curt

Remember all wage comparisons over time are basically useless unless you are comparing total compensation. You have huge costs that change over time such as federal employment taxes, unemployment insurance, workman's comp, 401k, and especially health insurance. These all eat into a persons hourly wage.

Highly doubt any of the countries that exist today will exist 500 years from now. Honestly I highly doubt most of them will exist 50 years from now. Most developed countries are headed for their day of reckoning as the bills for their welfare states come due. Combined with the fact that every developed country has a negative birthrate due to these policies delaying adulthood many countries will collapse from just demographic changes in the next 50 years.

How do people still believe in run away global warming? There's been absolutely ZERO warming for the lat 16 years, the Earth warmed for 15 years before that, then cooled for 40 years before that. Cloud formation, the major environment influencer of global climate, now seems to stem from cosmic rays.

I do believe space travel, specifically mining, will become much more prevalent. This will eliminate any resource problems. As for energy advances in solar technology and nuclear (fusion or fission) should drastically lower the cost of energy by an order of magnitude from today's prices.

The libertarian viewpoint is very simple and not the dog eat dog world people here are making it out to be. Libertarians such as myself believe that people should be left alone to make their own decisions and live with the consequences, except that you need laws to stop one person from hurting another. Does that mean everybody for themselves? No. Before the creation of the welfare state we had mutual aid groups where communities would help each other. The groups could be based on religion, ethnicity, occupations, etc... People naturally took care of each other.

Would a simple world like this work today? No. But you can still use the guiding principles to form a freer world. That's where Ron Paul went wrong, he lived in an idealistic world. We have legacy costs and promises that must be kept.

Here's a series of charts that show what percentage of income taxes are paid by each group (top 1%, 5%, 10%, etc) and their overall share of total income. As you can see the top 1% earn about 20% of total income but pay 40% of all income taxes.

http://www.heritage.org/federalbudget/top10-percent-income-e...

All those things you listed that a start needs from the government, they only account for about 26% of the budget. So... $6.6M down the drain.

Your entire premise is flawed since they all apply to companies in the stock market not a company sale. It's unrelated to my original statement but....

Investment vehicles, such as a 401k, do pay capital gains taxes just not on the sale they pay when the individual pulls the money out of the account.

You're arguing for less liquidity in the market? Liquidity is a good thing because it allows the market to more efficiently deploy capital.

PS... correlation does not equal causation otherwise the amount Chocolate eaten per capita has direct effect on the number of Nobel Prize winners.

Sorry, but this is how I was taught and how I've seen a lot of VC's do it. They take their assumptions which include revenue projections, required rate of return, risk premium, future dilution, and of course the tax rate. They then plug those into a model to tell them what percentage / valuation they need. Of course this doesn't work well for seed stage since there's not enough information.

It's not that it will discourage founders, it will discourage investors since they'll need a higher return to achieve the same after tax profits. What's more likely is investors will require a larger percentage reducing the founding teams ownership stake.

Missing for those in technology hoping to sell the company they build:

Capital Gains Rate is likely to increase from 15% to 23.8%

A shipping container last time I looked cost $6k. Air freights really won't add that much cost to something the weight of the iPad, less than a dollar.

Teachers work 9-months out of the year. Here's the site: http://www.forbes.com/sites/warrenmeyer/2011/12/22/the-teach...

"partly because of low pay"

Teachers are actually some of the highest paid people in society. When you don't include benefits teachers make about $40/hr while engineers make $42/hr. If you do include benefits, a teachers compensation far exceeds that of an engineer due to their pensions. Source, BLS via Forbes.

I've had the pleasure to meet a couple President's and a VP of the United States, Governors, hit golf balls with a Hall of Fame running back, drink with Mark Cuban and more just because I saw an opportunity and took advantage of it. As an example, I found out the President was going to a bar near me for a surprise visit so I got there quickly and placed myself where I knew he'd have to pass. Managed to get a hand shake and exchange a few words. You'd be amazed at how easy it is to meet people if you have a can-do attitude and use a little bit of creativity.

