Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt has said he is "perplexed" by the ongoing debate over the company's tax contributions in the UK.
Mr Schmidt told the BBC that the company did what was "legally required" to pay the right amount of taxes.
Google paid £10m in UK corporate taxes between 2006 and 2011.
Mr Schmidt said it was up to the government to change its tax system if it wanted companies to pay more taxes.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week, he said: "What we are doing is legal. I'm rather perplexed by this debate, which has been going in the UK for some time, because I view taxes as not optional.
"I view that you should pay the taxes that are legally required. It's not a debate. You pay the taxes.
"If the British system changes the tax laws, then we will comply. If the taxes go up, we will pay more, if they go down, we will pay less. That is a political decision for the democracy that is the United Kingdom."
And as much as I dislike Google for its political meddling, bias, censorship and data mining, he's got a point.
Oddly enough the griller in chief was Margaret Hodge, MP was director of a company which paid very low levels of taxes, using the rules to the max
The Labour MP has been one of the fiercest critics of tax avoidance by companies such as Starbucks, Google and Amazon. However, she is likely to face questions over the limited tax paid by Stemcor, the steel trading company in which she owns shares and which was founded by her father and is run by her brother.
Analysis of Stemcor's latest accounts show that the business paid tax of just £163,000 on revenues of more than £2.1bn in 2011. However. it is not known whether the company - which made profits of £65m - used similar controversial tax avoidance measures criticised in the past by Mrs Hodge.
Stemcor's tax bill to the exchequer equates to just 0.01pc of the revenues it booked through its UK-based business. In accounts filed with Companies House, Stemcor revealed that despite generating about one third of its revenues in Britain, its UK tax contribution made up only 2.7pc of the tax the company paid globally.
Stemcor was founded by Mrs Hodge's father Hans Oppenheimer more than 60 years ago.
Today, the business claims to be the sixth largest private UK company by turnover. Last year the company, which employs 2,000 people in 45 countries, generated sales of £6bn from trading about 20m tonnes of steel.
The majority of Stemcor's shares are still controlled by the Oppenheimer family and Mrs Hodge declares a "registrable shareholding" in the company, which is run by her brother Ralph Oppenheimer, executive chairman.
Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, Mrs Hodge defended Stemcor's behaviour and said that the company had "assured" her it paid "every penny of tax that is owed", adding that she was only "a very small shareholder".
"Clearly, I have asked them the question," said Mrs Hodge. "They have always promised that they do absolutely nothing to avoid tax. I would be very mad if I found out differently."
Mrs Hodge said unlike other companies under the spotlight, Stemcor did not try to shield profits or "hide information" and that was the difference between Stemcor and Starbucks.
However, when pressed about the details of why so little tax was paid by Stemcor despite the billions of pounds it makes
1. Share of taxes of richest decile
2. Share of market income of richest decile
3. Ratio of shares for richest decile (1/2)
Sweden 26.7 26.6 1.00
United Kingdom 38.6 32.3 1.20
United States 45.1 33.5 1.35
That last ratio is (share of total taxes paid of richest decile)/(share of market income by richest decile). You can actually make an argument that the rich in the US - which has lower personal tax rates than the UK pay more of their fair share. Similarly the UK has lower personal tax than Sweden, and yet rich people pay more of their fair share.
I.e. on a plausible model of fairness US>UK>Sweden even though in terms of personal tax rates Sweden>UK>US.
And the Laffer curve hasn't been refuted - the HMRC for example use it, and you'd expect them to know what they're talking about.
What is disputed is Taxable Income Elasticity which determines what shape the curve is. If you search the HMRC pdf I linked to for 'Laffer' you can see what happens to the curve as TIE varies and they also make some progress on determining the TIE for the UK and thus the optimal top tax rate. Basically that report was instrumental in the case for reducing the top personal tax rate from 50% back to 45% because a 50% tax was generating extra revenue.
And of course in France they experimented with high tax rates and then eventually rolled them back.
The Guardian is far left and supported high taxes on the rich but even they had to admit it didn't raise money and that's why it was dropped
Finance ministry studies showed that despite all the publicity, the sums obtained from the supertax were meagre, standing at €260m in 2013 and €160m in 2014, and affecting 1,000 staff in 470 companies. Over the same period, the budget deficit soared to €84.7bn.
The decision to drop the tax is a personal blow for Hollande and only one of a number of government U-turns since he was elected, fuelling criticism that he is indecisive and lacking presidential authority.
And if you look at the data I posted it's actually rather obvious that the US has personal taxes about right and that higher taxes than that will reduce revenue.
What it didn't have right was corporation tax, at least until the recent GOP tax cut.
The Laffer curve is obviously true. Consider. If you have zero taxes you collect zero revenue. If you have 100% taxes you also collect zero revenue because people won't work for free. In between the two there's a curve where tax revenues increase up to some level and then begin to fall.
When Gordon Brown put the top personal tax rate up from 45% to 50% HMRC - the UK equivalent of the IRS - did a study of the 50% tax rate in the UK with Laffer curves in it.
Here's one for just the Nordic countries. The argument is that they are very comparable because they are so similar. Firstly culturally, particularly the Scandinavian ones. Secondly the share of market income by the richest decile is quite similar.
It is not true that the actual corporate tax rate in the US is higher than the other OECD countries. It's a canard, as in lie, as in bogus.
No it's not and I linked to OECD data to prove it.
And saying 'well the effective tax rate is lower' is not a refutation. I'm sure big corporations do all sorts of deals to reduce their effective tax rate in the US - they shop around the states and pick the one who offers the best incentives.
