That's the best part of the Indian discovery- you can grow it in places where crops won't grow. Makes me wonder what other poisonous oils would work just as well in an engine- nightshade oil? How about Milkweed sap, that grew rather well on my parent's farm until the bull thistle invasion....
RTFA- Republicans in Crawford know that their boy W has been a HUGE disappointment as far as their own conservative values go. *ANY* honest digging into this administration at all, will return a similar judgement.
Not unless we get a lot more people eating junk food, no. Biodiesel, even from reclaimed french fry oil, is currently only produced in very small batches in comparison to gasoline and standard diesel.
Somehow I'd think "reflects the ideas of their advertisers" has a somewhat higher level of importance than "reflecting the ideas of their readers", seeing as how subscriptions barely cover delivery costs- it's the advertising that keeps the whole shebang going.
Bring a whole new level of dishonesty and idiocy to the White House.
Hard to beat the Bush-Cheney combination on idiocy and dishonesty, though. I was focusing on the idea that these two would be able to reform where the country is heading though- and that seems like an anti-instinctive assumption, since both of these broadcast personalities mimic the neoconservative line quite closely.
If you hate what is happening to our nation, the USA, then please write the following on the November ballot.
president: Bill O'Reilly
vice-president: Tammy Bruce
I've been meaning to ask- what would these two do that Cheney/Bush would not?
Good interpretation- but I meant it as Anybody But Bush. Anti-Big-Business also fits as well, however; especially given that Bush seems to be the biggest slave to big business to hold the office yet.
No worse than Oregon, where you have a couple of check boxes to assert that you're legal to vote, but *nobody* is allowed to actually check that you told the truth in those check boxes (due to a public employees law that bans public employees from asking about immigration or citizenship status, from the governor's office all the way down to city government).
I really don't see how the issue you keep citing is a problem.
And yet, it's the original reason for the estate taxes to begin with. You see, estate taxes were originaly supposed to be on the MONEY left behind, not on the business at all- it's only a modern corruption that places it on the business. The whole idea of Kerry is to slowly start moving it back towards being on the money and not on the business. Trouble is that Kerry has that good old American Conservative ideal of "deserving" eliteism in his head- and thus limits it to those businesses he thinks are deserving, truly small businesses (apparently worth less than $10 million- my business for instance is safe, I think it's got a net worth less than $2000, and my wife's business only has a net worth of about $6000) and is truly what most people think of when they think of "small business". Medium sized businesses are expected to be rich enough to take some responsibility for themselves- and the choice for them is hiring a lawyer to protect assets, or outsource it to a bank account with a reserve to protect assets (though a third option just occured to me, why not use "key man" life insurance to insure the business against the death of one of the owners? I'll bet it would be a LOT cheaper than seting asside, from your example, $5.4 million).
The 30 posts in 4 hours limit is not adequate for an in depth political conversation.
There are no liberals in America- if there ever were. Only varying degrees of conservatives. One conservative mantra is the idea of the "deserving" individual- the idea that some people deserve governmental assistance and others don't. Worth is a big part of that decision. It's a foreign decision to me- as I said in my last post on this topic, I'd far prefer limiting earnings in this lifetime to limiting inheritance in the next; but that's just me.
So I guess it's a medium sized family bussiness. How does that change things?
Basically, for Kerry's argument, it changes things from being a business than can't afford to take a hit, to one that can- and it goes on a conservative capitalist corruption of the old liberal Catholic idea that we are merely stewards of our wealth, that wealth should be used to support the people around us rather than for personal gain.
Because they ran the business better, the government should punish them and not punish their competitor who is worth only $9.5 million?
Yep- merely because that is the totally arbitrary line between "deserving" and "not deserving".
So we are going to encourage business to not expand and create new jobs?
This is a separate issue entirely, as we are fast approaching the day when productivity is such that we can keep up production and retail with 25% of the workforce we employ today. By that time we'd better be forgetting about this quibling over who we're going to allow to be millionaires- and start concentrating instead on how we're going to divorce survival from having a job (because there will be few, very few, jobs and many, very many, people who want them).
