Recent comments

  • In 2012, the US economy had 5.8 million active corporations. Their total receipts were $29.4 trillion ... Total corporate income in 2012 was nearly $1.8 trillion ... After subtracting out deductions, corporate income was about $1.1 trillion. The tax owed on that amount was $402 billion ... But after subtracting out tax credits, the actual income tax owed was $267 billion.

    And not all corporations pay corporate income tax. Some corporations pass their profits each year to their owners. For example, regulated investment companies pass profits to owners, and so do "S corporations." Out of the [1.8 trillion] in profits, before deductions and credits, a full $678 billion (38% of the total) happen in these pass-through forms, which are applying to a larger share of corporate profits over time.

    http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2015/05/breakdown-of-us-corpora...

    Reply to: Bill O'Reilly: The Rich aren't Rich Enough   9 years 7 months ago
    EPer:
  • Obama must support child labor in Vietnam (used by Nike, the corporate tax dodger).
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/06/obama-tpp-nike_n_7223256.html

    Check out Nike's slaver labor camps...
    http://manufacturingmap.nikeinc.com/

    So how do you sell a shoe for $180 that cost just $5 labor to make?
    http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lormand/poli/nike/nike101-4.htm

    Reply to: ADP Employment Report Shows Bad News for Manufacturing   9 years 7 months ago
    EPer:
  • Sometimes I have a few thoughts after posting, but rather the re-edit the entire post, I just add a comment later (sometimes a long comment).

    An updated chart from the Fed with all the data on one graph for corporate profits/taxes might be nice though ;)

    Reply to: Bill O'Reilly: The Rich aren't Rich Enough   9 years 7 months ago
    EPer:
  • We're not above borrowing a few not original from here graphs, appropriately attributed. Although looks like I need to update corporate profit overviews.

    Reply to: Bill O'Reilly: The Rich aren't Rich Enough   9 years 7 months ago
    EPer:
  • Via Reuters showing: 1) corporate taxes as a percentage of total profits, 2) corporate taxes as a percentage of GDP, and 3) corporate taxes as a percentage of pretax profits.

    And then there's this...

    • Washington Post: The rich get government handouts just like the poor — Here are 10 of them.
    • Washington Post: Elite private universities like Harvard and Princeton get from five to ten times more in taxpayer subsidies per student than do public colleges and universities. And these elite schools pay no taxes on their huge endowments ($35 billion for Harvard alone).
    • Bill Ackman (the billionaire hedge fund kingpin) is benefiting from a special real estate tax break that costs New York over $1 billion a year. Bill Ackman's penthouse cost $91.5 million (So he must NEED a tax break.)
    • Ice Cream kings Ben & Jerry say there are no good reasons for the "tax cut nutters in Congress [the GOP] to abolish the estate tax" for millionaires and billionaires.
    • On the latest Forbes list of the world’s billionaires, four heirs to the Walmart fortune — Christy Walton, Jim Walton, Alice Walton, and S. Robson Walton — occupy four of the top 12 slots with a combined fortune of $160.8 billion. 

    Bill O'Reilly and the GOP think they all (even Ben and Jerry) need MORE tax breaks, not less. Why? Because they're not rich enough? Maybe some people are too rich — and maybe some people shouldn't be rich at all.

    And maybe Bill O'Reilly envies the Walton heirs and others who are much richer than he is. The poor and middle-class don't envy the rich. Just the opposite — a lot of ordinary working folks admire and aspire to be more like them. It's rich people who feels envy towards someone much richer — the uber-rich. Did you every hear of yacht envy?

    Reply to: Bill O'Reilly: The Rich aren't Rich Enough   9 years 7 months ago
    EPer:
  • Reply to: Bill O'Reilly: The Rich aren't Rich Enough   9 years 7 months ago
    EPer:
  • No to ‘Fast Track,’ No to Trade Treachery –> Rep. Alan Grayson’s (D-Florida) excellent 9 minute “Hollywood-produced” video explains how we have "fake trade" and not "free trade" agreements.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7yX90EN5bM

    "We're creating tens of millions of jobs in other countries with our purchasing power, while were losing millions of jobs here in America, because people in other countries are buying THEIR own goods and services rather than ours. They’re not creating jobs in America, but they’re buying our assets — our stocks, our bonds, our mortgages, our homes, our farms, our coast lands, our big businesses and our small businesses."

    He goes on to say that our debt to foreigners totals $35,000 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. — and that foreigners already own 7% of America's assets.

