Tag Archives: Money/Economy/Taxes

Marc Faber: “Paul Krugman Should Go And Live In North Korea”

“The views of the Keynesians like Mr. Krugman is that the fiscal deficits are far too small. One of the problems of the crisis is that it was caused by government intervention with fiscal and monetary measures. Now they tells us we didn’t intervene enough. If they really believe that they should go and live in North Korea where you have a communist system. There the government intervenes into every aspect of the economy. And look at the economic performance of North Korea.” (Read more)

IRS vs ex-pats

open quoteFatca calls for foreign financial institutions to file an annual report to the I.R.S., either directly or through its own national tax authority, on each U.S. taxpayer for whom it holds more than $50,000 in assets at the end of the year.close quote

This is why a friend in Singapore gave up his US citizenship. He couldn’t get any financial institution to do business with him. It’s also why some Swiss banks have dumped US clients.

open quoteThe law also requires account holders to file an I.R.S. form themselves, 8938, detailing their foreign holdings, though American expatriates need file only if their financial assets exceed $200,000 at year’s end. To make sure account holders stay in touch, the agency levies a $10,000 penalty for failure to file a required 8938, and any underreported income will be subject to an additional 40 percent penalty. close quote (Read more)

$200k — I aspire to have these problems. :)

As we approach financial Armageddon, economic ignorance dominates the press

open quoteThat’s how things often work in America. Half-a-century of tax cuts focused on the wealthiest Americans leave us with third-rate public services, leading the wealthy to develop inefficient private workarounds. close quote (Read more)

The latest propaganda meme seems to revolve around the 90% top income tax bracket of the 1950’s (which nobody paid b/c there were so many loop holes). Regardless, the true measure of how much money the gov’t is stealing is not taxes, but spending. What they don’t steal immediately, they’ll take from your children through debt, or stealthily through inflation.

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open quoteSTUDY: Every $1 Of Infrastructure Spending Boosts The Economy By $2

Read more: www.businessinsider.com/infrastructure-economic-multiplier-2012-11#ixzz2DqgS19ci
close quote

I say we spend a HUNDRED THOUSAND BAZILLION dollars on infrastructure! That way, we’ll make TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND BAZILLION dollars!

Walmart Employees Threaten Black Friday Strike

It’s funny. I’m actually in Ukraine as an ex-pat. Many people in this country save money for years, and stand in lines for many hours to get permission to go to the US and work at Walmart-like jobs. When they succeed in doing so, they are grateful and their friends are envious.

How much do these clowns think they deserve for wrangling shopping carts and putting boxes onto shelves????

These guys are privileged, ungrateful and under-educated. Their rising political power makes me very happy to have chosen life as an ex-pat.

If you take almost any human being from any point in the history of man and put him in the middle of Walmart, and express the prices to him in terms of hours of unskilled, manual labor, he will think he arrived in heaven! But instead of praising this modern miracle of capitalism, we condemn it, because the people who CHOSE to work there want more money and better conditions.

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At least they didn’t have one of the morbidly obese employees deliver the line about not having enough to eat:

The Hostess Liquidation: A Curious Cast Of Characters As The Twinkie Tumbles

open quoteWhat is curious is that its emergence had all the drama of a anti-Mitt Romney PAC funded thriller, with a PE firm, in this case Ripplewood holdings, injecting $130 million in order to obtain equity control of Hostess as it was emerging last time. There were also more hedge funds, investment banks, strategic buyers, politicians involved in this particular story than one can shake a deep fried numismatic value Twinkie at. More importantly, however, as America has been habituated following the last season of the reality TV show known as the presidential election, if Private Equity then “bad.” Only this time there is a twist: because it wasn’t really PE that was the pure evil in the Obama long-term campaign, it was associating PE with Republicans, and thus: with jobs outsourcing. And here comes the Hostess twist: because Tim Collins of Ripplewood, was a prominent Democrat, a position which allowed him to get involved in the first bankruptcy process in the first place, due to his proximity with the Teamsters’ long-term heartthrob Dick Gephardt (whose consulting group just happens to also be an equity owner of Hostess). In other words, the traditional republican-cum-PE scapegoating strategy here will be a tough one to pull off since the narrative collapses when considering that it was a Democrat who rescued the firm, only to see it implode in a trainwreck that has resulted in the liquidation of a legendary brand, and 18,500 layoffs.

But it only gets better. Because the full cast of characters involved here is quite stunningclose quote (Read more)