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Strands in the Tapestry: the Business, Economics, and Tax Policy Thread

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Re: Strands in the Tapestry: the Business, Economics, and Tax Policy Thread

ScoobyDoo said:
Lots of jobs in Texas. I wonder why no one wants to move there?

Hmmmm..........

http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2009-01-16/726748/

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout...eels-very-badly-children-texas-163723592.html

http://theparisnews.com/news/article_f05cbebc-e009-11e2-a6d5-001a4bcf887a.html

I just can't ****ing understand why people don't want to move there. Someone clue me in.
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20% increase in population from 2000 to 2010. Yep, no one wants to move there. :rolleyes:
 
Re: Strands in the Tapestry: the Business, Economics, and Tax Policy Thread

FlagDUDE08 said:
20% increase in population from 2000 to 2010. Yep, no one wants to move there. :rolleyes:
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90% of which is Hispanic immigration! The very same people your pals don't want to give a path to citizenship too. :p

However, the idea that migration is some sort of proof that people support conservative policies, even though the country has given the liberal candidate more votes in 5 out of the last 6 Presidential elections is ludicrous. What people are doing is retiring and using the proceeds from selling their more expensive house and moving to places with warm weather and cheaper housing. If taxes and conservative policies were the driving force, wouldn't people be flocking to Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas? Or Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri? Why did Washington gain a seat, hardly a bastion of conservatism?

States like California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Georgia, and Florida have one main driver of population growth, and that is immigration either due to being a border state or because of a large agriculture and speculative housing industry and the construction jobs that go with it. Actual migration of people has slowed dramatically in this country over the last decade.
 
Re: Strands in the Tapestry: the Business, Economics, and Tax Policy Thread

Rover said:
90% of which is Hispanic immigration! The very same people your pals don't want to give a path to citizenship too. :p

However, the idea that migration is some sort of proof that people support conservative policies, even though the country has given the liberal candidate more votes in 5 out of the last 6 Presidential elections is ludicrous. What people are doing is retiring and using the proceeds from selling their more expensive house and moving to places with warm weather and cheaper housing. If taxes and conservative policies were the driving force, wouldn't people be flocking to Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas? Or Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri? Why did Washington gain a seat, hardly a bastion of conservatism?

States like California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Georgia, and Florida have one main driver of population growth, and that is immigration either due to being a border state or because of a large agriculture and speculative housing industry and the construction jobs that go with it. Actual migration of people has slowed dramatically in this country over the last decade.
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People still will retire to places that have lower taxes. Which is why you see a lot of Federales in North Carolina, which does not tax state or federal pensions (strangely enough, MA does not tax state or federal pensions either).

So why am I still in MD? Wife does not want to move.
 
Re: Strands in the Tapestry: the Business, Economics, and Tax Policy Thread

FlagDUDE08 said:
Is this an admission that global warming is a lie? :p:D

The reason you don't see a correlation between those two now is because any damage that that caused is already done. NYS has already been abandoned by the companies that wanted to abandon it. Apple has already moved corporate HQ to Nevada. People are understanding that they have to go where the jobs are. It's now a question of if they will be expanding back to these markets.
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Apple's Reno office, aka "Braeburn Capital" (clever :p), has "a handful" employees. Their main office is still in Cupertino, they just manage the cash in Nevada to at least partially evade CA corporate income taxes.
 
Re: Strands in the Tapestry: the Business, Economics, and Tax Policy Thread

joecct said:
People still will retire to places that have lower taxes. Which is why you see a lot of Federales in North Carolina, which does not tax state or federal pensions (strangely enough, MA does not tax state or federal pensions either).

So why am I still in MD? Wife does not want to move.
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Also, full-time RVers typically "move" to either Texas or South Dakota.
 
