Gotcha.

I'll agree to differ on pork.

According to Gibbs, he never put pressure on Daschle to pull out. In fact, on February 2nd he said that he stood behind him. On February 3rd he accepted his withdrawal "with sadness and regret." There's no evidence of Obama forcing Richardson to pull out either.

My understanding was that Richardson was asked to resign, but you're right on Daschle.

Obama already gave tax cuts to a huge portion of taxpayers who don't even pay any income tax once they take deductions and credits. It's not a tax cut when you don't have to pay taxes to begin with.

We need real tax reform.

Taxes and income taxes are not the same thing.

I'll agree, however, that it would have been better to do the majority of the tax cuts as a payroll tax holiday.

I just don't give a crap if the rich have their tax rate go up 3%. All this "they'll go somewhere else" or "it'll hurt business" is nonsense. It's pretty clear that money was just going into people's pockets and they just wanted more. Not only that but if you have a good accountant, and $250K+ per year affords you that, with all the loopholes in the tax code- they're paying a lesser percentage than those of us who just pay middle class rates.

So forgive me if I don't get all up in arms about the rich having a tax cut expire.

SI

I guess I thought your statement was regarding the income tax hikes. I know we have so many taxes. One thing is clear, tax hikes or cuts are worthless if you don't adjust your spending/budget according to that.

Agreed. I think the issue is that I'd rather not see my tax dollars bail this guy out. I'd rather have the banks see sense and refinance these failing mortgages into terms people can pay, since the banks, frankly, own at least half of the culpability here.


Yep.


Besides what Mac said, switching these mortgages to 50-year time periods will spread out the instances of failure points, which will put less stress on the system.

All this stuff makes me wish my wife & I had gone for the ridiculous mortgage we were offered a few years ago! :D

Did anyone see one of the CNBC reporters rip on Obama and the bailout plan? It was kind of funny, even if you don't agree with it.

yeah, kind of a homogenous audience though.

And funny how he didn't have anything to say about the TARP bailout.

All I gotta say is, thank God for the SDS.

Or better, the SKF. Time to liquidate for the second time this month, yay evil short monster.

Ok, I just looked those up and need some education: ProShares UltraShort?

SI

they go up (usually) when the market or sector goes down however that is NOT absolutely true of all short ETF's.

I'm starting to agree with Mark Cuban and his view on the stock market.

http://blogmaverick.com/2006/01/03/t...s-for-suckers/

SDS is double leveraged short of the S&P 500. SKF is same for financials. NOT an investment, best to treat it like a highly dangerous way to short a sector of the economy if you think it is going to go down.

The leverage and the general panic mongering we have been seeing has made it one of the speculation bets I pick up from time to time (lately anytime that I sense bad news triggers on the way and it has been at a stable or low point). It is pretty much pure asshattery, but it has been one way to ride the avalanche of bad news to profit.

It is very much a daytrading thing in you ask me, stay away from it unless you have catlike reflexes! :devil:

I'm pretty much sold on stock market as a giant gambling machine, especially given that my long portfolio only makes money if I sell off on spikes and reload low which I'm trying to avoid doing (so far only got 3% overall on my hold group, better than market for sure, but easily erased, it was slightly underwater for a while recently).

That's pretty much my own opinion as well. The problem is that things like 401k matching adds an additional level of complexity to the equation. Do I put money in, assuming my employer's contribution will (hopefully) at least offset any potential loss?

For me, and I suspect most people with 401k's, the answer is yes...it is probably worth it. Unless this past October becomes an annual occurence.

What's his advice? Get insider trading knowledge, cheat, and get caught?:lol:

There is a lot of truth in that blog post. Arguably insider information is what we should have... just transparent enough that everyone can see it. :)

I've talked to very few people who can successfully explain their 'buy and hold' strategies without inevitably pointing at 'well on average it grows 12%' statistic. I make several times more money off of speculation than any sort of holding policy (hell, most of my hold stocks I buy and sell at a decent clip to look in cash on the upswings). The only reason I hold stocks at all is to try and get at some of those traditional dividend style companies Cuban is talking about where I am hoping the dividend makes the investment worth something regardless of spot price fluctuations. This will probably be the best entry point we will see in some time to get price/dividend ratios that make sense to invest in. Forget your price/earnings ratios, you can get price to CASH MONEY ratios, presuming dividends are stable or growing (a big presumption).