Specifically, to keep bubble headed kids from inheriting wealth they didn't do a damned thing to earn. And it's NOT a liberal tax- it's a conservative one based on a strict idea of personal fiscal responsibility.
Your standard liberal version would eliminate the death tax altogether and just limit people to earning no more than $23.5 million in their lifetime to begin with (adjusted with the minimum wage- no more than 10x minimum wage working for 100 years). Your business down the road is WAY more in keeping with the liberal point of view (the C-levels, the owners, earning less than 10x what they pay their lowest paid workers in keeping with Platonic Ideals) than the conservative point of view to begin with.
Just because they aren't meant to be targets of war, doesn't mean they are.
And besides, the War on Terror was never declared as a war, and so at best it's an unconstitutional and illegal war. Augustine of Hippo had an idea for how to fight a just war against an unjust enemy: 1. Fight it on your own soil against a foreign invader. 2. Do not take revenge on the people the foreign invader left behind. 3. Use weapons that will stop your enemy, but show love for your enemy by not avoiding his weapons.
Oddly enough, right now, that's what al Qaida is doing against people they consider to be an unjust enemy.
To me, a business worth $12 million with 50 employees ain't a small business anymore- and they could save $80,000 a year by paying themselves the same as their employees, right off the top. $50,000 a year is enough for anybody to be comfortable on, just about anywhere in the US.
Precisely, to me, that the death tax needs to be on liquid assets only, eventually, and even then, PERSONAL liquid assets. But as you say- the super wealthy can hire lawyers- though it's pretty amazing to me that it's cheaper for a small business to keep back 45% of it's value in a bank account than to hire a lawyer to advise them on a better way to do it. Even if you had to pay the lawyer $150,000/year, well, you could have that lawyer in house working ONLY on stuff for the business for 36 years before you'd spend as much money as holding back 45% of a $12 million capital-intensive business's worth. Thus creating a job, if only a parasitical one.
How do they get that kind of resolution out of a commercial-grade GPS unit? Mine can rarely tell me where I am within 10 meters- seems like you could have a lot of rows of corn in 10 meters!
Given the duck-hunting incident and Scalia's decision in favor of Cheney- not gratuitous at all. But I'll agree that Scalia fits Bush perfectly- they both care far more about personal profit than they do about other people's lives OR what the Constitution says. As a rule- those who believe in personal responsibility cannot believe in a truly seemless garment of protecting human life. The two points of view are contradictory in the extreme.
Since you do have debt beyond a mortgage, that indicates you're not great at living within your means. Getting a whole pile of cash all at once is not a good way to learn money management. You're much better off to learn with live within your means before getting the big windfall, but if you can do that then you probably don't need it. Ironic, huh?
Actually, there's also the stage in between where you've accumulated enough debt to learn the lesson but don't have enough income yet to pay it off- and at that point a windfall would be VERY welcome.
True- they're a lighter shade than John Deers...but boy are they a hell of a lot bigger! I've seen a guy with a Steiger tackle plowing a 75 acre field in under 4 hours- merely because he was taking a quarter of an acre swath at a stroke!(but don't be like the guy who tried to hook up standard implements to his Steiger- and tore the tounges right off....)
How does a $10 million loophole for family farms and small businesses not succeed in allowing more family farms and small businesses to be passed down to children? I'm as skeptical as the next guy, but this seems pretty darned simple to me.
No, I want to see people taking responsibility for their actions and understanding the consequenses for those actions. Sexual intercourse, in most cases, is a choice--something that potentially could lead to the consequence of pregnancy. Providing "outs" like abortion removes personal responsibility.
I agree with this as well- but I'd have to say that we're facing a population implosion in countries with a high standard of living where abortion is legal, and that fact has to be addressed first.
Kerry's $10 million loophole seems adequate to cover that- and the raises for inflation insure that it will increase in the future. Bill Gates wouldn't be able to pass on his wealth- but taking a lesson from his father, I think his children will be lucky to get a $100,000 business loan if they drop out of college.
They must have some bitching equipment, buildings, or live near a large city to get farm values of $9k/acre! If farms that small are that valuable - are they animal feed operations or tobacco farms, or are they near a large population center that values the land for development instead of agriculture?
