Bucky wrote:i don't think so. Even just the U.S. will go through only peripheral changes unless one party controls the executive branch and both legislatures.

But there’s a simpler way to tax those people then by taxing corporations and having corporations pass the costs along to them: You could just tax the people directly. Depending on who you want to pay, you could raise payroll taxes, or raise capital gains and dividend taxes, or raise income taxes. The problem is we’d need to increase those taxes by quite a lot: The corporate income tax is expected to bring in more than $370 billion this year.
My Wonkbook partner Evan Soltas has a nice overview here of the case for getting rid of the corporate tax. The question, then, is what to replace it with. I’d suggest increasing taxes on capital gains and dividend income, capping deductions for the affluent and instituting a progressively structured carbon tax. All these tax sources would be far more efficient than corporate taxes. The carbon tax would help us slow global warming. And it would be easy to maintain about the same level of progressivity that we now have in the tax code.

A wide consensus of economists and tax experts finds it to be bad policy. Nobody, so far as I could find, thought that corporate taxes were a smart or efficient way for governments to raise revenue. Economic theory provides no strong argument for special taxation of corporate income, at whatever rate.

Taxes distort incentives, and corporate taxes especially so. Those distortions impose costs on the economy. "The domestic distortions that the corporate income tax induces are large compared with the revenues that the tax generates," the Congressional Budget Office wrote in a 2005 report. It found that for every dollar raised by corporate taxation, the cost due to distortions was between 24 and 65 cents. The harm is done through four main channels: corporate finance; corporate organization; investment in tax avoidance, and industrial structure.

If the corporate tax were abolished, the revenue would need to be found elsewhere. The tax raised $372 billion last year. That's roughly one-tenth of all federal revenue, making corporations the third largest source after individual incomes and payrolls. It turns out this isn't all that large of a problem: the U.S. has let corporate tax revenue fall and be replaced since the 1950s, when the tax raised a third of federal revenue.
Bloomberg's editors have suggested making up the difference with, among other things, higher taxes on individuals' investment incomes. Greg Mankiw has proposed that the corporate tax be swapped with a tax on carbon polluters -- a great idea, since it replaces a highly inefficient tax with one that actually improves economic efficiency.

Eliminating the corporate-income tax in exchange for a higher capital-gains rate would make the tax system fairer, simpler and more rational. It would eliminate inducements to tax avoidance and yield further benefits for investors such as pension funds and 401(k) accounts that already pay no capital- gains taxes and would see better dividends.
Ending the tax breaks for specific industries would also help get the government out of the dread practice of “picking winners and losers” and providing corporate welfare. Much of the vast corporate lobbying apparatus would be rendered moot, and companies could finally repatriate the more than $1 trillion in overseas earnings they’re holding to avoid taxation.
Economists are starting to get on board with variations of this idea. Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago recently argued for reducing the corporate rate to 15 percent and increasing the capital-gains rate to 35 percent. A study by Rosanne Altshuler, Benjamin H. Harris and Eric Toder of the Tax Policy Center argued for a capital-gains rate of 28 percent and a corporate rate of about 26 percent.
In the interest of compromise, we’d endorse such variations on our proposed deal. But it’s important to remember that none of these reforms would result in a fiscal utopia, and there would surely be complications.
Most crucial, there’s a revenue mismatch: Total savings to taxpayers of preferential treatment for capital gains and dividends in 2011 was about $158 billion, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. How much of that would go to the Treasury under this reform would depend on investor behavior, but it probably wouldn’t make up for what the corporate-income tax brings in.

The state released rate filings Thursday for the policies that will be sold through the health law's insurance exchange.
Experts had been especially eager to see California's rates, and it is the first large state to release price information for next year.
The average plan will carry a monthly premium of $300, regulators said. Most people will receive a subsidy to help cover part of that cost, and cheaper options are also available.
The Congressional Budget Office predicted in 2009 that premiums for a middle-of-the-road exchange plan would come to about $5,200 per year.
Other states have seen their rates track relatively close to that figure, but California's plans came in substantially lower — about $3,600 per year before subsidies.
Some young people in the state might not have to pay a premium at all — federal subsidies will be enough to cover the entire cost of one of the cheapest policies available.
A 21-year-old who isn't eligible for a subsidy would pay $172 per month for the same policy.