Re: Strands in the Tapestry: the Business, Economics, and Tax Policy Thread

This story reminds me of a lazy Friday afternoon in the summer of 1974. I was in high school at the time, working as a self-employed house painter. I'm scraping away in the hazy heat, listening to the Watergate hearings on the radio, and Alexander Butterfield is testifying. In a calm, matter-of-fact voice, he mentions that the White House had set up a system by which they taped every conversation that took place in the Oval Office. I nearly fell off my ladder: this was huge news, a major shift in what until then had seemed to be a desultory partisan witch hunt without much substance.




We had a similar bombshell in similar circumstances this week. I'll let Peggy Noonan describe:

The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office—that had been established—but to the office of the chief counsel.

That is a bombshell—such a big one that it managed to emerge in spite of an unfocused, frequently off-point congressional hearing in which some members seemed to have accidentally woken up in the middle of a committee room, some seemed unaware of the implications of what their investigators had uncovered, one pretended that the investigation should end if IRS workers couldn't say the president had personally called and told them to harass his foes, and one seemed to be holding a filibuster on Pakistan.

Still, what landed was a bombshell. And Democrats know it. Which is why they are so desperate to make the investigation go away. They know, as Republicans do, that the chief counsel of the IRS is one of only two Obama political appointees in the entire agency.

To quickly review why the new information, which came most succinctly in a nine-page congressional letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, is big news:

When the scandal broke two months ago, in May, IRS leadership in Washington claimed the harassment of tea-party and other conservative groups requesting tax-exempt status was confined to the Cincinnati office....

House investigators soon talked to workers in the Cincinnati office, who said everything they did came from Washington. Elizabeth Hofacre, in charge of processing tea-party applications in Cincinnati, told investigators that her work was overseen and directed by a lawyer in the IRS Washington office named Carter Hull.

Now comes Mr. Hull's testimony. And like Ms. Hofacre, he pointed his finger upward. Mr. Hull—a 48-year IRS veteran and an expert on tax exemption law—told investigators that tea-party applications under his review were sent upstairs within the Washington office....

Mr. Hull told House investigators that at some point in the winter of 2010-11, Ms. Lerner's senior adviser, whose name is withheld in the publicly released partial interview transcript, told him the applications would require further review: "She said it should go to chief counsel."

Q: "The IRS chief counsel?"

A: "The IRS chief counsel."

The IRS chief counsel is named William Wilkins. And again, he is one of only two Obama political appointees in the IRS.
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It is no longer a few lower-level people in a regional office who made an unfortunate mistake. It is now a deliberately calculated political act, directed from the highest levels within the IRS.


Now, it took months for the Butterfield revelations to play out. It will be interesting to see what happens next from here.


Obama is a lot more popular than Nixon, and he has people who are slavishly devoted to protecting him no matter what, which Nixon did not have. Obama himself will remain immune somehow, and the Republicans in the House are such bunglers they may not follow up nearly as well as the Democrats did in the Senate in 1974.

Nevertheless, for a political appointee in the highest level of the IRS to use the powers of his office deliberately to target political opposition for mistreatment is a terrible thing for our country and the whole concept of the rule of law.

What saddens me the most is that the people who will still defend the IRS actions don't seem to recognize the dangers of allowing this precedent to stand unchallenged, no matter where you stand on the political spectrum. Politics should not be the single most overriding consideration in every decision. Yet for some people, winning at politics is the only thing that matters these days. Morality and ethics are so quaint and old-fashioned, you know. :(
 
Re: Strands in the Tapestry: the Business, Economics, and Tax Policy Thread

AHAHAHAHA! Are you @_sswipes seriously still trying to pimp this IRS thing? Even after Issa has backed off his accusations of a cover up after witness upon witness testified to no political considerations over the scrutiny and after the Inspector General (a GOP nominee) decided to reveal that, oh yeah, liberal groups were also scrutinized too and he juuuust found out about it last week.

http://www.nationalmemo.com/issas-irs-witch-hunt-continues-to-unravel-in-latest-hearing-2/