    Rep. Alan Grayson's petition:
    http://tradetreachery.com/ 

    Maybe he could be Bernie Sander's VP ;)

    Reply to: Just another Day of More Bad Trade Deals and Elected Officials Who Don't Care   9 years 7 months ago
    EPer:
  • The TPP is not only going to outsource US jobs, Obama has kept under deep cover the fact that it makes LABOR as fluid between nations as goods. Anyone from a member nation who wants to apply for a job in the US will be allowed to do so. Obama is destroying our national sovereignty, and he will use the TPP and Climate Change treaties to do it. Do your homework, folks. We CANNOT allow Obama fast track authority on TPP. It is the American workers last stand.

    Reply to: Using RICO to Stop Union-busting and Restore Wages   9 years 7 months ago
    EPer:
  • "Globalization" Was Policy, Not Something That Happened: The downward pressure on wages was the deliberate outcome of government policies designed to put U.S. manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world. This was a conscious choice. Our trade deals could have been designed to put our doctors and lawyers in direct competition with much lower paid professionals in the developing world.

    http://www.cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/globalization-was-policy-not-so...

    Skepticism About Trade Deals is Warranted: The Clinton administration claimed [NAFTA] would open a new market to U.S. business, and U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, President Clinton, and even Labor Secretary Robert Reich argued that it would create jobs for American workers ... that NAFTA would help keep U.S. manufacturers from moving to Southeast Asia ... What actually happened? The trade balance with Mexico went from positive to very negative, resulting in the loss of more than 600,000 jobs in the United States. More recent claims about the expected benefits of free trade agreement with Korea have proven hollow, too. Instead of creating 70,000 jobs, the net effect has been a higher trade deficit and the loss of 60,000 jobs ... And then there’s Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China and China’s admission to the WTO, which led to an explosion of imports and the loss of more than 3 million jobs, mostly in manufacturing.
    http://www.epi.org/blog/skepticism-about-trade-deals-is-warranted/

    Robert Reich: For fast track -- before he was against it. “I still regret not doing more to strengthen the North American Free Trade Act’s labor and environmental side-agreements” when he was working for Clinton. “The TPP is NAFTA on steroids.”
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/in-the-loop/wp/2014/01/29/robert-rei...

    Reply to: Just another Day of More Bad Trade Deals and Elected Officials Who Don't Care   9 years 7 months ago
    EPer:
  • Duncan is generally considered to be pro-"fair trade" which distinguishes him from most Republicans. He has also been strong on immigration restriction, which helps the working class and American high tech workers, before being strong on immigration was the thing to be. He never has been and never will be a tool of the cheap labor lobby. It is fair to think of him as about the closest thing to a Buchananite among nationally elected Republicans as there is.

    As for foreign policy, prior to WWII, an America First noninterventionist foreign policy was the default position among the working class in flyover country, and globalist interventionism was generally a position associated with the Northeastern elite. How that got flipped around so that now a lot of the flyover country GOP base supports interventionism is a subject that deserves exploration, but it is primarily the position of hard core ideologues. Less ideological types who nonetheless lean Red are not as invested in it, particularly younger voters, so there is a gap there that a more populist conservative candidate could fill.

    Reply to: Run Jimmy Duncan Run!   9 years 7 months ago
    EPer:
  • The price indexes are change against themselves. GDP price index is ONLY for domestic goods produced in the United States. Whereas other price indexes probably include global sources, etc.

    They do not add assuredly, each one is calculated based on different things. Some description is in the NIPA handbook, ch.1-4 but as usual the BEA is not "up front" on these calculates (or is the Census).

    Reply to: Economy Stalled as First Quarter GDP Only 0.2%   9 years 7 months ago
    EPer:
  • after the release by wikileaks of the chapter on investment, i wrote about fracking and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, with a focus on mandated exports of natural gas to Asia, where prices are 5 times what they are here...

    the private investment protection mechanisms of these deals are particularly egregious ... they establish the means by which a multinational corporation can get compensation from a signatory government if one of that government's laws interferes with the corporation's profits...it sets up a supra-national court under the World Trade Organization's Dispute Settlement Body, whereby foreign firms can sue governments and obtain taxpayer compensation for whatever "expected future profits" that the government's law encumbered...the adjudication of these disputes would not be by elected officials of any of the signatory governments, but by a tribunal of international trade attorneys representing the multinational corporations....in effect, this trade agreement, and the similar trade agreement that we are negotiating with Europe, gives these world trade tribunals trump power over federal, state or local financial and environmental regulations, patent law, labor laws and worker safety rules, public health, anti-smoking legislation and drug laws, or any law that could be construed as interfering with corporate profits...

    as i concluded, if these agreements pass, we'll be transitioning into a new era where governments are completely subservient to the global corporate oligarchy in a way that will make what we've seen with Citizen's United seem like child' s play in comparison...

