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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (286697)	5/4/2006 11:41:19 AM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574744

The lost generation Randolph Schmid, author of the article "Lost generation can't find states with map or wits" (Page 1, yesterday) evinced surprise that so many young Americans are ignorant of geography. Well I'm surprised. I'm surprised the results were not worse than reported inasmuch as the schools stopped teaching geography — as well as history and civics — a long time ago. The schools also have gotten rid of most geography textbooks, so it's a wonder any recent graduate of an American school knows any geography. People who went to school before the 1960s might be surprised to learn that the courses on geography, history and civics that they took have been replaced with an amalgamation of the three subjects, called social studies. The result is that children receive a hodgepodge of information on the subjects, the accuracy and coherence of which depends on the quality of the teacher, and few teachers are good enough to wing it on their own. American schools will never produce graduates who really know geography, history and civics until they get rid of social studies and go back to the old approach. However, that is unlikely to happen with the American Federation of Teachers included in the group that has been formed to solve the problem. The AFT helped create social studies in the first place, and it almost certainly will fight any effort to do away with it.

To: TigerPaw who wrote (286697)	5/4/2006 12:18:51 PM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 1574744

Oil Company Profits and Tax Collections: The Senate will hold hearings on rising oil and fuel prices and the subsequent record earnings recently posted by U.S. oil companies. Some lawmakers have suggested that these profits are unseemly and, thus, should be subject to a new “windfall profits” tax. Before rushing to create a new federal tax, lawmakers should ask two questions: (1) Do oil companies currently pay too little in taxes compared to profits? (2) What was the effect of the last windfall profits tax enacted in 1980? The answer to the first question is that over the past 25 years, oil companies directly paid or remitted more than $2.2 trillion in taxes, after adjusting for inflation, to federal and state governments—including excise taxes, royalty payments and state and federal corporate income taxes. That amounts to more than three times what they earned in profits during the same period, according to the latest numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and U.S. Department of Energy. These figures do not include local property taxes, state sales and severance taxes and on-shore royalty payments. The answer to the second question, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), is that the 1980s windfall profits tax depressed the domestic production and extraction industry and furthered our dependence on foreign sources of oil. taxfoundation.org