. What happened is that they had been funding their retirees healthcare on a pay-as-you go basis. As a result, there was no fund set up for current or former employees. The law required them to begin funding healthcare for all past and current employees. So far, so good. The reason the law was flawed is that it only gave them 10 years to do all of that funding, and it did not come with a new revenue source. So yes, it was "designed to fail", but the fundamental idea was sound. In principle, I like the idea of government pensions following rules that are at least as strict as those imposed on private industry.
Even more ideally, pensions should be written in stone and insured.
I'm actually in agreement with you - pensions should be required to buy annuities and not be allowed to "invest" the funds. It would completely clear up the murkiness about whether or not a pension is "funded". But while I feel that is ideal, I don't think it is a reasonable expectation... look what happened when the Post Office was required to simply fund their pensions. And that was just one small part of government.
As for the lawsuits, lawyers tend to like the scatter gun approach, sue 'em all and see how much we get.
You can adjust for that by making them file multiple suits and other legal obstacles. Remember that I'm not advocating a 100% lifting of limited liability... I think it sounds reasonable for employees with no reports to remain protected, as an example.
I think it's OK to tax profit for a corporation as long as we don't allow them to make it disappear on paper using such tricks as owing a large 'debt' to a foreign subsidiary in a tax haven.
That is a very tall order. They don't do it with "debt", per se. First they sell some intellectual property to an overseas entity. Then they license the intellectual property back from said entity. So the entity grows very rich, and it doesn't really require many employees or infrastructure - so it can set up shop wherever taxes are most favorable.
You could get at this by taxing overseas profits, but you'd have to lower the corporate tax or most multinationals would go to greener pastures. I'm sure you could come up with other elaborate schemes to get at the money as well. I think the most successful way congress has done it in the past is to offer a grace period (they like to say "amnesty") where you can repatriate the money for something like 6% tax and a bunch of companies take advantage of it.
There's no reason that you couldn't ALSO fine the corporation - but I'd like to remove the limited liability protection for people active in the running of an organization. I should be able to sue the person or people who I suffer damage from - and you can bet that my lawyer is going to go after the guy making 6 or 7 figures and not the little man.
It may be that an s-corp is about as big as we want to let tings get.
There may be some truth in that. Or perhaps we can recognize that C-Corps are necessary for large scale manufacturing, but not for banking or finance. Maybe we grant corporate charters too freely.
I would be more concerned about protecting employees from liability than any investor.
When I worry about investors, I'm thinking of people who have their retirement pensions and 401(k) tied up in mutual funds and such. Those people should not have their assets at risk (other than the assets of the company). They really have nothing to do with the day-to-day operations of the company. I don't think low-level employees would be at large risk of lawsuits, because they don't really have any money. Lawyers aren't going to take a case against a janitor, but they'll definitely go for the scent of blood of a CEO.
In fact, before you know it companies will have to offer officers indemnity against lawsuits. You can pass a law that requires companies who choose provide such coverage to their officers also provide it to their other employees. What is good for the goose...:)
Taxing the presence sounds a lot like a corporate tax, yes?
Yes, I'm not suggesting anything very groundbreaking.
In particular since income is a decent measure of the weight of that presence. I'm sure you will agree it's a useful metric and we don't want to tax a 2 man operation the same actual amount as a multi-billion dollar multi-national.
Except that with individuals we tax income, but not corporations which we tax on profit. So we have this perverse incentive system for corporations to keep their apparent profit as close to zero as possible. I think that incentive is all wrong, but cannot think of a way to tax based on revenue in a way that makes sense. Shifting the burden to the individual fixes the incentive problem.
There is no reason we must collect a mere pittance.
Well, there ARE reasons based on competition (even if those reasons are probably trumped up or imaginary), and the result of the subsidy wars are extremely low actual taxes on corporations. I'm not ideologically opposed to corporate income tax - I'm just looking at the history of it and declaring the effort to be pretty much a failure. I'm just trying to be pragmatic. I agree with you that certain reforms may enable a short term bump in rates, but looking at the history I have to conclude that they would fall again.
Interesting thought exercise, limit personal contributions to a percentage of disposable income available to a full time minimum wage employee.
I think personal contributions are already limited to $2600, though you can make that payment to many candidates. I am all for limits on money in elections.
Many of these corporations use more court resources in a single month than a natural person could use in a lifetime.
Start charging corporations for use of court resources.
