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

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.

But the teachers are an easy target and brought a lot of this down on
themselves. Fighting against most reforms despite the fact schools are
routinely graduated undereducated people. Yelling that it is everyone's
fault BUT theirs (which of course is the other side of the coin that is
now showing up), fighting any attempt to bring in performance measures
(espcially galling to many who go through such things in THEIR jobs).

Having close friends who are teachers, they would counter and say that
"performance based" ratings often end up really being "you've been here a
while and are too expensive to keep" sorts of games. It's not very easy to
fairly rate a teacher because each year they get a new crop of kids with
varying degrees of intellectual competence.

Politicians look around for the easy prey just like lions, tigers, and
hedge fund operators.

That's true. I believe that Gov. Walker was truly surprised by the ferocity
of the opposition to the new law stripping state works of collective
bargaining rates and reducing their pay.


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.
I don't know if he is counting on forgetting, or having just enough
people think the other option is worse (which at times the GOP seems to
working REALLY hard to do), holding their noses and voting for him.
Maybe we need none of the above and if that gets more than 30% of the
vote, we start over again with the P and VP candidates from both sides
barred from running again (grin).


Sorry, but I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Could you
rephrase?
Yeah, although the corps get the hate, the money going to
individuals is much greater. We can no more balance the budget by
cutting breaks for the corps as we can taxing the rich, there just isn't
enough money there. Now, I am not at all saying that we shouldn't look
at the corp tax structure to see if there are things to cut. But to make
them the boogie man in this is simplistic and I don't like simplistic
answers.
Especially since in tax law, healthcare and many other government
functions, the Pogo Principle is invoked: "We have met the enemy and he
is us."

I agree. Everyone wants to see someone else's ox get gored. Means testing
for SS and Medicare would reclaim a lot of money. Just try passing such
laws in the face of special interest groups like the AARP. They've learned
from the NRA that being able to focus their member's ire on a particular law
or candidate is a very effective way of being an elephant in a jungle full
of lions. Yes, occasionally a lion will attack an elephant calf, but the
outcomes are always always bad for the lions.

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?
Coming in late.. but I don't think anyone at the high end benefited
from the Earned Income and other credits.

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.

And I was merely trying to state the fact that is a big whoop. There
are things at all levels of the tax code that don't impact on the other
levels. For example, there was a time a few years ago when I was
personally paying an addition $5000 in taxes (writing the check to the
Feds) solely and utterly because I made too much money and hit the phase
out of certain deductions.

But you and I are hopelessly out-gunned by the IRS. Not so for corporations
that routinely challenge IRS findings, going to their representatives and
Tax Court to have decisions reversed. The IRS doesn't have the staff to
take up all the challenges and often backs down when arrayed against an
armada of tax lawyers and accountants from businesses big enough to keep
them on staff.

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.
Yep what ifs are fun. But almost as useful as reading all those
books about what would have happened had the South won the
Unpleasantness Between the States. (grin).

Maybe not because one day we may come to that crossroads again at a time
when the Feds are so deep in the hole that they *can't* bail them out
without disastrous consequences, far worse that what we've already seen.

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

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. (-"
The WSJ was successful (1) because they started it early enough that
people weren't viewing free as some sort of birthright and (2). they put
stuff behind the wall that people were actually interested in paying
for. Most newspapers really can't do that because local news is
available in too many places (TV, radio, etc.) that there is little to
differentiate them. I think the NYT is grappling with this now.

I read through all 2000+ comments on the NYT site because I wanted to
evaluate the claim Sulzberger made that "quite a few people were willing to
pay for the NYT online." My count was 10 to 1 against the pay wall. As you
note, instituting one early on, as the WSJ, doesn't leave people with the
feeling that something's being taken away from them. I know that journalism
needs help, but I wonder if the NYT is doing things the right way. At $195,
people have pointed out that if all the other sites did the same, you could
end up paying $2,000 a year to surf multiple news sites, something that most
of us already do.

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?"

Apparntly nothing. As someone noted (might even have been Warren the
B) speculative bubbles all have a couple of characteristics in common.
The human feeling that good times inevitable continue (despite the old
adage that trees never grow to the sun) and the human conceit that THIS
time is different because We Know Things. Anytime the dudes in the WSJ
or CNBC start talking about how this new thing is a different paradigm
that won't react the same way things in the past have always acted, THAT
is the time to head for door.

Yes, I wanted to burn my J degree when I saw the extent to which news
outlets were fueling the spec bubble in housing. I came across a stash of
newspapers from 2007 when cleaning up and the number of stories about "you
can't lose in real estate" just floored me.

--
Bobby G.