Another Racist remark by Harry Reid

[OldTrapper]

Obama is in favor of broadening the tax base while also raising tax rates. A doubly whammy. Three problems here:

1. There were so many one-off factors helping the economy back then that teasing out the impact of tax rates is especially tough. As former Bain Capital executive Edward Conard notes in his book, Unintended Consequences: “The United States was prosperous for a unique set of reasons that are impossible to duplicate today, including a decade-long depression, the destruction of the rest of the world’s infrastructure, a failure of potential foreign competitors to educate their people, and a highly restricted supply of labor. … It seems to me anyone who makes comparisons between today’s economy and that of the old without fully disclosing their differences is deceiving their readers.”

2. In rich, multifaceted analysis of Diamond-Saez, AEI economists Aparna Mathur, Sita Slavov, and Michael Strain point out that Diamond and Saez assume sharply raising tax rates have no long-term impact on taxpayer behavior and the economy since, well, those effects are hard to measure. But economists agree those long-term effects are important. America benefits greatly from people who take risks and make career choices in hopes of striking it rich. “Significantly reducing that possibility by hitting those individuals with extremely high income taxes is of first-order importance in determining the optimal top tax rate,” Mathur, Slavov, and Strain argue.

3. In a 2010 e21 analysis, Arpit Gupta looked at some of the literature examining the macro, long-term impact of tax hikes:

A clever resolution is suggested by a set of papers by Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard. Chetty points out that the micro estimates rely on instantaneous adjustment to higher tax rates, and typically focus on short durations after law changes. However, a variety of factors may combine to make the behavior responses to tax cuts a more long-run effect. People face costs in switching jobs or entering the job force. They may simply be unaware of tax changes or lazy. Any of these plausible frictions are compatible with large long-term effects of tax cuts that are difficult to capture in micro data.

This distinction is important, because policymakers are generally interested in the economy-wide and durable impacts of tax increases, rather than their short-term impacts. Macro estimates, which use economy-wide data, may be better suited to answer this question.

In a separate paper, Chetty and coauthors develop new techniques to capture broader responses to taxation while looking at firm-level data in Denmark. They are able to obtain a set of estimates that suggest that the work disincentives of taxes, properly computed, are closer to the higher macro estimates (though lower than some estimates Prescott prefers). These figures would suggest that a sizable portion of the Europe-America income difference can be accounted for by differences in marginal tax rates.

Sadly, public discussion of this issue has been far more simplistic. The Obama Administration and other progressives have argued that because growth was high in the ‘90s and ‘50s; the higher tax rates of those periods can be revisited with few consequences. This coarse argument relies on decade-level generalizations, and ignores the difficult of isolating the effects of tax cuts from the noise of other economic activity.

These concerns and caveats should be not be waved away because they inconveniently stand in the way of certain egalitarian goals. Let me end with Mathur, Slavov, and Strain who come to this conclusion:


Diamond and Saez ignore long-term behavioral responses, assume more equality is a better social welfare function, assign no social value to the marginal dollar of consumption for the rich, and use a short-run behavioral response predicated in part on less evasion and more enforcement to compute an answer of 73 percent. Consequently, we can be pretty sure that the answer is significantly less than that. Further, we find the suggestion that the government should take more than half of a citizen’s income in taxes to be unpalatable.

Do you have a source for this C&P?

 

[OldTrapper]

Don't forget, B. Hussein Obama, Sr. was a full blown communist who was OK with the government confiscating 100% of ones income as long as it went to the greater good.

Obama, Jr. talked about this in his book written by Bill Ayers "Dreams From my Father".

“there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed.”

-B. Hussein Obama, Sr.
via Bill Ayers in the book Obama, Jr. claims to have written "Dreams From My Father"

Now for the full quote after a quote of John Marshall::

As the fourth Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court warned:
"An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy; because there is a limit beyond which no institution and no property can bear taxation." -John Marshall

In this light, as Obama continues to promote huge tax increases in the middle of a recession that's worse than the Great Depression, keep in mind, Obama is only carrying out the "Dreams from (His) Father":

"What does a country do when you have powerful concentrations of economic wealth at the top? (Two solutions): First, you have to use the power of the state to control and regulate private industry. Second, you need very high tax rates. How high? Theoretically, there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100 percent of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed." - Barak Obama, Sr., East Africa Journal, 1965​

 

[cashmcall]

Do you have a source for this C&P?

The sources are all in there .....

