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SD pension mess hits Journal's front page
Projected budgets always look good - it's easy to manipulate expected numbers. I think for a real look at the situation you need to look at the most recent years data where the really numbers come in. I really don't understand your last question in the context of your post. You explain why it's impossible to make any cuts then ask why you should have to pay more taxes. Sorry I don't believe that the US government should continue racking up a balance on a gigantic $17 Trillion credit card. So if you don't want to rack up debt then income has to equal expenses. I'm proposing a combination of spending cuts and revenue increases. The income tax is a very large portion of US federal revenue so I think any major revenue increase has to include an income tax hike. The income distribution in the U.S. is reaching historically high extremes. I think that's a somewhat dangerous situation and one of the ways to address that is with a more progressive tax scheme. So that's why I think the tax increase has to be tilted towards the wealthy.— August 18, 2014 8:35 a.m.
SD pension mess hits Journal's front page
Well admittedly yes it is easy for me to say raise SS age - I'm just a guy typing away on a computer. The hard job is actually balancing the budget. That is really hard. But I would say many (frankly most) political leaders also do something easy: They tell the public that we can balance the budget without big cuts to social security, defense, and tax increases. Somehow future economic growth will magically fix everything. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federa… In 2013 we had roughly a 700B deficit. So to fix that we need some combination of revenue increases and spending cuts that add up to 700B. I'm proposing something like 100B increase in personal income taxes - shifted mostly to the wealthy. 100B increase in corporate taxes 300B cut to defense (roughly half of defense budget) 100B cut to social security (through age of eligibility increases) 100B cut to discretionary spending (no idea if this is possible or not). I would certainly not want to do this overnight - probably needs to be phased in over 5 or 10 years. This is just a rough idea of what I think a potential starting point for budget revisions could be. I'm sure others others would have a different distribution of spending cuts / tax increases. But as I see it a $700B+ deficit means we need a lot more revenue AND a lot less spending. Sorry, I know that means a lot of people will be hurt unfairly, but as I see it the damage has already been done by decades of bad policies.— August 17, 2014 8:37 p.m.
SD pension mess hits Journal's front page
My most cynical view (which I hope isn't true) is that we are maintaining a strong military because we know that at some point we will default on our debt (maybe not an outright default but by manipulating money supplies and fiscal policies in ways which tend to artificially less the real value of our debt). If the Chinese asks for their money back rather than paying them we will threaten to kill them. I hope our leadership really isn't that vicious and that I'm just being cynical to think that's actually the plan. But I wonder....— August 16, 2014 1:02 p.m.
SD pension mess hits Journal's front page
I do think an across-the-board tax is risky and admittedly pretty unfair at this point based on how far the pendulum has swung in favor of the wealthy. But I also think it's a bit dangerous to have taxes which only affect one group. I think a small tax increase across aboard with a significant tax increase at the upper income ranges would be reasonable. I think clearly there should be significant tax increases on the wealthy - the distribution of income needs to be tweaked a bit or we are going to have some real instability in society. Tax havens are a growing problem and I think there's been a change in accounting attitudes and ethics to a state where "everything's OK as long as you don't get caught" or you have enough lawyers and accountants. Laws need to change quickly to keep up with loophole changes. But that's pretty hard to do even if our Congress was working great. Of course, if corporate leaders took some responsibility that would solve a lot of problems. Ultimately fraud needs to be punished with imprisonment. How many leaders of AIG, GS, BofA, Lehman whose fraudulent acts were major contributors to the mortgage meltdown are in prison? Not too many as far as I know.— August 16, 2014 12:58 p.m.
SD pension mess hits Journal's front page
At least the Tea Party guys are discussing the national debt as a major issue which is more than the Republicrats are doing. Of course as you say they don't seem to be serious about scaling back our military. I think at the national level we do need to get serious about eliminating the long term debt - and I think ALL of the following are needed: 1. Big increase in the social security and medicare eligibility age. 2. Big cuts in military spending. 3. Big tax increases across the board. 4. Really big tax increases for the wealthy.— August 15, 2014 10:20 p.m.
SD pension mess hits Journal's front page
7.25% is a very high expected rate of return unless there is a fairly high degree of risk involved. It's hard to find too many non-volatile asset classes which meet that rate of return. U.S. stock indexes have exceeded that average over a long period of time - but that was during a remarkable era as the US rose to prominence as a global economic and political superpower.— August 15, 2014 10:07 p.m.
Obama denounces companies for off-shore inversion
Japanese culture also seems to require that leaders take great responsibility and honor in their job performance. Leaders who fail resign and apologize for failing. In the U.S. leaders who fail ask for (and receive) bailouts from taxpayers.— August 15, 2014 5:21 a.m.
Obama denounces companies for off-shore inversion
There are a few companies (Whole Foods and Ben/Jerry's come to mind) that have made commitments to keeping executive / average employee pay ratios to reasonable levels. But I don't see much momentum in that trend.— August 15, 2014 5:11 a.m.
Obama denounces companies for off-shore inversion
I question whether the high CEO is even in the Shareholder's best interest - let alone consumers, other employees, or society in general. Even if we assume - for arguments sake - that shareholder return is the ONLY thing a corporation should be concerned with does the high CEO pay make sense? Is the CEO you could hire for 300X average employee salary really that much better than the CEO you could hire for, let's say, 100X average employee salary? Some studies conclude that there really isn't a strong relationship between CEO pay and company performance, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-22/f… I think it's gotten to the point where nobody benefits from high CEO pay except CEO's.— August 14, 2014 7:53 p.m.
In Bed with Wall Street
The economy is booming for the people in charge I should say. The DOW and Nasdaq are doing great. Meanwhile, many of the people not in charge are suffering without jobs or with losses in real earning power.— August 12, 2014 5:48 p.m.