    Reply to: Just another Day of More Bad Trade Deals and Elected Officials Who Don't Care   9 years 7 months ago
    EPer:
  • the deflator for PCE was negative 2.0%; the deflator for exports was negative 10.0%, the deflator for imports was negative 16.4%, and the deflator for government consumption was negative 1.7%…the only positive deflator was 0.9% for private investment, which is about 15% of GDP…so how they could arrive at a overall GDP deflator of just minus 0.1%?

    see table 4: http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/2015/pdf/gdp1q15_adv.pdf

    Reply to: Economy Stalled as First Quarter GDP Only 0.2%   9 years 7 months ago
    EPer:
  • Here on EP it's all economics all of the time. The Instapopulist almost (and I said almost with the rule no economic fiction and I should also add no promotion of things illegal and/or evil), anything goes...
    but we want to focus on economics, labor issues, anything $$ and especially anything $$ that effects citizens as a whole. I have no idea who John Duncan is either! ;)

    Reply to: Run Jimmy Duncan Run!   9 years 7 months ago
    EPer:
  • There is a direct correlation between immigration and middle class wage decline and wealth distribution. Until the immigration debacle is put under control, nothing else will work to solve these problems.

    Reply to: Using RICO to Stop Union-busting and Restore Wages   9 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • This is an economics site and we know, have seen the studies, labor economics that a massive increase in worker supply will lower wages. Businesses have know this forever and why they love illegal labor. Meatpacking used to be a career, union job and one could support a family, benefits, middle class income. Now it's dangerous, minimum wage and you cannot even get hired unless you are illegal. There is a fish packing plant near where I am and they will not hire anyone here legally. Yet city government, the law, state, does nothing even though the locals and called in complaint after complaint.

    Reply to: Using RICO to Stop Union-busting and Restore Wages   9 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • OK I hate to say this because it goes against the status quo. As long as we have hundreds of applicants for each open position, wages will continue to spiral down. There is a cost to illegal immigration that nobody wants to admit. The middle class is paying the cost.

    Reply to: Using RICO to Stop Union-busting and Restore Wages   9 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • Economist Robert Hall:

    * The standard of living stopped growing around 2000.
    * The decline in the labor share seems to have started around 2000.
    * Capital per household rose more slowly after 2000.
    * Hours per household grew rapidly until 2000.
    * The decline in hours since 2000 is the single biggest factor in the decline in household earnings.
    * Participation rose during the 1990s, but has fallen since.

    The LFPR peaked in April 2000, and has been in a steady decline ever since. In the last year of his presidency Bill Clinton called on Congress to help him change China’s normal trade relations status with the U.S. to permanent. Clinton signed on Oct 10, 2000. Since then our trade deficit has risen as well. Coincidence?

    Now Obama wants fast-track for the TPP trade agreement. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders oppose it, while Hillary Clinton seems to be sitting on the corporate fence.

    http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2015/04/robert-hall-sec...

    Reply to: Using RICO to Stop Union-busting and Restore Wages   9 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • Robert Reich: "Just-in-time" scheduling is another part of America’s new “flexible” economy — along with the move to independent contractors and the growing reliance on “share economy” businesses. New software is behind all of this — digital platforms enabling businesses to match their costs exactly with their needs. Businesses used to consider employees "fixed costs". That meant steady jobs. And with steady jobs came steady paychecks, along with regular and predictable work schedules. But employees are now becoming "variable costs" of doing business — depending on ups and downs in demand that may change hour by hour, possibly minute by minute. American workers can’t simultaneously be variable costs for business, yet live in their own fixed-cost worlds. We need a federal law requiring employers to pay for scheduled work. Alternatively, if American workers can’t get more regular and predictable hours, they at least need stronger safety nets. These would include unemployment insurance for people who can only get part-time work and a minimum guaranteed basic income.

    http://robertreich.org/post/116924386855

    Reply to: Using RICO to Stop Union-busting and Restore Wages   9 years 8 months ago
    EPer:
  • There should be some concern given to the effect of longer life expectancy to us people who started working on having a nest egg based on the time we started doing it. The retirement income, if any, is creeping up, but the taxes go up according to the higher income. Maybe a tax reduction based on ages would be very appropriate.

    Reply to: A Choice between Defense, Old People and Tax Hikes   9 years 8 months ago
    EPer:

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