 

[OldTrapper]

The sources are all in there .....

And yet not one link so one could verify what you are trying to say.

 

[cashmcall]

And yet not one link so one could verify what you are trying to say.

Google the names, if it's important to you.. I didn't just make it up, BUT as I read it, it made sense...

 

[OldTrapper]

Google the names, if it's important to you.. I didn't just make it up, BUT as I read it, it made sense...

In most forums, perhaps not this one, it is required that a person post links to the C&P's they post. In this case, it is not important to me. So, I will post this one:

I don’t expect many of you to actually read these articles, and I expect even fewer of you to be able to comprehend what the authors are saying. The first is from 2010 in regards to the events of 2008, and earlier. The second is a review of the first, and what has really happened since the recession, and who was actually harmed by those events.

http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/...missing-prosperity-economic-mystery-1952.html

“Our kids have a better chance of success than ever before— yet shocked Europeans look at how we have changed and say, “This is worse than socialism!”’

Drucker, though, is no sensationalist. His article describes how the American economy of 1952 has become a powerful force for democracy by promoting wealth AND equality.

“If you are an American and over twenty-five you have taken part, knowingly or unknowingly, in “one of the greatest social revolutions in history.” This summing up of the last quarter century of American history does not come from a Hollywood press agent or from a Fourth of July orator. It came, a few months ago, from the National Bureau of Economic Research, for the last twenty-five years the country’s leading student of long-range economic trends, and an outfit so ultra-scholarly, austere and publicity-shy that the most extreme term it had ever used before was a restrained and barely audible “statistically significant.” The development that provoked such unscholarly language was the change in the distribution of income during the last generation. It is indeed an amazing change.”

The income gap between the rich and the poor, Drucker states, is shrinking.

“More than half of the nation’s families now have a middle-class income—as against a quarter of the population fifty years ago… The further down the income scale we go, the greater, by and large, has been the rise. The 1900 dollar bought about three times what the 1951 dollar buys [but] the yearly income of the factory worker has gone up six-fold, from around $500 in the days of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, to $3,000 or more today.”

The increasing wealth of workers is part of a revolution in the idea of capitalism.

“We have produced a capitalist system in which ownership rests with the mass of the people. Individual horizons have steadily broadened—indeed, the progress toward equality of opportunity has, as befits a free country, been at least as fast as that toward equality of income or wider distribution of wealth.

The very term “capitalism” has come to mean something new. Formerly it expressed an all-but-complete divorce between the good of business and the good of the economy—if not an irreconcilable conflict. We now believe that there must be harmony between the ends of business and the good of society in the interest of both.

An illustration of this new idea is in business’ new concept of people. Fifty years ago the emphasis was on labor as a cost; today it is increasingly on human beings as a resource—and the scarcest, most important and most productive resource, at that.

Two years ago, well before Korea, the president of one of the largest steel companies asked some of his vice-presidents to figure out how much additional steelmaking capacity the company should build. In the letter in which be gave them this job, he said, “Do not start your figuring with the question of what capacity would be most profitable for our company. Start with the question how much steel the country will require to be strong and prosperous, and then work back to find out how much of that total our company should aim to provide.””


http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2013/06/24/archives/post-perspective/american-dream.html

In 1980, for example, 70 percent of Americans who worked at companies with 100 or more employees got health insurance coverage fully paid for by their employers. But from the 1980s onward, employers began requiring their employees to cover an increasing portion of the health costs. Other employers dropped company-financed health plans entirely, saying they could not afford them.

So pervasive did this burden shift become that by the mid-2000s, only 18 percent of workers—one-quarter of the percentage in 1980—were getting full health benefits paid by their employers. Some companies may have needed this change to survive, but many simply added the cost savings to their profit line.

In terms of the overall financial burden shift from corporations to employees, by far the largest change has come in retirement benefits. In 1980, 84 percent of the workers in companies with more than 100 employees were in lifetime pension plans financed by their employers. By 2006, that number had plummeted—only 33 percent had company-financed pensions. The rest either got nothing or had been switched into funding their own 401(k) plans with a modest employer match.

The switch offered big savings for employers. According to pension expert Brooks Hamilton, the lifetime pension system cost companies from 6 to 7 percent of their total payroll, but they spent only 2 to 3 percent on matching contributions for 401(k) plans. Often those savings went directly into corporate profits and bigger stock options bonuses for the CEO and other top executives.