However if you start a new corporation you get hit with the headline rate, until you grow large enough to corrupt the system, go bust or move your business overseas. Which is why 35% corporate taxes are a bad idea.
The first phones with non awful AMOLEDs were the Nokia N9 and Samsung Galaxy S. And I bet Nokia got their display from Samsung because the specs are so similar.
So Apple might have specced it, but probably only Samsung could make it.
Trump's Council of Economic Advisers say it will boost growth by 3-5%, which means Trump will go down in history as the Next Reagan. But then, as Mandy Rice-Davies put it "Well, they would say that wouldn't they?"
The U.S. is mired in a slow economic recovery, and is projected to continue growing at about a 2 percent annual rate for the next 10 years. The U.S. corporate tax is grossly out of step with the rates of its developed country competitors, and is the only nation to have increased its rate on net since 1988. A large body of economic research has documented the anti-growth effects of the U.S. corporate tax, with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) concluding that it is the most harmful form of tax on per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Reducing the corporate tax rate would lead to higher investment, faster productivity growth, faster economic growth and higher wages, which would offer a higher standard of living for U.S. workers.
This paper examines the relationship between tax structures and economic growth by entering indicators of the tax structure into a set of panel growth regressions for 21 OECD countries, in which both the accumulation of physical and human capital are accounted for. The results of the analysis suggest that income taxes are generally associated with lower economic growth than taxes on consumption and property. More precisely, the findings allow the establishment of a ranking of tax instruments with respect to their relationship to economic growth. Property taxes, and particularly recurrent taxes on immovable property, seem to be the most growth-friendly, followed by consumption taxes and then by personal income taxes. Corporate income taxes appear to have the most negative effect on GDP per capita. These findings suggest that a revenue-neutral growth-oriented tax reform would be to shift part of the revenue base towards recurrent property and consumption taxes and away from income taxes, especially corporate taxes. There is also evidence of a negative relationship between the progressivity of personal income taxes and growth. All of the results are robust to a number of different specifications, including controlling for other determinants of economic growth and instrumenting tax indicators.
Now the OECD report is credible.
And it doesn't really seem all that unreasonable for the US to cut corporation tax rates given it has the highest tax rate in the OECD.
In fact in best Laffer curve fashion you can make an argument that high tax rates encourage US corporations to have complex tax structures like Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich. Reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 22% makes it somewhat more competitive. A bit of Trumpian bullying of the likes of Apple and Google combined with a tax cut might cause them to start paying US taxes instead of paying Dutch, Irish or UK ones.
I can see you don't like Trump of the GOP and to be honest I've got mixed feelings about them myself. Still you c
In the UK each time there's a terrorist attack the hate speech laws get tightened up to catch 'extremists'. And each time it seems like a lot more people complaining about terrorism get caught than actual terrorists. Or even Islamists. Anjem Choudary was regularly invited on TV to spread his loathsome views and was allowed to recruit people for al Qaeda, ISIS etc up until 2016, even though hate speech laws were supposed to stop him
Meanwhile this hapless bastard got sent to prison, and mysteriously died there for putting a ham sandwich on a mosque. What did he die of? No one seems to care - even though there's supposed to be an inquiry no results of it were ever released.
So Crehan got very effectively screwed for committing 'a racially-motivated attack'. Anjem Choudhary blatantly recruited for ISIS from 2002 to 2016, was invited on the BBC to do it and is very unlikely to die mysteriously in prison. British prisons have a load of Islamists, so he'll be a hero in there.
tl;dr - hate speech laws get people who complain about Islamism, not actual Islamists.
Hmm, the NYT and The Atlantic don't like tax cuts. Democrats don't like tax cuts. I'm sure it's just a coincidence, and not that the NYT and Atlantic are only reporting things that fit the Democrat agenda.
And if you look at the study they cite they're talking about personal taxes, not corporate taxes.
The study I linked to found this
The results in column (3) show that, as expected, the coefficient of CIT rate is negative and statistically significant. The magnitude of the coefficient is, however, higher than what we obtain in column (2). The coefficients of the personal income and sales tax rates are still statistically insignificant. The coefficient of the interaction term between the sales tax rate and the RSTdummy is still negative but statistically insignificant.
I.e. lower corporate taxes mean higher growth 'the coefficient of CIT rate is negative and statistically significant' . Interestingly they can't tell if that's the case or not for personal and sales taxes because 'The coefficients of the personal income and sales tax rates are still statistically insignificant.'
This is why you need to look directly at economics research and not Google 'do tax cuts increase growth', and find an article on the NYT or Atlantic saying they don't. Clearly the sort of tax cut matters. You also need to read the whole paper, and not a summary by journalist who - in the US - is basically guaranteed to be left wing (only 7% of US journalist are Republicans), and given they all have liberal arts degrees, innumerate. All they're doing is Googling for some 'science' that backs their prejudices and then writing a long rant summarising it. Shit, even I could do that.
Exactly. I've looked at videos on battery replacement on sealed and it looks like you're going to crack the screen the first time you do it.
Actually I spend quite a lot of time in Taiwan these days so I could probably find someone who'd know how to do it and would do it cheaply while I waited and practised my aggressively bad Mandarin. Hell I could probably score the parts for another whole iPhone if I had to. But for most people - especially people who buy iPhones - it's not like that.
This paper examines the impact of tax rates on economic growth rate using panel data from Canadian provinces over the period 1977-2006. Our empirical analysis indicates that a higher CIT rate is associated with lower private investment and slower economic growth. However, the PIT rate does not affect the growth rate and investment once one controls for provincial fixed effects. Our empirical estimates suggest that a 1 percentage point cut in the CIT rate is related to 0.1-0.2 percentage point increase in the transitional growth rate.
