I just finished writing a forthcoming policy paper on the need to fix our Unemployment Insurance system (which I will post when it's published by New America) and there's some really shady shit that employers get up to. The worst case I heard about was this cement company where the boss would fire people, call them up the next day and say "hey can you come into work today" (specifically not saying, by the way, I've just offered you a job) and then when upset people understandably tell him to go to hell, turn around and deny UI benefits on the grounds that that constitutes a refusal of bona fide employment offers.
This constitutes tax evasion and tax fraud in my opinion, and I'd love to see the DoJ and the DoL go after these bosses.
You can still send as much money as you desire overseas, you just can't sent it to a BANK who won't report the transaction.
I guess, in reply to those who are afraid there is some hidden goal here, I'd ask "what alternate method would YOU propose to fix the problem of hidden Swiss accounts?". These cost tens of billions of tax revenue/year.
I'll note you've been required to report any foreign accounts over 10K (if memory serves), yearly, for at least the 10 years of so I've had one. Problem was, since the Swiss (and others) guaranteed you they wouldn't tell, you could cheat if you wanted. Hence this new reg.
So, zero difference if you were already law-abiding. Again, you can send as much as you like, as long as, if you're sending it to a bank, that bank agrees to report US holdings. If not, and the amount is over 50K, Uncle Sam withholds 30%.
Here's the KPMG breakdown on the new regs:
• Foreign account tax compliance measures, including:
• the imposition of 30-percent withholding requirements on certain payments made to foreign financial institutions unless those institutions agree to adhere to certain reporting requirements for U.S. account holders;
• the imposition of 30-percent withholding requirements on certain payments made to non-financial foreign entities unless those entities comply with certain reporting requirements as to U.S. owners;
• the repeal of preferred treatment for foreign-targeted bearer bonds;
• a requirement that individuals holding more than $50,000 in reportable foreign assets report information about such assets on their U.S. tax returns, and a penalty of up to $50,000 for failure to so report;
• penalties of 40 percent for under-payments attributable to undisclosed foreign financial assets;
• a presumption that where a U.S. person transfers property to a foreign trust, the trust has a U.S. beneficiary;
Way to go Midtowng. This post is viral. All EPers, this post represents something really important for all of us to attempt to do and that's read legislation. Every damn time Congress passes something, you can bet there is some sort of clause, loophole or something that slides by, hidden under legislative legalize. If we can read the bills and get others to join in on reading the bills, we might be able to catch more of this stuff. Sometimes you don't find out about the loopholes until a good 5 years has passed since the bill was put into law.
I think it was a play on the continual worry/claims that cell phone radio waves do evil things (and in many cases....uh, they do/did!).
The GOP ad and I wish I could have cut out the end because of course then it comes into the fact they offer nothing, but the first part is a scream!
Believe it or not, this series takes me the longest to put together. There is so much stuff out there which people think is funny, which I find really bad, and I have to watch it all hunting around for things that are somehow economically funny.
Here is the down-low on Meth (and any other 'illegal' drug)
1. Like the IRS/Tax code, the 'illegal' drug trade is a lucrative 'business' for your 'hero's in uniform'. The AM talk-Cons use the 'hero' refrain almost as Biblical citation when referring to the 'law' EnForcement community.
2. Legalizing drugs - of all kinds, is the ultimate expression of Liberty - the ability for sovereign individuals to Govern themselves - i.e., the 'Contractual agreements among Men', and 'My rights stop at your nose', and vice/versa.
3. Control Freak-ism, as practiced by our current two-party system, short-circuits the above dynamic by placing a 'nanny'/'proxy'/'middleman' or whatever you would prefer to call it, in the middle of the 'transaction' of Liberty.
Why?
$$$ and to an equal extent, Control.
But you already knew that - at least to some degree.
Until society-at-large has had it's fill of being 'Over-Governed', and wishes to un-hitch itself from BullSh!t 'laws', save for what is Constitutionally Prescribed per our Founding Documents, expect (Much) more of the same crapola along the merry way to a 'Security State'.