The possibility that not all of the stockholders are U.S. Citizens or residents means that taxing the individual incomes may not capture the proper amount due for services rendered.
How are the corporations going to use resources unless they have a presence? If they have a presence, then tax the presence. If there arises a specific instance of corporate abuse of a "free" resource, start charging corporations for the use of said resource. Besides, my contention is that we are collecting a mere pittance from them anyway. I think corporate taxes (actual, paid taxes - not rates) are at or near the lowest level ever as a percentage of GDP. I think we could collect a lot more money by taxing the individuals who benefit from the corporation directly.
And for the same reason, corporations won't leave if we increase their tax rate.
I'm not afraid of them leaving. I'm afraid of what has happened to our political system as a result of our tax structure. Corporations employ armies of accountants to find every possible means to avoid paying taxes. At the same time they spend billions lobbying government for special tax breaks, complicating the tax code and corrupting our politicians. The politicians, in turn, give away so much "corporate welfare" that we collect very little for all of our efforts - a pathetic 9% of total Federal revenue comes from corporate taxes.
I just can't believe that we deal with all of the side effects of corporate taxation for such little revenue. I think corporations are poisoning our democracy, and step one is to stop pretending that they are people. That means corporations don't get free speech - the people that make up the corporation do. Corporations don't commit crimes - the owners and the people that work there do. Corporations don't give politicians money - the individuals who direct the corporations do. I don't mind having the concept of a corporation to ease contract law, and I don't mind having some limited liability to protect non-activist investors... but we've gone too far.
The foreign shareholders probably would not be taxed for their capital gains (at least not by the US), but the domestic ones would be. The dividend rate for foreign owners of US stocks is 30% IIRC. I don't think it would be a problem, but maybe you have a specific scenario in mind?
Even if Apple went micro-USB, the other phone manufacturers have refused to renew the agreement as well. This is cast as an Apple thing, but they technically satisfied the agreement with the adapter and simply refused to renew - just like the others.
Why would they do that? And if they leave, we don't have to provide services for them and they can't lobby a congressman to do something on their behalf.
In all seriousness, Canada and Europe still have rich people despite a much higher tax burden.
If that pretend economic entity wants to enjoy any rights at all, it needs to pay it's way.
Well, it would be paying by taxing it's owners, investors, and employees for any money that flows out of it. But I'm also very supportive of taking away rights. Recognize that a corporation does not actually exists except through the imagination... some words printed on paper and a government charter.
Well, since you brought that up, I think it is kind of funny that electrical outlets have so much variety in Europe, yet they are concerned with the plug on smart phones.
By the way, Samsung has switched away from micro-USB for their tablets, presumably because of charge times. Expect them to follow with their higher-powered phones when it starts to affect recharge time - presumably that's why they declined to renew the micro-USB agreement.
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The law wasn't meant as a frame-up, but like most compromise-laden stuff it is flawed. The real killer was not letting them jack up rates.
Remember that the narrative of it being a Republican frame-up is mostly flawed. Two of the three bill sponsors were Dems, and the bill passed with a lot of Democratic support.
Utilities used to be worse before regulation.
Well, sure - a monopoly. It's a bit of a tangent, but I see a utility monopoly as impossible without government regulation. Whether you agree or not, I think we can agree that a private monopoly is not very efficient.
We had a gas explosion in California, not because of regulation but because the company didn't do the inspections and falsified the paperwork (both before and after regulation was added).
And our government accidentally dropped nuclear weapons on North Carolina. I don't think either incident proves a point in isolation.
MATLAB is an obvious choice unless the license fee becomes an issue. I would caution against doing a GUI in MATLAB, though. (That said, I'm doing one right now...)
Python is nice, but in my experience fewer people are familiar with scientific computing in Python than in MATLAB. I think if I didn't have that roadblock, I'd use Python (NumPy, SciPy).
You are supposed to take some ecstasy to balance things out. They have a pacifier version, too.
At my office, we are all required to inhale the office air, but exhale through little snorkels placed throughout the office which exhaust to the outside.
And 1 degree C is pretty cold... ~
It depends what you are looking for. Some things don't require fast change. Some things have considerations other than efficiency.
Also, I suspect some of the companies you consider "private industry" are probably a lot more like government than you think. No one likes their utility companies, which are heavily state regulated monopolies. It might very well be similar to having the state just run them directly.
I disagree, since most single payer systems have morphed into hybrid single-payer / private insurance systems.