Americans now take an average of 29 months to upgrade their cell phone
That's Apple *and* Samsung
Yeah, and later on the say the average for Apple alone is 22 months and Apple are offering a subscription model to reduce this to 15 months
Originally, Munster thought the program would reduce the average iPhone user's upgrade time frame from 22 months to only 15 months. But that 15 month time frame would mean iPhone users would be upgrading their phones 14 months earlier than the average American, based on Citigroup's new data. And with Apple's iPhone sales currently slowing, that quick upgrade time seems even more unlikely.
You can see there that the time for the average American is 29 months, and the time for Apple users is 22. They tried the subscription model to reduce it and then, I'm sure coincidentally, decided to throttle old iPhones to make them slower. Of course iPhones have an odd bug which causes them to shut down when it is cold that other cell phones don't seem to have. However throttling old devices is a good way to convince people to buy new ones, particularly if you don't tell them you're doing it because they need a new battery.
Apart from throttling Apple's upgrade system means old phones get new software. Which probably has decent performance on the latest device but crappy performance on the old ones. And cell phones tend to slow down with time anyway - my old S5 got slow and the battery life was bad so I did a firmware reset and replace the battery. When it got slow again I decided to replace it because V20s are pretty cheap now.
I.e. Apple have a number of subtle pushes to upgrade - throttling old devices, upgrading them to new software by default and making the battery non upgradeable for the vast majority of their rather non technical user base.
Which has got them a 22 month upgrade cycle compared to the 29 month average. And they're aiming to get that down to 15 months. A $1000 phone that lasts for 22 months on average is not a good deal. And actually if you t might cost you twice that.
The cost of owning the latest iPhone, including the inevitable screen repairs, is set to be higher than ever for the hoards of Apple fans who have already pre-ordered the latest iPhone X.
It comes as more premium pricing emerges for the after-sales element of owning the iPhone X.
Inc reports that it will cost $279 to get the screen repaired on an iPhone X. "Miscellaneous" repairs will be billed at as much as $549.
It almost goes without saying, therefore, that you should BUY A CASE.
Applecare? That's $199, compared to $129 for the iPhone 8 and $149 for the iPhone 8 Plus.
So let's take a look at how this works. Let's assume you buy a full price iPhone X off contract. £1,149. We're going to work on the basis that Apple is using 1:1 pricing for everything else as it is for the handset.
You're going to want Applecare. £200. Now let's assume you smash the screen three times (it's likely) in the two years.
If you don't opt for Applecare, that's £840. If you do, there's still an excess of £25 a pop to pay. That's £275, assuming you don't drop it in the toilet.
For an example, we're added in Three's Advanced Plan at £29.00 a month. In total that's £696 in airtime. We'll ignore Three's no-upfront-cost Advanced Plan, which will set you back a mere £114 per month for two years. That's £2,736 before case, repairs and so on!
Now let's add a decent case for good measure. Mobilefun is doing a Ghostek Nautical Series Waterproof case for £39.99. That's far from the most expensive here, but it'll do the job.
So that's £2,359.99 without any roaming charges, any "miscellaneous" damage repairs, any subscriptions to Apple Music, any ap
How many iPhone users are the sort of people who say "I looked at the iFixit video, and I'm comfortable doing it myself or I know a store that will do it. I know about LiIon battery life and Apple's throttling policy and I know I can avoid that by replacing the battery" and how many are people who buy and iPhone because "it just works" and replace it because "it got slow".
Your battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 500 complete charge cycles. The one-year warranty includes service coverage for a defective battery. If it is out of warranty, Apple offers a battery service for $79, plus $6.95 shipping, subject to local tax.
And you have to either send it in or make an appointment and bring it in
Plus they don't promote that service. And they didn't tell the people whose phones they throttled that it would fix it to try to nudge the non technical ones into replacing the phone, which Apple users do more frequently than Android ones.
But those days are largely over, according to new information from Citigroup. Americans now take an average of 29 months to upgrade their cell phone, up from 28 months at the end of last year, and an increase of 24 to 26 months that was typical just a couple of years ago, as noted in a recent Wall Street Journal article. And just four years ago, the upgrade cycle was just 22 months.... Originally, Munster thought the program would reduce the average iPhone user's upgrade time frame from 22 months to only 15 months. But that 15 month time frame would mean iPhone users would be upgrading their phones 14 months earlier than the average American, based on Citigroup's new data. And with Apple's iPhone sales currently slowing, that quick upgrade time seems even more unlikely.
I.e. the average for all cell phone users in the US is 29 months, for iPhone users it is 22. And Apple are trying to push that down.
Meanwhile on an S5 or V20 you can pop out to the store, buy a battery and change it yourself with zero downtime.
Wake up sheeple, Farmer Tim Cook is fattening you up for SLAUGHTER!
You don't think that Apple might be selling more phones because of the removable battery and walled garden? And also slowing down old phones to make you buy another.
One of the reasons us wild animals are wary of moving to the farm is because we think the farmer might have an ulterior motive for feeding you farm animals up.
I think it's depressing how many Americans seem intent on wrecking things like the First Amendment for a short term political gain.
As Benjamin Franklin observed "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety". The First Amendment is an essential liberty and trying to stop CU from make Moore-like partisan polemics/attack ad documentaries is a temporary safety.
I don't think people are particularly villainous. I think they're unprincipled and are playing a naive game where they don't see the long term effects of the laws they're defending.