I'm not sure I would go that far. The case by the SEC seems rather weak in my view.

Of course, when Mark buys stock, he'll buy a large enough stake where he can have influence and follow up on his investment.

I think the SEC and its insider trading bit is more put on for show than anything. Rather than all these artificial barriers and regulations that are impossible to really enforce, I much rather would like to see companies that are pretty much incapable of hiding anything. Make so much stuff in plain view that it is pointless to be an insider (you could still effect future planning, but if others can view the exact state of your company at a point in time it is much more difficult to make effective use of that inside information without it being detected).

That would also oddly enough make the stock market make a smidgeon more sense and play up that whole public investment ideal rather than the backroom dealing with the public on the front end basically pulling a slot machine lever. Nothing about the fundamental meaning of corporation includes "obfuscate as much data as possible about state of the company or its intentions", that is all set up merely to serve insider exploitation.

And another 667000 jobs lost.

and no top in sight.

These job losses are going to crush us. I still think we need the 'Clean Up all the Fricking Messes in America' Act. Long term projects (enough with the shovel-ready shit, its okay to spread true investment over a long term, you don't need to spend money on things that can only be started tomorrow)... fix up that power grid, invent some new damn cars, clean up the water and air, make recycling into a big business... I dunno, just stimulate jobs creation not just keep handing out money with no strategy.

The capital games don't work, it might save corporations at the expense of hundreds of thousands of workers (no need to fix your business, we'll pay for your losses and meanwhile you can still cut through the bone to maximize how much government monopoly money you get to hold onto).

Instead of pulling out Iraq a year from now, we should be gone a month from now.

Instead of foreclosing houses we should put a stop on bank's smashing people across the head with an eviction notice, and let people adjust their terms to keep making payments (and keeping the prices from further plummeting, foreclosures drive down the market as far as I can tell, Flasch might know more in that area).

Instead of waiting for some consumption boost, which makes no damn sense in a country where everyone is losing their job, we should find ways to get business back to normal. We are letting financial decay spill over to everywhere else, and we do not have to. In the worst case scenario (which will happen anyway if we completely collapse) we will just end up setting the imaginary numbers to zero and canceling them out. It happens. Millions of people don't care about how much red ink is on a piece of a paper, when push comes to shove they'll burn it all. So if it really is coming to that point anyway, I say step in and erase the balance sheet manually. This means some very big banks with some very pansy ass CEOs are going to have large chunks of their net worth set to zero (as well as many average people who still have their assets tied into companies proving they are increasingly worthless). But when the dust settles, we'll still have a country, we'll still have an interest in buying and selling goods, and the economy will start climbing back up.

The reason we can't get out of this downward slide right now is because we have a bunch of lard asses riding our backs with their bags full of millions of dollars that used to be billions. The government is trying to turn those bags back into billions of dollars for no good reason other than corruption or ignorance (probably a lot of both). They are holding hostage the wealth of the average American, however that is rapidly disappearing anyway. Heck, if the average american was holding banks, they have already lost 90% of their life savings on average I would presume... going full on to zero probably won't make much more of a difference.

Somehow I don't picture those two specific things going together. As soon as you ramp up recycling you also ramp up the urge to automate the process even further. And while you create a relative handful of jobs there, you likely put people out of work in the raw materials sector who have been providing for the manufacturing of new packaging/products.


If you zero out the cash of the people who provide the funding to manufacture those goods, what do you think people going to buy or sell? And who is going to be left to pay them a salary to buy it with? Or do you really believe Americans are capable (never mind willing) of reverting back to an agrarian society & growing their own and bartering carrots for cotton?

Which many of those people you're ready to sell down the river provided in the first place.

What you really highlight for me here is a pretty simple reality: we've got more people than we've got money to go around, and as I've known for a long time we've got a lot of dead weight. What we really need is fewer people.

Terms of Service

Feb. 26 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama proposed almost $1 trillion in higher taxes over the next decade on the highest-earning Americans, Wall Street financiers, U.S.-based multinational corporations and oil companies to pay for permanent tax breaks for lower earners.