Someone in the comment section of the article linked to a fascinating chart: http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mb77t0ygoF1qfrvjzo1_1280.p...

It shows bit-coin value to USD, gold, silver, and crude. It's fairly stable against the commodities but drastically spikes in value against the dollar. Our Fed at work...

Sorry have quite a bit of overlap between the two points.

Rates themselves are very abstract quantities since loopholes and deductions have a huge effect and change greatly with time. A good way to look at it is the percent of total tax payments.

To answer your question if you take a look at the link in the post you replied to, the income tax + capital gain tax burden for the rich would be even higher. Likely with the top 1% around 45%-50% and top 10% around 80%+ of all income and capital gains taxes. As you can see the rich already pay a huge amount.

Even if you were to raise the rates on the rich their numbers are so small that it would only cover a week or so of spending at the current levels.

I was referring to how you can't compare specific tax rates over large differences in time since behavior changes. Instead you need to look at tax burden through GDP and compliance costs.

But to answer the question, all that's doing is displacing economic "growth". Moving it from one hand to the other. Business instead of personal.

>the top 400 tax payers today pay income taxes below 16%. According to the best available figures, the top theoretical tax rate during the 1950s was over 90%, but the average tax rate paid by the top approximately 400 people was 51.2%.

Big problem... You're comparing two completely different things. The 16% number is based on the fact that most of the wealth earn their income through capital gains which is taxed at a lower rate. So you're comparing income taxes to capital gains taxes. Two completely different items, apple to oranges.

> But it is pretty hard to reasonably come to the conclusion that the rich today are paying similar tax rates to the rich 55 years ago.

You're second point is also wrong. The rich actually pay a higher percentage of the tax burden when rates are cut. Look at the 20's. Taxes were slashed and the percentage of the income taxes paid by the rich doubled. Same today happened with the Bush cuts. The top 10% pay 71% of income taxes, and top 1% around 40%. Here's a chart to show you: http://www.heritage.org/federalbudget/top10-percent-income-e...

How much more exactly should the rich pay?

As for capital gains. You don't want to raise it, unless you're out to punish the rich, since when it's lowered it generates more revenue. When it's increase, it generates less.

Please know that in periods of "high personal tax rates" business owners declared their income through their companies thereby lowering their tax rates. You would have a company car, company vacation, company dinners, you can even make it company policy to pay for the employees children college education, etc... This is the same reason any comparison of income equality over time is meaningless. Since income was declared through different avenues.

To understand the tax implications of economic growth you have to look at the tax payments as a percentage of GDP as well as compliance costs. In the US tax payments have held steady at about 18% of GDP since WWII until recently. People hunt for loopholes no matter what. But when rates are low you don't have to look for loopholes, so you can deploy your capital more efficiently. Thus generating economic growth. This is why tax cuts often stimulate large economic booms. Capital that was sitting in say tax-protected muni bonds will move into the market and be deployed for business expansion and thereby hiring.

There's so much evidence to the contrary of this article, even Obama's own counsel of economic advisories share the view that tax cuts stimulate economic growth. Christina Romer, his former advisor wrote a paper on the subject. What they do is look at country around the world to collect more data points for a better regression analysis.

Also note that when you say "tax cuts", not all tax cuts are made equal. For a tax cut to be effective it needs to change long-term behavior. So credits and such have a near zero or negative effect while rate cuts have a positive effect. The most beneficial being capital gain rate cuts (ie every time they have been cut, revenues from the tax have increased), corporate, and then final income tax rate cuts.

-Really going to down vote me without refuting any of what I said.

Before anyone believes this garbage please know that in periods of "high personal tax rates" business owners declared their income through their companies thereby lowering their tax rates. You would have a company car, company vacation, company dinners, you can even make it company policy to pay for the employees children college education, etc...

