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

To: tejek who wrote (622735)	8/3/2011 9:25:43 PM
From: TopCat	4 Recommendations Respond to of 1583406

"How do you know that I don't? For someone who knows very little about me, you make a lot of assumptions. And you know what they say about assuming." What kind of volunteer work are you doing? It can't possibly take you outside your house or require much time or thought since you are constantly on the Internet from 8 in the morning to midnight every day with one break in the afternoon to go to the gym (or so you say). In a typical day you make upwards of 100 posts.......It's hard to imagine that you have any extra time to do anything else.

To: tejek who wrote (622735)	8/4/2011 12:03:52 AM
From: d[-_-]b	3 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1583406

High-Speed Train Wreck California’s multi-billion-dollar bullet-train boondoggle was predictable—and predicted. 3 August 2011 In October 2008, Joseph Vranich, a preeminent authority on high-speed rail in the United States, testified before a hearing of California’s State Senate Transportation and Housing Committee. Vranich, the best-selling author of Supertrains, former CEO of the U.S. High Speed Rail Association, and a 40-year advocate of high-speed rail, had come to offer his thoughts on the state’s plan to build a high-speed rail line from Orange County to San Francisco. “This is the first time I am unable to endorse a high-speed rail plan,” he told the senators, saying that he found the California High Speed Rail Authority’s work to be “the poorest I have ever seen.” It’s fair to say that the vast majority of California voters never heard what Vranich had to say. Instead, they relied on faulty and unverified information on their ballot statements, where high-speed rail proponents touted the environmental advantages and fiscal benefits of the state’s plan. Less than a month after his testimony, voters approved Proposition 1A, authorizing Sacramento to sell a few billion dollars in bonds for a project most experts, now including the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Office and the University of California, say will cost tens of billions of dollars more than the official $43 billion estimate. With his 2008 testimony now posted on YouTube, more people are listening to Vranich, who predicted just about everything that came to pass, including that the trains would be slower than promised, carry fewer people than rail authorities claimed, and cost much more than officials would admit. “I would like to see high speed rail built,” Vranich told senators. “But not this boondoggle.” Almost three years on, the High Speed Rail Authority has spent $630 million—and the project hasn’t even broken ground yet. The vast majority of those dollars went to consultants and studies. Vranich explained in 2008 that while high-speed rail “holds great promise in certain sections of the country,” the California HSRA’s work was so deficient that “if the current plan is implemented it has the potential of setting back the cause of high-speed rail throughout the United States.” The Authority, Vranich argued, had learned nothing from failed projects in Texas and Florida (with another failure in the making in the Sunshine State), and aborted plans in Los Angeles and San Diego. The L.A. and San Diego projects had been undone by overly optimistic ridership estimates, pie-in-the-sky budgeting, and a callous disregard for local environmental impacts. The HSRA was repeating all of those mistakes, Vranich argued, “as if they never read a single page of history.” His recommendation: dissolve the HSRA and transfer its power to a different state agency. city-journal.org

To: tejek who wrote (622735)	8/4/2011 12:20:20 AM
From: Tenchusatsu	2 Recommendations Respond to of 1583406

Ted, > How do you know that I don't? Cause I've seen well-intentioned liberals, and I've seen just plain bitter liberals. The former usually put actions behind their words. The latter just whine whine whine. It's all about what you produce, and I don't necessarily mean "for-profit" gigs. Tenchusatsu

To: tejek who wrote (622735)	8/4/2011 8:22:24 AM
From: Brumar89	2 Recommendations Respond to of 1583406

The Class War Rhetoric War on RealityBy Henry Oliner A common fallacy of the class warfare rhetoric is to focus on the super rich to draw a conclusion that will impact the much less affluent; the working upper middle class sometimes called the 'working rich'. The drone on corporate jets is such an example. Few small businesses use private jets. Corporate jets are rare and already heavily scrutinized. The only issue is whether they should be depreciated over five years or seven years as required for commercial planes. The impact on tax revenues and the debt is so minimal it is hard to take such pathetic tactics seriously. [ So there's hardly any money involved in the recent dispute about private yets, they were just chosen as a symbol the envious could rail against. ] In an effort to play god with the tax purse strings, the tax code is so complex with credits and exemptions that it is no wonder that some companies and filers have figured out how to reduce their tax burdens to a lower level than most of us pay. But those corporations who are able to pay little or no taxes are still the exception. Yet these few winners of the tax lottery are held up by the class warmongers as a basis to increase taxes on the many businesses who are already paying more than their fair share. Hedge fund managers who have made billions in a single year often pay taxes at a capital gains rate and thus pay a much lower rate than many secretaries and office workers who work at the firm. Billionaire hedge fund traders are another exception heralded by class warriors, which even includes Warren Buffet. Again this applies to very few wealthy people and there are much better solutions than to raise taxes on the working wealthy who are often the small business owners. Stephen Moore writes in the Wall Street Journal (online edition) Warren Buffet is Wrong on Taxes, July 28, 2011: I don't know the details of Warren Buffet's personal taxes, and he hasn't made them public. But the IRS does provide reliable data on effective tax rates-the overall share of their income that various groups pay in federal income taxes (not including state or local taxes) after accounting for all deductions and exemptions. These are different than marginal tax rates, which are paid on the next dollar of income and now peak at 35% for individuals. IRS data for 2008, for example, show that households in the top 10% of earners (above about $114,000) paid 19% of their income to the feds. Those in the top 1% (above $380,000) paid 23.3%. The top 0.1% of earners, with incomes of $2 million or more, end up paying a slightly lower tax of 22.7%, because they get more of their income from investments .... So what about the rest of us? According to IRS data, a median-income household ($35,000) in 2008 paid about 4% of its income in federal income tax. Understanding the tax issue beyond the class war sound bites requires that you differentiate the statutory rate from the effective rate. The statutory rate is the stated rate before deductions and credits. The effective rate is the actual dollars you pay as a percent of income. It is conceivable to increase the statutory rate and reduce the effective rate with special provisions which lobbyists actively pursue. We could also reduce statutory rates and increase the effective rate by eliminating deductions. Reagan reduced the statutory rate but also eliminated many deductions which reduced the effective rate less. One must also understand the impact of the specific legislation on the marginal rate, the actual taxes paid on the next or incremental dollar of income. This is the rate that impacts job creation and new business development. Much of lobbying is an effort to garner tax breaks for specific industries and companies. Small businesses rarely benefit from such lobbying activities. The irony is that the more we regulate the more we encourage the proliferation of lobbying activity and the more of an advantage we create for large established businesses, who can afford the administrative overhead engendered by such regulation, over smaller innovative businesses. The focus on taxes and fairness also overlooks other friction costs such as regulations, credit availability, and the inconsistency of regulations and the tax code. Even when positive changes are made, one has to wonder if we can trust that the change will remain long enough to actually be of any benefit. Radical change in legislation impairs trust; no one knows what to expect next. The tiresome class warfare analogies share common attributes to other human prejudices: They are filled with stereotypes, play to the lowest human qualities and are equally intellectually vacuous. We are at the point where half of the people contribute little to government revenue yet are pandered to by a dying socialist elite that cries that those who are paying nearly all of the bill are not paying their fair share. The exceptions themselves are created by the labyrinth tax code designed by the very people who use it to leverage for more taxes on those taxpayers who are already paying most of the bill. americanthinker.com