TenuredVulture wrote:Charlie Cook may be a little "I watch the games" old school political analysis, but he's the best at it. And Republicans ought to take this article seriously.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/columns/ ... g-20130523

The reason why Obama's approval ratings are staying where they are (under 50% on average, which is hardly resounding support) is because of the color of his skin. There are large segments of the population that would continue to approve of the job he's doing if he murdered someone on live TV. They would continue to approve of the job he's doing if he personally spit in thier face and foreclosed on their house.

If you consider that about 12-13% of the population is black, and he will always get close to 100% job approval from them, you can get an idea of what his real numbers would be if he was a white, male Democrat. He would be at 40% approval, at best.

CalvinBall wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:Charlie Cook may be a little "I watch the games" old school political analysis, but he's the best at it. And Republicans ought to take this article seriously.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/columns/ ... g-20130523

Holy shit these comments:

The reason why Obama's approval ratings are staying where they are (under 50% on average, which is hardly resounding support) is because of the color of his skin. There are large segments of the population that would continue to approve of the job he's doing if he murdered someone on live TV. They would continue to approve of the job he's doing if he personally spit in thier face and foreclosed on their house.

If you consider that about 12-13% of the population is black, and he will always get close to 100% job approval from them, you can get an idea of what his real numbers would be if he was a white, male Democrat. He would be at 40% approval, at best.

With his ruling, Judge G. Murray Snow of United States District Court delivered the most decisive defeat so far to Sheriff Arpaio, who has come to symbolize Arizona’s strict approach to immigration enforcement by making it the leading mission for many of the 800 deputies under his command at the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.

At 142 pages, the decision is peppered with stinging criticism of the policies and practices espoused by Sheriff Arpaio, who Judge Snow said had turned much of his focus to arresting immigrants who were in the country illegally, in most cases civil violations, at the expense of fighting crimes.

He said the sheriff relied on racial profiling and illegal detentions to target Latinos, using their ethnicity as the main basis for suspecting they were in the country illegally. Many of the people targeted were American citizens or legal residents.

“In an immigration enforcement context,” Judge Snow ruled, the sheriff’s office “did not believe that it constituted racial profiling to consider race as one factor among others in making law enforcement decisions.” In fact, he said its plans and policies confirmed that, “in the context of immigration enforcement,” deputies “could consider race as one factor among others.”

The ruling prohibits the sheriff’s office from using “race or Latino ancestry” as a factor in deciding to stop any vehicle with Latino occupants, or as a factor in deciding whether they may be in the country without authorization.

It also prohibits deputies from reporting a vehicle’s Latino occupants to federal immigration authorities or detaining, holding or arresting them, unless there is more than just a “reasonable belief” that they are in the country illegally. To detain them, the ruling said, the deputies must also have reasonable suspicion that the occupants are violating the state’s human-trafficking and employment laws or committing other crimes.

Luzinski's Gut wrote:http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/25/world/europe/uk-attack-tensions/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/24/world/eur ... ?hpt=wo_c2

Fun and games associated with multi-culturalism in Europe. I think it's going to get far worse, but then I have a dismal stance on human nature.

Police made a number of arrests, mostly alcohol-related

Luzinski's Gut wrote:http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/25/world/europe/uk-attack-tensions/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/24/world/eur ... ?hpt=wo_c2

Fun and games associated with multi-culturalism in Europe. I think it's going to get far worse, but then I have a dismal stance on human nature.

Luzinski's Gut wrote:http://news.yahoo.com/kenya-uk-soldier-killing-suspect-arrested-2010-132149952.html

And the savage who beheaded the British squaddie has now been linked to an arrest by the Kenyans as he was preparing to hop over the border and join Al-Shahaab, an Al-Qaeda affiliate in Somalia (who have been exporting terrorists to the West for some time, including the US...do a google search).

I'm seriously wondering when the societal tipping point is breached, especially in Europe where the combination of racial unrest, terrorism and dessicated economies are leading to a witches brew of toxicity.