I'm no lawyer, but I read 802.2B not as a date for computation, but the date through which the new computation must be done, on an annual basis. In other words, if I rewrote it in English, it would say:
"Each year, the office shall recompute the postal surplus or liability. This shall begin the first fiscal year after Sept 30, 2007 and stop in the fiscal year ending Sept 20, 2038. Each year, any surplus shall be carried over into the next year. If there is still a liability at the end of 2017, then an amortization schedule must be worked out to retire the liability by 2043."
In other words, they must pre-pay that whole thing to a safe fund for the workers but then they must loan it to the general fund where it becomes subject to default. That doesn't sound at all like a prudent financial move or like rules as strict as a private corporation would face.
Yes, this is a terrible provision. It also makes the funding more expensive because treasuries pay out virtually zero interest.
Anyway, the pension obligations were one thing - the Postal Service actually had been funding those. It is the health coverage pre-pay that broke the bank. In your link, that is section 803. Look at the payments! Yikes...
Yes, but right now we have multinationals who headquarter here because the taxes are (if you are big enough to have the accounting department and lobbyists) low.
In any event, I don't think it would matter. Companies would still see to it that they don't pay 30% of their profits to taxes - they have demonstrated this over and over again over decades. I'm not optimistic that this will change without serious political reform, which I don't think is realistic. If you can get it done, you have my vote, cynic though I might be. :)
They were required to pre-fund pensions for anticipated employees who have yet to be born, much less hired.
That's not really true - but was frequently repeated by opponents. What happened is that they had been funding their retirees healthcare on a pay-as-you go basis. As a result, there was no fund set up for current or former employees. The law required them to begin funding healthcare for all past and current employees. So far, so good. The reason the law was flawed is that it only gave them 10 years to do all of that funding, and it did not come with a new revenue source. So yes, it was "designed to fail", but the fundamental idea was sound. In principle, I like the idea of government pensions following rules that are at least as strict as those imposed on private industry.
Even more ideally, pensions should be written in stone and insured.
I'm actually in agreement with you - pensions should be required to buy annuities and not be allowed to "invest" the funds. It would completely clear up the murkiness about whether or not a pension is "funded". But while I feel that is ideal, I don't think it is a reasonable expectation... look what happened when the Post Office was required to simply fund their pensions. And that was just one small part of government.
As for the lawsuits, lawyers tend to like the scatter gun approach, sue 'em all and see how much we get.
You can adjust for that by making them file multiple suits and other legal obstacles. Remember that I'm not advocating a 100% lifting of limited liability... I think it sounds reasonable for employees with no reports to remain protected, as an example.
I think it's OK to tax profit for a corporation as long as we don't allow them to make it disappear on paper using such tricks as owing a large 'debt' to a foreign subsidiary in a tax haven.
That is a very tall order. They don't do it with "debt", per se. First they sell some intellectual property to an overseas entity. Then they license the intellectual property back from said entity. So the entity grows very rich, and it doesn't really require many employees or infrastructure - so it can set up shop wherever taxes are most favorable.
You could get at this by taxing overseas profits, but you'd have to lower the corporate tax or most multinationals would go to greener pastures. I'm sure you could come up with other elaborate schemes to get at the money as well. I think the most successful way congress has done it in the past is to offer a grace period (they like to say "amnesty") where you can repatriate the money for something like 6% tax and a bunch of companies take advantage of it.
Do you have anything to add, or do you just randomly insult people?
The blame game will be immensely popular.
There's no reason that you couldn't ALSO fine the corporation - but I'd like to remove the limited liability protection for people active in the running of an organization. I should be able to sue the person or people who I suffer damage from - and you can bet that my lawyer is going to go after the guy making 6 or 7 figures and not the little man.
It may be that an s-corp is about as big as we want to let tings get.
There may be some truth in that. Or perhaps we can recognize that C-Corps are necessary for large scale manufacturing, but not for banking or finance. Maybe we grant corporate charters too freely.
I would be more concerned about protecting employees from liability than any investor.
When I worry about investors, I'm thinking of people who have their retirement pensions and 401(k) tied up in mutual funds and such. Those people should not have their assets at risk (other than the assets of the company). They really have nothing to do with the day-to-day operations of the company. I don't think low-level employees would be at large risk of lawsuits, because they don't really have any money. Lawyers aren't going to take a case against a janitor, but they'll definitely go for the scent of blood of a CEO.