Obama’s 2010 budget proposal, released today, would reinstate the top two Clinton-era tax rates of 36 percent and 39.6 percent, up from the 33 percent and 35 percent the richest Americans now pay. That would affect about 2.6 million taxpayers. The budget also would raise taxes on capital gains and dividends to 20 percent for top earners, up from the 15 percent set by former President George W. Bush in 2003.

The tax increases, which Obama vowed to impose as a presidential candidate, would take effect in 2011 and be the first on high-income earners since 1993. They also would reverse a course set by Bush of lowering the tax burden on the nation’s wealthiest people.

‘Obama Robin Hood’

“It’s a clear repudiation of Bush’s policy,” said Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland in College Park. “It’s more Obama Robin Hood.”

Obama’s budget would keep in place Bush’s tax cuts that benefit lower- and middle-income earners, and it preserves a sliver of policy that benefits the more affluent: A preferential tax rate on corporate dividends. Before Bush, dividends were taxed as ordinary income, at rates as high as 39.6 percent in the 1990s.

“It is a hugely positive step to keep that part of the ‘03 changes,” said Pamela Olson, who was the top tax official in Bush’s Treasury Department when the tax rate on dividends was reduced. “It’s good economic policy, good corporate governance policy and good tax policy.”

Obama also proposes to stop the scheduled repeal of the estate tax next year and to impose a 45 percent tax rate on a married couple’s estate valued at more than $7 million.

Higher-income earners, primarily families with more than $250,000 of income, would face an additional tax burden under a proposal to limit their itemized deductions. That provision would subject more of their income to tax.

Deductions Cap

The proposal would cap the value of deductions for things like charitable donations, mortgage interest and investment expenses at 28 percent for people in the top brackets, or 30 percent less than they would otherwise receive.

Senior Treasury officials speaking on background to reporters acknowledged the proposal would be controversial. They defended it, saying it still gives top earners a deduction worth twice as much as Americans in lower brackets receive.

In all, top-earning households would pay $636.7 billion in additional taxes over the next decade, Obama’s budget estimates.

Linda Beale, a tax-law professor at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, said “many will object to reinstituting phase-outs for itemized deductions because of the complications that creates.”

Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, the No. 3 Republican leader in the House, said Obama can expect a wall of opposition to his proposed tax increase on top-earners. Roughly half of Americans earning $250,000 are small-business owners, and the proposed increase will stifle the troubled economy, he said.

‘Overwhelming Opposition’

“There will be overwhelming opposition from the American people and House Republicans to the idea that we should raise taxes during a recession,” Pence said in an interview. “Raising taxes in a recession is not a strategy for recovery.”

Representative Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican, said in an e-mail, “You cannot help the job-seeker by punishing the job creator.”

The higher taxes on individuals will largely be used to pay for expanded health coverage for lower-income Americans and to make permanent Obama’s tax breaks such as a payroll tax credit worth up to $800 that was adopted on a temporary basis in the $787 billion fiscal stimulus measure earlier this month.

“He’s being so generous at the lower-income level that making $200,000 is going to be like falling off a cliff,” said Dustin Stamper, an analyst in the National Tax Office at Grant Thornton LLP. “Say what you want about the Bush tax cuts favoring the rich, but this is just becoming punitive.”

AMT Lives On

Obama’s budget also assumes Congress will continue to index the alternative minimum tax for inflation. The AMT is a parallel system that can impose higher rates on families earning between $75,000 and $500,000 when their deductions are too high relative to their income.

Executives at private-equity firms, venture-capital firms, some hedge funds and other partnerships that receive a 20 percent “carried interest” in the firm’s profits would see their tax burdens nearly triple under Obama’s budget.

Most of their carried interest currently is taxed at the 15 percent rate for long-term capital gains. Obama is asking Congress to tax the profit share as ordinary income, arguing that it’s a form of wages; under his plan, most executives would pay 39.6 percent.

That proposal will likely reignite a debate that was waged by Congress in 2007 when the House of Representatives approved the change and the Senate never considered it.

Corporate Tax Increase

Obama proposed $353.5 billion in higher taxes on corporations over the next decade, the bulk of which would come from “reforming” rules that allow U.S.-based multinational corporations such as General Electric Co. to defer U.S. tax on profits they earn overseas. GE has about $75 billion offshore on which it has never paid U.S. taxes, according to its regulatory filings.

The Treasury officials said they were preparing a more detailed plan on overhauling the international tax rules, which they may make public in the next month.

Obama’s budget estimates that such changes and beefing up Internal Revenue Service enforcement of international tax rules would generate $210 billion in additional revenue over the next decade. He also proposed to limit tax shelters by requiring they serve a business purpose by redefining the tax code’s “economic substance doctrine.”

‘Last-In, First Out’

Obama’s budget would end a tax-accounting technique called “last-in, first out,” or LIFO, that primarily benefited oil and gas companies when oil topped $100 a barrel but is widely used across industries.

Republican senators in April 2006 floated such a tax increase but backed off after Exxon Mobil Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Rex Tillerson called the proposal a “backdoor windfall-profits tax.”

In addition to oil companies, the repeal of LIFO would hit retailers, automakers and makers of non-automotive heavy equipment, textile makers, consumer products, drug companies, alcohol and tobacco manufacturers and wholesalers when times are good, according to tax experts.

The accounting method has been commonly used since the 1930s and is viewed as the most accurate measure of income for financial statement purposes, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan panel.

A plan to reinstate an expired oil and chemical excise tax to fund hazardous waste cleanup would generate $6.6 billion between 2010 and 2014, according to the budget.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ryan Donmoyer in Washington at [email protected];


Wasn't sure if I should put this here or the Obama thread.

Yep, liberal vermin like Obama doing what they do: redistributing the wealth whether the bottom feeders actually do anything to deserve it or not.

I just wish to hell I could have convinced my wife to get the fuck out of here when we had the means to do so :(

Just out of curiousity, where would you have gone?

Automating recycling would create tech jobs and manufacturing for the automation, yes it would kill jobs at the manual labor level and raw resource acquisition and processing. But if overall amount of material needed to create stuff decreases, and we have less garbage just sitting around, i'll take it. You are the person saying we have too many people for our resources, I'm saying reduce the amount of resources we use/waste if possible. Kind of supporting arguments in a way.

I don't believe in crapping in the pool just to give a guy a job shoveling poop out of the water. And we'll always need raw materials and processing jobs, I just want recycling as another source of those materials, and perhaps in pipe dream land a more cost efficient one overall. Creating all those recycling processes and machines though will create some jobs for some amount of time, and leave off us someplace better overall even if we end up cutting more overall jobs from more efficient processes, so be it.

I would zero out the NEGATIVE NET WORTH of massive banks. If they overleveraged out their ass, they owe more money than they have, and lately it shows, they are not building anything with all that money we hand them, and the jobs keep being cut. We need investors, and I don't think the current crop of stock market speculators makes the grade. Sorry if I disagree with the traditional trickle down economic view (although I've consistently disagreed with the notion that rich people with more money or tax cuts grows economies, in fact I've made the case that sometimes these rich people are looting productive assets rather than growing them, acting more like cancer than executives). So no, I'm not taking money from the rich and handing it out to the poor. I'm not giving them trillions in tax payer dollars to make up for their STUPID AS FUCK decisions to super-leverage and make bets they can't cover. They zeroed it out and then some into the negatives, I'd just kick them to the curb like they have kicked out so many numerous other people over the years.

As for the wealth of the average American, I think its detiorating at a rapid pace as is. I think it will detiorate even further trying to prop up failures, and avoiding massive messes that are just continuing to pile up. I consider it holding people hostage with the threat 'give us the bailout, we are too big to fail, if we go down we'll take down the whole economy with us'. You know that is not capitalism Jon, where is the 'tough luck, do better next time welfare scum!' I would expect from a fiscal conservative? Whereas most people are concerned with the big companies of the day, I'm concerned with the whole dang economy... right now I see a need to get back to business, and more and more it looks like some stuff is just going to need to be sweeped out of the way to do so.

I know it's not what you meant but I'm going to take this and run with it. These job losses are going to crush us just like the 2001 recession. Those jobs went overseas, never to be seen again. They were replaced by minimum wage service jobs, non-insurance-offered contract positions, and H1-B visas which are getting paid half their American counterparts.

Going back to the point before, if we keep getting rid of the jobs that drove this consumer boom over the past 30 years, why should we keep pushing a consumer based economy. It seems like all it did was push the money around to the rich and overseas. But that well is running dry and it's not like we're going to be able to refill it. It's not like we're waiting on World War 3 to wreck everyone else's economy so we can emerge in a strong position. If there is a WW3, we're going to be the Germany who was bombed to oblivion or, at the very least, the country who pissed away countless dollars fighting a war that didn't improve our way of life.


Again, going back to before- it's not as if they have wealth to hold us hostage with. It's not like they're going to suddenly or even gradually increase wages when balanced versus inflation. Globalization is out of the bag and we're just going to gradually settle back towards the rest of the world as they keep coming up towards us. But it seems like we're not even interested in trying to slow that down- we'd rather scrap over what's left so that a few can get fat and happy, the many get token handouts, and all of it just accelerates our plunge towards mediocrity.

SI

I hate to agree with you on something like this, since I think you have a few different ways of getting to that than I do but I think you're right. The ecosystem seems to adjust when it's getting too overcrowded for the population on it and we're getting due for a big plague, particularly since no one except the recent Chinese have any interest in population control.

I was thinking of starting a poll of "unlikely things that will happen in your lifetime" that span the gamut- things like great depression ii, world war 3, plague that wipes out over 1B people, major meteor strike, major geologic event, human mass extinction event, us land on mars, us travel out of the solar system, make first contact with sentient life, etc. Maybe that's tomorrow's idea for posting...

SI

I like this line. I am stealing it.

There were, no joke, a few remote islands out of major storm paths that had nice houses/estates on them in both the Atlantic & the Pacific. Even more shocking, relative to US home prices they were surprisingly reasonably priced at that point. At least a couple of them appeared to be so far off the beaten path that the governmental jurisdiction they fell under seemed extremely unlikely to even realize they existed and even if they did it was hard to imagine they'd be all that interested. I really can't think of anything that would suit me better than that.

About the biggest worry I had about it was high speed internet access, my wife had more concerns about the isolation and because of having a kid it became a subject I wasn't going to make any headway on. But if you told me I could get us there tomorrow & have it be doable I'd be gone so fast I wouldn't even leave a memory.

There continues to be a lot of hyperbolic over-reaction to Obama's tax plans, when all he's proposing is basically a repeal of the truly ridiculous over-generous tax cuts Bush gave to top earners and top earners only.

You wanted to be a Bond supervillian.

Sorry, but there's simply no such thing as an overgenerous tax cut on top earners until we get to a flat tax.

Honestly I was thinking more along the lines of a hermit. I'm so over 90% of the people I encounter that it's ceased to be funny.

:D

SI

As usual, we disagree on the basic assumption. In my opinion the tax rate on top earners was already generous before Bush's tax cuts.


Ironically, I actually feel the same way. I'll probably get blasted for this, but in all honesty the world would be a significantly better place with about 4 billion less people.

Presumably neither of us are even including any Chinese in that figure, so it could get larger.

Yes, probably. To be honest I wasn't really thinking of nationalities. I tend to agree with general Malthusian principles. I'm fully aware that we still possess the ability to provide for the number of people on the earth (i.e. we can produce, if not distribute, enough food), but it's my opinion that that's only one part of the equation.

Obviously with a drastically smaller population you lose a lot of good things, like the overall amount of creativity and production, as well as the rate of scientific advancement. But I'm one of the people of a mind that the current population's strain on the carrying capacity of the earth creates more problems than it solves.

That's the intellectual argument.

The emotional argument is that I tend toward the misanthropic anyway, and I'd say the majority of people I meet (perhaps not Jon's 90%) tend to simply reinforce this.

Found the study cited here to be pretty interesting. It notes that 55% of all foreclosures and 87% of all home value losses in the current recession are located in four states. That actually explains quite a bit. I've noted in previous threads that home value hasn't been affected a whole lot in our area and this study seems to confirm that point. We've lost a bit here and there, but overall, the downturn in the economy has been much harder on just a few areas.