The US does not have the power to force foreign banks to comply. OK, perhaps UBS and other International Banks that have a US presence can be coerced into compliance. These banks will (and already have) simply not do business with US citizens.
In a couple of years the dollar won't be worth the paper it is printed on so why take the liability?
I didn't volunteer for a single campaign in 2008. I wrote up 3 "per request" posts I think the entire time. Wait, I did some phone work for Hillary when I realized Obama would be even worse on trade, outsourcing/insourcing, but that was just a few hours, during a primary. (because obviously I was not enthusiastic about Hillary either). I became really disgusted with all of the work in 2006 to promptly be ignored 100% once he won. Just use the damn techies to get some damn votes for we know they are technically savvy but as a voting block...don't add up enough.
Yeah, EP is becoming pretty popular and much more analytic, focus on writing accurate, sourced pieces with details that (I hope) cannot be found elsewhere on the blogs and media.
noslaves.com is alive, but it's now pure tech labor issues. I got burnt out on doing all of the work and I wish others would post over there. I also shake head with people claiming to be technical, who cannot figure out how to format a URL. Although I wrote up one piece explaining the reason why the contract law was so messed up for techies and it got 10,000 hits in 1 day...so I guess they only care when the results are gruesome and morbid. But noslaves.com does get readers, and if there were other quality writings on it, I think it would help, it's set to "take off" in terms of hits, it simply needs some quality writings and frankly I'm so much more "into" straight, overall "everything econ". I get very burnt out on reading the latest lobbyist written fiction on how there is a "shortage of tech labor" and then point over and over to the actual stats which show how false such stuff is.
EP is a straight up economics site and I'm also the content police, esp. on "controversial" topics and to make the case very clear by the statistics, economic theory, facts. The mottos are listed in the FAQ and I think it's served us well over all to stay out of the misinformation wars path and do our best to really get to the answers and show where we dug around to reach conclusions.
I think you're right, it's pre-ordained to declare the economy "all good" to try to get the public ignoring all of those falling off of the roles, plus stop any legislation, action.
Watch, now Congress won't want to approve any further COBRA subsidy or unemployment benefits extensions because of the "good" March jobs report news.
Robert, I'm very impressed with your blog, and I put up a link to it on my new blog. I hadn't visited your old No Slaves sight for a long time and am thrilled to see the site you have developed. It is an instant favorite of mine. Your intellectual activism has come a long way since our time together on the John Kerry forums, years ago when I was known as the Intellectual Advocate.
Am I reading the chart correctly? The Bush Tax cuts cost 500+ billion a year? A stimulus package is once (or twice) and done but tax cuts are forever. Lets tax capital gains and dividends in the taxpayers bracket. If Obama pulls this off the government neeeds to be in a position to benefit with some revenue enhancement.
Yes not only are Defense and DHS blowing money but many of their employees sit around watching Fox News all day talking like Teabaggers. Fact. The hypocrisy is unfathomable.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., alleged that KBR knowingly included impermissible costs for private armed security in billings to the U.S. Army covering the 2003-2006 time period, the department said.
With my policy it goes like this. Regardless of just how incompetent, wrong or even dangerous a MD is, if they claim they did "service rendered", they get paid. Then, I have a host of things covered that well, frankly are proven not to work.
Now why isn't nutritional supplements covered, when many of those do work, yet some Big Pharma prescription that doesn't do much of anything but a load of side effects and costs $200/month...get covered.
You cannot even get prices before visiting a Doctor, they will not tell you how much X test, procedure will cost and it gets worse, what they tell you it costs, isn't what it really costs and what the insurance has contracted with them, isn't the same as what they quote you.
There is no way to get a "refund" for bad medical care and then even more ridiculous, the lack of urgent care, after hours so even people with insurance are pushed to the emergency room for things like Bronchitis, and then tagged with a $6k bill when they emergency room might have (after sitting there for hours) prescribed an anti-biotic.
I mean there is so much "stuck on stupid" with medical costs it's unbelievable.
