Here are my responses, thanks for the fun conversation, I love debating personal finance issues.
1. The employer should no doubt be the recorder. But since it's our taxes, we're ultimately responsible. But keep track of how much you earn is pretty unlikely and I think it's a fair expectation for the employer to take care of it.
2. I'm glad you're planning on cleaning up, that's a ton of accounts! Why have them open if you can't keep track of them, even if it's a small amount?
3. Intent is a big part of taxes, and it's unfortunate becaues a lot of times it's a judgment call that we and they have to make. If there's intent to make money selling items rather than just trying to get some cash for things you have laying around, it's time to start being vigilant in your records.
I'm sorry, but farmed shrimp is the furthest thing from sustainable. Shrimp farms are responsible for the destruction of 38 percent of the world's unique and crucial mangrove habitats. Farmed shrimp are also fed roughly 1.4 pounds of wild fish for every pound of shrimp produced. Shrimp ponds are regularly treated with toxic chemicals such as with urea, superphosphate, and diesel, in addition to pesticides and piscicides such as chlorine and retenone. In many farms, the shrimp are treated before sale with Borax, caustic soda and the suspected neurotoxin sodium tripolyphosphate. Widespread antibiotic use in fish farming produces, paradoxically, shrimp with high concentrations of bacteria. A recent test of imported ready-to-eat shrimp found it to be contaminated with 162 different species of bacteria that were collectively resistant to a total of 10 different antibiotics.
Don't think you can simply switch to wild-caught shrimp either to ease your consciousness. Wild caught shrimp (caught using trawlers) is responsible for the destruction of non-commercial (and often endangered) species such as sharks, rays, sea turtles and juvenile red snapper in massive numbers.
Has any seller ever won a credit card charge back disagreement that involved PayPal? Please4 don't respond with chargebacks where the buyer admits they made a mistake - though I bet there are plenty of folks who had sellers admit it but they still lost.
I second the Zip-it. I was skeptical, but one try and I was hooked.
Also, if you have plastic pipes you do need to be careful about the hot water. Lengthy exposure to boiling water can be bad for the pipes.
And maintenance is key. Try to keep stuff (including hair) from falling in the drain, and clear the pipes occasionally to cut down on residue inside the pipes. I fill my sinks with hot water periodically, then open the drain to let it clear the drain. I also periodically use the baking soda/vinegar/hot water treatment to keep the drains clear.
Great article! We own a busy seasonal pizza and sub shop in a resort town. I have all my employees, who are also cashiers, read it and do it. We haven't seen a counterfeit since. Customers joke, when they see us put a bill up to the light, but all I say is,"If this was your cash register, you'd check them, too" They agree. Thanks!!!
The IRS will only be able to see cash that you deposit in the bank. If my wife makes $100 for babysitting for a Saturday, that isn't going into the bank. I usually don't deposit cash into the bank unless it's $500 or more in which I probably (hopefully) are receiving that amount in the form of a check instead :)
Laszewski's paper actually stops short of advocating that more money go to the bottom 90% of income earners. What it says is that, if the division of money between the bottom 90% and the top 10% returned to its pre-1980s levels, GDP would increase by 4.5%. Other allocations of the returns to enterprise (putting even more money into the hands of the bottom 90%) could produce even greater levels of GDP increase.
Whether you want to change the way money is divided up by the enterprise is a different question. (As, indeed, is the question of whether you want higher rates of GDP growth.)
"Guest" is correct. Other than pointing out the inaccuracies in the article and follow-up comment, my point is that at some point the record keeping burden becomes excessive. My thoughts on the three scenarios mentioned:
1. You win a gift card or are given one by your employer. As an employee, my view is that it is the employer's responsibility to track that and for it to flow through the employee's W-2. Two different employers I've worked for did just that and reported it on the W-2. If the employer, who should have a system for recording compensation costs, can't/won't track it, it seems unreasonable to expect the employee to track it unless it is a significant amount ($500+).
2. Small interest savings accounts. Those of us that have been playing the game for a while have several accounts, many of which will be largely inactive and holding tiny balances. Myself, I can think of a dozen such accounts that are in my name or my wife's name. Is it worth the time to go to each inactive account to track down the interest earned that I am certain is less than $2 or $3? Nope. On a side note, closing down these inactive accounts is one of my goals for the year so this becomes largely a moot point.
