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POPSWhat Is Economics? Exchange is the trading of goods for money or for other goods. A market is any mechanism for buyers and sellers to exchange goods. A free market is a market in which buyers and sellers are generally free to decide what to exchange and under what terms. Money is anything generally accepted as a medium of exchange and thus useful for storing or measuring economic value. The price of a good is the amount of economic value that must be exchanged to acquire it. Demand is willingness and ability to buy. Supply is availability and proffer for sale. The scarcity of a good is the excess of its demand over its supply, and in a free market is measured by price.
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POPSObama's Fair Tax Mr. Warren, a man of the cloth, has done us a great service by asking the candidates to answer a pretty secular question: What kind of income makes an American "rich"? Maybe in the more secular setting of an upcoming debate, one of our nonpastor moderators could ask the candidates the moral question: What specific rate of individual taxation would it take for the rich to be paying their fair share?
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POPSLYING FORWARDS FROM THE RIGHTWING My niece sent me this email and asked me the following... Hey Aunt C, Somebody sent this to me and I know you are fantastic at finding the truth, so is this true or some republican trying to change peoples votes. Thanks, (Niece) LINK HERE: http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/taxes.asp Hi, (Niece). it is completely false... Thanks for asking... I wish that others would question this baloney the republican rightwing sends around to the naive, who mindlessly accept these stupid forwards as the truth... A sad America, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, (and the middle class continues to disappear) is the result of such irrationality... The very ones who get hurt by these forwards are the ones who would probably be helped if the wealthy, whether they be individuals or corporations were forced to pay their share of taxes, instead of getting tax breaks that the republican party keep giving them. http://thinkingblue.blogspot.com
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POPSFormer half-ton man endures hard times
Patrick acknowledges willpower is not his forte. To the chagrin of Edie and Harris, Patrick still smokes a pack and a half of cigarettes a day. He also has a weakness for chips and salsa. “I notice that stress eating is something I do well,” Patrick said. The Deuels moved to an apartment in Alliance a little more than a year ago so Edie could take a job as a school counselor. Her contract wasn’t renewed at the end of the school year, and she remains out of work. Patrick also is unemployed. He said he’s been going through vocational rehabilitation to determine the type of work that would best suit him. The former restaurant manager said he definitely won’t work in food service again. There’s too much temptation, he said. The couple’s only income is Patrick’s monthly Social Security check of less than $600. Patrick also has had to deal with the recent deaths of his grandmother, with whom he was very close, and of a longtime family friend. He said he talks to a psycholog
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POPSFrozen Katrina People will freeze to death this winter while republicans ignore assistance in favor of voting for offshore oil drilling. Last year LIHEAP was only able to assist 16% of eligible recipients forcing the poor to choose between food, medicine or heating fuel. And Bush proposed cutting the aid by $379 million. The total annual funding for this program amounts to less than what the U.S. spends every week in Iraq. They way we treat our disadvantaged, poor and homeless is atrocious.
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POPSWhoring for Her Big Wind Investments Naturally, the Pickens Big Wind plan is proudly endorsed by Do-Nothing Pelosi’s friends at the obstructionist Sierra Club. Through another company, Mesa Power, Pickens has committed upwards of $12 billion in wind farms on the Texas panhandle. CEFC and Mesa Power are separate entities. But what benefits one piece of the Pickens puzzle benefits them all. The wind venture, as Pickens himself acknowledges, depends on permanent federal subsidies. Speaker Pelosi bought between $50,000 and $100,000 of stock in Pickens’ CLNE Corp. in May 2007 on the day of the initial public offering: “She, and other investors, stand to gain a substantial return on their investment if gasoline prices stay high and municipal, state and even the Federal governments start using natural gas as their primary fuel source. If gasoline prices fall? Alternative fuels and the cost to convert fleets over to them becomes less and less attractive.”
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POPS The Great Corporate Tax Heist Not surprisingly, the income collected from corporations has been declining as a percentage of gross domestic product, with the burden transferred to your income and payroll taxes. According to a study by the Treasury Department, from 2000-2006, an average of 2.2 percent of GDP was collected in corporate taxes. This compares to an average of 3.4 percent in other industrial countries. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that, under current law, corporate revenues will decline to 1.9 percent of GDP by 2017. But the GAO study confirms what we already knew: Whatever the nominal tax rate, U.S. corporations pay an effective rate among the lowest in the industrial world.
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POPSIs 0% Too High for Corporate Taxes? While Repubs fight to lower corp tax rates, the US Govt Accountability Office reports that 2/3 of corporations PAID NO TAXES AT ALL between '98 and '05. Seems like corporations have all the rights of individuals but none of the responsibilities.
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POPSIndian Truat Fund Scandal- 1887 the US government took control of the properties and never paid a nickel for the oil, timber etc etc. 121 years of rip-off. Now a judge agreed to pay some. My question: Where are the billions, not millions?
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POPSIt's Good to be a Corporation in US! More than 38,000 foreign corporations had no tax liability in 2005 and 1.2 million U.S. companies paid no income tax, the GAO said. Combined, the companies had $2.5 trillion in sales. About 25 percent of the U.S. corporations not paying corporate taxes were considered large corporations, meaning they had at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in receipts. The GAO said it analyzed data from the Internal Revenue Service, examining samples of corporate returns for the years 1998 through 2005. For 2005, for example, it reviewed 110,003 tax returns from among more than 1.2 million corporations doing business in the U.S. Dorgan and Levin have complained about companies abusing transfer prices -- amounts charged on transactions between companies in a group, such as a parent and subsidiary. In some cases, multinational companies can manipulate transfer prices to shift income from higher to lower tax jurisdictions, cutting their tax liabilities.
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