Then, on insurance policies, you cannot buy "ala carte". For example, you may never want mental health of any sort of coverage but what lab work paid for. Nope, can't get that.
Its almost a chemists drug dujour thing going on. There will be something new down the road created that is even more addictive and even more profitable.
Meth has become so pervasive in society that the AMC series Breaking Bad is based on it. I wouldn't doubt there are some real high school chemistry teachers out there in the US making a killing cooking for biker gangs right now.
Money is a powerful motive and the reason that prohibition failed is that there was too much money in the illegal trade due to demand. That gels well with what you say in your other post. The people here are what creates the problem, admit it or not. Without demand there would be no supply.
Clearly legalizing marijuana nationwide will happen in my lifetime which probably means the next 20-30 years. These other harder drugs need to be dealt with through more effective means rather than imprisonment. We are creating hard core criminals from a cross section of society that is either drawn by the money or is genetically easily addicted.
Portugal legalized or decriminalized all drugs some time ago and crime has gone down.
It is very difficult to rationalize the jobs report. The fact is that unemployemnt increased by 134000 between february and March. In addition there has been a steady decline in the size of the registered labour force- 398,000 fewer people in the civilian labour force. In addition there is an increase of 546,000 people on benefits 0-26 weeks and a sharp decline of 414000 people on claims over 27 weeks- there are but three explanations 1) data error 2) these people have returned to work or 3) they have run out of benefits and disappeared from the sytstem. The labour department has these statisitics- they know if a claimant has returned to work based on their ssn but they clearly chose not to release the data in a language that tells the real state of affairs.
The united states in entering a stage of the frightening reality that unemployment is way beyond 10% - in all liklihood given the length of the recession and fact that hundreds of thousands or millions of americans are running out of benefits, a cynical embellishment of 162,000 new jobs being created almost all by government programs and temporary at that is an indictment of economic collapse and that if we are to be seduced by this idea of global economic recovery we have given up all pretence of deductive intelligence
The ecomomic situation is so bad that unrestricted printing of money to fund programs and debt is not even inflationary- problem a strong case for deflation and the Great Depression we are really in on this side of the hemisphere- we could say thank the powers that be that we have asia on a rampage, but the idea that production can be transferred globally to one country with a large and cheap labour force and not not have irreversible repurcussions on every greedy capitalistic economy around the globe is pure insanity.
what's next- hey there is no bandaid- no koolaid- no US aid- only the stark ugly truth that whatever happens it will be the consequence of unmanageable human greed- whereever.
While one would expect construction to wither and die due to the collapse of both Residential and Commercial Real Estate, what is surprising is to watch manufacturing job losses be much greater than anything else. I hope to find out (beyond the 3 big autos imploding) why exactly those losses were so great when the real bubble was in residential and of course finance. But it's an amazing graphic where health care is one of the few growth sectors. What does that mean? Not everyone suddenly turned old an feeble in such a short time period.
(h/t Ritholtz who has grabbed graphs from others in a unemployment chart round up.
What more can one say about the SEC, which has been too busy with tackling matters after the fact. Even this approach appears to be misplaced, as it will look to prosecute matters which until now may not have been illegal and for which many of these major financial institutions have taken internal actions to address so that they don't have a situation similar to that of Lehman Brothers. This would appear to be another instance where the SEC will mismanage their limited resources, being late to the party and prosecute something that doesn't require prosecution, simply because for public appearances it looks like they are doing their job. The SEC needs to focus its energies on real, substantive investigations that will protect public investors.
I just finished writing a forthcoming policy paper on the need to fix our Unemployment Insurance system (which I will post when it's published by New America) and there's some really shady shit that employers get up to. The worst case I heard about was this cement company where the boss would fire people, call them up the next day and say "hey can you come into work today" (specifically not saying, by the way, I've just offered you a job) and then when upset people understandably tell him to go to hell, turn around and deny UI benefits on the grounds that that constitutes a refusal of bona fide employment offers.
This constitutes tax evasion and tax fraud in my opinion, and I'd love to see the DoJ and the DoL go after these bosses.
One more reason why we need to rebuild our social insurance system.
You can still send as much money as you desire overseas, you just can't sent it to a BANK who won't report the transaction.
I guess, in reply to those who are afraid there is some hidden goal here, I'd ask "what alternate method would YOU propose to fix the problem of hidden Swiss accounts?". These cost tens of billions of tax revenue/year.
I'll note you've been required to report any foreign accounts over 10K (if memory serves), yearly, for at least the 10 years of so I've had one. Problem was, since the Swiss (and others) guaranteed you they wouldn't tell, you could cheat if you wanted. Hence this new reg.
So, zero difference if you were already law-abiding. Again, you can send as much as you like, as long as, if you're sending it to a bank, that bank agrees to report US holdings. If not, and the amount is over 50K, Uncle Sam withholds 30%.
Here's the KPMG breakdown on the new regs:
• Foreign account tax compliance measures, including:
• the imposition of 30-percent withholding requirements on certain payments made to foreign financial institutions unless those institutions agree to adhere to certain reporting requirements for U.S. account holders;
• the imposition of 30-percent withholding requirements on certain payments made to non-financial foreign entities unless those entities comply with certain reporting requirements as to U.S. owners;
• the repeal of preferred treatment for foreign-targeted bearer bonds;
• a requirement that individuals holding more than $50,000 in reportable foreign assets report information about such assets on their U.S. tax returns, and a penalty of up to $50,000 for failure to so report;
• penalties of 40 percent for under-payments attributable to undisclosed foreign financial assets;
• a presumption that where a U.S. person transfers property to a foreign trust, the trust has a U.S. beneficiary;
http://us.kpmg.com/microsite/tax/ies/2010_Flash_Alerts/fa10-066.pdf
Way to go Midtowng. This post is viral. All EPers, this post represents something really important for all of us to attempt to do and that's read legislation. Every damn time Congress passes something, you can bet there is some sort of clause, loophole or something that slides by, hidden under legislative legalize. If we can read the bills and get others to join in on reading the bills, we might be able to catch more of this stuff. Sometimes you don't find out about the loopholes until a good 5 years has passed since the bill was put into law.
cracked me up to no end.
I think it was a play on the continual worry/claims that cell phone radio waves do evil things (and in many cases....uh, they do/did!).
The GOP ad and I wish I could have cut out the end because of course then it comes into the fact they offer nothing, but the first part is a scream!
Believe it or not, this series takes me the longest to put together. There is so much stuff out there which people think is funny, which I find really bad, and I have to watch it all hunting around for things that are somehow economically funny.
Happy Easter!
Here is the down-low on Meth (and any other 'illegal' drug)
1. Like the IRS/Tax code, the 'illegal' drug trade is a lucrative 'business' for your 'hero's in uniform'. The AM talk-Cons use the 'hero' refrain almost as Biblical citation when referring to the 'law' EnForcement community.
2. Legalizing drugs - of all kinds, is the ultimate expression of Liberty - the ability for sovereign individuals to Govern themselves - i.e., the 'Contractual agreements among Men', and 'My rights stop at your nose', and vice/versa.
3. Control Freak-ism, as practiced by our current two-party system, short-circuits the above dynamic by placing a 'nanny'/'proxy'/'middleman' or whatever you would prefer to call it, in the middle of the 'transaction' of Liberty.
Why?
$$$ and to an equal extent, Control.
But you already knew that - at least to some degree.
Until society-at-large has had it's fill of being 'Over-Governed', and wishes to un-hitch itself from BullSh!t 'laws', save for what is Constitutionally Prescribed per our Founding Documents, expect (Much) more of the same crapola along the merry way to a 'Security State'.
Loved the goat and rabbit!
The US does not have the power to force foreign banks to comply. OK, perhaps UBS and other International Banks that have a US presence can be coerced into compliance. These banks will (and already have) simply not do business with US citizens.
