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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (43384)	3/9/2001 9:10:04 AM
From: Rick Storm	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Jacob, in the past you have bought stocks in increments; which has been extremely sucessful; this time you gave a fair price for Applied at @ 35; after you cover today<G> do you plan to buy in stages; would you consider 35 the average and try to buy on either side of that; ie at 40 and average down; it seems with all this bad news ; and the analysts unable to look beyond the next few quarters that Applied is still in a trading range and is not breaching the bottom; Since Applied is the Intel of equipment makers, don't you think this a powerful argument that we are close to a bottom price wise and since the Fed is easing for the third time, that a psr of Applied will not look like it has during the previous bottoms--

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (43384)	3/9/2001 11:55:54 AM
From: mitch-c	Respond to of 70976

More OT - Tax scheme Well thought out, Jacob - thanks! Much of this I'm shooting from the hip; I appreciate the critical questions. 1. the purpose of the tax code is to control citizen's behavior. I vehemently disagree. The purpose of the tax code is to fairly raise the revenue to run the government. It has been abused into supporting various agendas to control behavior, but that is not its true purpose. BTW, the Wilson Progressives did that to us. 1913 was a very bad year. 2. do you include all income (capital gains, dividends, etc.) in your "earnings"? Or just wages? All income, whatever the source. Net worth this year minus net worth last year. To put the tax formula in words for Mike, you pay some fixed percentage of your earnings after exempting the amount a minimum wage employee makes in a year. Congress sets the rate and the wage. (Philosophically, I disagree with this concept - I'd much prefer to tax spending rather than income - but we wouldn't want to make too radical a shift at once ... <g> Politics is the art of the feasible.) 3. The inflation-adjusted minimum wage has been declining since the 1950s. Today, you cannot provide the minimum necessities of life for a family, with a full-time minimum-wage job. Instead of M*MY, it would be fairer to use whatever amount provides for a family's necessities, and adjust it for inflation. We have a "living wage" crowd around here, too. Straw man argument - it presumes citizens are not responsible for their lifestyle choices. That's the paternalistic and dangerous assumption underlying the failures of the Great Society. Unfortunately, the distribution of living expenses is not uniform across the country - some places are more expensive to live in than others. I have relatives who pay more in rent for a small apartment than I pay PITI for a house 2.5 times as large. Location, location, location. Using Minimum Wage to index the exemption rather than poverty level deliberately retains a link to legislative action - "Poverty Level" studies can get wonked to death by non-legislators. It is very easy to extrapolate a wage minimum from an arbitrary poverty level - but I think we should keep the two separate. Besides, as a non-min-wage voter, many of my objections to raising the minimum wage become superseded by my desire for lower taxes in a structure like this ... it's called feedback. - Mitch