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

To: i-node who wrote (778688)	4/5/2014 11:09:39 PM
From: THE WATSONYOUTH	2 Recommendations Recommended By i-node TideGlider Respond to of 1573697

......there is not one number relative to the economic health of this country that you can believe from this administration. Obama Is Manufacturing His Manufacturing Numbers Thursday, 03 Apr 2014 08:08 AM By Neal Asbury Most presidents surround themselves with cabinet and staff members who have the skill sets required to handle the daunting tasks that they face each day. President Obama has taken a different approach. He hires fiction writers. If you spend any time looking at the unemployment numbers, for example, the Obama administration puts the national unemployment rate at just under 7 percent. That sounds very manageable, unless you take into account the 11 million Americans who have dropped out of the labor force and are no longer actively seeking a job. Conveniently, they aren't accounted for in the unemployment numbers. If you counted them, the unemployment rate would be near 16 percent. So the Obama fiction writers understand that if you can't actually improve the economy, you play around with the data and things suddenly seem better. The latest fiction work involves U.S. manufacturing. You will recall that several weeks ago the president held photo ops in three cities to announce that these cities would soon become major manufacturing hubs. This has faded from memory. Yet, recognizing that the administration probably can't conjure up enough manufacturing plants to make it look like manufacturing is growing, according to The Wall Street Journal, the fiction writers came up with a creative way to make it look like American manufacturing is on the rise. This slight-of-hand was accomplished by reclassifying assembly and fabricating shops as manufacturing facilities. The upshot is that it would appear that America gained thousands of new manufacturing facilities, which is simply untrue. According to a 2013 research study by the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, uncovered by a reporter, if these pseudo manufacturing sites were to be reclassified as traditional factories, the manufacturing labor force would seem to grow by 431,000 to 2 million workers. Another creative piece of fiction. We can appear to have up to 2 million factory workers without actually hiring a single one. Obama's fiction writers explained that the reclassification would properly account for the "effects of globalization." It's hard to reconcile this logic. If we started to count every small foreign shanty sewing boxer shorts as a manufacturing facility, the United States would look worse, not better. It's really about creating jobs. Not jobs on paper, but real jobs where someone can make a good living. The reality is that in the early 1990s, 17 million Americans worked in manufacturing. Today, that number is closer to 12 million. It's hard to explain to the 5 million workers no longer employed in manufacturing plants that manufacturing in the United States is on the rise. The answer to revitalizing U.S. manufacturing isn't to pretend that the data reflect reality. The answer is to put in place the kinds of incentives that help manufacturers create a business. Factories don't suddenly spring up, as if by magic. Behind each factory is an entrepreneur with a vision who believed he could build something — and there would be a market for it. Those 5 million factory workers disappeared not because they didn't want to work — there weren't enough factory jobs created for them. Entrepreneurs want to get back in the game, but several forces are keeping them out, including: • too much uncertainty in the marketplace • too many regulations • too many taxes • too little access to capital • too little vision and support by this administration. It's not unheard of for history to be rewritten years after an event occurs. But it's rare when history is being rewritten even as it is happening. Where are the voices questioning the numbers being disseminated by the White House? If so many good things are happening, why are so many people discouraged, unhappy and giving up? There's a program on ESPN titled "The Numbers Never Lie." Maybe they should move that show to a cable news network and use it to monitor the White House. Then we'd see the show renamed "The Numbers Always Lie" — at least that's what you'll conclude when you're reviewing the numbers coming out of the Obama administration. © 2014 Moneynews. All rights reserved. Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com moneynews.com Urgent: Should Obamacare Be Repealed? Vote Here Now!