Businesses said they could no longer afford lifetime pensions. But digging into the records, Wall Street Journal reporter Ellen Schultz found that wasn’t really true. In fact, pension plans were moneymakers for many a big company. In the bull market of the 1990s, America’s blue ribbon companies did so well investing their employee pension funds that many built up huge surpluses, above their obligations to employees, without contributing a cent of company cash for a decade or more. The stock market gains were so large that by November 1999, GE had a $25 billion surplus in its basic employee pension funds; Verizon had $24 billion; AT&T had $20 billion; IBM had $7 billion.

What’s more, some of America’s largest corporations were able to shift pension fund gains indirectly to their profit lines and, Schultz reported, a few legally took advantage of loose and poorly enforced accounting rules to siphon off money from their employee pension funds to finance portions of their corporate downsizing, restructuring, and mergers and acquisitions.

Some companies made billions by shutting down employee pension plans and shifting surplus assets to company profits. And if company pension plans got into financial trouble during the stock market decline in the early 2000s, it was either because the company itself was in deep financial trouble or because company finance officers had been too aggressive in gambling with pension assets, putting them into risky equities in hopes of making big gains, rather than investing carefully in safer, more conservative assets like bonds.

Either way, the shift out of lifetime pensions to 401(k) plans and so-called account balance plans by highly profitable corporations was a heavy cost blow to their workers. In the 1950s, U.S. employees nationwide paid collectively about 11 percent of their retirement costs. By the mid-2000s, they were paying 51 percent. Hundreds of billions of dollars in safety net costs were shifted from companies to employees without any offsetting real increase in the typical worker’s pay.

Corporate America was so successful in shifting a major portion of the cost for health and pension benefits onto individual employees that even a corporate financial giant like Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was moved to comment in 2007 that this shift had essentially turned the old social contract upside down. As MetLife put it, “The burden shift has turned the traditional definition of the American Dream ‘on its ear.’ ”

 

[dogtowner]

The requirements of this board are posted here.

 

[OldTrapper]

The requirements of this board are posted here.

Just as a point, in other forums the reason links are required is due to plagarism laws, and copyright laws. However, since that seems to be of no concern here I will just treat any unreferenced C&P as spam, and ignore it. If a person feels the comment is important enough it is quite easy for one to source it, and not rely on others to do the searching for it.

 

[dogtowner]

Just as a point, in other forums the reason links are required is due to plagarism laws, and copyright laws. However, since that seems to be of no concern here I will just treat any unreferenced C&P as spam, and ignore it. If a person feels the comment is important enough it is quite easy for one to source it, and not rely on others to do the searching for it.

If you have issues with the rules feel free to take it up with our host Walter. If you dont claim the words to be your own its not plagerism and poating more than a snip is a copyright issue. We dont choose to enforce this but in fact its seldom pursued legally. Other boards Ive modded have taken a stricter stance.

 

[OldTrapper]

If you have issues with the rules feel free to take it up with our host Walter. If you dont claim the words to be your own its not plagerism and poating more than a snip is a copyright issue. We dont choose to enforce this but in fact its seldom pursued legally. Other boards Ive modded have taken a stricter stance.

One of the reasons I brought up the subject was the lack of denial regarding the source of the words.

 

[cashmcall]

In most forums, perhaps not this one, it is required that a person post links to the C&P's they post. In this case, it is not important to me. So, I will post this one:

I don’t expect many of you to actually read these articles, and I expect even fewer of you to be able to comprehend what the authors are saying. The first is from 2010 in regards to the events of 2008, and earlier. The second is a review of the first, and what has really happened since the recession, and who was actually harmed by those events.

http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/...missing-prosperity-economic-mystery-1952.html

“Our kids have a better chance of success than ever before— yet shocked Europeans look at how we have changed and say, “This is worse than socialism!”’

Drucker, though, is no sensationalist. His article describes how the American economy of 1952 has become a powerful force for democracy by promoting wealth AND equality.

“If you are an American and over twenty-five you have taken part, knowingly or unknowingly, in “one of the greatest social revolutions in history.” This summing up of the last quarter century of American history does not come from a Hollywood press agent or from a Fourth of July orator. It came, a few months ago, from the National Bureau of Economic Research, for the last twenty-five years the country’s leading student of long-range economic trends, and an outfit so ultra-scholarly, austere and publicity-shy that the most extreme term it had ever used before was a restrained and barely audible “statistically significant.” The development that provoked such unscholarly language was the change in the distribution of income during the last generation. It is indeed an amazing change.”

