Bankruptcy and Reorganization for Detroit?

Discussion in 'General Motoring' started by edward ohare, Nov 23, 2008.

  1. edward ohare

    marcodbeast Guest

    Nope, I simply noticed that you had to use the term "left wing version of"
    before you invoked "national socialism", and then clammed up rather than
    explain when asked.

    Now, what one party in history used the word "socialism", but was not
    considered left wing?

    Think hard, now. ;)
     
    marcodbeast, Nov 26, 2008
    #81
  2. edward ohare

    Dave Head Guest

    Don't suppose it occurs to anyone that had there been no corporate income tax
    when they _were_ making money, they would have had more to invest, do more
    research and development, make better cars, accumulate some operating capital,
    etc., rather than shipping about 40% to the gov't.
     
    Dave Head, Nov 27, 2008
    #82
  3. edward ohare

    MoPar Man Guest

    Largely irrelavant. Except possibly if you're an oil company.

    Partly true.
    You're only taxed on your NET PROFIT.

    R&D, aquiring other companies, buying new equipment, etc, are all
    pre-tax costs.

    If you have any money left after all that, and if you don't have any
    past losses to carry forward, then you pay corporate taxes. And if you
    have any money left after you pay taxes, then you pay dividends out of
    what's left. Or you keep it in the bank.

    But since many companies are operating on credit, and since they have
    past losses, I doubt they've posted any profits recently that were
    taxible anyways.

    What's going to hurt the federal and state gov'ts in the next few years
    are the income taxes of the thousands of white collar and blue collar
    people in the auto and financial services sectors that are unemployed or
    becoming unemployed.
     
    MoPar Man, Nov 27, 2008
    #83
  4. edward ohare

    Dave Head Guest

    I think the best idea would be to not tax corporations _at all_ and be D***
    glad that they are here and not in India or Mexico or Canada or Russia.
    Corporations don't pay taxes anyway, their customers do.
    Oh, yeah, and if we get the depression-era 25% unemployment or worse, its going
    to hurt a lot. If the US loses its AAA credit rating, and China won't lend us
    money, there's going to be a lot of death and... recovery at all would be in
    doubt.
     
    Dave Head, Nov 27, 2008
    #84
  5. edward ohare

    MoPar Man Guest

    Whoa - hold on there.

    Canada is not India or Mexico or China when it comes to economic trade.
    Canada is pretty much the only country in the world that the US can
    count on to be affluent enough to buy a lot of US-made stuff and NOT
    have huge import duties or taxes applied to that stuff, and be close
    enough so it doesn't cost a fortune to ship that stuff there.

    The problems for US trade are Mexico and China. There was no practical
    value for the US to sign a free trade agreement with Mexico. Unlike
    China, I've never heard that Mexico buys a lot of US-gov't T-bills to
    support it's trade surplus with the US. All I hear is a lot of grief
    that the US has over illegal immigration (supported by the Mexican
    gov't) and the drug problem caused by Mexico. Why the US congress and
    senate allows Mexico to get away with all that shit, and still allow it
    to be part of NAFTA, I'll never understand. They weren't even part of
    the "coalition of the co-opted" - they sent no troops to Iraq or
    Afghanistan.

    India and Russia are no threat to US jobs because they are too backwards
    and corrupt to be alternative locations for moderately skilled
    blue-collar jobs.

    The heavy trade reliance that the US has with China is designed to
    convert them from communism to capitalism. I have no idea if it's going
    to work in the long run, but in the short term it has contributed to the
    erosion of US blue-collar jobs like nothing else in history.
     
    MoPar Man, Nov 27, 2008
    #85
  6. edward ohare

    Dave Head Guest

    Maybe not, but it has the one thing in common with them in that it is _not
    here_!