All of the above- mainly fall into two categories, animal feed and grass seed crop (this area of Oregon produces something like 80% of the world's grass seed). It's due mainly to the terrain (the Willamette Valley is anything but flat, the foothills of the Cascades and the foothills of the Coast Range both come almost down to the Valley Floor) that farms do not grow larger here- back in Eastern Oregon they do. In addition, strict land use laws are such that any farm can only be used for farmland even if it's right next to a city until it is included in the urban growth boundary- at which time property taxes tripple immediately and few farms can survive as such.Around here, sustainable farms are much larger (farming entire sections of land or more (that's 640 acres for you city dwellers)). If the land is the only asset of the farm at death, that's easily of $1.25M.
So $10 million could easily cover $1.25 million in land, another $1.25 million in buildings, another $1.25 million in equipment (you city dwellers probably don't know what a Steiger is- but one of those tractors can cost a few hundred thousand easy, and if you meet one on a standard two-lane country road you will need to either reverse or hop the ditch). Kerry's plan still sounds quite sound to me for protecting small farms and businesses.
what if the tax system had no loop holes at all. everyone paid the same graduated tax rate. that goes for people and corporations and charities and nonprofits and every other legal entity. (note i'm not talking about a flat tax.)
As long as the tax rate is progressive- I personally like it. PLUS, as you point out:
i think that this would make things more fair and simple and reduce the tax code to 10 pages. and it would raise government revenue a lot. (so we could then cut taxes, yeah!) also when we had tax cuts or tax increases it would be a lot more obvious who was getting screwed and who wasn't. politicians would be more likely to just pass a general 1% increase or 1% decrease or something like that.
It would especially reduce our budget for the IRS. I'm personally VERY for this. Unfortuneately, I don't fall into the category of Kerry freak- I'm much more of an ABB voter, and if I can avoid voting for Kerry I will on grounds of conscience.
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That's the best part of the Indian discovery- you can grow it in places where crops won't grow. Makes me wonder what other poisonous oils would work just as well in an engine- nightshade oil? How about Milkweed sap, that grew rather well on my parent's farm until the bull thistle invasion....
RTFA- Republicans in Crawford know that their boy W has been a HUGE disappointment as far as their own conservative values go. *ANY* honest digging into this administration at all, will return a similar judgement.
Not unless we get a lot more people eating junk food, no. Biodiesel, even from reclaimed french fry oil, is currently only produced in very small batches in comparison to gasoline and standard diesel.
Somehow I'd think "reflects the ideas of their advertisers" has a somewhat higher level of importance than "reflecting the ideas of their readers", seeing as how subscriptions barely cover delivery costs- it's the advertising that keeps the whole shebang going.
Bring a whole new level of dishonesty and idiocy to the White House.
Hard to beat the Bush-Cheney combination on idiocy and dishonesty, though. I was focusing on the idea that these two would be able to reform where the country is heading though- and that seems like an anti-instinctive assumption, since both of these broadcast personalities mimic the neoconservative line quite closely.
If you hate what is happening to our nation, the USA, then please write the following on the November ballot. president: Bill O'Reilly vice-president: Tammy Bruce
I've been meaning to ask- what would these two do that Cheney/Bush would not?
Good interpretation- but I meant it as Anybody But Bush. Anti-Big-Business also fits as well, however; especially given that Bush seems to be the biggest slave to big business to hold the office yet.
No worse than Oregon, where you have a couple of check boxes to assert that you're legal to vote, but *nobody* is allowed to actually check that you told the truth in those check boxes (due to a public employees law that bans public employees from asking about immigration or citizenship status, from the governor's office all the way down to city government).
I really don't see how the issue you keep citing is a problem.
