conservation of Euros

[Martin Brown]

On 14/05/2010 16:25, John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:50:11 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

A pure sales tax paid only by the non-business end user would be a lot
simpler. Allowing businesses not to have to fight with badly paid VAT
advisers. I have had some amusing run-ins with them on reclaiming VAT
for a charity making disabled access improvements.

There's nothing wrong or difficult about having businesses pay sales
tax. We in California pay sales tax on anything we consume, like

I see that as faintly odd. Taxing businesses for buying stuff to help
run their business and new equipment doesn't really make any sense.

equipment and furniture and supplies, and pay no tax on parts or
subassemblies that will go into sellable products. But it probably
makes sense to exempt productive equipment, since that would encourage
long-term productivity and job creation.

It does provide the odd interesting loophole. My supervisor at
university tried a lawnmower as a company expense (ruled invalid).
We tried company bicycles and that was accepted!

If there's an opamp in stock and I pull it out to make a breadboard or
a test fixture, I should in theory note the event and pay sales tax on
it. And if I buy a bunch of parts for engineering, taxed, but some
wind up in a shipped product, we should get a refund on the taxes.

It is different to what I am used to and just as messy to implement. If
anything you have the same nightmare scenario as UK fast food places
where the price you pay depends on whether you take away or eat in VAT=0
or 17.5 respectively. I presume that noone bothers in the US like buying
stuff from another state to evade state sales taxes.

VAT sounds like a mess to me. Accountants and attorneys and
bureaucrats are all useless, expensive overheads on society.

It is relatively straightforward provided that you do not have too many
different rates and/or wierd exemptions. Different to what you are used
to - but I think an end user purchase/sales tax would be a lot cleaner.

Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Joerg]

John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:31:48 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:50:11 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/05/2010 05:12, krw@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz wrote:
On Thu, 13 May 2010 21:03:14 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com wrote:

On May 13, 10:21 pm, "k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz"
k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz> wrote:
On Thu, 13 May 2010 19:08:20 -0700, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
VATs tend to be sales taxes, in reality.
VAT is applied all up and down the production chain. So the only stage
that can be selectively taxes is the last one, at point of sale. I
prefer a true 100% visible point of sale sales tax. VAT is designed to
hide the actual taxation level, at considerable cost of complexity.
That's the theory but in practice, AIUI, VATs are only collected at the end of
the pipe.
No. They're charged and credited throughout the chain. Your thing
gets taxed, then rebated and the next guy pays, then gets his rebate,
etc.
So it's only collected at the end.

Maximum work for everyone. Maximum intrusion. Horrible.
A lot of work, sure, but money only changes hands at the end of the pipe.
No. You have it wrong. Every stage in the pipeline *pays* VAT inclusive
prices to their suppliers and totals up their input tax and then charges
their customers including VAT and totals up their output tax. Then
every month if large or three months if a small company you send a VAT
cheque to HMRC which is the difference of those two numbers.

A modern computer system doesn't find this too difficult. Unless that is
some half baked government changes the VAT rate from 17.5% to 15% in the
run up to Christmas as they did last year. That was a disaster for shops
as shelf prices are all marked inclusive of VAT. UK VAT is expected to
go to 20% shortly to deal with the deficit. It will make mental
arithmetic a lot easier - I never learnt my 17.5x table.

Exceptions exist for cross boarder trades in the EEC which allow not
charging VAT if the goods are for export to another country in the EEC.
This leads to a complex form of cross border trade called carousel fraud
which typically involves small high value objects like memory chips,
mobile phones and latterly carbon credits.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5204422.stm

...and IIRC, the Canuckistani VAT is paid by the buyer; a sales tax.
A pure sales tax paid only by the non-business end user would be a lot
simpler. Allowing businesses not to have to fight with badly paid VAT
advisers. I have had some amusing run-ins with them on reclaiming VAT
for a charity making disabled access improvements.
There's nothing wrong or difficult about having businesses pay sales
tax. We in California pay sales tax on anything we consume, like
equipment and furniture and supplies, and pay no tax on parts or
subassemblies that will go into sellable products. But it probably
makes sense to exempt productive equipment, since that would encourage
long-term productivity and job creation.