Hit & Run > Eighty Seven Percent of Housing Value Loss* in Just Four States - Reason Magazine

Hold on, lemme guess: Cali, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida? With a special prize for New York City coming in the next few months?

SI

How were the tax cuts generous?

The Tax Foundation - Summary of Latest Federal Individual Income Tax Data

"This year's numbers show that both the income share earned by the top 1 percent of tax returns and the tax share paid by that top 1 percent have once again reached all-time highs. In 2006, the top 1 percent of tax returns paid 39.9 percent of all federal individual income taxes and earned 22.1 percent of adjusted gross income, both of which are significantly higher than 2004 when the top 1 percent earned 19 percent of adjusted gross income (AGI) and paid 36.9 percent of federal individual income taxes."

"The IRS data below include all of the 135.7 million tax returns filed in 2006 that had a positive AGI, not just the returns from people who earned enough to owe taxes. From other IRS data, we can see that in 2006, 92.7 million of the tax returns came from people who paid taxes into the Treasury. That leaves 43 million tax returns filed by people with positive AGI who used exemptions, deductions and tax credits to completely wipe out their federal income tax liability. Not only did they get back every dollar that the federal government withheld from their paychecks during 2005, but some even received more back from the IRS. This is a result of refundable tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit, which are not included in the aggregate percentile data here."

"The IRS data below include all of the 135.7 million tax returns filed in 2006 that had a positive AGI, not just the returns from people who earned enough to owe taxes. From other IRS data, we can see that in 2006, 92.7 million of the tax returns came from people who paid taxes into the Treasury. That leaves 43 million tax returns filed by people with positive AGI who used exemptions, deductions and tax credits to completely wipe out their federal income tax liability. Not only did they get back every dollar that the federal government withheld from their paychecks during 2005, but some even received more back from the IRS. This is a result of refundable tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit, which are not included in the aggregate percentile data here."

Because it hasn't reached 100% yet silly.

Did you not get the memo? Anyone who makes more than you do is "rich" and should therefore be taxed until there's nothing left, with the money redistributed among those who have failed to earn the same level of income.

Once they're broke of course, there's a new set of "rich" & the cycle begins all over again.

This brings back memories of the "Cadillac Soup Kitchens" of the 1990s, when former billionaires were reduced to begging for food from charities due to their excessive tax bills. The charities, of course, were unable to help as the economy had withered due to the crippling tax burden placed on the wealthiest one percent.

Let's review what I wrote again:


Bolded for emphasis.

Tax rates for high earners in the U.S. are not onerous and haven't been since Reagan got a hold of them.

Now, you can certainly argue that tax money isn't well spent, and that people paying taxes, especially large amounts of taxes, have a right to complain, and I won't disagree with that. Especially in the U.S. But that's a different argument.

you know how far apart we fall on the political spectrum, and yet I 100% agree with you on this. Also on your espousal of Malthusian principles. We do need a die-off. And whether we create it (although TBH I don't think we can create it in a way large enough to reach equilibrium), or the Earth does it via natural means (over a longer timeframe and with more prolonged suffering) it will happen. It's happened before and it will happen again. As much as we like to think we're the "masters of the earth" it will regulate if need be.

I'd like to see those numbers when adjusted not for income but for total money gained in a year. People on the lower 98% of the scale aren't storing money away in offshore accounts or using tax loopholes to deflate their incomes a substantial amount (i.e. I took a loss on my second home that I claim is rental property so I can deduct that so my salary isn't as much or I got a bunch of bonus/stock/retirement money that I can magic away tax free because I have a good tax lawyer).

This sounds like how our CEO the other day said he was taking a 20% pay cut (on his 1.5M) while those of us in the rank and file only lost 2.5% or 5%. Oh, but his bonus money comes from another program so it doesn't count. And that doesn't take into account his stock options he cashed in or his stock vesting. When you look at the SEC filings for our company, he was compensated at $45M and if you counted everything he got, it's well over $60M so even the SEC doesn't account for all the money he's getting (a $15M not counted by them) and his 20% pay cut becomes realistically under 1%.

I could be wrong but I suspect I'm not.

SI