3. eBay. It is definitely a judgment call on when you start viewing these are "business" transactions and recording accordingly, but my thought is that unless you are purchasing items with the intent to resell them or you are reselling collectible items you know have increased in price there isn't a significant taxable income event here. If you are just cleaning out closets or the garage and reselling household items you are almost certainly getting back less than you originally paid for the items, at which point there is no taxable income. Not to mention most people won't remember or be able to document what they originally paid for those items anyway.
With regards to the comment from Guest about the IRS not being able to track cash, this is untrue. Although rare there are audits where the IRS will review your bank records and require you to explain or document the sources of large deposits to your accounts.
3.
I shredded some old applications for my boss from years ago and noticed odd or outrageous information on a few. One applicant responded to the application question" Tell me more about yourself" with "I like to eat." Well, who doesn't? Another one, who did not get hired, stated she was needed a certain day of the week off so she could earn lots of tips as an erotic dancer at a strip club. This was for a conservative company with extensive background checks for new hires.
Frozen shrimp for $2 per pound? Must be in the U.S.A?
We see it here in Canada for $4-$5 per lb once in a while and we stock up on it big time. We love to make curry with shrimp and Mrs. SPF makes a nice lemon/shrimps/broccoli pasta dish that is scrumptious as well.
I generally agree with the article. However, in the past 30 years, technology, and globalization have changed the paradigm. As a result, purchases of consumer goods tend to profit companies wthout creating new jobs at home for the most part. Thus, stimulus spending is making the rich richer as well and profiting non-Americans. I'm not against people in China bettering their lives, nbt not on my tax dollars. Unless policies change to reflect this, pumping money into the economy is like trying to pump water into a river that feeds to the sea and pretending you're watering your garden. I'm being purposely simplistic here to make my point.
"Free trade" has been a net loss for the average American. Yes, we can buy cheaper flat screens and socks, but we no longer have high quality jobs, which erodes our tax base, well being, and our outlook for our future. The oligarchs remain oblivious or uncaring to what amounts to an upcoming economic and social tsunami. I guess their escape plans are secure or they are completely myopic. Time tell which is the case, as only time can change this course.
Comparing consumption of income groups is irrelevant to the debate between supply and demand-side economics. Supply side argues that *investment* is key to economic growth, not consumption. That upper income brackets consume less than lower is meaningless because the income that they do not consume is not buried in their backyards or stuffed into mattresses. It's invested in businesses or put into banks where it's available for loans. That is the process that generates growth.
Further, the notion that supply-side exclusively favors upper brackets over lower is also false. Supply-side marginal tax rate cuts in 1964, 1981, as well as the more recent Bush tax cuts were across the board--all tax brackets. The 1964 and 1981 were particularly effective because the upper most tax brackets were sufficiently high to be a disincentive to investment. The more recent cuts were less effective simply because rates were not high enough to be a barrier to investment--we were not beyond the peak on the legendary Laffer curve.
The real debate is between those who advocate monetary policy to regulate the economy and Keynesians who argue for consumption by government as a method to stimulate growth. The monetarists won that argument handily until recently when they failed to execute the theory properly. The Federal Reserve simply could not distinguish between real growth and the real estate bubble.
I think I learned the foolishness of this kind of thinking from running my own little neighborhood fruit stand when I was twelve. Even the most elementary understanding of what 'profits' are would rescue someone from a statement like, "Corporations are pocketing the profits of this. What if we . . . could live on those profits instead. . . ."
The fact that Guest can talk about "wants and needs" as if they are finite in the same post that talks about "a living wage" should say it all. A "living wage" is enough to keep body and soul together. This can pretty much be done with one 25# bag each of rice and beans per month per family and some dandelion greens. But if you ask the typical McDonald's employee, he/she will argue forcefully that a living wage includes the ability to buy a flat screen TV, cable, and one of those gadgets that starts with the letter I.
Human "wants and needs" are infinite and infinitely variable. Mine include good subscription seats at the opera, regular range practice with enough ammo, and Manchego cheese. On the other hand, my 14 year old car will probably last me another 8-10 years, and I don't need I-gadgets. In order to get what I want, I work as much as necessary and no more. I don't actually understand why people pay me for what I do, but they want it, I can do it competently, so I'll give it to them.
The views Guest espouses require us to accept Guest or someone like him/her to decide for everybody else what we need and how hard we should work to attain it and ultimately, what we should do as work. No thanks.
I wrote a comment earlier that the Laszewski article was GIGO, but didn't have time then to elaborate.