To understand the tax implications no economic growth you have to look at the tax payments as a percentage of GDP as well as compliance costs. In the US tax payments have held steady at about 18% of GDP since WWII until recently.

There's so much evidence to the contrary, even Obama's own counsel of economic advisories share the view that tax cuts stimulate economic growth. Christina Romer, his former advisor wrote a paper on the subject.

The really interesting part if I understand the recent Supreme Court rulings is that Federal Law would no longer apply to those firearms since they regulate commerce between the states. Since it would be built all within the state (Montana past a similar law) the Federal Government can no longer place any limits on those firearms.

...or the fact that's it's increasingly looking as if cosmic rays cause cloud formation thereby controlling climate change. The climate is a chaotic system and by it's very definition you can't predict or model said system.

No real scientist would ever write what you just did. Is this like Einstein's cosmological constant, expansion of the universe, or any number of other supposed knowns that have been proven wrong.

It's FAR more expensive to produce in the US, Usually between 2x-4x. I do prototyping in the US and the companies that I use also do small-medium production runs. You can find them in the Manufacturing thread I wrote.

They could be moving into "other" markets as well. Version controlling for design? Think that'd be a huge market especially with a simple interface.

Their wikipedia page said 7 months in total, with a 90-day on-site construction time.

Smart think to do would be to make it two pieces. Take the existing card reader but have an additional attachment that does exactly what you said, add stability by holding onto the corners. If a customer wants something small, they have that. Or they can get something for the load. Best part is that it would make manufacturing a breeze still all you would be creating would be a few versions of an injection mold.

Had this recently happen to me a few months ago. They did three phone screens over two weeks but missed dates a few times. No biggy, shit happens... Said they were flying me out a certain date and then the day before said oops we didn't get approval, I finally get out there do a 4 hour interview and they forget to schedule me with the CEO even though I point out the mistake the day of the interview. They call be the next day asking to schedule that interview for the day after even though I'm now 2000 miles away. I said I'd be out there again in two weeks after my move. When I get out there I contact, contact, contact... No Response... They get back to me a few weeks later and I tell them to fuck off and there wasn't a chance in hell I'd ever work with them.

...and then they wonder why they can't hire anyone.

I can't tell you how many companies did shit like this, just not this bad, and I was interviewing for senior level positions. It's huge red flag.

San Francisco, CA

TinyCo

Mobile gaming startup hiring everything: iOS, C++, Python, Product Managers, UI/UX, Artists, Game Designers, Data Analysts. See all the positions here: http://tinyco.com/jobs.php

Joined recently as a Technical PM and love it there. The company's growing fast and they are laser focused on maintaining the awesome culture they've built. If you have any questions please feel free to contact me: curt at tinyco dot com. Let them know you heard about the position through the posting.

There are only two profitable high-speed rail lines in the ENTIRE WORLD. One in Japan and I believe the other is in France. High speed rail just doesn't make sense especially in the spread out urban centers that make up the US. The last mile problem is huge.

Someone commented on the airports being near capacity. That's only because our air traffic system is horrible. If they updated the system and automated much of it, we could drastically increase capacity since the planes could fly straighter routes instead of the current zig zap pattern and fly much closer together safely. Sadly the air traffic controllers union won't allow the changes since they'll lose jobs in the productivity increase.

MBA is definitely much much easier than getting an engineering degree. Went out to the bars 4 nights a week during my MBA and only did the same once a week during my undergrad. Everything is softer, the said part was that they had to dumb down a lot of the data modeling, quant, finance, econ, etc because most of the class struggled with algebra let alone calculus. We never touched a diff eq in the MBA program.

This is exactly why high taxes hurt startups. How can a startup/small business compete profit wise against Google or another large company when they are paying a much lower effective rate. Since their tax burden is so much lower they can charge a much lower price, effectively pricing any startup/competition out of the market.

We just need a super low corporate tax with zero loopholes that make it less expensive to just comply vs hiring hundreds of lawyers and accountants to move around money.