In fact, before you know it companies will have to offer officers indemnity against lawsuits. You can pass a law that requires companies who choose provide such coverage to their officers also provide it to their other employees. What is good for the goose... :)
Taxing the presence sounds a lot like a corporate tax, yes?
Yes, I'm not suggesting anything very groundbreaking.
In particular since income is a decent measure of the weight of that presence. I'm sure you will agree it's a useful metric and we don't want to tax a 2 man operation the same actual amount as a multi-billion dollar multi-national.
Except that with individuals we tax income, but not corporations which we tax on profit. So we have this perverse incentive system for corporations to keep their apparent profit as close to zero as possible. I think that incentive is all wrong, but cannot think of a way to tax based on revenue in a way that makes sense. Shifting the burden to the individual fixes the incentive problem.
There is no reason we must collect a mere pittance.
Well, there ARE reasons based on competition (even if those reasons are probably trumped up or imaginary), and the result of the subsidy wars are extremely low actual taxes on corporations. I'm not ideologically opposed to corporate income tax - I'm just looking at the history of it and declaring the effort to be pretty much a failure. I'm just trying to be pragmatic. I agree with you that certain reforms may enable a short term bump in rates, but looking at the history I have to conclude that they would fall again.
Interesting thought exercise, limit personal contributions to a percentage of disposable income available to a full time minimum wage employee.
I think personal contributions are already limited to $2600, though you can make that payment to many candidates. I am all for limits on money in elections.
Many of these corporations use more court resources in a single month than a natural person could use in a lifetime.
Start charging corporations for use of court resources.
The possibility that not all of the stockholders are U.S. Citizens or residents means that taxing the individual incomes may not capture the proper amount due for services rendered.
How are the corporations going to use resources unless they have a presence? If they have a presence, then tax the presence. If there arises a specific instance of corporate abuse of a "free" resource, start charging corporations for the use of said resource. Besides, my contention is that we are collecting a mere pittance from them anyway. I think corporate taxes (actual, paid taxes - not rates) are at or near the lowest level ever as a percentage of GDP. I think we could collect a lot more money by taxing the individuals who benefit from the corporation directly.
And for the same reason, corporations won't leave if we increase their tax rate.
I'm not afraid of them leaving. I'm afraid of what has happened to our political system as a result of our tax structure. Corporations employ armies of accountants to find every possible means to avoid paying taxes. At the same time they spend billions lobbying government for special tax breaks, complicating the tax code and corrupting our politicians. The politicians, in turn, give away so much "corporate welfare" that we collect very little for all of our efforts - a pathetic 9% of total Federal revenue comes from corporate taxes.
I just can't believe that we deal with all of the side effects of corporate taxation for such little revenue. I think corporations are poisoning our democracy, and step one is to stop pretending that they are people. That means corporations don't get free speech - the people that make up the corporation do. Corporations don't commit crimes - the owners and the people that work there do. Corporations don't give politicians money - the individuals who direct the corporations do. I don't mind having the concept of a corporation to ease contract law, and I don't mind having some limited liability to protect non-activist investors... but we've gone too far.
The foreign shareholders probably would not be taxed for their capital gains (at least not by the US), but the domestic ones would be. The dividend rate for foreign owners of US stocks is 30% IIRC. I don't think it would be a problem, but maybe you have a specific scenario in mind?
Even if Apple went micro-USB, the other phone manufacturers have refused to renew the agreement as well. This is cast as an Apple thing, but they technically satisfied the agreement with the adapter and simply refused to renew - just like the others.
Well, your single data point means we should just throw away those statistics books!
But won't that make everybody leave the country?
Why would they do that? And if they leave, we don't have to provide services for them and they can't lobby a congressman to do something on their behalf.
In all seriousness, Canada and Europe still have rich people despite a much higher tax burden.
If that pretend economic entity wants to enjoy any rights at all, it needs to pay it's way.
Well, it would be paying by taxing it's owners, investors, and employees for any money that flows out of it. But I'm also very supportive of taking away rights. Recognize that a corporation does not actually exists except through the imagination... some words printed on paper and a government charter.
Well, since you brought that up, I think it is kind of funny that electrical outlets have so much variety in Europe, yet they are concerned with the plug on smart phones.
I have no idea what you are trying to say...
By the way, Samsung has switched away from micro-USB for their tablets, presumably because of charge times. Expect them to follow with their higher-powered phones when it starts to affect recharge time - presumably that's why they declined to renew the micro-USB agreement.