First, the article notes that high-income people do not consume as much of their income proportionately as people in lower income deciles. It ignores that one of the reasons for this is that many people are 'high-income' for only one or two years of their lives, and must conserve the 'income' from that high point to last the rest of their lives. Over the course of my live, I've worked with perhaps three or four dozen clients who have been in the top 5% of income earners by the Laszewski charts (roughly $450,000 and above), but in every single case it was a result of some unique circumstance that would never be repeated in that client's life - the sale of a small business, the settlement of a personal injury lawsuit, the sale of a family farm or commercial real estate, etc.
The article talks of the various decile levels of income earners as if they were each a unique and immutable caste, whereas instead they are ever-changing - this year's high-income individual who sold his business for $1 million will earn $30,000 next year in income from investing what's left to him of that million after taxes. And while he won't consume all the income from that business in the year it is sold, he'll consume MORE than his income in future years because he'll draw on that capital for consumption throughout retirement.
It doesn't surprise me that the distribution of income to the top decile has seemingly increased since the 1980s. For one thing, it was during the 1980s that the ability to income-average an extra-high year's income over five years was eliminated, which evened out somewhat those who enjoyed rare high-income years. The late 1970s was also the beginning of an inflationary spiral that increased the 'nominal' gain from the sale of long-term capital assets even though, after inflation, some of those assets might actually have lost value.
For example, my parents bought a duplex in 1964 for $15,000 and sold it in 1996 for $60,000. [Ignoring depreciation recapture] they paid taxes of $9,000 on their $45,000 nominal gain. But they would have had to sell it for over $75,000 to just break even with inflation over that time period. So their 'income' was entirely illusory and they actually sustained a loss of real wealth of $24,000 in 1996 dollars or about $4,800 in 1964 dollars.
People who want to find justifications for income and wealth redistributionary schemes can always fake some plausible-sounding argument, but diligently avoid looking at the real-life historical consequences when such schmes are put in practice.
We don't have to go to the extremes of Cuba, Zimbabwe, North Korea or even the Soviet Union to look at the real-life effects. European socialism implemented many of these schemes over decades, and as a result also 'enjoyed' chronic unemployment for decades at the levels we are only experiencing today, until finally they have been forced to start liberalizing (in US language it would be Republicanizing) their labor markets and tax structures, a task that has a long way to go and is causing major unrest in the countries with the most enthusiastic schemers.
And people who talk about the 'evil corporations' (I haven't seen Philip do this, but other comments here run along those lines) hogging all the money forget that corporations are legal fictions for aggregations of individuals. Corporations CAN'T hog the money. They don't even have a mattress to stuff it into.
Philip correctly identifies those individuals as workers, managers and owners, and wants to give workers more power at the expense of owners. First, he fails to recognize that in today's economy, workers and managers are almost certainly also owners, if not of their own company then of others through pension, retirement and insurance plans. But more importantly, if workers take more money away from owners than owners find tolerable, the owners will withdraw their capital and the company will fail, taking workers down too.
You missed Zip-It, it's a $3 piece of plastic with teeth on it, slide it down the drain all the way then slowly pull up. The teeth hook onto all the nastiness and pull it right up. I think they're supposed to be disposable, but if you just use a plastic bag to pull the gunk off in the opposite direction of the teeth, a quick soapy rinse and you can use the tool again and again. Fixed in 5 mins a drain issue I'd been battling with water/draino/etc... for years.
Phillip - Come on, you've been around long enough to realize that Republicans have zero interest in anything other than improving their own financial situation. Just like with global warming, science and reason and data have zero ability to influence them any other way. Even if (as a whole) we move backwards as a well functioning society, it does not matter so long as their own financial situation improves for the better. Unfortunately, their blind faith in the corporate machine has, and will continue to lead to the country's demise as an economic super-power. Without a true middle class, if a small portion of the country controls all of the money, how the hell is everyone else going to keep buying things in order to keep the economy from collapsing? We are a consumer-driven economy. If only 10% of us can consume, even that 10% at the top is ultimately going to end up being screwed.
"Lets just create an economy built on justice and take our lumps come what may."
That is only possible if you level the playing field as much as possible- via education. Give every single US school the same level of teachers (use a rating system that evaluates professional expertise), the same teacher to student ratio, and the identical facilities, books, computer access both at school and at home, and identical offerings both academic and extracurricular. As long as public school is funded via property taxes, the rich get a hug advantage in the form of better education, Knowledge is power.