    We need stuff here so that American workers can have good manufacturing jobs
    and we can produce stuff so that we halt our slide toward having our only
    national endeavors being burger flipping, stock trading, and suing each other.
    Still, our manufacturing sector needs a huge boost. It'll take a combination
    of squelching envirowackos, BANANAs, and NIMBYs that oppose everything that has
    to do with manufacturing or construction, and making it profitable to be in the
    USA again.
    Congress is corrupted with lobbyists. That's probably the main thing that
    makes Congress act strangely. We probably need to eliminate lobbyists
    altogether, or at least restrict them to those that represent blocks of voters.
    They seem to do OK at siphoning off the software jobs. Working in a factory is
    easier than building software.
    It ain't worth it, then. We need our middle class to prosper. Wages have been
    stagnant since the 70's. A lot of it has to do with the huge amounts of money
    being shunted into "environmental concers" that will, if this global warming
    nonsense really gets going, probably make a depression-era existence a
    permanent thing. And the rest of it is mostly shipping our jobs overseas by
    making a hostile manufacturing environment here with things like taxes and
    wildly excessive pollution regulations.
     
    Dave Head, Nov 27, 2008
    #86
  7. edward ohare

    edward ohare Guest


    Why do we need "good jobs" with the qualifier "manufacturing"?

    Why not let other countries pollute themselves with heavy industry.
    Why don't we find some nice clean highpaying stuff to do? Oh, because
    our workers are dumb... because people complain about taxes (that on a
    world wide basis are very reasonable) and elect people who cut them,
    and then with the lower taxes we find out the schools suck.

    Why would voters need lobbyists? If you outlaw them, then you just
    write your Congressperson/Senator.


    See education comments above.


    Hostile manufacturing environment? So hostile that Subaru is losing
    money running a no land fill plant in Lafayette IN? GM, Ford, and
    Chrysler doing anything like that while they're making tons of money?

    Actually, if you want to know what happened to GM, Ford, and Chrysler,
    its this:

    1) They have an old model for handling retirees that assumes their
    workforce will grow over time, but instead in got smaller (the same
    problem social security has), and so now they're buried in the cost of
    supporting that.

    2) They haven't needed new factories, because their volume has
    dropped, so all their factories are old an not up to current
    efficiency standards.

    3) In addition having volume drop, they've knowingly given up volume
    by giving up markets. Look at GM and its small cars. Outside of the
    Saturn SL, GM hasn't built a small car on its own since the Chevy
    Vega, which came out almost 40 years ago. The Chevette was a
    reskinned Opel and the entire Geo line consisted of bought cars for
    which GM was merely a distributor. Ford's second generation Escort
    was a Mazda 323. Its Festiva was built in Korea.

    4) What were the best engineers in America doing in the 70s and 80s?
    Working on the space shuttle and on weapons. People sit back and say
    the USSR couldn't compete with Reagan's military build up. True
    enough. But the US couldn't compete with the Asians in consumer goods
    while that was going on. People can see that spending a bunch of
    money on military goods broke the USSR, but don't bother to look and
    see what it did to the US.

    I'm sure waving the flag makes some people feel good, but what good
    are feelings if you're waving the flag over a broken economy? Oh,
    yea, and George's spending on the current wars pretty much finished
    things off... over $700 billion in borrowed money... so far.
     
    edward ohare, Nov 28, 2008
    #87
  8. edward ohare

    Dave Head Guest

    Because - there are a lot of people that are not comfortable programming
    computers, and so forth. They are, however, quite comfortable doing plumbing
    and electrician work and working assembly lines, and so forth. A manufacturing
    job working for a factory that employs 300 generally pays far more than a
    comparable job working for a private business that has 5 plumbers, or 7
    electricians, etc. And of course the factory employing 300 is 300 more jobs
    in a city of 15,000 people than would otherwise be in that city by simply
    servicing people's residential plumbing and electrical and other needs. IOW,
    with or without a union, these jobs are "better" in both wages and working
    conditions than comparable jobs.

    Because, America needs manufacturing in the country. These are basic parts of
    the economy that produce something of value where it didn't exist before.
    Produce a car, and there is value in that for a very long time. Produce a
    hamburger, perform some service, that work is often undetectable the next day.

    Because America needs manufacturing in the country as both a National security
    issue and an economic issue. If we need to go to war, we shouldn't have to
    check to see if we're getting something necessary to conduct that war from the
    country we're going to war with. IOW, if we're attacked by Japan (again!), how
    great an idea is it if we're getting most of our cars from them? How about if
    we're attacked by someone that is friendly with Japan or (some other of our
    sources of manufactured goods) and decides to withhold their products from us
    to help their "friends." Plus, there's a balance of trade issue if we're not
    doing something in any major sector such as manufaturing. We bleed money to
    the rest of the world in the textile industry and the auto industry and the
    electronics industry, etc. I read somewhere that we _can't_ reproduce the
    battleships we once built because we don't have the steelmaking industry we
    once did. Not sure if its true, but its plausible. We shouldn't be in such a
    position.

    Because if we don't hang onto our manufacturing sector, we're going to forget
    how to do it. No, really. The vast majority of human knowledge is not written
    down, it exists in the memories of individuals. Let the rest of the world do
    the manufacturing, we will, as a nation, forget how - or at least how to do it
    efficiently. Nobody can make a Stradavarius violin now because that
    manufacturing process was not written down or handed down in an apprenticeship
    through the decades. That's lost knowledge. It could happen here.
    Because heavy industry is lucrative like few other endeavors and allows greater
    prosperity for people that have IQ's under 130 than any other thing one can do.
    You can be a lawyer or doctor and live better, on average, than factory
    workers. You used to be able to do it as a programmer, but outsourcing and H1B
    visas allowing virtually the entire world to come here and take jobs from
    Americans has pretty much gutted that profession. "Smart" college students
    don't study computer science any more unless they absolutely love it and don't
    care how long it takes to pay off their student loans, because they aren't
    going to be making all that much $$$ any more.
    Because there is no such animal that can be performed by those that can, or
    feel comfortable, doing factory kind of work. We need _good_, high-paying jobs
    for people who enjoy and have aptitude for working primarily with their hands
    as well as their brains.
    Look, fully half the population has IQ's less than 100. Those people are not
    going to make good doctors, lawyers, or computer programmers, but they can make
    good factory workers. Factory work is one of the few avenues to higher
    prosperity for those people. Plus, not _all_ of the factory workers have IQ's
    under 100, either, but the person with, say, an 85 IQ can still do a
    crackerjack job on an assembly line or running some stamping machine or etc.
    Voters sometimes need a collective voice concerning certain issues. Abortion,
    unionization, gun control - these things are best approached by groups with
    spokespeople.

    And if any kind of group has a representative for their interests to people in
    Washington, it should be voters. "The people" are what this country is all
    about. If industry wants such a voice, maybe they'll need to form the "guild
    of manufacturing executives" or "The American Bar Association" or "The Screen
    Actors Guild" and so forth. Having people that represent entities that are not
    people, but corporations, is, I believe, proving to be a bad thing.
    Education is fine, but my Mom was a teacher - with respect to education, she
    said, "You can't pour 5 gallons of water into a 4 gallon pail," meaning you
    can't teach a guy with a 90 IQ to be a doctor, or a software engineer. It just
    ain't happenin'.
    Yep, that too.
    Seems reasonable.
    GM's, and other American manufacturer's bread and butter were in large cars and
    trucks. They do/did them very well. Why waste your engineering and research
    talent making cars that Americans don't want to buy (from you?) The rest of
    the world had a huge headstart in small cars, and attempting to get as good as
    or better than them was basically paddling upstream, esp. when it was necessary
    to expend every available ounce of engineering talent attempting to satisfy the
    (unreasonable, in my opinion) demands of the greens concerning tailpipe
    emissions as well as factory emissions and the safety radicals in terms of auto
    safety which are both harder for larger cars and trucks.
    If we hadn't taxed the snot out of manfacturing, and let the greens go hog-wild
    in f'ing the manufacturing sector with wildly excessive regulations, we could
    have had a growing consumer manufacturing industry, too. But the greens were
    (and still are) allowed to approach the issue of "the environment" as if there
    was a bottomless pit of money to pay for it. Also worth mentioning is the
    safety issue - that is far overdone, too. Why should I be _forced_ to buy
    safety features that I don't want on the car I buy? I don't want air bags. I
    don't want antilock brakes. I don't want stability control. I don't want
    traction control. I want the $$$ that my car would be cheaper by due to not
    paying for these features. Everything like this makes individual prosperity to
    be less. Not being forced to pay for things we don't want or need probably
    should be an amendment to the Constitution. But all the money spent on that
    both in the excessive price of goods with unwanted features and billions spent
    in taking the last few grams per mile of some pollutant out of a manufacting
    plant's smokestack or a vehicle's tailpipe (which is much harder to do for a
    big car or truck than it is for some imported rollerskate of a car) is lost to
    people that might otherwise have spent it on a better standard of living for
    themselves.
    Well, we could have simply stayed home and done nothing, and let the terrorists
    keep hitting us, year after year after year... how many buildings would we be
    missing now? How many more people would be dead when the terrorists do finally
    get their hands on weaponized anthrax? I think without going to Afghanistan
    and Iraq, we would know the answers to those questions, and we wouldn't like it
    - assuming we were among those that could still care about it.
     
