The Neverending Thread for Political Shit

[LuthierJustin]

I'm not against funding the government I'm against the system we have now which is complete chaos,you can manipulate the numbers to say anything you want, loopholes, thousands upon thousands of pages of tax laws, millions of dollars a year wasted on tax compliance... Name a business that's run like that?

[Smitty]

[Zip City]

You can't manipulate the numbers to say that today's income taxes are higher than 50 years ago

[Penny Lane]

I'm not against funding the government I'm against the system we have now which is complete chaos,you can manipulate the numbers to say anything you want, loopholes, thousands upon thousands of pages of tax laws, millions of dollars a year wasted on tax compliance... Name a business that's run like that?

LJ---forget the tax code and legalities, as a man and a DBT afficianado, do you see anything wrong with what Bain Capital/Romney did?

[Zip City]

I'm not against funding the government I'm against the system we have now which is complete chaos,you can manipulate the numbers to say anything you want, loopholes, thousands upon thousands of pages of tax laws, millions of dollars a year wasted on tax compliance... Name a business that's run like that?

LJ---forget the tax code and legalities, as a man and a DBT afficianado, do you see anything wrong with what Bain Capital/Romney did?

he won't give a straight answer. he never does.

[Smitty]

I'm not against funding the government I'm against the system we have now which is complete chaos,you can manipulate the numbers to say anything you want, loopholes, thousands upon thousands of pages of tax laws, millions of dollars a year wasted on tax compliance... Name a business that's run like that?

Well, for one, the private healthcare industry.

[Smitty]

I'm not against funding the government I'm against the system we have now which is complete chaos,you can manipulate the numbers to say anything you want, loopholes, thousands upon thousands of pages of tax laws, millions of dollars a year wasted on tax compliance... Name a business that's run like that?

LJ---forget the tax code and legalities, as a man and a DBT afficianado, do you see anything wrong with what Bain Capital/Romney did?

he won't give a straight answer. he never does.

He doesn't pay attention in class.

[beantownbubba]

Mitt Romney's job at Bain:

1. getting a bunch of investors to invest in your negotiation skills and your company (I'm cool with that..)
2. taking that money and buying a company that's headed for trouble or in trouble already (still cool with that)
3. taking over the managerial reigns of that company with the company's permission -or without if that co is broke (pretty okay with that)
4. negotiating a HUGE fee for your services (capitalist baby! i love it...and this still is okay--free market reigns)
5. seeing WASTE in that company and trimming the fat, laying off unnecessary workers, tightening ship (pretty okay with this, too, believe it or not)
6. taking company's liquidity and spending it to get the bottom line at zero (hmm...okay nothing seems THAT bad yet, i might be amenable to this)
7. once company is at zero, asking for a HUGE ass loan for this company because company is now broke, yo! maybe from a huge bank where all your banker friends work...or from the government where more of your friends work.. (this seems a little risky)
7. managing co/or not managing co--it no longer matters, your fee is negotiated. (smart thinking!)
8. company goes bankrupt anyway, you incur no personal liabilities for this (yay legal loophole!)
9. You make millions of dollars and walk away with your fee, having contributed and created nothing... (SWEET!)
10. Company goes bankrupt. Debt incurred by bank/govt/taxpayers (Boo).

Penny, you don't have steps 7 or 8 quite right. Or, at least, it might be that way, but what happens more often is that the new owners use the company's cash flow (meaning that it's doing at least reasonably well, it's generating more cash than it's spending) to obtain loans (i.e. the future cash flow is pledged to repay the debt). But instead of using those loan proceeds to invest in the company (do more r&d, add technology, build factories, buy more TV ads, etc etc) they either use the cash to pay for their purchase (thus buying something for nothing) and/or take the cash out of the company in the form of dividends, management fees, salaries, bonuses and the like. So the company becomes less and less competitive and before long is unable to keep making the payments on the outrageously large loans.

And that's how old, staid, non-cutting edge companies that could have supported their communities and workers for many, many years even if they didn't dazzle Wall St w/ their growth potential are simply gutted and left to die, the only question being how quickly. Many of these companies undoubtedly had too much fat and needed to be re-energized, including through judicious layoffs. But that's not what happened. They were not managed to increase efficiency and to improve performance and competitiveness. They were managed to produce as much cash as possible as quickly as possible for their owners. Then those owners turn around and say "see, we told u that company couldn't compete anymore. Don't blame us that it died." Put another way, billions and billions of dollars worth of assets that were built up over decades by entrepreneurs, families, workers, highly educated and skilled managements and prudent bankers and advisors were stripped of everything of value in about 20 years by a bunch of thieves masquerading as capitalists.