If you have THAT in place, then I say hands off economic lift-ups.
But if the economics strongly favor an already privileged group with better educational opportunities for their entire formative life (not earned, BTW- a child can work extremely hard at a lousy school, or work extremely hard a great school - one does not inherently deserve a better PUBLIC education), then we will never have equal opportunity. We cannot fix all home factors, but we can do as many other countries do, and either offer uniform education, or educational opportunities based on ability and continued achievement- not on zip code at birth, and the size of daddy's wallet. The way we dole out educational opportunities is fascist, and does not benefit our economy in the long term.
Whenever your employer pays you, whether it's in cash or check, it should be documented and included in your compensation. Gifts and found money are separate issues and I can understand the viewpoint that 99.9% of people will not record such transactions. But when you work and get paid, no matter how you are paid, you need to record that as income, as does your employer.
The fact that the IRS won't find out is irrelevant. Some people can earn thousands of dollars in cash tutoring or babysitting. Very hard to track, but that's still income that should be reported.
i think the point this commenter is trying to make is that tracking business related stuff is fine, but trying to track every time someone gave you $20 for gas money, you found $5 on the ground, or your company gave you $100 for coming into work on a Saturday (happened to me last year), etc. is excessive and would end up costing a ton of time (money).
Plus, there is no way the govt will ever come after you for it, unless the amount is in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Even if you are audited, the IRS has no way of tracking cash.
I have a (growing) list of charities that I donate to once a year. At that point I look at the list and decide which ones to add (maybe a new group I got involved with over the last year) and if there are any that I no longer feel align with my values.
I don't give to other causes throughout the year unless solicited by a friend. I have some amount set aside each year to support friends (and their charities) when asked.
I also have done extensive work (both paid and volunteering) for local nonprofits.
Yes, Gilt is my favorite! Invite link here for those interested: http://www.gilt.com/invite/oliviairis That way you don't have to wait a few days or more for Gilt admins to approve your request for membership.
Thanks for the kind words!
I like you BillyOceansEleven.
Here are my responses, thanks for the fun conversation, I love debating personal finance issues.
1. The employer should no doubt be the recorder. But since it's our taxes, we're ultimately responsible. But keep track of how much you earn is pretty unlikely and I think it's a fair expectation for the employer to take care of it.
2. I'm glad you're planning on cleaning up, that's a ton of accounts! Why have them open if you can't keep track of them, even if it's a small amount?
3. Intent is a big part of taxes, and it's unfortunate becaues a lot of times it's a judgment call that we and they have to make. If there's intent to make money selling items rather than just trying to get some cash for things you have laying around, it's time to start being vigilant in your records.
I'm sorry, but farmed shrimp is the furthest thing from sustainable. Shrimp farms are responsible for the destruction of 38 percent of the world's unique and crucial mangrove habitats. Farmed shrimp are also fed roughly 1.4 pounds of wild fish for every pound of shrimp produced. Shrimp ponds are regularly treated with toxic chemicals such as with urea, superphosphate, and diesel, in addition to pesticides and piscicides such as chlorine and retenone. In many farms, the shrimp are treated before sale with Borax, caustic soda and the suspected neurotoxin sodium tripolyphosphate. Widespread antibiotic use in fish farming produces, paradoxically, shrimp with high concentrations of bacteria. A recent test of imported ready-to-eat shrimp found it to be contaminated with 162 different species of bacteria that were collectively resistant to a total of 10 different antibiotics.
Don't think you can simply switch to wild-caught shrimp either to ease your consciousness. Wild caught shrimp (caught using trawlers) is responsible for the destruction of non-commercial (and often endangered) species such as sharks, rays, sea turtles and juvenile red snapper in massive numbers.
Has any seller ever won a credit card charge back disagreement that involved PayPal? Please4 don't respond with chargebacks where the buyer admits they made a mistake - though I bet there are plenty of folks who had sellers admit it but they still lost.
I second the Zip-it. I was skeptical, but one try and I was hooked.
Also, if you have plastic pipes you do need to be careful about the hot water. Lengthy exposure to boiling water can be bad for the pipes.
And maintenance is key. Try to keep stuff (including hair) from falling in the drain, and clear the pipes occasionally to cut down on residue inside the pipes. I fill my sinks with hot water periodically, then open the drain to let it clear the drain. I also periodically use the baking soda/vinegar/hot water treatment to keep the drains clear.
Great article! We own a busy seasonal pizza and sub shop in a resort town. I have all my employees, who are also cashiers, read it and do it. We haven't seen a counterfeit since. Customers joke, when they see us put a bill up to the light, but all I say is,"If this was your cash register, you'd check them, too" They agree. Thanks!!!
@BILLYOCEANSELEVEN
The IRS will only be able to see cash that you deposit in the bank. If my wife makes $100 for babysitting for a Saturday, that isn't going into the bank. I usually don't deposit cash into the bank unless it's $500 or more in which I probably (hopefully) are receiving that amount in the form of a check instead :)
Laszewski's paper actually stops short of advocating that more money go to the bottom 90% of income earners. What it says is that, if the division of money between the bottom 90% and the top 10% returned to its pre-1980s levels, GDP would increase by 4.5%. Other allocations of the returns to enterprise (putting even more money into the hands of the bottom 90%) could produce even greater levels of GDP increase.
Whether you want to change the way money is divided up by the enterprise is a different question. (As, indeed, is the question of whether you want higher rates of GDP growth.)
"Guest" is correct. Other than pointing out the inaccuracies in the article and follow-up comment, my point is that at some point the record keeping burden becomes excessive. My thoughts on the three scenarios mentioned:
1. You win a gift card or are given one by your employer. As an employee, my view is that it is the employer's responsibility to track that and for it to flow through the employee's W-2. Two different employers I've worked for did just that and reported it on the W-2. If the employer, who should have a system for recording compensation costs, can't/won't track it, it seems unreasonable to expect the employee to track it unless it is a significant amount ($500+).
2. Small interest savings accounts. Those of us that have been playing the game for a while have several accounts, many of which will be largely inactive and holding tiny balances. Myself, I can think of a dozen such accounts that are in my name or my wife's name. Is it worth the time to go to each inactive account to track down the interest earned that I am certain is less than $2 or $3? Nope. On a side note, closing down these inactive accounts is one of my goals for the year so this becomes largely a moot point.
3. eBay. It is definitely a judgment call on when you start viewing these are "business" transactions and recording accordingly, but my thought is that unless you are purchasing items with the intent to resell them or you are reselling collectible items you know have increased in price there isn't a significant taxable income event here. If you are just cleaning out closets or the garage and reselling household items you are almost certainly getting back less than you originally paid for the items, at which point there is no taxable income. Not to mention most people won't remember or be able to document what they originally paid for those items anyway.
With regards to the comment from Guest about the IRS not being able to track cash, this is untrue. Although rare there are audits where the IRS will review your bank records and require you to explain or document the sources of large deposits to your accounts.
3.
I shredded some old applications for my boss from years ago and noticed odd or outrageous information on a few. One applicant responded to the application question" Tell me more about yourself" with "I like to eat." Well, who doesn't? Another one, who did not get hired, stated she was needed a certain day of the week off so she could earn lots of tips as an erotic dancer at a strip club. This was for a conservative company with extensive background checks for new hires.
Frozen shrimp for $2 per pound? Must be in the U.S.A?
We see it here in Canada for $4-$5 per lb once in a while and we stock up on it big time. We love to make curry with shrimp and Mrs. SPF makes a nice lemon/shrimps/broccoli pasta dish that is scrumptious as well.
Why are eBay store owners (who pay to own that store) penalized by not getting free insertion fees for their first 50 listings??
I generally agree with the article. However, in the past 30 years, technology, and globalization have changed the paradigm. As a result, purchases of consumer goods tend to profit companies wthout creating new jobs at home for the most part. Thus, stimulus spending is making the rich richer as well and profiting non-Americans. I'm not against people in China bettering their lives, nbt not on my tax dollars. Unless policies change to reflect this, pumping money into the economy is like trying to pump water into a river that feeds to the sea and pretending you're watering your garden. I'm being purposely simplistic here to make my point.
"Free trade" has been a net loss for the average American. Yes, we can buy cheaper flat screens and socks, but we no longer have high quality jobs, which erodes our tax base, well being, and our outlook for our future. The oligarchs remain oblivious or uncaring to what amounts to an upcoming economic and social tsunami. I guess their escape plans are secure or they are completely myopic. Time tell which is the case, as only time can change this course.