To: i-node who wrote (778688)	4/6/2014 2:59:35 PM
From: bentway	Respond to of 1573697

A Minimum Tax for the Wealthy By WARREN E. BUFFETT nytimes.com Published: November 25, 2012 SUPPOSE that an investor you admire and trust comes to you with an investment idea. “This is a good one,” he says enthusiastically. “I’m in it, and I think you should be, too.” Would your reply possibly be this? “Well, it all depends on what my tax rate will be on the gain you’re saying we’re going to make. If the taxes are too high, I would rather leave the money in my savings account, earning a quarter of 1 percent.” Only in Grover Norquist’s imagination does such a response exist. Between 1951 and 1954, when the capital gains rate was 25 percent and marginal rates on dividends reached 91 percent in extreme cases, I sold securities and did pretty well. In the years from 1956 to 1969, the top marginal rate fell modestly, but was still a lofty 70 percent — and the tax rate on capital gains inched up to 27.5 percent. I was managing funds for investors then. Never did anyone mention taxes as a reason to forgo an investment opportunity that I offered. Under those burdensome rates, moreover, both employment and the gross domestic product (a measure of the nation’s economic output) increased at a rapid clip. The middle class and the rich alike gained ground. So let’s forget about the rich and ultrarich going on strike and stuffing their ample funds under their mattresses if — gasp — capital gains rates and ordinary income rates are increased. The ultrarich, including me, will forever pursue investment opportunities. And, wow, do we have plenty to invest. The Forbes 400, the wealthiest individuals in America, hit a new group record for wealth this year: $1.7 trillion. That’s more than five times the $300 billion total in 1992. In recent years, my gang has been leaving the middle class in the dust. A huge tail wind from tax cuts has pushed us along. In 1992, the tax paid by the 400 highest incomes in the United States (a different universe from the Forbes list) averaged 26.4 percent of adjusted gross income. In 2009, the most recent year reported, the rate was 19.9 percent. It’s nice to have friends in high places. The group’s average income in 2009 was $202 million — which works out to a “wage” of $97,000 per hour, based on a 40-hour workweek. (I’m assuming they’re paid during lunch hours.) Yet more than a quarter of these ultrawealthy paid less than 15 percent of their take in combined federal income and payroll taxes. Half of this crew paid less than 20 percent. And — brace yourself — a few actually paid nothing. This outrage points to the necessity for more than a simple revision in upper-end tax rates, though that’s the place to start. I support President Obama’s proposal to eliminate the Bush tax cuts for high-income taxpayers. However, I prefer a cutoff point somewhat above $250,000 — maybe $500,000 or so. Additionally, we need Congress, right now, to enact a minimum tax on high incomes. I would suggest 30 percent of taxable income between $1 million and $10 million, and 35 percent on amounts above that. A plain and simple rule like that will block the efforts of lobbyists, lawyers and contribution-hungry legislators to keep the ultrarich paying rates well below those incurred by people with income just a tiny fraction of ours. Only a minimum tax on very high incomes will prevent the stated tax rate from being eviscerated by these warriors for the wealthy. Above all, we should not postpone these changes in the name of “reforming” the tax code. True, changes are badly needed. We need to get rid of arrangements like “carried interest” that enable income from labor to be magically converted into capital gains. And it’s sickening that a Cayman Islands mail drop can be central to tax maneuvering by wealthy individuals and corporations. But the reform of such complexities should not promote delay in our correcting simple and expensive inequities. We can’t let those who want to protect the privileged get away with insisting that we do nothing until we can do everything. Our government’s goal should be to bring in revenues of 18.5 percent of G.D.P. and spend about 21 percent of G.D.P. — levels that have been attained over extended periods in the past and can clearly be reached again. As the math makes clear, this won’t stem our budget deficits; in fact, it will continue them. But assuming even conservative projections about inflation and economic growth, this ratio of revenue to spending will keep America’s debt stable in relation to the country’s economic output. In the last fiscal year, we were far away from this fiscal balance — bringing in 15.5 percent of G.D.P. in revenue and spending 22.4 percent. Correcting our course will require major concessions by both Republicans and Democrats. All of America is waiting for Congress to offer a realistic and concrete plan for getting back to this fiscally sound path. Nothing less is acceptable. In the meantime, maybe you’ll run into someone with a terrific investment idea, who won’t go forward with it because of the tax he would owe when it succeeds. Send him my way. Let me unburden him. Warren E. Buffett is the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway.