ERICOPOLY

Really? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2092021/Australian-PM-dragged-safety-crowd-aborigines-protesters-ambushed-restaurant.html Somehow they've managed to have the following policies: 1) No inheritance or gift taxes 2) No double tax on dividends Without demonstrations in the streets! Of course their unemployment level is under 5%. The system of having the tax paid either by the corporation or the individual ensure that the tax is actually paid. People can't stand the "no double tax" argument here in the US because we're not even sure if the corporation has paid any tax! Many do not pay much if any tax and still distribute dividends that get taxed at only 15%. I think people could relax a bit regarding corporate jet tax deductions and everything if they knew that the dividend recipient would be paying the full tax one way or the other. You want the big corporate tax deductions? Fine, then pay the personal income tax on the dividend instead. You've already paid the big corporate tax? Great! We'll reward you by giving you a credit towards your personal income tax on the dividend.

I have a Motorola SurfBoard. It's certainly Apple's issue to fix. They either need to figure out how to work with Motorola's bug (a workaround) or fix their own.

It might be a lemon, but in my house there is a hatch of flies buzzing around this fruit. My MacBook Pro crashed (full system crash) twice in the first few months (though not again in the past year). My IPhone constantly "forgets" my WiFi password (frequently after I walk out of range of the network). I have to keep typing it in again (happens a few times a month or so). The ITunes app on my PC will hang when I try to sync to it. My wife's IPod needs to be reformatted sometimes after she syncs with ITunes (that was the only solution I found on the net as there are plenty of people complaining of this). When the Apple TV stops "working" (my wife's words) I just walk in there and pull the power -- that usually fixes it. Otherwise, the problem is that her IMac on her desk (wireless) needs to have the "Airport" turned off and then turned back on again -- it just drops off the network and doesn't rejoin unless you refresh the Airport. And that happens also on my MacBook Pro (same issue with the airport). But it never happens on my Windows Vista laptop! "Stink" Different -- that's my impression.

Add Apple to that list too (the first post-Jobs era back in the 1990s).

From the CC transcript: Our period end FTE is down about 7,000 people in the fourth quarter compared to the third quarter. This is over and above the 2,500 people we added in this quarter for our legacy asset services. - Moynihan This means they are already (in one quarter) 31.6% done with phase I of New BAC head count reduction. Any hints on when the next big purge is?

Perhaps it wasn't quite clear, but the dividend franking system eliminates double taxation only on US corporate profits. Taxes on profits paid in foreign lands will be assessed a second time in the form of income taxes when distributed to US shareholders. So it just makes it a bit cheaper from a US taxpayer's perspective to keep manufacturing operations here in the US, if you take into account the tax savings upon getting that dividend in hand. Well, it would be one way for Obama to make US based investment more attractive -- and that Republicans may actually agree with (getting rid of double taxation on US corporate profits).

Try an Apple TV if you want a change of pace -- I have to reboot it (unplug the power) time and again to fix it when it stops responding.

Let's put it this way. Restore the dividend tax to regular "income" rates and watch them squirm and resist. Would you support that with an elimination of corporate taxes? No, the corporations need to pay tax. I have 1/2 of my money in a Roth IRA -- if the corporations don't pay any tax then I've got it a little too good. Corporations need roads to drive their trucks on -- it's in their best interest to have at least some form of government provided infrastructure. I'd be happy to eliminate the double taxation per the Australian dividend franking system. There is no rioting in Australia.

Obama really ought to look at Australia's dividend franking system. Australian investors in Australian companies don't pay personal income taxes on after-tax profits from Australian corporations. This is because the corporation has already paid Australian tax. You might pay a little bit of tax on the dividend if your personal tax rate is higher than the corporate tax rate, but their highest personal tax rate is 45%. So some people might pay 15% or so tax on the dividend income, but others in lower tax brackets will pay nothing extra on the individual level. Now you bring that rule in here to the United States and investors will be more interested in companies that have paid on-shore corporate taxes. Obama could call it a jobs package, a reason to make onshore operations a bit more attractive. Takes a bit of the advantage away from offshore operations. And it wouldn't upset the Republicans of course.

Let's put it this way. Restore the dividend tax to regular "income" rates and watch them squirm and resist.

You are sampling the wrong population. The top 1% is not the right category to draw statistics from. Too many people in there work for a living. Instead, focus on the individuals who don't -- those people who have it so good that they live on investment income. They're the ones who got the tax cut. Start your search for truth in the top 1/10 of the 1%.

Apple should return the extra cash to shareholders. Apple is a technology company not an investment firm. In theory it might sound good but I have very little faith in a technology company buying bunch of unrelated companies. Most tech companies have bad record in buying companies even in their related field. Shareholder's can use the cash to invest themself but Apple should continue doing what they do best. The investment manager should allocate the excess produced by the operating company. In this case, the manager of the fund that owns the AAPL shares is the investment manager. Berkshire doesn't let it's railroad subsidiary allocate the excess into non-related businesses. It requires it to be returned to Buffett (the investment manager) who then makes the allocation decision. The structure of having an investment manager be the capital allocator works pretty well.

Windows is a platform, it is mean to run other things and is useless if you don't run applications on it. A Coke can (filled with Coke) is a complete product in itself and is not a platform. Monopoly is decided by marketshare. What was Window's share of PC OSes during the antitrust suits? Well I'm not a lawyer and such. This is probably why I'm more driven by "spirit" of the law rather than letter of the law. So whether you define a monopoly by the term "marketshare" is your choice, or perhaps it's letter of the law. My "spirit" of the law is based around barrier to entry. Can a competitor create a competing personal computing platform. Of course! Apple. Google. Case closed (based on spirit of the law).

Oh, and of course the name "Canberra" was given to the capital city of Australia. The place from which this name was derived says a lot about the permissive culture of the country, and perhaps speaks to the divine beauty of the country: Alternatively, the name was reported by Queanbeyan newspaper owner John Gale in the 1860s to be an anglicisation of the indigenous name 'nganbra' or 'nganbira', meaning "hollow between a woman's breasts" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra

Too cold in winter :) Brrr...

Maybe Obama should just bring the tax rates back up to the Reagan years if Reagan "does it for you": After all, for seven of Reagan’s eight years in office, the top tax rate was higher than the current 35 percent. In six of those years, it was 50 percent or more. And every year that Regan was in office, the bottom tax bracket was higher than the current ten percent. http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/06/01/233526/taxes-lower-reagan/?mobile=nc

How do you compare living in Aus vs US? There was a pretty insightful comparison earlier from dwy, I was curious about your thoughts. Some history helps understand the differences; America got the puritans and Australia got the convicts. Much less of the "born-again" American Taliban clones! I love Australia. There are so many weird things about it. It sort of feels like a throwback in time. Imagine going into a downtown in an American city and finding a green grocer and a "chemist" (pharmacy) a butcher, a baker, etc... only they are all in separate independent stores! Okay, that is just like America... in the 1950s!!! Basically I just feel like it's really laid back and literally "no worries mate". It's just a cool relaxed place. However I've never lived there -- it's always been on a vacation or a visit. So we'll see whether my perception was tainted by lack of responsibility and change of routine.

Imagine an independent Coca Cola bottler deciding to sell Pepsi adds on the Coke cans. That's like Compaq wanting to install Netscape links on the Windows desktop.

Remember when Gates had to go infront of Congress? As crazy as it sounds right now with their revenue and NEt - Apple doesn't have a monopoly the way Microsoft did back in the day. Neither did Microsoft. Obviously the barriers to entry were overstated! Microsoft was way closer to a monopoly at that time Compared to Apple today. History suggests that there was no (edit: impenetrable) monopoly on personal computers. There was a monopoly on Windows software, but there's a monopoly on the Coke recipe too. Yet there is Pepsi, and Apple. Nothing the government did led to the success of Google and Apple. That was innovation. If I remember correctly it wasnt actually the windows software itself rather how Windows Operating software and its arteries were installed on most all PCs out of the box. Well, this is a long discussion. But in 1995 I got my first PC and it was out of a retail store (installed) that provided me a PC with dual boot Windows 95 and Linux! Yes! Right out of a retail store. Fully 3 years before the antitrust BS. So consumers who wanted Linux could find it. But they didn't want it! I sought it out and found it.

Remember when Gates had to go infront of Congress? As crazy as it sounds right now with their revenue and NEt - Apple doesn't have a monopoly the way Microsoft did back in the day. Neither did Microsoft. Obviously the barriers to entry were overstated! Microsoft was way closer to a monopoly at that time Compared to Apple today. History suggests that there was no (edit: impenetrable) monopoly on personal computers. There was a monopoly on Windows software, but there's a monopoly on the Coke recipe too. Yet there is Pepsi, and Apple. Nothing the government did led to the success of Google and Apple. That was innovation.

Remember when Gates had to go infront of Congress? As crazy as it sounds right now with their revenue and NEt - Apple doesn't have a monopoly the way Microsoft did back in the day. Neither did Microsoft. Obviously the barriers to entry were overstated!

I got a call back tonight from the Australian Tax Office, this time from someone with experience dealing with the repealed Foreign Investment Fund (FIF) rules. He confirmed that under the old rules my IRA would have been taxed based on account balance swings, irrespective of whether any gains were realized. Thus, Buffett himself if he held all of his Berkshire shares in an IRA would be taxed in the multiple billions per year (on a good mark to market year for the BRK shares) if he were an Australian citizen prior to July 2010! Hows that for a Buffett rule! He said firmly that the FIF is currently repealed and no tax exists at the present. However they are expecting the new Foreign Accumulation Fund (FAF) rules to take effect in July. Yet they don't know what those rules will be as they are not official. So maybe I'm staying in America, or maybe I'm leaving in July. Stay tuned!

At least twice the interviewer tried to get Dimon to say that Bank of America would come out alright.

The rates were only the same from 1988 to 1990 per this source http://www.ctj.org/pdf/regcg.pdf It is really hard to take seriously an article where the authors cannot even spell Buffett's name correctly. Just as annoying they argue that the loss of $18 billion in tax revenue from the super-rich results in higher taxes for everyone else. Patently false. One it is not zero sum. Two, the middle class enjoyed a tax cut too. While not a huge amount per person it is huge in terms of the overall budget. The main takeaway though is that Romney himself still worked hard even when capital gains rates were as high as income. Common sense would dictate that 65% of a 20% gain is better than 0% of a 0% gain! As much as I hate paying higher taxes, I agree that taxing capital gains the same as income will not kill capitalism. The only argument I firmly believe in is that the stock market in the aggregate does not appreciate much more than inflation. Maybe the price level beats inflation by 1% real rate over time. The rest of the "real" gains come from inflation (edit: dividends). So once you lower capital gains rates to account for inflation, the corporations tend to buy more stock back for tax laundering motivation. So it's kind of a whack a mole thing.

This is a great quote (but it doesn't seem accurate. When were capital gains taxed the same as labor income?): Actually, Romney's own business career makes the point better. No one seems to have noticed it, but Romney worked those long hours and made those risky bets mostly during a decade-long period when capital gains were taxed at the same rate as labor income. For a brief shining moment, the 1986 Tax Reform Act that Romney's icon Ronald Reagan supported interrupted the steady decline of capital gains taxes and restored the simple idea that all income should be taxed equally. That is to say, Romney's own success suggests that low capital gains rates aren't necessary to encourage the kind of entrepreneurship that Romney now celebrates. http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/24/opinion/hacker-pierson-romney-taxes/index.html?hpt=hp_c2