Comparing consumption of income groups is irrelevant to the debate between supply and demand-side economics. Supply side argues that *investment* is key to economic growth, not consumption. That upper income brackets consume less than lower is meaningless because the income that they do not consume is not buried in their backyards or stuffed into mattresses. It's invested in businesses or put into banks where it's available for loans. That is the process that generates growth.
Further, the notion that supply-side exclusively favors upper brackets over lower is also false. Supply-side marginal tax rate cuts in 1964, 1981, as well as the more recent Bush tax cuts were across the board--all tax brackets. The 1964 and 1981 were particularly effective because the upper most tax brackets were sufficiently high to be a disincentive to investment. The more recent cuts were less effective simply because rates were not high enough to be a barrier to investment--we were not beyond the peak on the legendary Laffer curve.
The real debate is between those who advocate monetary policy to regulate the economy and Keynesians who argue for consumption by government as a method to stimulate growth. The monetarists won that argument handily until recently when they failed to execute the theory properly. The Federal Reserve simply could not distinguish between real growth and the real estate bubble.
I think I learned the foolishness of this kind of thinking from running my own little neighborhood fruit stand when I was twelve. Even the most elementary understanding of what 'profits' are would rescue someone from a statement like, "Corporations are pocketing the profits of this. What if we . . . could live on those profits instead. . . ."
The fact that Guest can talk about "wants and needs" as if they are finite in the same post that talks about "a living wage" should say it all. A "living wage" is enough to keep body and soul together. This can pretty much be done with one 25# bag each of rice and beans per month per family and some dandelion greens. But if you ask the typical McDonald's employee, he/she will argue forcefully that a living wage includes the ability to buy a flat screen TV, cable, and one of those gadgets that starts with the letter I.
Human "wants and needs" are infinite and infinitely variable. Mine include good subscription seats at the opera, regular range practice with enough ammo, and Manchego cheese. On the other hand, my 14 year old car will probably last me another 8-10 years, and I don't need I-gadgets. In order to get what I want, I work as much as necessary and no more. I don't actually understand why people pay me for what I do, but they want it, I can do it competently, so I'll give it to them.
The views Guest espouses require us to accept Guest or someone like him/her to decide for everybody else what we need and how hard we should work to attain it and ultimately, what we should do as work. No thanks.
I wrote a comment earlier that the Laszewski article was GIGO, but didn't have time then to elaborate.
First, the article notes that high-income people do not consume as much of their income proportionately as people in lower income deciles. It ignores that one of the reasons for this is that many people are 'high-income' for only one or two years of their lives, and must conserve the 'income' from that high point to last the rest of their lives. Over the course of my live, I've worked with perhaps three or four dozen clients who have been in the top 5% of income earners by the Laszewski charts (roughly $450,000 and above), but in every single case it was a result of some unique circumstance that would never be repeated in that client's life - the sale of a small business, the settlement of a personal injury lawsuit, the sale of a family farm or commercial real estate, etc.
The article talks of the various decile levels of income earners as if they were each a unique and immutable caste, whereas instead they are ever-changing - this year's high-income individual who sold his business for $1 million will earn $30,000 next year in income from investing what's left to him of that million after taxes. And while he won't consume all the income from that business in the year it is sold, he'll consume MORE than his income in future years because he'll draw on that capital for consumption throughout retirement.
It doesn't surprise me that the distribution of income to the top decile has seemingly increased since the 1980s. For one thing, it was during the 1980s that the ability to income-average an extra-high year's income over five years was eliminated, which evened out somewhat those who enjoyed rare high-income years. The late 1970s was also the beginning of an inflationary spiral that increased the 'nominal' gain from the sale of long-term capital assets even though, after inflation, some of those assets might actually have lost value.
For example, my parents bought a duplex in 1964 for $15,000 and sold it in 1996 for $60,000. [Ignoring depreciation recapture] they paid taxes of $9,000 on their $45,000 nominal gain. But they would have had to sell it for over $75,000 to just break even with inflation over that time period. So their 'income' was entirely illusory and they actually sustained a loss of real wealth of $24,000 in 1996 dollars or about $4,800 in 1964 dollars.
People who want to find justifications for income and wealth redistributionary schemes can always fake some plausible-sounding argument, but diligently avoid looking at the real-life historical consequences when such schmes are put in practice.
