Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

F6 .. "Executives and politicians must find new ways to link value creation and job creation. If they don’t, business
leaders will continue to lose legitimacy in society, especially if they keep prospering while people around them are
struggling. Instead of a virtuous circle, the relationship between business and society will become a vicious circle."

Yeah, repeat .. I went off sport when the first US athlete was paid a million dollars. It didn't feel or
smell right then. Course, my action didn't help anybody. And you can't stay away from all of it forever.

This is always worth repeating ..

"In 1977, an elite chief executive working at one of America’s top 100 companies earned about 50 times the wage of its average
worker. Three decades later, the nation’s best-paid C.E.O.’s made about 1,100 times the pay of a worker on the production line." [...]

"in the 1970s found that executives in the top 10 percent made about twice as much as those in the middle of
the pack. By the early 2000s, the top suits made more than four times the pay of the executives in the middle." [...]

"Xavier Gabaix and Augustin Landier, published a study [ http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=890829 ] in 2006 estimating that the sixfold rise in the pay of chief executives in the United States over the last quarter century or so was attributable entirely to the sixfold rise in the market size of large American companies.

And therein lies a big problem for American capitalism.

CAPITALISM relies on inequality. Like differences in other prices, pay disparities steer
resources — in this case, people — to where they would be most productively employed." [..]

"Other experiments have found that winner-take-all games tend to elicit much less player effort — and
more cheating — than those in which rewards are distributed more smoothly according to performance."

Ultimately, the question is this: How much inequality is necessary?"

It is true that the nation grew quite fast as inequality soared over the last three decades. Since 1980, the country’s gross domestic product per person has increased about 69 percent, even as the share of income accruing to the richest 1 percent of the population jumped to 36 percent from 22 percent. But the economy grew even faster — 83 percent per capita — from 1951 to 1980, when inequality declined when measured as the share of national income going to the very top of the population.

One study concluded that each percentage-point increase in the share of national income channeled to the top 10 percent of Americans since 1960 led to an increase of 0.12 percentage points in the annual rate of economic growth — hardly an enormous boost. The cost for this tonic seems to be a drastic decline in Americans’ economic mobility. Since 1980, the weekly wage of the average worker on the factory floor has increased little more than 3 percent, after inflation.

The United States is the rich country with the most skewed income distribution." According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [ http://www.oecd.org/document/53/0,3746,en_2649_33933_41460917_1_1_1_1,00.html ], the average earnings of the richest 10 percent of Americans are 16 times those for the 10 percent at the bottom of the pile. That compares with a multiple of 8 in Britain and 5 in Sweden.

US workers are less mobile, yet the TeaParty trogs who CRY FREEDOM seem to be happy with that

Banks were 'under control until Reagan, and the 'best and brightest, eager to become
richer flocked back to the finance industry where they could play to their hearts content making .. .

"A third of the 2009 Princeton graduates who got jobs after graduation went into finance; 6.3 percent took jobs in government."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkRIbUT6u7Q

CATCHY, but UGH! The financial industry became the wave of the times, still cruising, despite the odd dump or two.

The financial industry ballooned, cuz it's get rich, baby, get rich, even though ..

"bankers’ pay could be structured to discourage wanton risk taking."

US companies hire top people to spend ALL their day working out how to dodge American taxes. Great job if it interests you.

This stuff will do me for now ..

"At the White House on Dec. 15, business executives asked President Obama for a tax holiday that
would help them tap more than $1 trillion of offshore earnings, much of it sitting in island tax havens.

The money -- including hundreds of billions in profits that U.S. companies attribute to overseas subsidiaries to avoid taxes -- is supposed to be taxed at up to 35 percent when it’s brought home, or “repatriated.” Executives including John T. Chambers of Cisco Systems Inc. say a tax break would return a flood of cash and boost the economy.

What nobody’s saying publicly is that U.S. multinationals are already finding legal ways to avoid that tax. [...]

Merck & Co Inc., the second-largest drugmaker in the U.S., last year brought more than $9 billion from abroad without paying any U.S. tax to help finance its acquisition of Schering-Plough Corp., securities filings show. Merck is also appealing a federal judge’s 2009 finding that Schering-Plough owed taxes on $690 million it had earlier brought home from overseas tax-free.

The largest drugmaker, Pfizer Inc., imported more than $30 billion from offshore in connection with its acquisition of Wyeth last year, while taking steps to minimize the tax hit on its publicly reported profit.

Disclosures in Switzerland and Delaware by Eli Lilly & Co. show the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical company carried out many of the steps for a tax-free importation of foreign cash after its roughly $6 billion purchase of ImClone Systems Inc. in 2008.

‘Trivially Small Taxes’

“Sophisticated U.S. companies are routinely repatriating hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign earnings and paying trivially small U.S. taxes on those repatriations,” said Edward D. Kleinbard, a law professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “They devote enormous resources first to moving income to tax havens, and then to bringing those profits back to the U.S. at the lowest possible tax cost.”

With the exception of the Schering-Plough case, no authority has accused Merck or Pfizer or Lilly of paying less tax than they should have. [...]

U.S. companies overall use various repatriation strategies to avoid about $25 billion a year in federal income taxes, he said. [...]

“The current U.S. international tax system is the best of all worlds for U.S. multinationals,” said David S. Miller, a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP in New York. That’s because the companies can defer federal income taxes by shifting profits into low-tax jurisdictions abroad, and then use foreign tax credits to shelter those earnings from U.S. tax when they repatriate them, he said."

Business is the cat, the people represented by government regulators the mouse in the "Cat and Mouse" game.

Good work .. “Some of the best minds in the country are spent all day, every day, wheedling
nickels and dimes out of the tax system,” .. if it interests and satisfies you

Ouch, read it ALL LOL before, but now only 1 cm down .. just thought to isolate some bits .. plenty enough on it for now.

HAPPY NEW YEAR .. to liberals particularly .. to the 'money making only guys' on condition, you look
in the mirror, and consider the American society you are creating. Buffett, Gates and others are.

It's not asking too much.