    Dave Head, Nov 28, 2008
    #88
  9. edward ohare

    Larrybud Guest

    We're so beyond "essential" government services it's pathetic.
     
    Larrybud, Nov 28, 2008
    #89
  10. edward ohare

    Larrybud Guest

    The top 50% of wage earners pay 96% of the taxes. Hardly a
    "huge chunk" of taxes for the minimum wage worker.
     
    Larrybud, Nov 28, 2008
    #90
  11. edward ohare

    Larrybud Guest

    Yes, debt was increased by excess spending, not for a lack of
    revenue.
     
    Larrybud, Nov 28, 2008
    #91
  12. edward ohare

    Larrybud Guest


    Sorry, but you're way off. From the Census Bureau:

    http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/tables/08s0455.xls

    1999 1,827.6
    2000 2,025.5
    2001 1,991.4
    2002 1,853.4
    2003 1,782.5
    2004 1,880.3
    2005 2,153.9
    2006 2,407.3
    2007 estimate 2,540.1
    2008 estimate 2,662.5

    Of course, that even begs the question of whether or not allowing
    the government to take more of our money is a good thing anyway?
     
    Larrybud, Nov 28, 2008
    #92
  13. edward ohare

    Larrybud Guest

    Since when does the government care what the Constitution says?
     
    Larrybud, Nov 28, 2008
    #93
  14. edward ohare

    Larrybud Guest

    1) Repeal the income tax - ALL of it.
    They ain't voluntary. Men with guns make sure of that.

    Therefore, if someone takes your money without your permission, what
    else is it called except for theft?

    I suppose one could technically argue that it's extortion. Pay up or
    else go to jail.

    Similar to dealing with organize crime, except in the case of
    taxation, it's legalized extortion.
     
    Larrybud, Nov 28, 2008
    #94
  15. edward ohare

    Larrybud Guest

    Why not let other countries pollute themselves with heavy
    Who cares how are taxes are compared to socialist countries
    worldwide? Since when is is depressed 2nd and 3rd world countries
    our baseline?

    Greater school revenue <> better schools.

    And federal income tax has nothing to do with local school
    taxes/revenue.
     
    Larrybud, Nov 28, 2008
    #95
  16. edward ohare

    Lloyd Guest

    Yes, and if we had no taxes in this country, think of all the money
    we'd have. Of course, we'd be Sudan, with no government, just rival
    gangs and warlords controlling things, but hey, right-wingers can put
    up with anything if they get to keep an extra dollar!
     
    Lloyd, Nov 28, 2008
    #96
  17. edward ohare

    Lloyd Guest

    Income taxes only. And so? That's anybody making over $32,000 a
    year. People making below that are poor!

    And poor people pay a greater % of their salary in Social Security
    taxes than the wealthy; that's what the poster was referring to.
     
    Lloyd, Nov 28, 2008
    #97
  18. edward ohare

    Lloyd Guest

    Neither is stopping at a red light, or not committing arson. What a
    doofus.
    You, sir, are a kook. K-O-O-K.
    You and your friend McVeigh?
     
    Lloyd, Nov 28, 2008
    #98
  19. edward ohare

    Lloyd Guest

    Your opinion. Get elected or appointed to the USSC and it'll mean
    something. Now it just labels you as a K-O-O-K.
     
    Lloyd, Nov 28, 2008
    #99
  20. edward ohare

    Dave Head Guest

    I meant "no corporate taxes." I thought that would be clear from the
    previous posts regarding eliminating the income taxes - _all_ of them,
    and substituting a consumption tax. Sorry if it was unclear.

    Dave Head
     
    Dave Head, Nov 28, 2008
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