And yet, it's the original reason for the estate taxes to begin with. You see, estate taxes were originaly supposed to be on the MONEY left behind, not on the business at all- it's only a modern corruption that places it on the business. The whole idea of Kerry is to slowly start moving it back towards being on the money and not on the business. Trouble is that Kerry has that good old American Conservative ideal of "deserving" eliteism in his head- and thus limits it to those businesses he thinks are deserving, truly small businesses (apparently worth less than $10 million- my business for instance is safe, I think it's got a net worth less than $2000, and my wife's business only has a net worth of about $6000) and is truly what most people think of when they think of "small business". Medium sized businesses are expected to be rich enough to take some responsibility for themselves- and the choice for them is hiring a lawyer to protect assets, or outsource it to a bank account with a reserve to protect assets (though a third option just occured to me, why not use "key man" life insurance to insure the business against the death of one of the owners? I'll bet it would be a LOT cheaper than seting asside, from your example, $5.4 million).
The 30 posts in 4 hours limit is not adequate for an in depth political conversation. There are no liberals in America- if there ever were. Only varying degrees of conservatives. One conservative mantra is the idea of the "deserving" individual- the idea that some people deserve governmental assistance and others don't. Worth is a big part of that decision. It's a foreign decision to me- as I said in my last post on this topic, I'd far prefer limiting earnings in this lifetime to limiting inheritance in the next; but that's just me.
So I guess it's a medium sized family bussiness. How does that change things?
Basically, for Kerry's argument, it changes things from being a business than can't afford to take a hit, to one that can- and it goes on a conservative capitalist corruption of the old liberal Catholic idea that we are merely stewards of our wealth, that wealth should be used to support the people around us rather than for personal gain.
Because they ran the business better, the government should punish them and not punish their competitor who is worth only $9.5 million?
Yep- merely because that is the totally arbitrary line between "deserving" and "not deserving".
So we are going to encourage business to not expand and create new jobs?
This is a separate issue entirely, as we are fast approaching the day when productivity is such that we can keep up production and retail with 25% of the workforce we employ today. By that time we'd better be forgetting about this quibling over who we're going to allow to be millionaires- and start concentrating instead on how we're going to divorce survival from having a job (because there will be few, very few, jobs and many, very many, people who want them).
Specifically, to keep bubble headed kids from inheriting wealth they didn't do a damned thing to earn. And it's NOT a liberal tax- it's a conservative one based on a strict idea of personal fiscal responsibility.
Your standard liberal version would eliminate the death tax altogether and just limit people to earning no more than $23.5 million in their lifetime to begin with (adjusted with the minimum wage- no more than 10x minimum wage working for 100 years). Your business down the road is WAY more in keeping with the liberal point of view (the C-levels, the owners, earning less than 10x what they pay their lowest paid workers in keeping with Platonic Ideals) than the conservative point of view to begin with.
revealed October 11th
Just in time to make sure that most of the voters they've spent the last two weeks telling not to vote won't even be able to register.
Just because they aren't meant to be targets of war, doesn't mean they are.
And besides, the War on Terror was never declared as a war, and so at best it's an unconstitutional and illegal war. Augustine of Hippo had an idea for how to fight a just war against an unjust enemy:
1. Fight it on your own soil against a foreign invader.
2. Do not take revenge on the people the foreign invader left behind.
3. Use weapons that will stop your enemy, but show love for your enemy by not avoiding his weapons.
Oddly enough, right now, that's what al Qaida is doing against people they consider to be an unjust enemy.
To me, a business worth $12 million with 50 employees ain't a small business anymore- and they could save $80,000 a year by paying themselves the same as their employees, right off the top. $50,000 a year is enough for anybody to be comfortable on, just about anywhere in the US.
Precisely, to me, that the death tax needs to be on liquid assets only, eventually, and even then, PERSONAL liquid assets. But as you say- the super wealthy can hire lawyers- though it's pretty amazing to me that it's cheaper for a small business to keep back 45% of it's value in a bank account than to hire a lawyer to advise them on a better way to do it. Even if you had to pay the lawyer $150,000/year, well, you could have that lawyer in house working ONLY on stuff for the business for 36 years before you'd spend as much money as holding back 45% of a $12 million capital-intensive business's worth. Thus creating a job, if only a parasitical one.
How do they get that kind of resolution out of a commercial-grade GPS unit? Mine can rarely tell me where I am within 10 meters- seems like you could have a lot of rows of corn in 10 meters!
