I'm saying that a business with revenues of millions of dollars is very very badly managed if they have to close due to an unexpected bill for $5,000. If a $5000 bill can knock down your business, your business is going to get knocked down, tax or not. barfo
It might not mean closing the business, but cutting an employee. Unless, of course, the owner wants to continue taking a loss on his business while keeping extra employees. Again, looking at everything in a vacuum. Obviously times have been bad for awhile now. Most likely these companies have already cut and cut and cut. Another $5000 bill will just require more cuts. Unless you think there are no companies continuing to stay in business even while posting zero, or negative profits.
We were discussing a company that supposedly went out of business due to a supposed $5000 tax bill. I didn't create that scenario for discussion. I find it implausible. Any rational manager of a multi-million dollar business, whether it is making or losing money, knows that unexpected $5k expenses happen, and not infrequently. barfo
Gotcha. I guess it is a different argument then, but that $5k extra cost very well could mean cutting another employee.
The original claim was that the new tax would cause businesses to move out of state. Then the claim became that a $5000 tax would cause a business to go under. Then Barfo showed that the business would have to make $7 million per year in sales to pay that much. So the claim evolved into, this might cause one layoff. But $5000 is a small fraction of one full-time equivalent employee. So it might cause one employee to lose 1/6 of his hours, like maybe 5-7 hours per week. This is a long way from the original claim, that the new tax will cause businesses to move out of state.
I'll ask you again... What about a bunch of examples of companies moving into the state BECAUSE of the tax breaks and incentives they received?
Well, why don't you present the list? It will be short, yet expensive to the taxpayers. To get one major company to move here, you have to give up hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes, which has to be made up for by all other taxpayers. And it causes other states to have to compete by doing the same, in an eternal spiral of competition, so that later we must give even more breaks to get more companies, on and on forever. Come to think of it, the tax breaks to a few large companies (that you praise) might be what forced the current small tax increase to everyone else (that you dislike).
This doesn't make sense. There isn't a negative cashflow from the state by getting a company to move to the state with tax incentives. If the company didn't move to the state, the state wouldn't get any tax revenue anyway. (For now I'll ignore smaller, secondary terms such as increased road wear).
If tax breaks are given generally, and not just to NEW businesses, then the state could lose money even if they attract new businesses (since existing businesses would pay less, even if new businesses would pay more than the $0 they did before). I don't live in Oregon. It's not really my business. I do have a long-time friend who has an internet-based company that he plans on moving out of the state. Ed O.
Clearly the Bush tax cuts created a long term financially secure future for the United States, and therefore we should listen to all of these "economists". Economics is a lot like religion, you believe what you want regardless of what you see. It is a faith, a language created by men to try and explain the way things work. In general there is not one economic theory that can actually stand the test of time, and the majority of economics gets turned on it's head and remixed to simply explain away why the original theory did not hold. It is a bunch of garbage that really is based on bullshit.
At least get your facts right if you are going to be righteous. The new buildings money is from the stimulus law. Money from taxes or tuition have NOTHING to do with it.
Spoken like someone who has never studied the field with any seriousness. Thank you for putting the limelight on your own ignorance.
The stimulus is paying for all new college buildings? Even the ones already under construction (and thus previously funded) that were seen by Sug? That would be quite a fast reaction. How did the previous funding get refunded to its previous sources, once the new stimulus funding replaced it? That would be quite a newsworthy accounting transaction. I must have missed it. Please provide a link so I can learn some accounting. All I know is that for decades, colleges and other governmental entities have maintained capital construction funds, by allocating part of operating inflows to them, such as from tuition. Obviously, there are other sources, like private contributions, special amounts from the state dedicated only to new buildings, etc. But it would answer the question of, with all this increased enrollment, why is tuition still going up? --At least partially because of new buildings, some of which I consider unnecessary.
Maybe you are right about the buildings, but I think I am righter about the subsidies. If you have one student, who pays $30 for tuition, and it costs $100 to educate him, and taxes pay $70, then you have a balanced budget. Add one more student without raising taxes, and now you have a shortfall of $70. You can raise taxes $70, or you can raise tuition $70, but you have to do one or the other - usually both - to subsidize that extra student. Increased enrollment causes higher tuition. barfo
You are right. Increased enrollment (without increasing per-student tax income) causes higher tuition. All this posting has been to answer this.
Economists and faith healers share the same master; fear. If the field was a "serious" subject than we would have gotten it right at some point. It certainly is not nearly as developed as say medicine, construction, design, art, writing, literature, science. All of these fields have been advanced over the last 100 years, yet economics remains a theory without proof of concept. It is actually evident that the definitions that are often used to explain economic situations are constantly adjusted to meet the failures to explain why the original theories were incorrect. Economists are famous for semantic shifts to cover their ass when everything they believe to be true never comes to be. As a result we have competing theories, false beliefs, and a multilayered theory that only holds itself up by inserting new explanations to why things are the way they are. It is a form of religion, a belief system that is held together by true believers and cynics. It is the language of the wealthy to help justify the way they do business. You can put labels on things like factors of production, capital, labor, trickle down, etc. At the end of the day it is simply a way for people to put their spin on how people should function around the idea of exchanging goods and services.
I'm gonna stick up for maxiep here and say that I think you are not giving economists enough credit. It's a hard problem. It's like predicting the weather. The state of the art isn't advanced enough to make accurate predictions on a short timescale [and it has the added problem that, unlike the weather, predictions of the economy can affect the economy]. That doesn't mean the economic tools we have today are useless - they'll be the basis for whatever advances we make in understanding economics in the future. barfo
Thank you for reinforcing my previous opinion of your understanding. It turns out your ignorance on the subject is not only deep, but wide. I'm interested in your explanation to the error of the invisible hand, moral hazard, the Nash equilibrium, the Cournot duopoly, CAPM or even Black-Scholes. Assumptions are made because in the end you're trying to determine human behavior, which isn't always rational. In that sense, it's no different than other social sciences. Your error seems to be that you wish to treat it as a natural science. Like I said, your problem is ignorance in how to use the tools in the toolbox.
Yes, yes, we know - everyone is ignorant but you. At least we don't have time to post over 9,000 (!) times on this board. Your alleged intelligence is either strangely prioritized, misused, or BS. I know what I think, but whatever the case, it's kind of a joke given that you spend all day . . . here.