[Tequila Cowboy]

Please folks, let's stop feeding this guy. I'm as much to blame as anyone and even today I posted tax numbers to support arguments being made, but that never matters to LJ. If the facts don't mesh with his conclusions then they've been manipulated, if there are questions about his conclusions he deflects them, if a question is asked to spark debate he either ridicules it or ignores it or a combination of both. The whole thing is futile and silly and we all need to stop. Of course we won't, I just needed to say it anyway.

[beantownbubba]

Please folks, let's stop feeding this guy. I'm as much to blame as anyone and even today I posted tax numbers to support arguments being made, but that never matters to LJ. If the facts don't mesh with his conclusions then they've been manipulated, if there are questions about his conclusions he deflects them, if a question is asked to spark debate he either ridicules it or ignores it or a combination of both. The whole thing is futile and silly and we all need to stop. Of course we won't, I just needed to say it anyway.

You're just a pawn of the system, man!

[LuthierJustin]

I'm not against funding the government I'm against the system we have now which is complete chaos,you can manipulate the numbers to say anything you want, loopholes, thousands upon thousands of pages of tax laws, millions of dollars a year wasted on tax compliance... Name a business that's run like that?

LJ---forget the tax code and legalities, as a man and a DBT afficianado, do you see anything wrong with what Bain Capital/Romney did?

Absolutely not, he saved jobs

[LuthierJustin]

Liberal facts or fact facts? There is a difference

[Penny Lane]

I'm not against funding the government I'm against the system we have now which is complete chaos,you can manipulate the numbers to say anything you want, loopholes, thousands upon thousands of pages of tax laws, millions of dollars a year wasted on tax compliance... Name a business that's run like that?

LJ---forget the tax code and legalities, as a man and a DBT afficianado, do you see anything wrong with what Bain Capital/Romney did?

Absolutely not, he saved jobs

Thank you. That's all I wanted..

I disagree about him doing more good than harm but I'm sure there are a lot of employees at Staples who are grateful to him for their job.


Guys--See? LJ totally answered my question! You have no faith.

[Penny Lane]

Mitt Romney's job at Bain:

1. getting a bunch of investors to invest in your negotiation skills and your company (I'm cool with that..)
2. taking that money and buying a company that's headed for trouble or in trouble already (still cool with that)
3. taking over the managerial reigns of that company with the company's permission -or without if that co is broke (pretty okay with that)
4. negotiating a HUGE fee for your services (capitalist baby! i love it...and this still is okay--free market reigns)
5. seeing WASTE in that company and trimming the fat, laying off unnecessary workers, tightening ship (pretty okay with this, too, believe it or not)
6. taking company's liquidity and spending it to get the bottom line at zero (hmm...okay nothing seems THAT bad yet, i might be amenable to this)
7. once company is at zero, asking for a HUGE ass loan for this company because company is now broke, yo! maybe from a huge bank where all your banker friends work...or from the government where more of your friends work.. (this seems a little risky)
7. managing co/or not managing co--it no longer matters, your fee is negotiated. (smart thinking!)
8. company goes bankrupt anyway, you incur no personal liabilities for this (yay legal loophole!)
9. You make millions of dollars and walk away with your fee, having contributed and created nothing... (SWEET!)
10. Company goes bankrupt. Debt incurred by bank/govt/taxpayers (Boo).

Penny, you don't have steps 7 or 8 quite right. Or, at least, it might be that way, but what happens more often is that the new owners use the company's cash flow (meaning that it's doing at least reasonably well, it's generating more cash than it's spending) to obtain loans (i.e. the future cash flow is pledged to repay the debt). But instead of using those loan proceeds to invest in the company (do more r&d, add technology, build factories, buy more TV ads, etc etc) they either use the cash to pay for their purchase (thus buying something for nothing) and/or take the cash out of the company in the form of dividends, management fees, salaries, bonuses and the like. So the company becomes less and less competitive and before long is unable to keep making the payments on the outrageously large loans.