The income gap between the rich and the poor, Drucker states, is shrinking.

“More than half of the nation’s families now have a middle-class income—as against a quarter of the population fifty years ago… The further down the income scale we go, the greater, by and large, has been the rise. The 1900 dollar bought about three times what the 1951 dollar buys [but] the yearly income of the factory worker has gone up six-fold, from around $500 in the days of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, to $3,000 or more today.”

The increasing wealth of workers is part of a revolution in the idea of capitalism.

“We have produced a capitalist system in which ownership rests with the mass of the people. Individual horizons have steadily broadened—indeed, the progress toward equality of opportunity has, as befits a free country, been at least as fast as that toward equality of income or wider distribution of wealth.

The very term “capitalism” has come to mean something new. Formerly it expressed an all-but-complete divorce between the good of business and the good of the economy—if not an irreconcilable conflict. We now believe that there must be harmony between the ends of business and the good of society in the interest of both.

An illustration of this new idea is in business’ new concept of people. Fifty years ago the emphasis was on labor as a cost; today it is increasingly on human beings as a resource—and the scarcest, most important and most productive resource, at that.

Two years ago, well before Korea, the president of one of the largest steel companies asked some of his vice-presidents to figure out how much additional steelmaking capacity the company should build. In the letter in which be gave them this job, he said, “Do not start your figuring with the question of what capacity would be most profitable for our company. Start with the question how much steel the country will require to be strong and prosperous, and then work back to find out how much of that total our company should aim to provide.””


http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2013/06/24/archives/post-perspective/american-dream.html

In 1980, for example, 70 percent of Americans who worked at companies with 100 or more employees got health insurance coverage fully paid for by their employers. But from the 1980s onward, employers began requiring their employees to cover an increasing portion of the health costs. Other employers dropped company-financed health plans entirely, saying they could not afford them.

So pervasive did this burden shift become that by the mid-2000s, only 18 percent of workers—one-quarter of the percentage in 1980—were getting full health benefits paid by their employers. Some companies may have needed this change to survive, but many simply added the cost savings to their profit line.

In terms of the overall financial burden shift from corporations to employees, by far the largest change has come in retirement benefits. In 1980, 84 percent of the workers in companies with more than 100 employees were in lifetime pension plans financed by their employers. By 2006, that number had plummeted—only 33 percent had company-financed pensions. The rest either got nothing or had been switched into funding their own 401(k) plans with a modest employer match.

The switch offered big savings for employers. According to pension expert Brooks Hamilton, the lifetime pension system cost companies from 6 to 7 percent of their total payroll, but they spent only 2 to 3 percent on matching contributions for 401(k) plans. Often those savings went directly into corporate profits and bigger stock options bonuses for the CEO and other top executives.

Businesses said they could no longer afford lifetime pensions. But digging into the records, Wall Street Journal reporter Ellen Schultz found that wasn’t really true. In fact, pension plans were moneymakers for many a big company. In the bull market of the 1990s, America’s blue ribbon companies did so well investing their employee pension funds that many built up huge surpluses, above their obligations to employees, without contributing a cent of company cash for a decade or more. The stock market gains were so large that by November 1999, GE had a $25 billion surplus in its basic employee pension funds; Verizon had $24 billion; AT&T had $20 billion; IBM had $7 billion.

What’s more, some of America’s largest corporations were able to shift pension fund gains indirectly to their profit lines and, Schultz reported, a few legally took advantage of loose and poorly enforced accounting rules to siphon off money from their employee pension funds to finance portions of their corporate downsizing, restructuring, and mergers and acquisitions.

Some companies made billions by shutting down employee pension plans and shifting surplus assets to company profits. And if company pension plans got into financial trouble during the stock market decline in the early 2000s, it was either because the company itself was in deep financial trouble or because company finance officers had been too aggressive in gambling with pension assets, putting them into risky equities in hopes of making big gains, rather than investing carefully in safer, more conservative assets like bonds.

Either way, the shift out of lifetime pensions to 401(k) plans and so-called account balance plans by highly profitable corporations was a heavy cost blow to their workers. In the 1950s, U.S. employees nationwide paid collectively about 11 percent of their retirement costs. By the mid-2000s, they were paying 51 percent. Hundreds of billions of dollars in safety net costs were shifted from companies to employees without any offsetting real increase in the typical worker’s pay.

Corporate America was so successful in shifting a major portion of the cost for health and pension benefits onto individual employees that even a corporate financial giant like Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was moved to comment in 2007 that this shift had essentially turned the old social contract upside down. As MetLife put it, “The burden shift has turned the traditional definition of the American Dream ‘on its ear.’ ”

Anyone who told you to be yourself, could not have given you any worse advice..First I read everything I can get my hands on, 2nd , as far as I'm concerned your the one with a problem understanding reality.. we all tend to agree with people of the same mindset and that's just what you post... you have a very high opinion of yourself and after awhile it gets old.

 

[cashmcall]

Sometimes when I write something, I reflect back on it and I wind up hating it. Not because of the content so much it's because I hate preachy bastards. I have always hated preachy bastards. I too have been a preachy bastard- so I know the meme well..... Preachers by my definition...(I am not talking about Ministers) ...are the people that express their opinion on how the world should operate, like it's some matter of fact that they themselves have decided long ago. There is no better place to view this serial ridiculousness than on a comment thread at Huffington Post and now right here... Preachy bastards really do think they are smarter and wiser than everyone else. They are sleepwalkers.

Good stewards rely on facts to support their views. That is the litmus test that I apply to something I read or something I write. Do the facts tend to support this? Has that been my experience? Or has somebody found an insight that I have missed?

This encapsulates the idea perfectly. “You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”
― Harlan Ellison


I have always tried to use facts to support my conclusions. Where facts are not readily available, I try to use my own personal experience and any insight that was made possible by my experiences.

So we are not really required to buy in to some opinion or viewpoint simply because some preachy bastard rattles it off. You are not even required to believe facts. Yesterday, a preacher type with a hate agenda on Huffington Post, rattled off some lunacy about the Quran and how Mohammad supported the rape of women and other assorted atrocities over 200 times in the book. I tend to confront bullshit especially when it's malicious. I asked the guy to tell me which books in the Quran contained such references. Offer proof. Why? Because I have read the Quran not all of it but most and I knew he was full of shit. Of course, I got no reply.

I try to be a good steward here. Most of my pieces offer references and insight gleaned from true experiences. I have a bullshit detector that fires off continually based on my 58 years worth of listening and living... Mostly I just let people get away with their little white lies, once in awhile I don't. Most of the blogs that I read are supported by facts and referenced. I use those insights to form opinions of my own or reach conclusions.

Being a good steward means telling the truth. It means being personally responsible for what you say and write. I don't really care what people think about my efforts so long as it's the truth or reasonably close.

The other day, I ran afoul of my own personal standards, Now I can not find where I got that post.. But like I said , the names of all concerned are there, and It makes a whole lot more sense than most of these other links that have been poster here...

 

[dogtowner]

Anyone who told you to be yourself, could not have given you any worse advice..First I read everything I can get my hands on, 2nd , as far as I'm concerned your the one with a problem understanding reality.. we all tend to agree with people of the same mindset and that's just what you post... you have a very high opinion of yourself and after awhile it gets old.

trap has an amazing capacity to misread cause and effect. as with the so called scientists who started with man=bad and then tried to pin CO2 to hot so as to pin man to CO2. he feels greed=bad yet he also claims to be hoarding weapons so as to sell them at a tidy profit later. somehow making a buck being bad is a relative thing that only just started happening.

 

[Texas_tea]

trap has an amazing capacity to misread cause and effect. as with the so called scientists who started with man=bad and then tried to pin CO2 to hot so as to pin man to CO2. he feels greed=bad yet he also claims to be hoarding weapons so as to sell them at a tidy profit later. somehow making a buck being bad is a relative thing that only just started happening.

Thus is the hypocrisy of liberalism!

 

[OldTrapper]

trap has an amazing capacity to misread cause and effect. as with the so called scientists who started with man=bad and then tried to pin CO2 to hot so as to pin man to CO2. he feels greed=bad yet he also claims to be hoarding weapons so as to sell them at a tidy profit later. somehow making a buck being bad is a relative thing that only just started happening.

I "misread" nothing, however, you demonstrate the poverty of your intellect. I never said I was "hoarding" guns, so that was a lie you made up to make yourself feel as if you have some relevance just as the teabagger consistently makes up stuff with no way to support if.

Kind of like you now claiming I have "pinned" CO2 to hot. Perhaps you, in your astounding world of delusions, can show how the actions of man have had no effect on the environment? Just as another quick example, the pollution of the waterways with farm chemicals, cosmetics, sewage, etc. Did nature dump all of that in the water, or did man?