If there's an opamp in stock and I pull it out to make a breadboard or
a test fixture, I should in theory note the event and pay sales tax on
it. And if I buy a bunch of parts for engineering, taxed, but some
wind up in a shipped product, we should get a refund on the taxes.

VAT sounds like a mess to me. Accountants and attorneys and
bureaucrats are all useless, expensive overheads on society.

Yup. And now they are talking about taxing services. Meaning what I cost
my clients would then go up by x percent, or the cost of doing business
in California would go up by x percent. Which will increase the exodus
because the guy 50 miles east of here in Nevada doesn't have that cost.
I sure hope that the 2/3rds rule will hold to avert such damage. Every
business or person leaving the state will cause the net tax from that to
drop to zero.

Since we're increasingly a services economy, we should tax services
and simultaneously reduce tax rates on stuff.

Well, if that happens and they also hit consultants and contractors with
it I may finally have to move to the island to drop my cost to clients
back to where it was. Luckily in my line of work it doesn't matter where
I reside. Selling a home in CA, that's a whole 'nother matter right now :-(

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

 

[Joerg]

Martin Brown wrote:

On 14/05/2010 16:25, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:50:11 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

A pure sales tax paid only by the non-business end user would be a lot
simpler. Allowing businesses not to have to fight with badly paid VAT
advisers. I have had some amusing run-ins with them on reclaiming VAT
for a charity making disabled access improvements.

There's nothing wrong or difficult about having businesses pay sales
tax. We in California pay sales tax on anything we consume, like

I see that as faintly odd. Taxing businesses for buying stuff to help
run their business and new equipment doesn't really make any sense.

Moving the business to Montana and will make that problem go away

[...]

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

 

[Joerg]

John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 07:56:31 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:

Bill Sloman wrote:
On May 14, 12:39 am, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
[...]

That's the way sales tax works in California. If I buy uncooked
chicken at Safeway, there's no sales tax. If I buy cooked, hot,
ready-to-eat chicken, it's taxed. It's simple, because it's a visible,
automated-cash-register, point-of-sale tax. Restaurant food is taxed
whether you eat it there or not. I can't imagine how you could work a
thing like this all the way back up the VAT chain.

It would be easy to structure a national sales tax to exempt the
things poorer people actually need. There would be some cheating
around the edges, but there always will be some cheating. But things
like VAT carousel fraud couldn't happen.

(One shop near here sells " *WARM* " corned-beef sandwiches because
hot ones have a higher tax rate.)

I like the sales tax, as opposed to income tax, because it puts
business on a better basis against imports, so saves jobs. And because
it would be enormously simpler and cheaper to comply with. No
accountants, no tax returns, no exemptions, no deductions, no
quarterly estimates, no loopholes... almost.
Dream on. Why do you think that VAT was invented?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_added_tax

The usual. To squeeze ever more taxes out of people. Whether you call
them VAT, fees, surcharges, carbon credits or whatever, a tax is a tax
is a tax.

But some taxes require you to hire an army of bookkeepers and CPAs and
attorneys just to figure out how much taxes you should pay. Luckily,
all their fees are tax-deductable. This year, we will spend more on
the droids than we will pay in taxes.

Yup, I also pay a chunk of money to my CPA so my bases are covered and
thing are all legit. I guess in technical terms that's called
"compliance costs". And it doesn't move our country one iota farther in
terms of technological leadership.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

 

[Joerg]

John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 07:39:56 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

[...]

I like the sales tax, as opposed to income tax, because it puts
business on a better basis against imports, so saves jobs. And because
it would be enormously simpler and cheaper to comply with. No
accountants, no tax returns, no exemptions, no deductions, no
quarterly estimates, no loopholes... almost.

Tax consumption. Don't tax savings or investment or job creation. If a
person is rich but doesn't spend any money, nobody can reasonably be
jealous of his wealth.

A serious problem with that: It punishes frugal people who have saved
for their retirement and rewards those who squandered everything. The
money they saved _has_ already been taxed.

Simple fix: don't tax income.