And that's how old, staid, non-cutting edge companies that could have supported their communities and workers for many, many years even if they didn't dazzle Wall St w/ their growth potential are simply gutted and left to die, the only question being how quickly. Many of these companies undoubtedly had too much fat and needed to be re-energized, including through judicious layoffs. But that's not what happened. They were not managed to increase efficiency and to improve performance and competitiveness. They were managed to produce as much cash as possible as quickly as possible for their owners. Then those owners turn around and say "see, we told u that company couldn't compete anymore. Don't blame us that it died." Put another way, billions and billions of dollars worth of assets that were built up over decades by entrepreneurs, families, workers, highly educated and skilled managements and prudent bankers and advisors were stripped of everything of value in about 20 years by a bunch of thieves masquerading as capitalists.

that's too much for me to 1. understand and 2. to put in a numbered list

[Zip City]

I'm not against funding the government I'm against the system we have now which is complete chaos,you can manipulate the numbers to say anything you want, loopholes, thousands upon thousands of pages of tax laws, millions of dollars a year wasted on tax compliance... Name a business that's run like that?

LJ---forget the tax code and legalities, as a man and a DBT afficianado, do you see anything wrong with what Bain Capital/Romney did?

Absolutely not, he saved jobs

Whose?

[beantownbubba]

Smitty, Reich is mostly right but imo he loses credibility by avoiding some truths that are inconvenient for his narrative. I don't have time now, but the short version is that while the US was one of 2 military superpowers in the post war years, it was the SOLE economic superpower. All the competition was either flattened and depopulated by war (europe, japan, other parts of asia), unable to figure out an economically supportable path (USSR) or going backward (China w/ its cultural revolution). Not only could the US sell its good all over the world w/out competition, the govt funded a lot of it (see e.g. the Marshall plan) and domestically, w/out competition, management could give labor more or less whatever it wanted and just pass on the costs to the rest of us. A much simpler, less competitive time.

[Smitty]

Smitty, Reich is mostly right but imo he loses credibility by avoiding some truths that are inconvenient for his narrative. I don't have time now, but the short version is that while the US was one of 2 military superpowers in the post war years, it was the SOLE economic superpower. All the competition was either flattened and depopulated by war (europe, japan, other parts of asia), unable to figure out an economically supportable path (USSR) or going backward (China w/ its cultural revolution). Not only could the US sell its good all over the world w/out competition, the govt funded a lot of it (see e.g. the Marshall plan) and domestically, w/out competition, management could give labor more or less whatever it wanted and just pass on the costs to the rest of us. A much simpler, less competitive time.

To be fair, that was just an excerpt - while he did ignore the correlation between the world economical conditions that supported "the great prosperity" in that piece, a major part of his focus recently has been globalization.

[LuthierJustin]

Whose?

All the people who still had jobs because their companies didn't shut down, I know you don't understand that

[Zip City]

Whose?

All the people who still had jobs because their companies didn't shut down, I know you don't understand that

Plus all those newly employed Chinese!

[LuthierJustin]

Yep, so they should have kept he jobs here and had the company shut down so everyone lost their job. Well, I will put it this way, you are for equil opertunity or everyone to be jobless!

[Zip City]

Yep, so they should have kept he jobs here and had the company shut down so everyone lost their job. Well, I will put it this way, you are for equil opertunity or everyone to be jobless!

Clearly the answer is to repeal the minimum wage and pay Americans 35 cents/hour

[LuthierJustin]

Yep, so they should have kept he jobs here and had the company shut down so everyone lost their job. Well, I will put it this way, you are for equil opertunity or everyone to be jobless!

Clearly the answer is to repeal the minimum wage and pay Americans 35 cents/hour

Clearly you have no business sense

[Zip City]

Yep, so they should have kept he jobs here and had the company shut down so everyone lost their job. Well, I will put it this way, you are for equil opertunity or everyone to be jobless!

Clearly the answer is to repeal the minimum wage and pay Americans 35 cents/hour

Clearly you have no business sense

do tell

[dogstar]

Say here's a business, it has to lay off 1000 people or go bankrupt. The liberals would rather see no one get layed off, the whole company fail and everyone be out of a job, or say they could have cut salaries and kept people so everyone suffers for the few

When the financial meltdown occurred a lot of companies in Germany actually agreed with their workers that they would cut their pay rather than having to lay them off. The companies figured that it would be better to have the people in place when things picked up rather than having to rehire and retrain them.

