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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GraceZ who wrote (53652)	2/13/2006 2:45:27 AM
From: Mike Johnston	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

but then Maryland is in a serious boom (apart from RE) due to large increases in government and military spending as well as huge increases in capital spending by the numerous hospitals and healthcare facilities located here. I haven't seen anything like that with health care facilities in my area. What is it about Maryland that it has such a hospital boom ?

To: GraceZ who wrote (53652)	2/13/2006 11:26:25 AM
From: TimbaBear	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 110194

Timba ....were the cutoff periods for both time slots of equal duration? Grace If you ever want to get the IRS to come down hard on you fast, fool around with the withholding. Employment taxes are probably the most paid on time and timely taxes that the government collects. Perhaps you misunderstood the thrust of my point? It is the IRS reporting period to which I refer, not the taxpayer's. One quarter may have an extra week in it as opposed to the same quarter in the previous year. For example if 14 weeks worth of data were reported because of a slight calendar quirk instead of the normal 13 weeks, just that quirk would result in a 7.69% apparent increase in the numbers when really they may have been very similar if the same exact number of collection days were used. Or, if a Holiday fell just right one year as opposed to another and if that Holiday were during a time of heavy receipts, etc, etc. Grace, while your stories of successful clients is heart-warming, they are anecdotal and not much different than the stories many folks can tell each year in different parts of the country. While important to you, it may not be reflective of the nation as a whole. The national employment and unemployment numbers and the national wage numbers simply do not support the 10% increase showing in the tax receipts. Additionally, nothing you have provided so far has refuted the contention that the national phenomenon of house flipping is perhaps responsible for a significant part of the difference between the amount collected and listed under "Individual Taxes" and those collected under "Employment Taxes". The story of America is that entrepreneurs like your friends can make something more of their lives through success in business. That happens every year. The difference the last few tax years has been the increase in the number of homes purchased for no other reason than immediate resale at a higher price. This practice has been commented upon frequently in every type of media in almost every population center in the country and many of the rural areas as well. This type of widespread action is likely to have had major tax ramifications. This isn't a wild-eyed conclusion, it is simple logical deduction. Again, I applaud you for having the good sense and the gumption to go find the figures for yourself. But what good is it if you then put subjectivity into the mix when trying to distill from those figures the objective reality that they portray? I do much number crunching of financial statements when reviewing 10Qs and 10Ks. I have run across the phenomenon of the extra week in a quarter making numbers appear better than they should. It is one of the pitfalls one learns to be aware of. I have also learned that no matter how much I want the numbers to look a certain way, my investment results are better when I filter them through the question: "Does this make sense?" Timba