In a couple of years the dollar won't be worth the paper it is printed on so why take the liability?
I didn't volunteer for a single campaign in 2008. I wrote up 3 "per request" posts I think the entire time. Wait, I did some phone work for Hillary when I realized Obama would be even worse on trade, outsourcing/insourcing, but that was just a few hours, during a primary. (because obviously I was not enthusiastic about Hillary either). I became really disgusted with all of the work in 2006 to promptly be ignored 100% once he won. Just use the damn techies to get some damn votes for we know they are technically savvy but as a voting block...don't add up enough.
Yeah, EP is becoming pretty popular and much more analytic, focus on writing accurate, sourced pieces with details that (I hope) cannot be found elsewhere on the blogs and media.
noslaves.com is alive, but it's now pure tech labor issues. I got burnt out on doing all of the work and I wish others would post over there. I also shake head with people claiming to be technical, who cannot figure out how to format a URL. Although I wrote up one piece explaining the reason why the contract law was so messed up for techies and it got 10,000 hits in 1 day...so I guess they only care when the results are gruesome and morbid. But noslaves.com does get readers, and if there were other quality writings on it, I think it would help, it's set to "take off" in terms of hits, it simply needs some quality writings and frankly I'm so much more "into" straight, overall "everything econ". I get very burnt out on reading the latest lobbyist written fiction on how there is a "shortage of tech labor" and then point over and over to the actual stats which show how false such stuff is.
EP is a straight up economics site and I'm also the content police, esp. on "controversial" topics and to make the case very clear by the statistics, economic theory, facts. The mottos are listed in the FAQ and I think it's served us well over all to stay out of the misinformation wars path and do our best to really get to the answers and show where we dug around to reach conclusions.
I think you're right, it's pre-ordained to declare the economy "all good" to try to get the public ignoring all of those falling off of the roles, plus stop any legislation, action.
Watch, now Congress won't want to approve any further COBRA subsidy or unemployment benefits extensions because of the "good" March jobs report news.
Robert, I'm very impressed with your blog, and I put up a link to it on my new blog. I hadn't visited your old No Slaves sight for a long time and am thrilled to see the site you have developed. It is an instant favorite of mine. Your intellectual activism has come a long way since our time together on the John Kerry forums, years ago when I was known as the Intellectual Advocate.
Frank the Underemployed Professional
http://FlusterCucked.blogspot.com
Am I reading the chart correctly? The Bush Tax cuts cost 500+ billion a year? A stimulus package is once (or twice) and done but tax cuts are forever. Lets tax capital gains and dividends in the taxpayers bracket. If Obama pulls this off the government neeeds to be in a position to benefit with some revenue enhancement.
Yes not only are Defense and DHS blowing money but many of their employees sit around watching Fox News all day talking like Teabaggers. Fact. The hypocrisy is unfathomable.
a minor drop in the bucket, but finally, at least something. KBR sued by U.S. justice:
No financial amounts that I can find.
With my policy it goes like this. Regardless of just how incompetent, wrong or even dangerous a MD is, if they claim they did "service rendered", they get paid. Then, I have a host of things covered that well, frankly are proven not to work.
Now why isn't nutritional supplements covered, when many of those do work, yet some Big Pharma prescription that doesn't do much of anything but a load of side effects and costs $200/month...get covered.
You cannot even get prices before visiting a Doctor, they will not tell you how much X test, procedure will cost and it gets worse, what they tell you it costs, isn't what it really costs and what the insurance has contracted with them, isn't the same as what they quote you.
There is no way to get a "refund" for bad medical care and then even more ridiculous, the lack of urgent care, after hours so even people with insurance are pushed to the emergency room for things like Bronchitis, and then tagged with a $6k bill when they emergency room might have (after sitting there for hours) prescribed an anti-biotic.
I mean there is so much "stuck on stupid" with medical costs it's unbelievable.
Then, on insurance policies, you cannot buy "ala carte". For example, you may never want mental health of any sort of coverage but what lab work paid for. Nope, can't get that.