And to be honest that seems to apply to both sides of American politics more than it does to UK politics. Most British people can vote for a party on a 'lesser of N evils' basis and not think the party is blameless or that its opponents are evil incarnate. Americans, or at least the ones who rant and rave at me pseudonymously online, don't seem to be able to do that. Republican government is probably not compatible with this mindview in the long run.
None of that changes that Citizens United doesn't produce bona fide documentaries. They produce campaign advertisements disguised as documentaries. It's sort of like how late-night infomercials sometimes pretend to be talk shows. They're ads.
You could say the same thing about Fahrenheit 9/11 and all the other crap Michael Moore has put out.
It's intellectually dishonest to claim that Michael Moore is putting out documentaries and CU is putting out advertising when both are doing pretty much the same thing - they produce advertisements to vote for one side, or at least not vote for the other. Plus of course there's the fact that the First Amendment says
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Back when the McCain Feingold bill was signed into law but President Bush he said there were 'serious constitutional concerns'.
Here's a classic example of what I'm talking about when I say that the president has an independent duty to uphold the Constitution rather than simply defer to the Supreme Court: George W. Bush's decision to sign the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill into law. President Bush clearly believed significant parts of the bill were unconstitutional. His own presidential signing statement cited "serious constitutional concerns," "questions [that will] arise under the First Amendment," and "reservations about the constitutionality of the broad ban on issue advertising."
Many other Presidents have thought they had an independent duty to prevent violations of the First Amendment, as well as violations of states' rights, criminal defendants' rights, and other constitutional freedoms.
For example, when Congress in its 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts sought to outlaw criticism of incumbents (sound familiar?), Thomas Jefferson campaigned against these laws and later, as President, refused to support a new Sedition Act when the old one expired. Jefferson also pardoned all those who had been convicted under the old Act, even though federal courts had upheld these convictions over First Amendment objections. To Jefferson, the question was not simply what courts had done or might do, but what his own independent constitutional conscience dictated.
Consider also what President Andrew Jackson wrote in 1832, as he vetoed a bill on constitutional grounds even though the Supreme Court had already upheld a similar bill against constitutional challenge:
The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them for passage or approval as it is of the supreme judges when it may be brought before them for judicial decision.
Before last week, George W. Bush clearly sided with Jefferson and Jackson. During the 2000 campaign, pundit George Will explicitly asked Bush whether he thought "a President has a duty to make an independent judgment of what is and is not constitutional, and veto bills that, in his judgment he thinks are unconstitutional." Bush's reply was an emphatic "I do."
When asked if he would therefore veto the version of McC
Wow. Partisan political abuse. Not a single citation, a two misspellings (it's 'thing' and 'debunked') and then you reference the Dunning Kruger effect.
I'm sure if you posted a bunch poorly written articles by cat ladies at Gawker, HuffPo, Buzzfeed, Politifact, Snopes all telling me that Hillary Clinton is not corrupt and that their fellow cat ladies were not biased, that would do it!
What would it take to convince you that the Russians didn't 'hack the 2016 election'?
The to the first question was no - the film was not advertised via broadcast during the prohibited period, rendering the second part of that question moot. The answer to the second question was no - the film was commercial activity (the most profitable documentary ever, in fact) and so was not a contribution.
You realise your argument would give the government the power to ban films it didn't like so long as those films are not commercially successful? I'm guessing you're not a fan of the people currently in charge of the White House or Congress.
Don't you see a problem there? At least the CU vs FEC decision means the government doesn't have that power. Which means when people worry about Trump muzzling the media, that's one less reason for them to worry. And frankly given some of the things he said, the worry that he'd use any powers he had to silence his opponents is not completely unfounded. And Democrats seem to be even worse, as your rationalisation of an attempt to ban the CU film shows.
So rejoice, all these people won't be able to censor documentaries. Thanks to the SCOTUS's CU vs FEC decision.
It's 9.81 mm at 60hz, 10.7 mm at 50Hz, though if you use the formula on wikipedia you get a slightly different answer of 9.22 mm, but I'm too lazy to look it up in a proper source.
In Engineering Electromagnetics, Hayt points out[page needed] that in a power station a busbar for alternating current at 60 Hz with a radius larger than one-third of an inch (8 mm) is a waste of copper, and in practice bus bars for heavy AC current are rarely more than half an inch (12 mm) thick except for mechanical reasons.
If you look at these high power cables, it looks like they're made of a bunch of smaller cables, each with a diameter of about 8-10mm.
I think if you disagree you've lost touch of your principles quite frankly. E.g. if they banned Moore and allowed CU I think you'd be saying it was a First Amendment violation.
Slashdot Mirror
â(TM)
Apple fans show their people skills once again.
They've update it now it's
Don't be evil
Taxation is theft
Theft is evil
Don't pay taxes.
/s
There was a lot of anger in the UK about Google not paying taxes, with Google execs grilled by the PAC.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/busi...
Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt has said he is "perplexed" by the ongoing debate over the company's tax contributions in the UK.
Mr Schmidt told the BBC that the company did what was "legally required" to pay the right amount of taxes.
Google paid £10m in UK corporate taxes between 2006 and 2011.
Mr Schmidt said it was up to the government to change its tax system if it wanted companies to pay more taxes.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week, he said: "What we are doing is legal. I'm rather perplexed by this debate, which has been going in the UK for some time, because I view taxes as not optional.
"I view that you should pay the taxes that are legally required. It's not a debate. You pay the taxes.
"If the British system changes the tax laws, then we will comply. If the taxes go up, we will pay more, if they go down, we will pay less. That is a political decision for the democracy that is the United Kingdom."
And as much as I dislike Google for its political meddling, bias, censorship and data mining, he's got a point.
Oddly enough the griller in chief was Margaret Hodge, MP was director of a company which paid very low levels of taxes, using the rules to the max
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fin...
The Labour MP has been one of the fiercest critics of tax avoidance by companies such as Starbucks, Google and Amazon. However, she is likely to face questions over the limited tax paid by Stemcor, the steel trading company in which she owns shares and which was founded by her father and is run by her brother.
Analysis of Stemcor's latest accounts show that the business paid tax of just £163,000 on revenues of more than £2.1bn in 2011. However. it is not known whether the company - which made profits of £65m - used similar controversial tax avoidance measures criticised in the past by Mrs Hodge.
Stemcor's tax bill to the exchequer equates to just 0.01pc of the revenues it booked through its UK-based business. In accounts filed with Companies House, Stemcor revealed that despite generating about one third of its revenues in Britain, its UK tax contribution made up only 2.7pc of the tax the company paid globally.
Stemcor was founded by Mrs Hodge's father Hans Oppenheimer more than 60 years ago.
Today, the business claims to be the sixth largest private UK company by turnover. Last year the company, which employs 2,000 people in 45 countries, generated sales of £6bn from trading about 20m tonnes of steel.
The majority of Stemcor's shares are still controlled by the Oppenheimer family and Mrs Hodge declares a "registrable shareholding" in the company, which is run by her brother Ralph Oppenheimer, executive chairman.
Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, Mrs Hodge defended Stemcor's behaviour and said that the company had "assured" her it paid "every penny of tax that is owed", adding that she was only "a very small shareholder".
"Clearly, I have asked them the question," said Mrs Hodge. "They have always promised that they do absolutely nothing to avoid tax. I would be very mad if I found out differently."
Mrs Hodge said unlike other companies under the spotlight, Stemcor did not try to shield profits or "hide information" and that was the difference between Stemcor and Starbucks.
However, when pressed about the details of why so little tax was paid by Stemcor despite the billions of pounds it makes
It increases the wealth of the top fraction of a percent, and degrades the wealth of everyone below that.
And yet, if you read the links I posted here
https://pastebin.com/JU3exgXL
That last ratio is (share of total taxes paid of richest decile)/(share of market income by richest decile). You can actually make an argument that the rich in the US - which has lower personal tax rates than the UK pay more of their fair share. Similarly the UK has lower personal tax than Sweden, and yet rich people pay more of their fair share.
I.e. on a plausible model of fairness US>UK>Sweden even though in terms of personal tax rates Sweden>UK>US.
And the Laffer curve hasn't been refuted - the HMRC for example use it, and you'd expect them to know what they're talking about.
What is disputed is Taxable Income Elasticity which determines what shape the curve is. If you search the HMRC pdf I linked to for 'Laffer' you can see what happens to the curve as TIE varies and they also make some progress on determining the TIE for the UK and thus the optimal top tax rate. Basically that report was instrumental in the case for reducing the top personal tax rate from 50% back to 45% because a 50% tax was generating extra revenue.
And of course in France they experimented with high tax rates and then eventually rolled them back.
The Guardian is far left and supported high taxes on the rich but even they had to admit it didn't raise money and that's why it was dropped
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
Finance ministry studies showed that despite all the publicity, the sums obtained from the supertax were meagre, standing at €260m in 2013 and €160m in 2014, and affecting 1,000 staff in 470 companies. Over the same period, the budget deficit soared to €84.7bn.
The decision to drop the tax is a personal blow for Hollande and only one of a number of government U-turns since he was elected, fuelling criticism that he is indecisive and lacking presidential authority.
And if you look at the data I posted it's actually rather obvious that the US has personal taxes about right and that higher taxes than that will reduce revenue.
What it didn't have right was corporation tax, at least until the recent GOP tax cut.
The Laffer curve is obviously true. Consider. If you have zero taxes you collect zero revenue. If you have 100% taxes you also collect zero revenue because people won't work for free. In between the two there's a curve where tax revenues increase up to some level and then begin to fall.
When Gordon Brown put the top personal tax rate up from 45% to 50% HMRC - the UK equivalent of the IRS - did a study of the 50% tax rate in the UK with Laffer curves in it.
http://webarchive.nationalarch...
Also if you percentage of income tax paid by the top decile vs the top personal tax rate you can see a very Laffer curve like effect
https://imgur.com/zaeEh
(more details here
https://pastebin.com/JU3exgXL )
Here's one for just the Nordic countries. The argument is that they are very comparable because they are so similar. Firstly culturally, particularly the Scandinavian ones. Secondly the share of market income by the richest decile is quite similar.
https://i.imgur.com/q5WNJ.gif
It is not true that the actual corporate tax rate in the US is higher than the other OECD countries. It's a canard, as in lie, as in bogus.
No it's not and I linked to OECD data to prove it.
And saying 'well the effective tax rate is lower' is not a refutation. I'm sure big corporations do all sorts of deals to reduce their effective tax rate in the US - they shop around the states and pick the one who offers the best incentives.
However if you start a new corporation you get hit with the headline rate, until you grow large enough to corrupt the system, go bust or move your business overseas. Which is why 35% corporate taxes are a bad idea.
Because that's how you get Autons.
Only Samsung and LG make OLEDs of that quality. And I think only Samsung does phone sized ones - they've been using OLED since the first Samsung Galaxy S phone which was released in 2010.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The first phones with non awful AMOLEDs were the Nokia N9 and Samsung Galaxy S. And I bet Nokia got their display from Samsung because the specs are so similar.
So Apple might have specced it, but probably only Samsung could make it.
If I do some googling with Duck Duck Go I find
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=corp...
