Political signs - What to do with them after the election?

[Jim Yanik]

Nate Nagel wrote in news: [e-mail]:

[Bob F]

The benefits they receive by living in our society include far more than the simplistic ones you suggest. Their lifestyle displays this clearly.

[Bob F]

Amazing. It is all because Obama is getting elected, not because of the obcene rupublican policies and lack of regulation that collapsed the economy? It is crazy the way republicans can blame anythig that happens on the democrats. It seems like republicans can make no mistakes at all. LOL!

[Bob F]

There's a wonder republican christian attitude.

They are the ones we killed. There were virtually no terrorists in Iraq before we invaded.

[Bob F]

Because we destroyed all structure that kept them in line. And replaced it with nothing.

Why do they want us out then. They have made that clear.

Yeah. I saw the video of them toppleing the statue. Then I found out that it was staged by the military.

[HeyBub]

Let's get up-to-date, Slick. It was the PRESENCE of regulations that caused the current collapse. Specifically the Community Redevelopment Act "enhancements" in 1995 that mandated banks provide low (or no) interest loans to people who were simply unqualified.

The Republicans have tried, most recently in 2005, to impose oversight on Mae and Mac but were rebuffed by the Democrats. Actually, John McCain was a co-sponsor of the the '95 bill to scrutinize both Mae & Mac.

To paraphrase Al Gore, "Everything that should not be regulated was, and everything that was not regulated should have been."

[HeyBub]

Okay, but they didn't just miracle themselves there. They came from somewhere! And wherever they came from now has fewer terrorists.

Now it could be they were responsible, respected citizens and the appearance of American troops inspired them to take up arms. If so, then they had some gene or indoctrination that overwhelmed their common sense. Whether nature or nurture, we need to stamp that out too.

The goal here is to kill terrorists. It doesn't matter where they came from or how they came to be terrorists. We must guarantee a future for them that includes dead.

[HeyBub]

The above post should have read: "John McCain was co-sponsor of the _2005_ bill to scrutinize both Mae & Mac."

We regret the error.

[Kurt Ullman]

There is another on-going regulation that has played a BIG part in most of the financial hoohas over the last 15 years or so. The Congress passed a law that mandated salaries over $1 million could not be deducted. In an attempt to "align the interests of top management with those of the shareholders", compensation in the form of "performance-based" and stock options was treated favorably for tax purposes. This had three results: It put a floor under the salaries of the bigwigs of $1 million. (2). It resulted in total compensation being a few orders of magnitude above what any board of directors would have had the balls to give the dudes and dudettes in salary and (3). It actually divorced the interests of the bigwigs and the stockholders by making

80-90% of their compensation dependent on ever-increasing metrics and stock prices. I don't think it is just happenstance that every major corporate scandal since then is to a great extent based on executive's actions trying to boost stock price and "performance".

[HeyBub]

Yep. It's none of the government's concern (or almost anybody else's) what the company shareholders want to pay their chief executive. Where the government gets screwed, of course, is when the president of a (relatively) small, closely held, corporation gets a huge compensation.

Suppose a company makes $10 million in profit and pays the entire sum to its president as "salary." Presto, no corporate income tax! If, however, the company paid the owner $1 million, the remaining $9 million would be subject to corporate income tax of, say, 30%. The residual $5.4 million gets taxed again as stock dividend.

This can be solved by simply not taxing corporations at all. Tax the profits after they are distributed as dividends. Or, if they're going to tax corporations, then dividends should be tax exempt since they were already taxed. Let's do the Obama "fairness" thing - tax profits once.

[N8N]

This is true, to a point. The banks were scared of falling afoul of that law, sure, but there were other things that should have been regulated that weren't. The latter point you will hear emphasized by Democrats; the point you made will be emphasized by Republicans. Nobody wants to admit that they actually share the blame for the current mess.

Indeed.

nate

[Kurt Ullman]

Maybe, maybe not. Many, if not most, smaller companies like that are Subchapter S companies which means they don't exist for tax purposes and everything flows through to the shareholders personal taxes.

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[Dan Espen]

Wow!

So any money that's previously been taxed should never be taxed again. That's amazing!

Why don't you stick to home repair?