Fishy, you're becoming a bigger dinosaur than Opie, and I never thought I'd say that. PS - that's not a compliment. :D
 
Re: Strands in the Tapestry: the Business, Economics, and Tax Policy Thread

Rover said:
AHAHAHAHA! Are you @_sswipes seriously still trying to pimp this IRS thing? Even after Issa has backed off his accusations of a cover up after witness upon witness testified to no political considerations over the scrutiny and after the Inspector General (a GOP nominee) decided to reveal that, oh yeah, liberal groups were also scrutinized too and he juuuust found out about it last week.

http://www.nationalmemo.com/issas-irs-witch-hunt-continues-to-unravel-in-latest-hearing-2/

Fishy, you're becoming a bigger dinosaur than Opie, and I never thought I'd say that. PS - that's not a compliment. :D
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You've mentioned several times that Issa was involved with the Benghazi hearing. You're starting to lose your edge, Grover.
 
Re: Strands in the Tapestry: the Business, Economics, and Tax Policy Thread

Awwwww...poor Fishy is beating a dead horse and how he's mad somebody called him on it. :rolleyes: Don't know what's up with you old guys, but I fear some of you have lost your fastball.

A good summation of Fishy's "revelation" which is two months old.
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Whatever happened to the IRS scandal? Rep. Darrell Issa is still banging the scandal drum. Is anyone listening anymore? By Peter Weber | 9:54am

As recently as a month ago, the conventional wisdom was that the Obama administration was in danger of being buried under a heaping pile of scandals. There was Benghazi. There was the snooping on journalists to catch national security leakers. And there was the IRS flagging Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny.

The IRS scandal, which drew bipartisan outrage, had the potential to be the most damaging, not least because nobody likes the IRS. Furthermore, unlike the Benghazi scandal, the underlying accusation was not in dispute: The IRS admitted to targeting conservative-sounding tax-exempt applicants. (IRS officials have consistently maintained that the extra scrutiny was not ideologically or politically motivated, for what it's worth.)

And then? Well, the revelations that have come out in the past few weeks, which show that lefty groups were also targeted, have undermined the IRS flub as a political scandal, and made it appear more of a bureaucratic train wreck. Immigration politics also took center stage. Plus, Edward Snowden started leaking National Security Agency secrets, dividing Congress along strange, non-party-based, privacy-versus-security lines.

However, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House oversight committee, isn't ready to rest his case. On Thursday, Issa held another hearing on the IRS brouhaha, teeing it up with an op-ed in USA Today the previous day and a big tease to Fox News' Carl Cameron. On Wednesday night, Cameron told Bill O'Reilly that Issa said Thursday's hearing would prove "he can get it right, all the way up into the White House."


In USA Today, Issa was a tad more circumspect. The White House wants to pin the scandal on officials at the IRS's Cincinnati office, he wrote, but "following the trail of facts from Cincinnati to Washington, our investigation found corroboration that the scrutiny of Tea Party applicants was being directed by IRS officials in Washington."

It's important to keep digging, Issa added. "Was the targeting of Tea Party applicants directed from the White House or somewhere else outside the IRS?"

So what was Issa's big reveal at Thursday's hearing? That Carter Hull, a career IRS employee in Washington, "took his concerns about the IRS's BOLO lists to — hold your breath — the chief counsel of the IRS, a White House appointee" in 2011, explains David Weigel at Slate. But we learned that two months ago, in the inspector general's report. Repackaged stale revelations are "not the scandal we were promised!" Weigel says.

If there is a scandal here, says Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast, it's that Treasury Inspector General Russell George, who wrote the IRS report, seems to have held back a lot of exculpatory evidence. His top inspector found that there was no political motivation in the targeting, and Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the oversight committee's ranking Democrat, has uncovered documents proving that the targeting was aimed at "progressive" and "occupy" groups since 2010 — facts that George, a former Bob Dole staffer, either failed to mention or denied.That's not all, Tomasky says. All 15 of the IRS employees interviewed — including six Republicans and three Democrats — "have shot down the idea that there was any political bias at the IRS, and all have said they had no knowledge or evidence of any White House involvement."

