"Kurt Ullman" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Robert Green" wrote:



I know a few teachers and they feel very much under attack. If you
recall,
in Wisconsin they singled out teacher's unions but left police and
firefighters out of the legislation to end collective bargaining for
public
employees. That seems, to teachers at least, to imply that the state's
money woes came from overpaying teachers. Why would they select them
and
not firefighters or police?

In real life, their union is the single biggest campaign contributor
to Dem candidates. The unions for the cops/firefighters (and the
Chamber) spread their money around a lot more. Live by the Dems, die by
the Dems. Politics ain;t patty cake.

So it's clear you have to pay to play. Singling out the teachers, for
whatever reason, still has the appearance of blaming them specifically for
the recent economic unpleasantness when it's clear there were many other
contributing factors to our money woes, mainly, in my eyes, runaway
arbitrage that adds very little to the nation's productivity but clearly
takes away much of it as anyone with a 401K or a savings account paying
below 1% interest can verify.

Your example proves the point. Corporate compensation is completely out
of
whack because the real owners of these companies, the stockholders, have
virtually no input as to how execs are compensated. Performance based
bonuses are a sham - CEO's get them whether they perform or not and the
only
time it doesn't happen is when they do something so extreme that they
feel
forced to decline their bonuses rather than being tarred and feathered
by
the press and the public - thereby causing the stock price to drop and
reducing the non-salary compensation.

Congress is a lot of fire and (try to) forget. Of course a lot of
this is how to put genies back in bottles.

Promises buy votes. Obama got my vote by promising to extricate us from
wars we can ill afford. He seems quite willing to think that people will
forget about his failure to do what he promised at election time. Maybe
he's right. How we're getting knee-deep in Libya when we have no business
interests in the country since the 80's amazes me. Let Europe and Asia deal
with their own problems spending their own damn money.

But the mortgage deduction had the effect of encouraging home ownership
and
that built wealth - the wealth that investment banks were falling all
over
themselves to securitize and sell, driving the real estate bubble to
burst
wide open. Giving tax breaks to corporations usually means that a very
few
people at the top of the corporate pyramid get the money. Yes, some
companies do invest and pay dividends to their stockholders, but the
trend
has been more and more obscene compensation for the guys at the top and
very
little trickle down for anyone else.

Which of course is beside the point I was (attempting to make). You
can take away the things you want taken away and it will make not a lot
of real impact. They just don't take that much money out of pockets when
compared to what we take out for ourselves.

Sorry, but I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Could you rephrase?

That knife cuts both ways. Do you think anyone at the lower end of the
income scale benefited at all from the reduction of the estate tax?
That
break was only for the rich and as I recall, it meant a significant loss
of
revenue for the Treasury. I don't need to tell you the difference
between
progressive and regressive taxation. As for the bottom two quintiles,
you
really wouldn't want to be there, even if you got tax credits. My point
was
that in order to stimulate the economy, lowering taxes for the people
that
buy consumables gives them more money to spend which goes to
corporations
selling goods which increases their profits. Lowering taxes for the
highest
earners is far more likely to result in them investing or sheltering
that
money abroad, which doesn't help restart the stalled economy very much
at
all.

The estate tax is yet another smokescreen. Not all that much was
collected even at the zenith. ALso, that was a tax that was entirely
punitive. You had too much money, you offended the Gods of Washington,
and you had to pay much higher rates than any other tax. It was
confiscatory. (FWIW, I have long said that you should tax estates at
whatever it would have been taxed on at the time of death. Got cap gains
in the family company, tax it at cap gains rate, etc. Essentially tax it
exactly as you would if Dad sold it to the kid. I fyou wanted to get
really radical, pass it along tax free with no bump in basis. Then it
would taxed based on what Great Grandad paid for it in the late 1800s
when the business was sold outside the family)

I don't disagree. I was merely pointing out that the estate tax, whatever
its evils, has virtually no impact on most Americans, especially the people
at the poverty line.

Well, ostensibly with taxes collected. Obviously we've borrowed to make
those payments, but the principle remains the same. Who would be in a
position to a) borrow that much money and b) lend it to a company nearly
in
extremis other than the Federal government?

But it was the Federal government that got us into this mess. ALL of
the laws that people point to as being THE REASON (whether or not it
was, of course) were passed by large bipartisan majorities. (Heck the
bill to kill off Glass-Stegal was passed by voice vote in the Senate for
the love of Pete). We were limping along with the Fed, FDIC,, etc.,
doing forced marriages between good place and bad places until they
finally decided to throw someone to the wolves. THAT is what caused the
dry up, the idea that nobody knew any more the parameters of what would
or would not be propped up. EVERYBODY became suspect and the system
immediately shut down. I have often wondered what might have happened if
the forced marriages had continued.. but again I digress.

And I often wonder what would happen if the Feds had not intervened. I
suspect they did so because a failure of a bank like the Bank of America
would shatter the economy and not even the FDIC could pick up the pieces.

What saddens me the most about modern American is how woefully
uninformed
people are about current events. Newspapers are dying not only because
of
"bust out" schemes perpetrated upon them by takeover firms, but because
people just don't seem motivated to learn enough to be educated voters.
I
am reluctant to look up how few people read a paper or watch TV news
anymore.