Given the duck-hunting incident and Scalia's decision in favor of Cheney- not gratuitous at all. But I'll agree that Scalia fits Bush perfectly- they both care far more about personal profit than they do about other people's lives OR what the Constitution says. As a rule- those who believe in personal responsibility cannot believe in a truly seemless garment of protecting human life. The two points of view are contradictory in the extreme.
Since you do have debt beyond a mortgage, that indicates you're not great at living within your means. Getting a whole pile of cash all at once is not a good way to learn money management. You're much better off to learn with live within your means before getting the big windfall, but if you can do that then you probably don't need it. Ironic, huh?
Actually, there's also the stage in between where you've accumulated enough debt to learn the lesson but don't have enough income yet to pay it off- and at that point a windfall would be VERY welcome.
True- they're a lighter shade than John Deers...but boy are they a hell of a lot bigger! I've seen a guy with a Steiger tackle plowing a 75 acre field in under 4 hours- merely because he was taking a quarter of an acre swath at a stroke!(but don't be like the guy who tried to hook up standard implements to his Steiger- and tore the tounges right off....)
How does a $10 million loophole for family farms and small businesses not succeed in allowing more family farms and small businesses to be passed down to children? I'm as skeptical as the next guy, but this seems pretty darned simple to me.
No, I want to see people taking responsibility for their actions and understanding the consequenses for those actions. Sexual intercourse, in most cases, is a choice--something that potentially could lead to the consequence of pregnancy. Providing "outs" like abortion removes personal responsibility.
I agree with this as well- but I'd have to say that we're facing a population implosion in countries with a high standard of living where abortion is legal, and that fact has to be addressed first.
Kerry's $10 million loophole seems adequate to cover that- and the raises for inflation insure that it will increase in the future. Bill Gates wouldn't be able to pass on his wealth- but taking a lesson from his father, I think his children will be lucky to get a $100,000 business loan if they drop out of college.
They must have some bitching equipment, buildings, or live near a large city to get farm values of $9k/acre! If farms that small are that valuable - are they animal feed operations or tobacco farms, or are they near a large population center that values the land for development instead of agriculture?
All of the above- mainly fall into two categories, animal feed and grass seed crop (this area of Oregon produces something like 80% of the world's grass seed). It's due mainly to the terrain (the Willamette Valley is anything but flat, the foothills of the Cascades and the foothills of the Coast Range both come almost down to the Valley Floor) that farms do not grow larger here- back in Eastern Oregon they do. In addition, strict land use laws are such that any farm can only be used for farmland even if it's right next to a city until it is included in the urban growth boundary- at which time property taxes tripple immediately and few farms can survive as such.Around here, sustainable farms are much larger (farming entire sections of land or more (that's 640 acres for you city dwellers)). If the land is the only asset of the farm at death, that's easily of $1.25M.
So $10 million could easily cover $1.25 million in land, another $1.25 million in buildings, another $1.25 million in equipment (you city dwellers probably don't know what a Steiger is- but one of those tractors can cost a few hundred thousand easy, and if you meet one on a standard two-lane country road you will need to either reverse or hop the ditch). Kerry's plan still sounds quite sound to me for protecting small farms and businesses.
what if the tax system had no loop holes at all. everyone paid the same graduated tax rate. that goes for people and corporations and charities and nonprofits and every other legal entity. (note i'm not talking about a flat tax.)
As long as the tax rate is progressive- I personally like it. PLUS, as you point out:
i think that this would make things more fair and simple and reduce the tax code to 10 pages. and it would raise government revenue a lot. (so we could then cut taxes, yeah!) also when we had tax cuts or tax increases it would be a lot more obvious who was getting screwed and who wasn't. politicians would be more likely to just pass a general 1% increase or 1% decrease or something like that.
It would especially reduce our budget for the IRS. I'm personally VERY for this. Unfortuneately, I don't fall into the category of Kerry freak- I'm much more of an ABB voter, and if I can avoid voting for Kerry I will on grounds of conscience.
And thus- Kerry's reversal of the loopholes would be a good thing.