Sure, but that's not a competitive product. People buying $4,000 dresses aren't shopping around for value, they're looking for something unique/trendy/whatever.
Fashion is an extemely compteitive market. Chanel has plenty of competition - Gucci, YSL, Bulgari, Nicole Miller, and hunderds of others of which I've never heard. But the big fashion houses don't compete on price. How can that be? They compete on design, reputation, packaging, the "experience". There is a lot more to a value proposition than dollars and cents.
Power is pretty much the only thing regulated that highly. Phone & cable companies have far more leeway, and it's completely ignoring things like Microsoft and oligopolies.
Water, natural gas, and sewer also come to mind as utilities with regulated profit margins. Most markets have plenty of competition for phone now (multiple mobile carriers). As for cable, their competition is DirecTV in every market. And DirecTV is very successful competing against the likes of Comcast. There's a dish on every other house in my neck of the woods.
Monopolies and oligopolies are when the price charged for something is independent of the actual cost.
False. In fact, the truth is very close to the opposite.
First, there are plenty of non-monopoly markets where price is indpendent of the actual cost. Chanel doesn't have a monopoly on litle black dresses, but they can charge $4000 for theirs. The Gap cannot charge more than $100. Something is priced at what the market will bear. The "value" of something is what it can be sold for, not "what you think it is worth" unless you are the only buyer in the market.
Secondly, in the USA (and probably elsewhere) the majority of monopolies are heavily regulated utilities. For example, many power companies are guaranteed a fixed profit (say 10%) in the consumer electric market by the local government, based on their direct operating costs. So their margins are essentially regulated. I will not comment on whether this scheme is good or bad, but that is the way it is.
And I say, so what? Every relevant office suite is going to have to implement OOXML (as well as support for legacy MSFT formats) for many years to come, whether or not OOXML is a published standard. So it is much better for everyone if OOXML becomes a standard, so that the spec is out there and diverting from it is more difficult for MSFT.
If you're suggesting that MSFT adopt ODF instead of OOXML, well, why should they? ODF has a lot of design-by-committee compromises and missing features (no change tracking, no tables in presentations). MSFT is the 800 pond gorilla, and changing the direction of the MS Office ship is enormously more painful and complex for the whole industry (and MSFT customers) than adding OO.org and KOffice support for OOXML. Why should Sun and the open source community be allowed to dictate MSFT file formats? Because Microsoft is a big, rich, successful coporation, and you just don't like them?
Thank you for making my point. The standardization of OOXML is immaterial, and certainly nothing about which to get your knickers in a twist. Everyone will have to implement interoperability with MS Office to remain relevant in the marketplace anyway, regardless of any standardization process. We certainly don't need courts and a UN Tribunal to "investiage" this issue, as the GP desires, because it just doesn't matter that much.
"Disallowed"? What "court"? This has nothing whatsoever to do with any government. ISO is a standards body, which publishes recommendations that people volutarily follow. And this particular standard isn't exactly the kilogram. Even if it passes, it is not something that will be forced down anybody's throat as a requirement.
Let me guess: you're the sort of whining douchebag that wants a law regulating every pet peeve and perceived injustice you encounter. Someong talking on a cell phone in a restaurant? Make a law against it. Someone building a new parking lot near your house? Make a law against it. Don't like Microsoft? Make a law against it. Hispanics moving in down the street? Make a law against them.
Microsoft is famous for shaking down corporations that have either misplaced or misdocumented licenses in order to force them to buy again or upgrade software.
Really? Do you have any supporting references? Microsoft has always gone out of their way to re-issue lost license keys to us, with only a copy of a printed email receipt from our reseller. We have never, in the 11 years I have worked there, had to re-buy licenses. MSFT also provide tools to manage license keys on-line, to help you keep things straight.
Most of my company's servers and desktops from the 1995-2000 era (some 600+ machines total) had Trident video chipsets either onboard or on a discrete video card. They just worked for the most part, as I recall.