Its almost a chemists drug dujour thing going on. There will be something new down the road created that is even more addictive and even more profitable.
Meth has become so pervasive in society that the AMC series Breaking Bad is based on it. I wouldn't doubt there are some real high school chemistry teachers out there in the US making a killing cooking for biker gangs right now.
Money is a powerful motive and the reason that prohibition failed is that there was too much money in the illegal trade due to demand. That gels well with what you say in your other post. The people here are what creates the problem, admit it or not. Without demand there would be no supply.
Clearly legalizing marijuana nationwide will happen in my lifetime which probably means the next 20-30 years. These other harder drugs need to be dealt with through more effective means rather than imprisonment. We are creating hard core criminals from a cross section of society that is either drawn by the money or is genetically easily addicted.
Portugal legalized or decriminalized all drugs some time ago and crime has gone down.
Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work?
It is very difficult to rationalize the jobs report. The fact is that unemployemnt increased by 134000 between february and March. In addition there has been a steady decline in the size of the registered labour force- 398,000 fewer people in the civilian labour force. In addition there is an increase of 546,000 people on benefits 0-26 weeks and a sharp decline of 414000 people on claims over 27 weeks- there are but three explanations 1) data error 2) these people have returned to work or 3) they have run out of benefits and disappeared from the sytstem. The labour department has these statisitics- they know if a claimant has returned to work based on their ssn but they clearly chose not to release the data in a language that tells the real state of affairs.
The united states in entering a stage of the frightening reality that unemployment is way beyond 10% - in all liklihood given the length of the recession and fact that hundreds of thousands or millions of americans are running out of benefits, a cynical embellishment of 162,000 new jobs being created almost all by government programs and temporary at that is an indictment of economic collapse and that if we are to be seduced by this idea of global economic recovery we have given up all pretence of deductive intelligence
The ecomomic situation is so bad that unrestricted printing of money to fund programs and debt is not even inflationary- problem a strong case for deflation and the Great Depression we are really in on this side of the hemisphere- we could say thank the powers that be that we have asia on a rampage, but the idea that production can be transferred globally to one country with a large and cheap labour force and not not have irreversible repurcussions on every greedy capitalistic economy around the globe is pure insanity.
what's next- hey there is no bandaid- no koolaid- no US aid- only the stark ugly truth that whatever happens it will be the consequence of unmanageable human greed- whereever.
The Wall Street Journal put together a flash graphic showing the growth of job losses per business/occupational sector that's just dynamite.
here is the link.
While one would expect construction to wither and die due to the collapse of both Residential and Commercial Real Estate, what is surprising is to watch manufacturing job losses be much greater than anything else. I hope to find out (beyond the 3 big autos imploding) why exactly those losses were so great when the real bubble was in residential and of course finance. But it's an amazing graphic where health care is one of the few growth sectors. What does that mean? Not everyone suddenly turned old an feeble in such a short time period.
(h/t Ritholtz who has grabbed graphs from others in a unemployment chart round up.
In addition to the three excellent books mentioned, add "13 Bankers" by Simon Johnson and James Kwak.
Together, these four tomes will give you all you need to know
about "what happened and why".
That's an interesting slant on this, that they are announcing other areas so they do not have to deal with 105 repos or Lehman.
I haven't looked into the SEC staffing, I know they are understaffed but what's the salary in comparison to private?
What more can one say about the SEC, which has been too busy with tackling matters after the fact. Even this approach appears to be misplaced, as it will look to prosecute matters which until now may not have been illegal and for which many of these major financial institutions have taken internal actions to address so that they don't have a situation similar to that of Lehman Brothers. This would appear to be another instance where the SEC will mismanage their limited resources, being late to the party and prosecute something that doesn't require prosecution, simply because for public appearances it looks like they are doing their job. The SEC needs to focus its energies on real, substantive investigations that will protect public investors.
Down with the Free-Traitors.
this is different. Thanks for going into the details because the news just reads the headline and doesn't tell the real story on temporary jobs.
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