We don't have to go to the extremes of Cuba, Zimbabwe, North Korea or even the Soviet Union to look at the real-life effects. European socialism implemented many of these schemes over decades, and as a result also 'enjoyed' chronic unemployment for decades at the levels we are only experiencing today, until finally they have been forced to start liberalizing (in US language it would be Republicanizing) their labor markets and tax structures, a task that has a long way to go and is causing major unrest in the countries with the most enthusiastic schemers.
And people who talk about the 'evil corporations' (I haven't seen Philip do this, but other comments here run along those lines) hogging all the money forget that corporations are legal fictions for aggregations of individuals. Corporations CAN'T hog the money. They don't even have a mattress to stuff it into.
Philip correctly identifies those individuals as workers, managers and owners, and wants to give workers more power at the expense of owners. First, he fails to recognize that in today's economy, workers and managers are almost certainly also owners, if not of their own company then of others through pension, retirement and insurance plans. But more importantly, if workers take more money away from owners than owners find tolerable, the owners will withdraw their capital and the company will fail, taking workers down too.
You missed Zip-It, it's a $3 piece of plastic with teeth on it, slide it down the drain all the way then slowly pull up. The teeth hook onto all the nastiness and pull it right up. I think they're supposed to be disposable, but if you just use a plastic bag to pull the gunk off in the opposite direction of the teeth, a quick soapy rinse and you can use the tool again and again. Fixed in 5 mins a drain issue I'd been battling with water/draino/etc... for years.
Oh Great... What does it mean if you think have nine out of twenty? Douh!!!!
Phillip - Come on, you've been around long enough to realize that Republicans have zero interest in anything other than improving their own financial situation. Just like with global warming, science and reason and data have zero ability to influence them any other way. Even if (as a whole) we move backwards as a well functioning society, it does not matter so long as their own financial situation improves for the better. Unfortunately, their blind faith in the corporate machine has, and will continue to lead to the country's demise as an economic super-power. Without a true middle class, if a small portion of the country controls all of the money, how the hell is everyone else going to keep buying things in order to keep the economy from collapsing? We are a consumer-driven economy. If only 10% of us can consume, even that 10% at the top is ultimately going to end up being screwed.
Thanks for including my link in your roundup!
"Lets just create an economy built on justice and take our lumps come what may."
That is only possible if you level the playing field as much as possible- via education. Give every single US school the same level of teachers (use a rating system that evaluates professional expertise), the same teacher to student ratio, and the identical facilities, books, computer access both at school and at home, and identical offerings both academic and extracurricular. As long as public school is funded via property taxes, the rich get a hug advantage in the form of better education, Knowledge is power.
If you have THAT in place, then I say hands off economic lift-ups.
But if the economics strongly favor an already privileged group with better educational opportunities for their entire formative life (not earned, BTW- a child can work extremely hard at a lousy school, or work extremely hard a great school - one does not inherently deserve a better PUBLIC education), then we will never have equal opportunity. We cannot fix all home factors, but we can do as many other countries do, and either offer uniform education, or educational opportunities based on ability and continued achievement- not on zip code at birth, and the size of daddy's wallet. The way we dole out educational opportunities is fascist, and does not benefit our economy in the long term.
Whenever your employer pays you, whether it's in cash or check, it should be documented and included in your compensation. Gifts and found money are separate issues and I can understand the viewpoint that 99.9% of people will not record such transactions. But when you work and get paid, no matter how you are paid, you need to record that as income, as does your employer.
The fact that the IRS won't find out is irrelevant. Some people can earn thousands of dollars in cash tutoring or babysitting. Very hard to track, but that's still income that should be reported.
i think the point this commenter is trying to make is that tracking business related stuff is fine, but trying to track every time someone gave you $20 for gas money, you found $5 on the ground, or your company gave you $100 for coming into work on a Saturday (happened to me last year), etc. is excessive and would end up costing a ton of time (money).
Plus, there is no way the govt will ever come after you for it, unless the amount is in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Even if you are audited, the IRS has no way of tracking cash.
I have a (growing) list of charities that I donate to once a year. At that point I look at the list and decide which ones to add (maybe a new group I got involved with over the last year) and if there are any that I no longer feel align with my values.
I don't give to other causes throughout the year unless solicited by a friend. I have some amount set aside each year to support friends (and their charities) when asked.
I also have done extensive work (both paid and volunteering) for local nonprofits.
Yes, Gilt is my favorite! Invite link here for those interested: http://www.gilt.com/invite/oliviairis That way you don't have to wait a few days or more for Gilt admins to approve your request for membership.