Of course, there were many "inexplicable" crashes in our environment during the Win9x / NT4 era (blue screen or freeze without a corresponding crash dump file), so who knows. We assumed those were from faulty IDE/SCSI/RAID drivers or hardware, since no crash dump was written to disk. But that was really just guesswork - we had no other tools available to gather the required data for analysis (users just restarted their machines before IT could investigate). It was something we just lived with until Windows 2000 came out, and everything magically improved.
That experience being; "mine, mine, ALL MINE!....hahahaha!" AKA "screw you...it's all about me!"
Economists call this the Tragedy of the Commons, and it's the reason driving in traffic sucks, and also the reason public toilets are filthy.
The Internet is fundamentally a shared infrastructure. BitTorrent and other protocols intentionally utilize that infrastructure unfairly. A BitTorrent swarm is like a pack of hundreds of cars driving 90 mph, both directions, in every lane including the shoulder. They cut you off just before the overpass, and refuse to slow and let you merge from the on-ramp.
We really do need traffic police (traffic shaping) to enforce the rules of the road, because the drivers certainly will not police themselves. Internet routers cannot just forward packets on a first-come-first-serve basis anymore. Yes, the connections are getting faster, but not quickly enough to support even a few million people sharing movies via something like BitTorrent.
You ignore the fact that ISPs pay for transit of your traffic to other networks in some fashion. Even if your ISP is a Tier-1, they pay to maintain peering arangments with other Tier-1 ISPs. Those arrangements are based on traffic balance. So even if you're running torrents in the middle of the night when the peering links are mostly unutilized, you're still potentially costing your ISP a lot of money.
The problem is economic, not technological. Nobody has figured out a way to fairly distribute the infrastrcuture costs of P2P applications like BitTorrent. For the same reason - economics - IP multicast has never been widely deployed in the Internet at large. (Heck, BitTorrent is just a hack for getting multi-cast like behavior in the absence of Internet multicast support).
So who pays for a packet? The sending netowrk? The receiver? Both? "Neither" is not a sustainable option, despite the current Slashdot group-think opinion. If you figure it out, let us all know. I'm sure you'll get a PhD and a boatload of research dollars.
This is false. We have dozens of MSSQL servers, both 2000 and 2005, and they generally operate with four-nines-plus reliability. Most have uptime measured in months. When you don't worry about patching things like IE on a server, very few restarts are required.
MSSQL *will* by default use up nearly all memory on a system, leaving enough for all the other running processes plus about 64 MB. It does this so it can do joins, hash merges, and sort all in memory where possible, as well as cache as many database pages in RAM as it can. This is well-documented behavior, and it is easy to change if you are running MSSQL on a machine that does other stuff.
We had to apply DST patches acounting systems, ERP systems, CRM systems, mobile devices, VOIP software, HR systems,payroll systems, messaging/groupware systems, backup software, and probably a lot of others.
Almost everything at the enterprise level has some form of scheduling and calendaring. For example, our VOIP system needed the DST patches to correctly generate call activity reports (which are used for departmental charge-backs) correctly. It needed to know the correct hour locally to know the correct rates to charge back.
If everything could use a standard OS library, that would be great. But there is no universtal standard at the OS layer, and even the most common OS-layer APIs (POSIX, Java, Windows) have crippling limitations for some applications. There's also no time zone standard defined in ANSI SQL. Many apps need to support more than one OS or database, so they use their own static table for time zone info.
The typical advice of "store everything in UTC and use an OS library to convert" just doesn't work in many application domains. Microsoft Exchange did it like that, but still required patches because appointments would shift after time zone definitions changed at the OS layer. You needed to know exactly when the appointment was scheduled, and the source time zone definition in use on the client at the time an appointment was scheduled. The user wants the meeting every Wednesday at 1:00 PM local time. There are a lot of edge cases that need handling.
Are you kidding? Group calendaring is *the* reason that Microsoft Exchange Server is by far the #1 communications platform in use in businesses. By a huge margin over Notes, Groupwise, and . And Google calendar sucks in comparison. It's really tough to suck at anything in comparison to Outlook, but they manage.
There's a lot more to networking that "the Internet". Even small companies like mine (150 employess) need faster *local* networking. Our Gigabit Ethernet links often become saturated during nightly backups, and our iSCSI SAN actually uses 6 load-balanced Gigabit links to prevent from being a bottleneck (4 Gbps wasn't enough).
Though we have just 100 Mbps to the Internet (that's 1/10 our nominal LAN speed), it is only utilized at about 10% on average during business hours.
False. The military is only part of the "national defense" budget, which is only 21% of the federal budget. This includes the FBI, CIA, NSA, DHS, Coast Guard, FEMA, foreign aid, and lots of other non-military spending. "Entitlements", such as social security, medicare, etc. make up 61% of the budget. 22% goes to pay for healthcate (Medicare + other healthcare combined).Source.
Of course there are lies, damn lies, and then statistics. Feel free to go through the federal budget line item by line item and categorize things yourself. It can be spun by anybody's agenda. For instance, the Washington post splits up "health" and "medicare" into separate buckets, clearly a spin move to make "defense" tie for the largest category.
Anyways, it's no surprise that it's all the OLE, spreadsheet-object-inside-a-document, stuff that would make it difficult to design a Word killer. (How often to people actually use that anyway?)
At my company, our users do that every day. Excel spreadsheets embedded in Word or PowerPoint, Microsoft office Chart objects embedded in everything. It's what made the Word/Excel/PowerPoint "Office Suite" a killer app for businesses. MS Office integration beat the pants of the once best-of-breed and dominant Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. When you embed documents in Office, instead of a static image, the embedded doc is editable in the same UI, and can be linked to another document maintained by somebody else and updated automatically. It saves tremendous amounts of staff time.
Ha! You've never dealt with the IRS on an intimate basis, I see.
A million and a half can support me for my lifetime and be bigger at the end of it.
Not if you aave a family, and want to own a modest house with a lawn, and want to send your kids to college.
if it's generating $100k/yr and valued at $6M, that's a 3% return, which is insane.
Not at all. It depends on the business, and on the assets the business holds. A warehouse might be valued at $15M, even though it was bought free-and-clear 20 years ago for $150K. But the IRS still values the company based on the $15M valuation of the building, even if there is no intent to sell. So when the sole prioprietor dies, his children HAVE to sell the building to pay the estate taxes. Obviously there are a lot of possible situations, but in general a near-break-even buisiness with a book value in the tens of millions is not at all uncommon.
Name one farmer affected by the estate tax.
My great-uncle. His children had to sell the farm when he died because of the estate tax owed. Go to any small town in the midwest and you can hear thousands of similar stories. You don't hear of many that actually happened in the last few years, though, because the "family farm" is almost gone, thanks to the estate tax. Everyone had to sell out to ADM. Now it's the turn of the small-business owner.
No, they're the result of changed expectations of the company's future value. They aren't really tied to the actual value of the company.
There are dozens of ways to calculate a valuation for a company, but in all of them, the more cash on hand a company owns, the higher the value. So yes, market share prices are tied to the real book value to a large degree. The folks who manage mutual funds and other instituional investments aren't idiots, even though Joe Daytrader might be. Emotional and speculatory factors might provide for transient swings from a "true" valuation-based share price, but the mass irrationality of the dot-com boom isn't the rule.
Who's going to pay for all the crap we need, the middle class?
We don't need all that crap. It's mostly waste and make-work, designed to keep the populace subservient and dependent upon the government. All we really need is the military, some police, and some roads. Maybe some modest regulatory agencies like the FAA and FCC. Cut the federal budget by 90%, and let's get back to being America again.
Hey, that's how the rich do it. Also, the first 1.5M is exempt. Would you prefer we have landed gentry?
1.5M doesn't even begin to cover anything other than maybe a hot dog stand. A neigbiohood bar in Chicago is worth many millions of dollars, for example, even though it might genereate only ~$100K in usuable income for the owner. Our family business has just 12 employees, but is valued by the IRS at many times the 1.5 million exemption. But strangely, none of us are buying Bentleys and houses in the Hamptons. A million bucks isn't a whole lot these days.
Family farmers have it the worst, as the land is worth so much compared to the actual income they receive from it on a yearly basis. What are you, a communist? Americans aren't allowed to build a business and pass it on to their kids anymore?
We actually DO have landed gentry in the USA - the estate tax doesn't crimp the Kennedys' style. It's the middle class business owner that gets screwed.
No, you pay income tax on your dividends and capital gains on stock gains.
Stock gains, that is, and increase in the value of the stock, are the result of the company making money. That money was already taxed once at the corporate rate as corporate income. A portion of it is taxed again at the individual rate when disbursed to shareholders as dividends. Money retained or reinvested by the corporation increases the value of the stock. Taxes have already been paid on that increase in value. Capital gains tax are simply a socialist wealth-redistribution scheme.
In any case, precious metals and other physical goods are also subject ot capital gains tax as well. This despite the fact that the money seller used to purchase those goods was already subject to income tax, and the money the buyer uses is also subject to income tax. Even though the gold itself just sat in a vault somewhere for a few years. It's absurd, and a tremendous disincentive to investment, and therefore a huge drag on our economy. Despite the recent rate cut.
Estate taxes most definitely do affect many in the middle class. We have a family business that can't be passed on directly to the children and grandchildren without an enormous tax burden, or hamstringing ourselves with a lot of irrevocable trusts.
Capital gains taxes are clearly a double-tax in addition to income taxes... I don't consider myself rich, merely middle class, but I do own stock. So I am already paying corporate income tax out of my dividends. But if I sell that stock, I play capital gains tax as well, even though the increase in value was already taxed as corporate income.
Unforutnately, moving an established family business away from Chicago is not an option. I would move it to northwest Indiana in a second if we could make that work, but our largest customers are here.
Do you also have federal, state, and local income taxes, social security taxes, medicare taxes, payroll taxes, $14K/year property taxes for a modest 3 bedroom home, estate taxes, and capital gains taxes? In Illinois, it is not uncommon for some people to have a total tax burden (federal, state, county, and municipal combined) in excess of 60% of their income.
The People's Republic of New York probably likely wants far too much in property, payroll, and income taxes. And other local "organizations" will ensure an overpaid, unproductive, all-union labor force.
I live in Chicago, and we have a lot of the same problems attracting new business investment. The tax and union burdens here have pushed a lot of investment into Indiana and even the Union of Wisconsin Socialist Counties. We have 10% sales tax now, for Heaven's sake.
Slashdot Mirror
Fashion is an extemely compteitive market. Chanel has plenty of competition - Gucci, YSL, Bulgari, Nicole Miller, and hunderds of others of which I've never heard. But the big fashion houses don't compete on price. How can that be? They compete on design, reputation, packaging, the "experience". There is a lot more to a value proposition than dollars and cents.
Water, natural gas, and sewer also come to mind as utilities with regulated profit margins. Most markets have plenty of competition for phone now (multiple mobile carriers). As for cable, their competition is DirecTV in every market. And DirecTV is very successful competing against the likes of Comcast. There's a dish on every other house in my neck of the woods.
False. In fact, the truth is very close to the opposite.
First, there are plenty of non-monopoly markets where price is indpendent of the actual cost. Chanel doesn't have a monopoly on litle black dresses, but they can charge $4000 for theirs. The Gap cannot charge more than $100. Something is priced at what the market will bear. The "value" of something is what it can be sold for, not "what you think it is worth" unless you are the only buyer in the market.
Secondly, in the USA (and probably elsewhere) the majority of monopolies are heavily regulated utilities. For example, many power companies are guaranteed a fixed profit (say 10%) in the consumer electric market by the local government, based on their direct operating costs. So their margins are essentially regulated. I will not comment on whether this scheme is good or bad, but that is the way it is.
And I say, so what? Every relevant office suite is going to have to implement OOXML (as well as support for legacy MSFT formats) for many years to come, whether or not OOXML is a published standard. So it is much better for everyone if OOXML becomes a standard, so that the spec is out there and diverting from it is more difficult for MSFT.
If you're suggesting that MSFT adopt ODF instead of OOXML, well, why should they? ODF has a lot of design-by-committee compromises and missing features (no change tracking, no tables in presentations). MSFT is the 800 pond gorilla, and changing the direction of the MS Office ship is enormously more painful and complex for the whole industry (and MSFT customers) than adding OO.org and KOffice support for OOXML. Why should Sun and the open source community be allowed to dictate MSFT file formats? Because Microsoft is a big, rich, successful coporation, and you just don't like them?
Thank you for making my point. The standardization of OOXML is immaterial, and certainly nothing about which to get your knickers in a twist. Everyone will have to implement interoperability with MS Office to remain relevant in the marketplace anyway, regardless of any standardization process. We certainly don't need courts and a UN Tribunal to "investiage" this issue, as the GP desires, because it just doesn't matter that much.
"Disallowed"? What "court"? This has nothing whatsoever to do with any government. ISO is a standards body, which publishes recommendations that people volutarily follow. And this particular standard isn't exactly the kilogram. Even if it passes, it is not something that will be forced down anybody's throat as a requirement.
Let me guess: you're the sort of whining douchebag that wants a law regulating every pet peeve and perceived injustice you encounter. Someong talking on a cell phone in a restaurant? Make a law against it. Someone building a new parking lot near your house? Make a law against it. Don't like Microsoft? Make a law against it. Hispanics moving in down the street? Make a law against them.
Grow up, man. The government is not your mommy.
Really? Do you have any supporting references? Microsoft has always gone out of their way to re-issue lost license keys to us, with only a copy of a printed email receipt from our reseller. We have never, in the 11 years I have worked there, had to re-buy licenses. MSFT also provide tools to manage license keys on-line, to help you keep things straight.
The "secure" part was funny, too, you know...
How did that not get a +1 Funny mod?
Most of my company's servers and desktops from the 1995-2000 era (some 600+ machines total) had Trident video chipsets either onboard or on a discrete video card. They just worked for the most part, as I recall.
Of course, there were many "inexplicable" crashes in our environment during the Win9x / NT4 era (blue screen or freeze without a corresponding crash dump file), so who knows. We assumed those were from faulty IDE/SCSI/RAID drivers or hardware, since no crash dump was written to disk. But that was really just guesswork - we had no other tools available to gather the required data for analysis (users just restarted their machines before IT could investigate). It was something we just lived with until Windows 2000 came out, and everything magically improved.
Economists call this the Tragedy of the Commons, and it's the reason driving in traffic sucks, and also the reason public toilets are filthy.
The Internet is fundamentally a shared infrastructure. BitTorrent and other protocols intentionally utilize that infrastructure unfairly. A BitTorrent swarm is like a pack of hundreds of cars driving 90 mph, both directions, in every lane including the shoulder. They cut you off just before the overpass, and refuse to slow and let you merge from the on-ramp.
We really do need traffic police (traffic shaping) to enforce the rules of the road, because the drivers certainly will not police themselves. Internet routers cannot just forward packets on a first-come-first-serve basis anymore. Yes, the connections are getting faster, but not quickly enough to support even a few million people sharing movies via something like BitTorrent.
You ignore the fact that ISPs pay for transit of your traffic to other networks in some fashion. Even if your ISP is a Tier-1, they pay to maintain peering arangments with other Tier-1 ISPs. Those arrangements are based on traffic balance. So even if you're running torrents in the middle of the night when the peering links are mostly unutilized, you're still potentially costing your ISP a lot of money.
The problem is economic, not technological. Nobody has figured out a way to fairly distribute the infrastrcuture costs of P2P applications like BitTorrent. For the same reason - economics - IP multicast has never been widely deployed in the Internet at large. (Heck, BitTorrent is just a hack for getting multi-cast like behavior in the absence of Internet multicast support).
So who pays for a packet? The sending netowrk? The receiver? Both? "Neither" is not a sustainable option, despite the current Slashdot group-think opinion. If you figure it out, let us all know. I'm sure you'll get a PhD and a boatload of research dollars.
This is false. We have dozens of MSSQL servers, both 2000 and 2005, and they generally operate with four-nines-plus reliability. Most have uptime measured in months. When you don't worry about patching things like IE on a server, very few restarts are required.
MSSQL *will* by default use up nearly all memory on a system, leaving enough for all the other running processes plus about 64 MB. It does this so it can do joins, hash merges, and sort all in memory where possible, as well as cache as many database pages in RAM as it can. This is well-documented behavior, and it is easy to change if you are running MSSQL on a machine that does other stuff.
You just might if Hillary gets elected!
We had to apply DST patches acounting systems, ERP systems, CRM systems, mobile devices, VOIP software, HR systems,payroll systems, messaging/groupware systems, backup software, and probably a lot of others.
Almost everything at the enterprise level has some form of scheduling and calendaring. For example, our VOIP system needed the DST patches to correctly generate call activity reports (which are used for departmental charge-backs) correctly. It needed to know the correct hour locally to know the correct rates to charge back.
If everything could use a standard OS library, that would be great. But there is no universtal standard at the OS layer, and even the most common OS-layer APIs (POSIX, Java, Windows) have crippling limitations for some applications. There's also no time zone standard defined in ANSI SQL. Many apps need to support more than one OS or database, so they use their own static table for time zone info.
The typical advice of "store everything in UTC and use an OS library to convert" just doesn't work in many application domains. Microsoft Exchange did it like that, but still required patches because appointments would shift after time zone definitions changed at the OS layer. You needed to know exactly when the appointment was scheduled, and the source time zone definition in use on the client at the time an appointment was scheduled. The user wants the meeting every Wednesday at 1:00 PM local time. There are a lot of edge cases that need handling.
Are you kidding? Group calendaring is *the* reason that Microsoft Exchange Server is by far the #1 communications platform in use in businesses. By a huge margin over Notes, Groupwise, and . And Google calendar sucks in comparison. It's really tough to suck at anything in comparison to Outlook, but they manage.
Yes, both those sources are far more reliable than the Washington-fucking-Post. Nutjob.
There's a lot more to networking that "the Internet". Even small companies like mine (150 employess) need faster *local* networking. Our Gigabit Ethernet links often become saturated during nightly backups, and our iSCSI SAN actually uses 6 load-balanced Gigabit links to prevent from being a bottleneck (4 Gbps wasn't enough).
Though we have just 100 Mbps to the Internet (that's 1/10 our nominal LAN speed), it is only utilized at about 10% on average during business hours.
False. The military is only part of the "national defense" budget, which is only 21% of the federal budget. This includes the FBI, CIA, NSA, DHS, Coast Guard, FEMA, foreign aid, and lots of other non-military spending. "Entitlements", such as social security, medicare, etc. make up 61% of the budget. 22% goes to pay for healthcate (Medicare + other healthcare combined).Source.
Of course there are lies, damn lies, and then statistics. Feel free to go through the federal budget line item by line item and categorize things yourself. It can be spun by anybody's agenda. For instance, the Washington post splits up "health" and "medicare" into separate buckets, clearly a spin move to make "defense" tie for the largest category.
At my company, our users do that every day. Excel spreadsheets embedded in Word or PowerPoint, Microsoft office Chart objects embedded in everything. It's what made the Word/Excel/PowerPoint "Office Suite" a killer app for businesses. MS Office integration beat the pants of the once best-of-breed and dominant Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. When you embed documents in Office, instead of a static image, the embedded doc is editable in the same UI, and can be linked to another document maintained by somebody else and updated automatically. It saves tremendous amounts of staff time.
Ha! You've never dealt with the IRS on an intimate basis, I see.
Not if you aave a family, and want to own a modest house with a lawn, and want to send your kids to college.
Not at all. It depends on the business, and on the assets the business holds. A warehouse might be valued at $15M, even though it was bought free-and-clear 20 years ago for $150K. But the IRS still values the company based on the $15M valuation of the building, even if there is no intent to sell. So when the sole prioprietor dies, his children HAVE to sell the building to pay the estate taxes. Obviously there are a lot of possible situations, but in general a near-break-even buisiness with a book value in the tens of millions is not at all uncommon.
My great-uncle. His children had to sell the farm when he died because of the estate tax owed. Go to any small town in the midwest and you can hear thousands of similar stories. You don't hear of many that actually happened in the last few years, though, because the "family farm" is almost gone, thanks to the estate tax. Everyone had to sell out to ADM. Now it's the turn of the small-business owner.
There are dozens of ways to calculate a valuation for a company, but in all of them, the more cash on hand a company owns, the higher the value. So yes, market share prices are tied to the real book value to a large degree. The folks who manage mutual funds and other instituional investments aren't idiots, even though Joe Daytrader might be. Emotional and speculatory factors might provide for transient swings from a "true" valuation-based share price, but the mass irrationality of the dot-com boom isn't the rule.
We don't need all that crap. It's mostly waste and make-work, designed to keep the populace subservient and dependent upon the government. All we really need is the military, some police, and some roads. Maybe some modest regulatory agencies like the FAA and FCC. Cut the federal budget by 90%, and let's get back to being America again.
1.5M doesn't even begin to cover anything other than maybe a hot dog stand. A neigbiohood bar in Chicago is worth many millions of dollars, for example, even though it might genereate only ~$100K in usuable income for the owner. Our family business has just 12 employees, but is valued by the IRS at many times the 1.5 million exemption. But strangely, none of us are buying Bentleys and houses in the Hamptons. A million bucks isn't a whole lot these days.
Family farmers have it the worst, as the land is worth so much compared to the actual income they receive from it on a yearly basis. What are you, a communist? Americans aren't allowed to build a business and pass it on to their kids anymore?
We actually DO have landed gentry in the USA - the estate tax doesn't crimp the Kennedys' style. It's the middle class business owner that gets screwed.
Stock gains, that is, and increase in the value of the stock, are the result of the company making money. That money was already taxed once at the corporate rate as corporate income. A portion of it is taxed again at the individual rate when disbursed to shareholders as dividends. Money retained or reinvested by the corporation increases the value of the stock. Taxes have already been paid on that increase in value. Capital gains tax are simply a socialist wealth-redistribution scheme.
In any case, precious metals and other physical goods are also subject ot capital gains tax as well. This despite the fact that the money seller used to purchase those goods was already subject to income tax, and the money the buyer uses is also subject to income tax. Even though the gold itself just sat in a vault somewhere for a few years. It's absurd, and a tremendous disincentive to investment, and therefore a huge drag on our economy. Despite the recent rate cut.
Estate taxes most definitely do affect many in the middle class. We have a family business that can't be passed on directly to the children and grandchildren without an enormous tax burden, or hamstringing ourselves with a lot of irrevocable trusts.
Capital gains taxes are clearly a double-tax in addition to income taxes... I don't consider myself rich, merely middle class, but I do own stock. So I am already paying corporate income tax out of my dividends. But if I sell that stock, I play capital gains tax as well, even though the increase in value was already taxed as corporate income.
Unforutnately, moving an established family business away from Chicago is not an option. I would move it to northwest Indiana in a second if we could make that work, but our largest customers are here.
Do you also have federal, state, and local income taxes, social security taxes, medicare taxes, payroll taxes, $14K/year property taxes for a modest 3 bedroom home, estate taxes, and capital gains taxes? In Illinois, it is not uncommon for some people to have a total tax burden (federal, state, county, and municipal combined) in excess of 60% of their income.
The People's Republic of New York probably likely wants far too much in property, payroll, and income taxes. And other local "organizations" will ensure an overpaid, unproductive, all-union labor force.
I live in Chicago, and we have a lot of the same problems attracting new business investment. The tax and union burdens here have pushed a lot of investment into Indiana and even the Union of Wisconsin Socialist Counties. We have 10% sales tax now, for Heaven's sake.