My family still owns a newspaper. They were dying out LONG before the
internet.

My condolences, but I don't think I blamed the internet. Papers have been
accosted by the same sort of "load it with debt and cash out" takeover deals
that decimated Simmons. Couple that with a dumbing down of the population
that considers American Idol statistics a "newsworthy" event and what chance
does serious print journalism have anymore?

The NYT just instituted their third attempt at a "pay wall" to try to
develop new income streams. The smart money says that the income gained
will be completely neutralized by the loss in "eyes" viewing their
advertising. But that's the newspaper business. They just can't adapt to
the new model and keep trying the same old tricks that fail time after time.
Just like the music industry. The WSJ was successful with their pay wall
because it's a deductible expense as well as news that allows people to make
money. The NYT doesn't have those two critical draws. I expect to hit the
pay wall (20 free articles allowed per month) any day now but I am not sure
it will even effect me since I surf with Javacrap turned off on all but
critical commerce sites. Even before the pay wall went up, hackers had
developed workarounds. When you build a tall wall, remember, someone's
building a taller ladder to climb over it. (-"

It's clear from the adverts in both that only the Geritol set watches
the
news anymore. That's why so many people believe the crazy things that
"interpreters" tell them, hence the birthers, the blame placed on the
CRA
for the entire real estate bubble and other odd, nearly cultish beliefs
that
propagate through our society.

That and there is a need for people to find ONE THING (preferably one
they have no skin in-grin) to blame it on. The CRA definitely had a
place in the real estate meltdown, but there were many others. But
again, this is more human nature than political venality.

We were in the middle of a plain ol' garden variety spec bubble, the same
kind of thing that's been happening since the great tulip spec bubble of
centuries ago. People all "want in" on a good thing and that force alone
eventually makes it a very bad thing by over-valuing whatever it is (tulips,
tech, real estate) that's the current "hot" item. So you're right, it's
clear these spec bubbles are part of human nature. The question is: "What
can we do to mitigate their potential damage?"

Our growing national ignorance is why people can claim a bomb and not a
plane caused the damage at the Pentagon on 9/11 even though you can
easily
find footage from the parking lot's CCTV cameras showing the impact of
the
plane. It doesn't matter if their theory gapingly fails to answer what
on
earth happened to the missing jet. I'll bet some believe it went
through an
"Event" type portal to another universe. I blame part of the American
appetite for conspiracies on the JFK assassination and all the questions
it
left unanswered. People who grew up in that era are likely to see
"shooters" behind every bush.

If you look history, American and otherwise, this is nothing new.
Some segment of the population has always "seen" the reality as
different. THe biggest difference since JFK is that they now have much
more efficient ways to find others to reinforce their beliefs.

I don't know if I agree. In looking at Japan I believe a country can
experience a major shift in national consciousness when enough people feel
their government is lying to them. Oswald's strange journey to the USSR,
Jack Ruby's shadowy mob connections and much more overwhelmed people to the
point that they did not know who to trust or what to believe. Fast forward
to Dan Rather's denouement over the alleged evaluations of Bush's fitness.
By that time, even Dan was ready to believe anything without checking the
facts critically. Higgs Boson, are you reading this? Shame on you for that
Pi BS. Bad, bad, BAD dog!!!! People might start to think you're a fifth
columnist, and I don't mean newspaper columnist, either.

Maybe countries suffer from a "hardening of the arteries" with age just
the
way people do. )-:

If not, we'd probably still all be Roman or Mongol, or pick whatever
previous top dog you want. (g).

That's an interesting reminder that history has made it very clear that even
though we're the top dog now, we won't be forever and by the time we realize
we're slipping, it may be too late. The fall of Rome always fascinated me -
a number of very powerful forces acting in concert from very different
directions all conspiring to end the greatest empire the world has ever
known. I hope we'll be remembered as force for overall good in the future,
but I have my doubts. Reminds me of "Life of Brian" when a Jew asks "What
have the Romans ever done for us?"

XERXES
The aqueduct?

REG
What?

XERXES
The aqueduct.

REG
Oh yeah, yeah. They did give us that. That's true, yeah.

UNNECESSARY
And sanitation.

LORETTA
Oh yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like.

REG
Yeah, all right, I'll grant you the aqueduct, the sanitation are two things
the Romans have done...

MATTHIAS
And the roads.

REG
Well, yeah. Obviously the roads, I mean the roads go without saying, don't
they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads...

VESTIGIAL
Irrigation.

XERXES
Medicine.

EXPENDABLE
Education.

REG
Yeah, yeah, all right. Fair enough...

SUPERFLUOUS
And the wine.

PFJ
Ohhhh yeah...

FRANCIS
Yeah. Yeah, That's something that we'd really miss, Reg, if the Romans left,
huh?

UNNEEDED
Public baths.

LORETTA
And it's safe to walk the in streets at night now, Reg.

FRANCIS
Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it, the only ones
who could in a place like this! (indicating them)

PFJ
(general agreement)

REG (irritated)
All right. But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine,
public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public
health... What have the Romans ever done for us?

XERXES
Brought peace?

REG
Oh, peace... SHADDAP!

--
Bobby G.