[Tequila Cowboy]

Say here's a business, it has to lay off 1000 people or go bankrupt. The liberals would rather see no one get layed off, the whole company fail and everyone be out of a job, or say they could have cut salaries and kept people so everyone suffers for the few

Rarely is the solution so black and white. The Container Store made a deal with it's workers in 2009 similar to what dogstar mentioned despite calls from financial circles that they lay off 400 workers. Rather than lay off those workers it asked them to take a cut in benefits and pay in exchange for a no layoff pledge. The executives also took the same cuts. In early 2011 they restored the benefits and pay and not one job was lost. So yeah in LJ's world everyone "suffered for the few" in this case 400 jobs were saved and the company has been successful going forward.

Earlier LJ said that a liberal always believes that a group always trumps an individual. If you frame that instead as a group working together can accomplish more than an individual I'll own that 100%. What we can do together is far greater than what we can do alone. Every man for himself is a selfish and ultimately self defeating ideal.

[one belt loop]

Mitt Romney's job at Bain:

1. getting a bunch of investors to invest in your negotiation skills and your company (I'm cool with that..)
2. taking that money and buying a company that's headed for trouble or in trouble already (still cool with that)
3. taking over the managerial reigns of that company with the company's permission -or without if that co is broke (pretty okay with that)
4. negotiating a HUGE fee for your services (capitalist baby! i love it...and this still is okay--free market reigns)
5. seeing WASTE in that company and trimming the fat, laying off unnecessary workers, tightening ship (pretty okay with this, too, believe it or not)
6. taking company's liquidity and spending it to get the bottom line at zero (hmm...okay nothing seems THAT bad yet, i might be amenable to this)
7. once company is at zero, asking for a HUGE ass loan for this company because company is now broke, yo! maybe from a huge bank where all your banker friends work...or from the government where more of your friends work.. (this seems a little risky)
7. managing co/or not managing co--it no longer matters, your fee is negotiated. (smart thinking!)
8. company goes bankrupt anyway, you incur no personal liabilities for this (yay legal loophole!)
9. You make millions of dollars and walk away with your fee, having contributed and created nothing... (SWEET!)
10. Company goes bankrupt. Debt incurred by bank/govt/taxpayers (Boo).

Penny, you don't have steps 7 or 8 quite right. O

To which step 7 do you refer?

[Lone Wolf1]

way to go obamma. selfishness before citizens
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/20 ... f-notices/

[beantownbubba]

that's too much for me to 1. understand and 2. to put in a numbered list

OK, here's the two sentence version:

By buying companies using leveraged buy-outs, he used the credit that companies had spent decades establishing and that old reliable, "other people's money" in such a way that every available dime went to the investors while all the risk was shifted to a combination of banks, faceless investors w/ whom he had no connection, employees and government, turning capitalism on its head. IOW, he looted companies but because he wore an expensive suit instead of an eye patch, it was legal.

Note to OBL: Both.

[Slipkid42]

Vulture capitalists were not in the original equation of free enterprise. Corporate takeovers skirt awfully close to the monopolies that EVERYONE knew was not in the economic best interest of our country, as recently as the breakup of Ma Bell. When the have-nots FAR outnumber the haves (and we are rapidly approaching that scenario); the shit is gonna hit the fan. That ANYONE finds anything meritorious in what Romney did to gain his wealth, shows a distinct misunderstanding of the law of diminishing returns. Does ANYONE think that this self-serving shyster could somehow find inner morality & possibly lead us ALL out of the clusterfuck we are in? If so, in the spirit of free enterprise; I've got a few bridges & a tunnel or 2 I'd like to sell you.

[Penny Lane]

Vulture capitalists were not in the original equation of free enterprise. Corporate takeovers skirt awfully close to the monopolies that EVERYONE knew was not in the economic best interest of our country, as recently as the breakup of Ma Bell. When the have-nots FAR outnumber the haves (and we are rapidly approaching that scenario); the shit is gonna hit the fan. That ANYONE finds anything meritorious in what Romney did to gain his wealth, shows a distinct misunderstanding of the law of diminishing returns. Does ANYONE think that this self-serving shyster could somehow find inner morality & possibly lead us ALL out of the clusterfuck we are in? If so, in the spirit of free enterprise; I've got a few bridges & a tunnel or 2 I'd like to sell you.

i love the way you put that, slip---that's not free enterprise..

even though everyone hates her except LJ and i, does anyoen think ayn rand would have a prob with that?