"This should all wrap fairly soon this fall," Tomasky adds, and when that happens it will be time to "take a much harder look at Issa, George, and the other perpetuators of this non-story."

Conservatives aren't convinced. Democrats on the committee claim that "none of the witnesses they've engaged have stated (or admitted) personal knowledge of interference or direction from the White House or the Obama campaign," says Guy Benson at Townhall. "These members seemed to think it is somehow dispositive that low-to-mid-level IRS employees weren't personally given marching orders directly from David Axelrod. It's a specious point."

And so the scandal beat goes on.
 
FlagDUDE08 said:
Oh, but what do you know... http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/17/irs-officials-washington-ordered-special-scrutiny-/

You still banking on knucks thinking it's OK just because some tokens were sacrificed? For a party that boasts about its education, you really are dumb.
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Flaggy you've been taking stupid pills again. Everybody already knows, and has known, the IRS ordered special scrutiny, much like everybody knows rain is wet. They ordered it for both conservative AND liberal groups, and it was purely because they didn't know how to handle the new legal status post the SCOTUS Citizens United ruling. Got anything new for us?
 
Re: Strands in the Tapestry: the Business, Economics, and Tax Policy Thread

Rover said:
Flaggy you've been taking stupid pills again. Everybody already knows, and has known, the IRS ordered special scrutiny, much like everybody knows rain is wet. They ordered it for both conservative AND liberal groups, and it was purely because they didn't know how to handle the new legal status post the SCOTUS Citizens United ruling. Got anything new for us?
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And yet, the issue in question is the relative amount of scrutiny ordered upon one side over another, not the existence of scrutiny. Got anything new for us there? Or would you like to dodge it again?
 
FlagDUDE08 said:
And yet, the issue in question is the relative amount of scrutiny ordered upon one side over another, not the existence of scrutiny. Got anything new for us there? Or would you like to dodge it again?
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More groups = more scrutiny. And to my knowledge the only group denied was a progressive one. You were going to mention that, right?
 
Re: Strands in the Tapestry: the Business, Economics, and Tax Policy Thread

Rover said:
More groups = more scrutiny. And to my knowledge the only group denied was a progressive one. You were going to mention that, right?
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The dartboard is a bit away from where you're throwing. The issue is the pretense of accusation. I believe in your neck of the woods, the name used is "witch hunt". If a group actually screwed up, that sure as heck isn't the IRS's fault, and that goes for any group regardless of affiliation. Of course, if you are a Mass-hole (assuming you are; I keep getting you and Priceless mixed up), it doesn't surprise me that witch hunts tickle your fancy. Perhaps we should be calling you the knuckledragger. :p
 
Re: Strands in the Tapestry: the Business, Economics, and Tax Policy Thread

5mn_Major said:
It does appear that they save 80% in waste management labor.

Regardless, I'll see your trash cans and raise you $9 billion in lost Iraqi funds.
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I'll see your Iraqi funds and raise you $1.76 trillion in a health care system that now only the President, Pelosi, Reid, Schemer, and their kissasses on this board like.
 
FlagDUDE08 said:
I'll see your Iraqi funds and raise you $1.76 trillion in a health care system that now only the President, Pelosi, Reid, Schemer, and their kissasses on this board like.
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I'll see that and raise you the $500 trillion dollars wasted in tax breaks for GOP campaign contributors.

(see, making up numbers is fun! Lets see who can top that.)
 
Rover said:
I'll see that and raise you the $500 trillion dollars wasted in tax breaks for GOP campaign contributors.

(see, making up numbers is fun! Lets see who can top that.)
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I'll see that and raise you the $1 I gave to a homeless person today.
 
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