Yeah, but how do you deal with income that _has_ already been taxed but
not spent yet because people saved it for their retirement? A flat
VAT-type tax is the same as confiscating xx% percent of that. Not fair
at all.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

 

[Martin Brown]

On 14/05/2010 16:06, John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:31:49 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

Engels saw first hand what greedy industrialists were doing to their
workers in the Lancashire cotton industry. Boiler explosions were
commonplace up until the Vulcan insurers made a stand and insisted on
proper boiler safety inspections. And in cases of tampering with safety
relief valves they would not pay out.

[snip]

It makes reasonable sense to pay your workers a living wage for the work
that they do rather than pay them less than they can sensibly live on.
Ford was about the first in the USA to actually do this.

It only makes sense if the money comes from somewhere. If all the
employers arbitrarily doubled wages, inflation would take it all away

We are talking here of industrialised manufacture that was possibly two
or more orders of magnitude more productive. All the profits went to the
mill owners and their workers were left to starve on a subsistance level
of pay because it was marginally better than being out of work.

The mill owners lived like Gods as did the iron masters. One of our
local iron masters who was pretty benevolent for the time was an
inflation adjusted multibillionaire in the early 1900's. He and his mate
Andrew Carnegie paid to endow Middlesbrough public library.

Not all of them were miserly penny pinching scrouge type characters, but
enough of them were to influence Engels and later Marx.

within weeks, maybe days. If a single employer did it, he's go out of
business. Shuffling paper money around is meaningless; productivity is
real. Ford increased wages because he had a revolutionary
super-efficient way of making cheap cars, and most workers found the
pace and discipline tiring and tended to quit after a few months. He
needed the best workers to stick around, so he golden-handcuffed them;
this was *before* they were unionized. The "invisible hand" was at
work. Productivity was the key.

This is good:

http://www.amazon.com/Ford-Men-Machine-Robert-Lacey/dp/0517635046/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1273849223&sr=1-1

The same was true of industrialised machine based cotton mills powered
by steam engine. The difference was they could prey on large numbers of
starving unemployed penniless former handloom weavers. The profits were
entirely for the mill owners and were immense whilst life expectancy for
the workers housed in slums was poor at about 40.

It was even worse in the iron & steel industry just with a few notable
exceptions they were quite happy to evaporate a few more employees if it
made them extra profit. Fettlers were relatively well paid but died even
younger than the already low average.

In the UK there were some decent industrialists mostly of quaker
families who did treat their workforce fairly - examples include some
household names like Pilkingtons, Cadbury, Bournville, Marks&Spencer.

A decent industrialist realizes that a partnership with workers is
mutually beneficial, but must still compete with company owners who
don't agree with this philosophy. A company can't arbitrarily give
away high wages without achieving corresponding competitive benefits.

This wasn't about competition though it was about screwing the poor sods
at the bottom of the pile into the ground knowing full well that they
were individually powerless and a consumable item.

Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 14 May 2010 16:53:49 +0100, Martin Brown
<|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 14/05/2010 16:25, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:50:11 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

A pure sales tax paid only by the non-business end user would be a lot
simpler. Allowing businesses not to have to fight with badly paid VAT
advisers. I have had some amusing run-ins with them on reclaiming VAT
for a charity making disabled access improvements.

There's nothing wrong or difficult about having businesses pay sales
tax. We in California pay sales tax on anything we consume, like

I see that as faintly odd. Taxing businesses for buying stuff to help
run their business and new equipment doesn't really make any sense.

equipment and furniture and supplies, and pay no tax on parts or
subassemblies that will go into sellable products. But it probably
makes sense to exempt productive equipment, since that would encourage
long-term productivity and job creation.

It does provide the odd interesting loophole. My supervisor at
university tried a lawnmower as a company expense (ruled invalid).
We tried company bicycles and that was accepted!

If there's an opamp in stock and I pull it out to make a breadboard or
a test fixture, I should in theory note the event and pay sales tax on
it. And if I buy a bunch of parts for engineering, taxed, but some
wind up in a shipped product, we should get a refund on the taxes.

It is different to what I am used to and just as messy to implement.

Well, nobody actually implements it at the opamp level. We do not pay
sales tax on anything that we buy "for resale", which isn't much of a
hassle. It's mostly an honor system.


If

anything you have the same nightmare scenario as UK fast food places
where the price you pay depends on whether you take away or eat in VAT=0
or 17.5 respectively. I presume that noone bothers in the US like buying
stuff from another state to evade state sales taxes.