Trump's Council of Economic Advisers say it will boost growth by 3-5%, which means Trump will go down in history as the Next Reagan. But then, as Mandy Rice-Davies put it "Well, they would say that wouldn't they?"
http://uk.businessinsider.com/...
Then there's this, another right wing think tank
https://www.americanactionforu...
The U.S. is mired in a slow economic recovery, and is projected to continue growing at about a 2 percent annual rate for the next 10 years.
The U.S. corporate tax is grossly out of step with the rates of its developed country competitors, and is the only nation to have increased its rate on net since 1988.
A large body of economic research has documented the anti-growth effects of the U.S. corporate tax, with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) concluding that it is the most harmful form of tax on per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Reducing the corporate tax rate would lead to higher investment, faster productivity growth, faster economic growth and higher wages, which would offer a higher standard of living for U.S. workers.
Here's the OECD paper.
https://www.oecd.org/officiald...
This paper examines the relationship between tax structures and economic growth by entering indicators of the tax structure into a set of panel growth regressions for 21 OECD countries, in which both the accumulation of physical and human capital are accounted for. The results of the analysis suggest that income taxes are generally associated with lower economic growth than taxes on consumption and property. More precisely, the findings allow the establishment of a ranking of tax instruments with respect to their relationship to economic growth. Property taxes, and particularly recurrent taxes on immovable property, seem to be the most growth-friendly, followed by consumption taxes and then by personal income taxes. Corporate income taxes appear to have the most negative effect on GDP per capita. These findings suggest that a revenue-neutral growth-oriented tax reform would be to shift part of the revenue base towards recurrent property and consumption taxes and away from income taxes, especially corporate taxes. There is also evidence of a negative relationship between the progressivity of personal income taxes and growth. All of the results are robust to a number of different specifications, including controlling for other determinants of economic growth and instrumenting tax indicators.
Now the OECD report is credible.
And it doesn't really seem all that unreasonable for the US to cut corporation tax rates given it has the highest tax rate in the OECD.
E.g.
http://stats.oecd.org/index.as...
In fact in best Laffer curve fashion you can make an argument that high tax rates encourage US corporations to have complex tax structures like Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich. Reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 22% makes it somewhat more competitive. A bit of Trumpian bullying of the likes of Apple and Google combined with a tax cut might cause them to start paying US taxes instead of paying Dutch, Irish or UK ones.
I can see you don't like Trump of the GOP and to be honest I've got mixed feelings about them myself. Still you c
It's about $358 now as I pointed out in my encyclical on gluttony, of which you are probably guilty.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
It's a got a Snapdragon 820 which is enough for me since I'm not into mobile games. The camera is pretty OK.
Basically it's a phone based on a year old Qualcomm reference platform with a removable battery. Which is what I wanted.
In the UK each time there's a terrorist attack the hate speech laws get tightened up to catch 'extremists'. And each time it seems like a lot more people complaining about terrorism get caught than actual terrorists. Or even Islamists. Anjem Choudary was regularly invited on TV to spread his loathsome views and was allowed to recruit people for al Qaeda, ISIS etc up until 2016, even though hate speech laws were supposed to stop him
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Meanwhile this hapless bastard got sent to prison, and mysteriously died there for putting a ham sandwich on a mosque. What did he die of? No one seems to care - even though there's supposed to be an inquiry no results of it were ever released.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
So Crehan got very effectively screwed for committing 'a racially-motivated attack'. Anjem Choudhary blatantly recruited for ISIS from 2002 to 2016, was invited on the BBC to do it and is very unlikely to die mysteriously in prison. British prisons have a load of Islamists, so he'll be a hero in there.
tl;dr - hate speech laws get people who complain about Islamism, not actual Islamists.
Hmm, the NYT and The Atlantic don't like tax cuts. Democrats don't like tax cuts. I'm sure it's just a coincidence, and not that the NYT and Atlantic are only reporting things that fit the Democrat agenda.
And if you look at the study they cite they're talking about personal taxes, not corporate taxes.
The study I linked to found this
The results in column (3) show that, as expected, the coefficient of CIT rate is negative and statistically significant. The magnitude of the coefficient is, however, higher than what we obtain in column (2). The coefficients of the personal income and sales tax rates are still statistically insignificant. The coefficient of the interaction term between the sales tax rate and the RSTdummy is still negative but statistically insignificant.
I.e. lower corporate taxes mean higher growth 'the coefficient of CIT rate is negative and statistically significant' . Interestingly they can't tell if that's the case or not for personal and sales taxes because 'The coefficients of the personal income and sales tax rates are still statistically insignificant.'
This is why you need to look directly at economics research and not Google 'do tax cuts increase growth', and find an article on the NYT or Atlantic saying they don't. Clearly the sort of tax cut matters. You also need to read the whole paper, and not a summary by journalist who - in the US - is basically guaranteed to be left wing (only 7% of US journalist are Republicans), and given they all have liberal arts degrees, innumerate. All they're doing is Googling for some 'science' that backs their prejudices and then writing a long rant summarising it. Shit, even I could do that.
Exactly. I've looked at videos on battery replacement on sealed and it looks like you're going to crack the screen the first time you do it.
Actually I spend quite a lot of time in Taiwan these days so I could probably find someone who'd know how to do it and would do it cheaply while I waited and practised my aggressively bad Mandarin. Hell I could probably score the parts for another whole iPhone if I had to. But for most people - especially people who buy iPhones - it's not like that.
https://ntanet.org/NTJ/65/3/nt...
This paper examines the impact of tax rates on economic growth rate using panel data from Canadian provinces over the period 1977-2006. Our empirical analysis indicates that a higher CIT rate is associated with lower private investment and slower economic growth. However, the PIT rate does not affect the growth rate and investment once one controls for provincial fixed effects. Our empirical estimates suggest that a 1 percentage point cut in the CIT rate is related to 0.1-0.2 percentage point increase in the transitional growth rate.
Americans now take an average of 29 months to upgrade their cell phone
That's Apple *and* Samsung
Yeah, and later on the say the average for Apple alone is 22 months and Apple are offering a subscription model to reduce this to 15 months
Originally, Munster thought the program would reduce the average iPhone user's upgrade time frame from 22 months to only 15 months. But that 15 month time frame would mean iPhone users would be upgrading their phones 14 months earlier than the average American, based on Citigroup's new data. And with Apple's iPhone sales currently slowing, that quick upgrade time seems even more unlikely.
You can see there that the time for the average American is 29 months, and the time for Apple users is 22. They tried the subscription model to reduce it and then, I'm sure coincidentally, decided to throttle old iPhones to make them slower. Of course iPhones have an odd bug which causes them to shut down when it is cold that other cell phones don't seem to have. However throttling old devices is a good way to convince people to buy new ones, particularly if you don't tell them you're doing it because they need a new battery.
Apart from throttling Apple's upgrade system means old phones get new software. Which probably has decent performance on the latest device but crappy performance on the old ones. And cell phones tend to slow down with time anyway - my old S5 got slow and the battery life was bad so I did a firmware reset and replace the battery. When it got slow again I decided to replace it because V20s are pretty cheap now.
I.e. Apple have a number of subtle pushes to upgrade - throttling old devices, upgrading them to new software by default and making the battery non upgradeable for the vast majority of their rather non technical user base.
Which has got them a 22 month upgrade cycle compared to the 29 month average. And they're aiming to get that down to 15 months. A $1000 phone that lasts for 22 months on average is not a good deal. And actually if you t might cost you twice that.
https://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/new...
The cost of owning the latest iPhone, including the inevitable screen repairs, is set to be higher than ever for the hoards of Apple fans who have already pre-ordered the latest iPhone X.
It comes as more premium pricing emerges for the after-sales element of owning the iPhone X.
Inc reports that it will cost $279 to get the screen repaired on an iPhone X. "Miscellaneous" repairs will be billed at as much as $549.
It almost goes without saying, therefore, that you should BUY A CASE.
Applecare? That's $199, compared to $129 for the iPhone 8 and $149 for the iPhone 8 Plus.
So let's take a look at how this works. Let's assume you buy a full price iPhone X off contract. £1,149. We're going to work on the basis that Apple is using 1:1 pricing for everything else as it is for the handset.
You're going to want Applecare. £200. Now let's assume you smash the screen three times (it's likely) in the two years.
If you don't opt for Applecare, that's £840. If you do, there's still an excess of £25 a pop to pay. That's £275, assuming you don't drop it in the toilet.
For an example, we're added in Three's Advanced Plan at £29.00 a month. In total that's £696 in airtime. We'll ignore Three's no-upfront-cost Advanced Plan, which will set you back a mere £114 per month for two years. That's £2,736 before case, repairs and so on!
Now let's add a decent case for good measure. Mobilefun is doing a Ghostek Nautical Series Waterproof case for £39.99. That's far from the most expensive here, but it'll do the job.
So that's £2,359.99 without any roaming charges, any "miscellaneous" damage repairs, any subscriptions to Apple Music, any ap
How many iPhone users are the sort of people who say "I looked at the iFixit video, and I'm comfortable doing it myself or I know a store that will do it. I know about LiIon battery life and Apple's throttling policy and I know I can avoid that by replacing the battery" and how many are people who buy and iPhone because "it just works" and replace it because "it got slow".
Tell the truth now.
My old S5 and my current V20 both have user replaceable batteries.
The $29 offer is for the phones they've been throttling, and only to the end of the year
https://www.apple.com/batterie...
Your battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 500 complete charge cycles. The one-year warranty includes service coverage for a defective battery. If it is out of warranty, Apple offers a battery service for $79, plus $6.95 shipping, subject to local tax.
And you have to either send it in or make an appointment and bring it in
https://support.apple.com/ipho...
Plus they don't promote that service. And they didn't tell the people whose phones they throttled that it would fix it to try to nudge the non technical ones into replacing the phone, which Apple users do more frequently than Android ones.
https://www.fool.com/investing...
But those days are largely over, according to new information from Citigroup. Americans now take an average of 29 months to upgrade their cell phone, up from 28 months at the end of last year, and an increase of 24 to 26 months that was typical just a couple of years ago, as noted in a recent Wall Street Journal article. And just four years ago, the upgrade cycle was just 22 months. ...
Originally, Munster thought the program would reduce the average iPhone user's upgrade time frame from 22 months to only 15 months. But that 15 month time frame would mean iPhone users would be upgrading their phones 14 months earlier than the average American, based on Citigroup's new data. And with Apple's iPhone sales currently slowing, that quick upgrade time seems even more unlikely.
I.e. the average for all cell phone users in the US is 29 months, for iPhone users it is 22. And Apple are trying to push that down.
Meanwhile on an S5 or V20 you can pop out to the store, buy a battery and change it yourself with zero downtime.
Wake up sheeple, Farmer Tim Cook is fattening you up for SLAUGHTER!
You don't think that Apple might be selling more phones because of the removable battery and walled garden? And also slowing down old phones to make you buy another.
One of the reasons us wild animals are wary of moving to the farm is because we think the farmer might have an ulterior motive for feeding you farm animals up.
dig -t AAAA slashdot.org returning something else than NXDOMAIN, though, my hopes are not so high.
What do you mean by that? If I do it I get
I think it's depressing how many Americans seem intent on wrecking things like the First Amendment for a short term political gain.
As Benjamin Franklin observed "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety". The First Amendment is an essential liberty and trying to stop CU from make Moore-like partisan polemics/attack ad documentaries is a temporary safety.
I don't think people are particularly villainous. I think they're unprincipled and are playing a naive game where they don't see the long term effects of the laws they're defending.
And to be honest that seems to apply to both sides of American politics more than it does to UK politics. Most British people can vote for a party on a 'lesser of N evils' basis and not think the party is blameless or that its opponents are evil incarnate. Americans, or at least the ones who rant and rave at me pseudonymously online, don't seem to be able to do that. Republican government is probably not compatible with this mindview in the long run.
None of that changes that Citizens United doesn't produce bona fide documentaries. They produce campaign advertisements disguised as documentaries. It's sort of like how late-night infomercials sometimes pretend to be talk shows. They're ads.
You could say the same thing about Fahrenheit 9/11 and all the other crap Michael Moore has put out.
It's intellectually dishonest to claim that Michael Moore is putting out documentaries and CU is putting out advertising when both are doing pretty much the same thing - they produce advertisements to vote for one side, or at least not vote for the other. Plus of course there's the fact that the First Amendment says
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Back when the McCain Feingold bill was signed into law but President Bush he said there were 'serious constitutional concerns'.
https://spectator.org/25356_mc...
Here's a classic example of what I'm talking about when I say that the president has an independent duty to uphold the Constitution rather than simply defer to the Supreme Court: George W. Bush's decision to sign the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill into law. President Bush clearly believed significant parts of the bill were unconstitutional. His own presidential signing statement cited "serious constitutional concerns," "questions [that will] arise under the First Amendment," and "reservations about the constitutionality of the broad ban on issue advertising."
The American Spectator links to this
http://supreme.findlaw.com/leg...
Many other Presidents have thought they had an independent duty to prevent violations of the First Amendment, as well as violations of states' rights, criminal defendants' rights, and other constitutional freedoms.
For example, when Congress in its 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts sought to outlaw criticism of incumbents (sound familiar?), Thomas Jefferson campaigned against these laws and later, as President, refused to support a new Sedition Act when the old one expired. Jefferson also pardoned all those who had been convicted under the old Act, even though federal courts had upheld these convictions over First Amendment objections. To Jefferson, the question was not simply what courts had done or might do, but what his own independent constitutional conscience dictated.
Consider also what President Andrew Jackson wrote in 1832, as he vetoed a bill on constitutional grounds even though the Supreme Court had already upheld a similar bill against constitutional challenge:
The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them for passage or approval as it is of the supreme judges when it may be brought before them for judicial decision.
Before last week, George W. Bush clearly sided with Jefferson and Jackson. During the 2000 campaign, pundit George Will explicitly asked Bush whether he thought "a President has a duty to make an independent judgment of what is and is not constitutional, and veto bills that, in his judgment he thinks are unconstitutional." Bush's reply was an emphatic "I do."
When asked if he would therefore veto the version of McC
Wow. Partisan political abuse. Not a single citation, a two misspellings (it's 'thing' and 'debunked') and then you reference the Dunning Kruger effect.
Sort yourself out, bucko! Clean your room!
I guess this Clinton supporter is admitting defeat too then
https://slashdot.org/comments....
I'm sure if you posted a bunch poorly written articles by cat ladies at Gawker, HuffPo, Buzzfeed, Politifact, Snopes all telling me that Hillary Clinton is not corrupt and that their fellow cat ladies were not biased, that would do it!
What would it take to convince you that the Russians didn't 'hack the 2016 election'?
The to the first question was no - the film was not advertised via broadcast during the prohibited period, rendering the second part of that question moot. The answer to the second question was no - the film was commercial activity (the most profitable documentary ever, in fact) and so was not a contribution.
You realise your argument would give the government the power to ban films it didn't like so long as those films are not commercially successful? I'm guessing you're not a fan of the people currently in charge of the White House or Congress.
Don't you see a problem there? At least the CU vs FEC decision means the government doesn't have that power. Which means when people worry about Trump muzzling the media, that's one less reason for them to worry. And frankly given some of the things he said, the worry that he'd use any powers he had to silence his opponents is not completely unfounded. And Democrats seem to be even worse, as your rationalisation of an attempt to ban the CU film shows.
So rejoice, all these people won't be able to censor documentaries. Thanks to the SCOTUS's CU vs FEC decision.
Interestingly even at 50-60Hz it seems like it does have an effect
http://circuitcalculator.com/w...
It's 9.81 mm at 60hz, 10.7 mm at 50Hz, though if you use the formula on wikipedia you get a slightly different answer of 9.22 mm, but I'm too lazy to look it up in a proper source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In Engineering Electromagnetics, Hayt points out[page needed] that in a power station a busbar for alternating current at 60 Hz with a radius larger than one-third of an inch (8 mm) is a waste of copper, and in practice bus bars for heavy AC current are rarely more than half an inch (12 mm) thick except for mechanical reasons.
If you look at these high power cables, it looks like they're made of a bunch of smaller cables, each with a diameter of about 8-10mm.
https://electronics.stackexcha...
Documentaries or films are speech, not a campaign contribution. And the US government is not allowed to regulate speech.
Which is what the SCOTUS decided
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I think if you disagree you've lost touch of your principles quite frankly. E.g. if they banned Moore and allowed CU I think you'd be saying it was a First Amendment violation.