People make a great effort to buy out-of-state to avoid sales taxes.
In theory, one should confess an ebay buy and voluntarily report it to
the state, and pay sales tax. Nobody does, at least not individuals.
Companies are subject to audit, and submit sales tax reports and
checks anyhow, so most do keep the records properly. We collect sales
tax on stuff we sell to end users in California, so we do send in
reports and checks, and we include our own equipment purchases.

VAT sounds like a mess to me. Accountants and attorneys and
bureaucrats are all useless, expensive overheads on society.

It is relatively straightforward provided that you do not have too many
different rates and/or wierd exemptions. Different to what you are used
to - but I think an end user purchase/sales tax would be a lot cleaner.

It won't happen, because it's too visible.

John

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 14 May 2010 09:13:21 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid>
wrote:

Martin Brown wrote:
On 14/05/2010 16:25, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:50:11 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

A pure sales tax paid only by the non-business end user would be a lot
simpler. Allowing businesses not to have to fight with badly paid VAT
advisers. I have had some amusing run-ins with them on reclaiming VAT
for a charity making disabled access improvements.

There's nothing wrong or difficult about having businesses pay sales
tax. We in California pay sales tax on anything we consume, like

I see that as faintly odd. Taxing businesses for buying stuff to help
run their business and new equipment doesn't really make any sense.


Moving the business to Montana and will make that problem go away

[...]

Yes, but it would also make my edgier employees go away too.

We could set up a manufacturing company in another state, or just
subcontract manufacturing and some engineering there. Arizona sounds
good, just to tweak the local idiots on the Board of Stupidvisors.

John

 

On May 14, 9:56 am, Joerg <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote:

Bill Sloman wrote:
On May 14, 12:39 am, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

[...]



That's the way sales tax works in California. If I buy uncooked
chicken at Safeway, there's no sales tax. If I buy cooked, hot,
ready-to-eat chicken, it's taxed. It's simple, because it's a visible,
automated-cash-register, point-of-sale tax. Restaurant food is taxed
whether you eat it there or not. I can't imagine how you could work a
thing like this all the way back up the VAT chain.

It would be easy to structure a national sales tax to exempt the
things poorer people actually need. There would be some cheating
around the edges, but there always will be some cheating. But things
like VAT carousel fraud couldn't happen.

(One shop near here sells  " *WARM* " corned-beef sandwiches because
hot ones have a higher tax rate.)

I like the sales tax, as opposed to income tax, because it puts
business on a better basis against imports, so saves jobs. And because
it would be enormously simpler and cheaper to comply with. No
accountants, no tax returns, no exemptions, no deductions, no
quarterly estimates, no loopholes... almost.

Dream on. Why do you think that VAT was invented?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_added_tax

The usual. To squeeze ever more taxes out of people.

And--don't forget--to hide the deed, hence the prestidigitation.

My favorite accountant says spotting fraud is easy--she just looks for
unreasonable complexity. Like VAT.

Whether you call
them VAT, fees, surcharges, carbon credits or whatever, a tax is a tax
is a tax.

Yup.

--
Cheers,
James Arthur

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 14 May 2010 09:17:15 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid>
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 07:39:56 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

[...]

I like the sales tax, as opposed to income tax, because it puts
business on a better basis against imports, so saves jobs. And because
it would be enormously simpler and cheaper to comply with. No
accountants, no tax returns, no exemptions, no deductions, no
quarterly estimates, no loopholes... almost.

Tax consumption. Don't tax savings or investment or job creation. If a
person is rich but doesn't spend any money, nobody can reasonably be
jealous of his wealth.

A serious problem with that: It punishes frugal people who have saved
for their retirement and rewards those who squandered everything. The
money they saved _has_ already been taxed.

Simple fix: don't tax income.


Yeah, but how do you deal with income that _has_ already been taxed but
not spent yet because people saved it for their retirement? A flat
VAT-type tax is the same as confiscating xx% percent of that. Not fair
at all.

As I suggested, exempt basics, like food, reasonable rent, generic
medicines. If people can afford a yacht, they can afford to pay sales
tax on it.

John

 

On May 14, 9:53 am, Joerg <inva...@invalid.invalid> wrote:

Bill Sloman wrote:
On May 14, 6:03 am, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:
On May 13, 10:21 pm, "k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz"

k...@att.bizzzzzzzzzzzz> wrote:
On Thu, 13 May 2010 19:08:20 -0700, John Larkin
jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:
VATs tend to be sales taxes, in reality.
VAT is applied all up and down the production chain. So the only stage
that can be selectively taxes is the last one, at point of sale. I
prefer a true 100% visible point of sale sales tax. VAT is designed to
hide the actual taxation level, at considerable cost of complexity.
That's the theory but in practice, AIUI, VATs are only collected at the end of
the pipe.
No.  They're charged and credited throughout the chain.  Your thing
gets taxed, then rebated and the next guy pays, then gets his rebate,
etc.

Maximum work for everyone.  Maximum intrusion.  Horrible.

But easily automated, unless you want to cheat. No place where I
worked complained about the complexity or got worried about
intrusions. European small business software packages claim to include
it as a matter of course.

And then you get a letter from the tax agency, asking for some
explanation why your VAT intake was so low and you claimed so much in
refunds. "Because I run a business, are VAT-exempt for that, and have
clients in places like Asia" ... "Can you come by with the books and
show us?" ... "Sure". It was a nice bicycle ride through a forest so I
didn't mind. The guy there was very friendly but became quite frustrated
because nearly all the stuff was in foreign languages, some in Korean

People who are sloppy about their paper-work can get in a mess with
VAT, as with every other item of accounting, but at least it isn't
hard to understand.

IIRC we had 6 or 7 VAT rates and you really had to watch your data
entry. At the "Pre-computer" point.

Taxes are scarcely any inconvenience at all to the people who don't
pay them.

You made something. That was your mistake.

James

 

On May 14, 9:51 am, John Larkin
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Thu, 13 May 2010 22:16:49 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com
wrote:



On May 13, 5:02 pm, Bill Sloman <bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On May 13, 8:20 pm, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:

The argument for progressive taxation is usually put in terms of those
with the broadest shoulders carrying more of the load.

Right.  That's how the Little Red Hen got a hold of all the other
animals' bread, greedy thing that she was.  She had broad shoulders.

This falls a
long way short of Marx -

Marx was kind of an idiot.

"The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e.,
that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely
requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer."
  --The Communist Manifesto

 See what I mean?

Yeah, he wouldn't understand a female plumber making $150K.

What created our modern wealth was engineers applying science.

Yep. They made machines to relieve human toil, to improve the human
condition.

Evil capitalists. Marx the Moocher should've stopped 'em.

--
Cheers,
James Arthur

 

[Joerg]

John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 09:13:21 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:

Martin Brown wrote:
On 14/05/2010 16:25, John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:50:11 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

A pure sales tax paid only by the non-business end user would be a lot
simpler. Allowing businesses not to have to fight with badly paid VAT
advisers. I have had some amusing run-ins with them on reclaiming VAT
for a charity making disabled access improvements.
There's nothing wrong or difficult about having businesses pay sales
tax. We in California pay sales tax on anything we consume, like
I see that as faintly odd. Taxing businesses for buying stuff to help
run their business and new equipment doesn't really make any sense.

Moving the business to Montana and will make that problem go away

[...]

Yes, but it would also make my edgier employees go away too.

I dunno, depends on whether they are the outdoors kind or not. Once a SW
guys threw the question into the round: "What if we all packed it up and
moved to Bozeman, Montana?". Some silence. Then one by one the guys
uttered "Yeah", "Cool", "I'd come" and so on.

We could set up a manufacturing company in another state, or just
subcontract manufacturing and some engineering there. Arizona sounds
good, just to tweak the local idiots on the Board of Stupidvisors.

Check the tax situation first, all taxes including property taxes, cost
of living, et cetera. AZ may not be the first contender then.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

 

[Joerg]

John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 09:17:15 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Fri, 14 May 2010 07:39:56 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
[...]

I like the sales tax, as opposed to income tax, because it puts
business on a better basis against imports, so saves jobs. And because
it would be enormously simpler and cheaper to comply with. No
accountants, no tax returns, no exemptions, no deductions, no
quarterly estimates, no loopholes... almost.

Tax consumption. Don't tax savings or investment or job creation. If a
person is rich but doesn't spend any money, nobody can reasonably be
jealous of his wealth.

A serious problem with that: It punishes frugal people who have saved
for their retirement and rewards those who squandered everything. The
money they saved _has_ already been taxed.
Simple fix: don't tax income.

Yeah, but how do you deal with income that _has_ already been taxed but
not spent yet because people saved it for their retirement? A flat
VAT-type tax is the same as confiscating xx% percent of that. Not fair
at all.

As I suggested, exempt basics, like food, reasonable rent, generic
medicines. If people can afford a yacht, they can afford to pay sales
tax on it.

Then you also have to exempt cars, sofas, washing machines, dryers,
blood pressure monitors, shoes, jeans, shirts, chain saws, firewood, TV
sets of non-obscene size, stereos, telephones, everything at Home Depot, ...

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

 

[Spehro Pefhany]

On Fri, 14 May 2010 10:40:49 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid>
wrote:

Check the tax situation first, all taxes including property taxes, cost
of living, et cetera. AZ may not be the first contender then.

Maybe they have some "boycott days" special deals.

 

[Joerg]

Spehro Pefhany wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 10:40:49 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:


Check the tax situation first, all taxes including property taxes, cost
of living, et cetera. AZ may not be the first contender then.

Maybe they have some "boycott days" special deals.

Doubt it. There's actually emails going around suggesting to prefer AZ
products and services, and boycott same from regions that turned hostile
towards them. Got one early this morning. Even if only some quotes in
there were true that would be rather sobering.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

 

[Jim Thompson]

On Fri, 14 May 2010 13:47:27 -0400, Spehro Pefhany
<speffSNIP@interlogDOTyou.knowwhat> wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 10:40:49 -0700, Joerg <invalid@invalid.invalid
wrote:


Check the tax situation first, all taxes including property taxes, cost
of living, et cetera. AZ may not be the first contender then.

Maybe they have some "boycott days" special deals.

There's idle talk around here to cut off Californica's water and
electricity... wonder how Californica would like Arizona's style of
"boycott" ? LA would shrivel up and die.

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

The only thing bipartisan in this country is hypocrisy

 

[Bill Sloman]

On May 14, 5:14 pm, John Larkin
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 02:49:23 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On May 14, 7:16 am, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:
On May 13, 5:02 pm,Bill Sloman<bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:

On May 13, 8:20 pm, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:
The argument for progressive taxation is usually put in terms of those
with the broadest shoulders carrying more of the load.

Right.  That's how the Little Red Hen got a hold of all the other
animals' bread, greedy thing that she was.  She had broad shoulders.

I think you are mixing your metaphors. If you want to refer to
Orwell's "Animal Farm" you had better read it first.

This falls a
long way short of Marx -

Marx was kind of an idiot.

The same kind of idiot as Darwin, who laid out the obvious facts that
nobody had noticed before.

"The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e.,
 that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely
 requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer."
   --The Communist Manifesto

  See what I mean?

That pretty much describes the state of industrial workers in
Victorian England before the trade union movement got under way. Marx
was describing the way the world worked at the time when he wrote
that, based - in part - on the data that he got from Friedrich Engels,
who not only supported Marx financially, but also provided a lot of
the social statistics on which Marx based his work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Engels

Marx's economic writings were much more evidence-based than those of
his contemporaries. If Marx is a kind of idiot, it is the kind of
idiot that we should see more often.

Your comment demonstrates that you don't understand why industrial
workes are no longer paid a bare subsistence wage, and the
contribution that Marx made to the process that changed their
condition.

  Of course Marx himself was a n'er-do-well who never earned his keep,
a pseudo-academic parasite sponging off patron Engels.  Engels in turn
coasted off the family business.  Marx made his living guilt-tripping
Engels with econobabble, a fine tradition carried on by Marxists
today.

There was nothing pseudo-academic about Marx. He revolutionised
academic economics, in part by exploiting statistical data about the
actual economies of the time, quite a bit of which was collected by
Engels.

  "To each according to need" really means "From you to me."  "Dear
Fred, I need that grocery money, and I deserve it, luv Karl, xoxoxoxo
P.S. Stop exploiting me! KM"

Perhaps. Marx didn't have an appealing personality. But he was doing
important - ground-breaking  - work, and Engels saw its value and
provided the financial and intellectual support that allowed Marx to
get on with it.

That you don't see its value reflects your - negligible - intellectual
status as a right-wing nitwit.

  Marx's moronic precepts ruined scores of countries, and killed tens
of millions, maybe hundreds.

The Bolshevik version of Marxism, with its emphasis on the "leading
role of the party" has damaged a lot of countries, and killed a lot of
people. The problem isn't with Marxism, but the concentration of power
into the hands of an unrepresentative and irresponsible elite - the
Communist party in Stalin's Russian, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's
Cambodia killed a lot of people, but the Nazi Party in Hitler's
Germany, the Fascist parties in Mussolini's Italy and Franco's Spain
weren't far behind, despite their violently anti-Marxist ideologies.

 "Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean
  the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form
  of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no
  need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a
  great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying
  it daily."  --The Communist Manifesto

But, dim-witted Marx had it exactly bass-ackwards--industry was the
very salvation for the proletariat, pulling them up out of poverty.

Only after the trade union movement forced industrial employers to pay
their workers at above subsistence levels.

All a union can do is increase its members' wages at the expense of
other, poorer citizens.

Wrong. The historical purpose of trade unions was to increase the
price that capital had to pay for labour; for most manufacturing, the
cost of the product is now more or less evenly split between the
interest on the capital invested in the manufacturing plant and the
wages paid out to the people who work the plant to produce the
product.

In so far as the people who own that plant are generally richer than
the people who work in it, your point is entirely invalid.

It's a less-then-zero-sum game.

Only from your hopelessly ill-informed point of view.

The thing that
makes everybody better off is productivity, and unions are generally
opposed to that.

They aren't. They do have a preference for employers to retrain
existing workers rather than firing them and hiring a new work force,
which does - marginally - increase the cost of up-grading
manufacturing equipment, but trade unionists are well aware that if
they succeeded in preventing their employers from increasing
productivity, their employers would go out of business because they
would trying to sell a more expensive product in competiton with
manufacturers who could make it more cheaply. This isn't a recipe for
job security.

Unfortunately, employers have been known to lie about changes to
manufacturing plant, and trade unionists have been known to be
sceptical about the stories they have been told.

Ford doubled his workers wages before they were
unionized for two reasons: it was good for his business, and the
technology that he invented increased productivity enough that he
could afford it.

Manufacturers have a vested interest in hanging onto trained and
experienced workers, though they hate to admit it. Ford was just being
sensible.

Productivity is the only real source of wealth, and technology is the
main source of productivity. Unions went for the money *after*
technology created the money.

You obviously haven't got a clue about the early history of the trade
union movement. The 1890's were interesting, in Australia and in the
UK.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1891_Australian_shearers%27_strike

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/TUdockers.htm

The most productive enterprises these days are non-union.

Unions exist to represent a bunch of people who all do much the same
kind of work. The most productive modern enterprises practice
continuous innovation - individual employees don't do the same kind
work for much more than year at time. It's difficult to negotiate a
rate for a job which will be radically different in a few months time.

Unions have mostly killed off the classic union industries.

The employers made a substantial contribution to their decline - the
famous line about the railways was that the railway companies thought
that they were in the railroad busniess, and were devastated to find
out that they were in transportation, at a time when other modes of
transport had become cheaper and more flexible.

Detroit didn't go down the tubes because the emloyees were unionised -
the German auto industry is even more unionised and hasn't lost its
competitive edge - but because the employers didn't understand their
market. When the message finally got through, the employers only
option was to downsize, which is tough on the employees being let go,
and leaves the unions very little room to negotiate. The German car
industry has been more technically innovative, and because they were
leading the industry, rather than failing to follow it, the necessary
retraining and redeployment didn't involve firing a lot of workers.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

 

[Bill Sloman]

On May 14, 4:48 pm, John Larkin
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Fri, 14 May 2010 01:45:16 -0700 (PDT),Bill Sloman

bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On May 13, 10:05 pm, Greegor <greego...@gmail.com> wrote:
BS > Do pay attention. The trouble that Greece is
BS > now in will be fixed by Greece. The EU - as
BS > a whole - will under-write Greek borrowing
BS > until that happens.

Oh GOODY!   More DEBT!   THAT'LL fix em!   LOL!

The alternative was to let them go bankrupt, taking down a bunch of
Eurpean banks that had lent them money. This is pretty much what
happend in 1929, and the relevant politicians know enough history to
be aware of this, and didn't fancy going down that route again.

There's a good argument that the government interventions in the '30s
created a decade-long depression that otherwise would have been a
year-or-so stock market bust. The "success" of the Roosevelt acts has
entered our mythology.

You've peddled this nonsense before. Unemployment in the US was around
25% in the early 1930's, and Roosevelt's New Deal got it down to 9% in
1937, before an unfortunate revival in economic conservatism undid the
good work and pushed it back up to 17%.

When you last posted on this subject, you ignored the fact that
unemployment got down to 9% at the start of of 1937, which did make
nosense of the story you were trying to sell.

It's not as though economists understand any of this stuff.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100511092406.htm

Some economists do better than others; classical monetarist economists
still believe in the "perfect market", because it keeps the math
tractable, and give answers that suit the rich, despite the fact that
it's predictions have very little to do with reality.

Keynes did better, but he didn't have the tools and the information
that today's "econophysicists" have at their command, and they don't
do all that well either.

Right-wing nitwits are less familiar with history, and correspondingly
more enthusiastic about repeating their ancestor's mistakes.

History records that we had stock market bubbles and busts for
hundreds of years before 1929, and that the first great government
intervention in such a bust was followed by the first Great
Depression.

What intervention do you have in mind?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Crash_of_1929

Governments did nothing in 1929. The New Deal wasn't enacted until
1933, after a couple of years of deep depression, and it worked a lot
better than Hoover's inaction.

Make no mistake. The Greeks are in the process of reforming their
economy.

Beginning with a general strike.

These things happen when belt-tightening is imposed from above.

 Already public servants are getting 10% lower salaries, and

their retirement age has been raised from 61 to 65. There's a lot
more  of that kind of belt-tightening in the pipe-line.

When "public servants" getting a 10% pay cut has serious effects on an
economy, you know that you have way too many "public servants."

Whatever the cuts are, they haven't had time to have any "serious
effects on the economy" beyond inspiring a brief general strike, which
seems to be more political theatre than any kind of serious power
play.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

It's not exceptionally big or incompetent, nor - apparently - all that
honest.

Not that this matters - the Greeks are going to have to balance their
budget before the loan guaranties run out

 

[Bill Sloman]

On May 14, 4:51 pm, John Larkin
<jjlar...@highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote:

On Thu, 13 May 2010 22:16:49 -0700 (PDT), dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com
wrote:



On May 13, 5:02 pm,Bill Sloman<bill.slo...@ieee.org> wrote:
On May 13, 8:20 pm, dagmargoodb...@yahoo.com wrote:

The argument for progressive taxation is usually put in terms of those
with the broadest shoulders carrying more of the load.

Right.  That's how the Little Red Hen got a hold of all the other
animals' bread, greedy thing that she was.  She had broad shoulders.

This falls a
long way short of Marx -

Marx was kind of an idiot.

"The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e.,
that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely
requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer."
  --The Communist Manifesto

 See what I mean?

Yeah, he wouldn't understand a female plumber making $150K.

I don't see why not. Most of the plumbers I've dealt with are self-
employed tradesmen - they own their own tools and use them themselves,
so there's no division between capital and labour.

What created our modern wealth was engineers applying science.

Putting together a semi-conductor fabrication line involves spending
around a billion dollars; average engineers have to consult a
financial instituion before they can take advantage of the relevant
science.

Back when I was working for Cambridge Instruments on electron beam
micro-fabricators (which sold for a couple of million dollars) we sold
one to AWA in Australia. It happened that my younger brother was
working for the building company that built the building into which
AWA was going to put the electron beam microfabricator (and a great
deal of other expensive equipment) and he negotiated the contact for
the building, which cost about a hundred times as much as the
microfabricator.

The people who provide the capital to pay for this kind of gear do
need to get an appropriate return on their investment, but they also
need to pay the skilled people who make it work. Marx spelled out the
conflicts of interest involved.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen