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From: Joerg on 14 May 2010 12:13 Martin Brown wrote: > On 14/05/2010 16:25, John Larkin wrote: >> On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:50:11 +0100, Martin Brown >> <|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote: >> >>> A pure sales tax paid only by the non-business end user would be a lot >>> simpler. Allowing businesses not to have to fight with badly paid VAT >>> advisers. I have had some amusing run-ins with them on reclaiming VAT >>> for a charity making disabled access improvements. >> >> There's nothing wrong or difficult about having businesses pay sales >> tax. We in California pay sales tax on anything we consume, like > > I see that as faintly odd. Taxing businesses for buying stuff to help > run their business and new equipment doesn't really make any sense. > Moving the business to Montana and will make that problem go away :-) [...] -- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/ "gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam. Use another domain or send PM.
From: Joerg on 14 May 2010 12:15 John Larkin wrote: > On Fri, 14 May 2010 07:56:31 -0700, Joerg <invalid(a)invalid.invalid> > wrote: > >> Bill Sloman wrote: >>> On May 14, 12:39 am, John Larkin >>> <jjlar...(a)highNOTlandTHIStechnologyPART.com> wrote: >> [...] >> >>>> That's the way sales tax works in California. If I buy uncooked >>>> chicken at Safeway, there's no sales tax. If I buy cooked, hot, >>>> ready-to-eat chicken, it's taxed. It's simple, because it's a visible, >>>> automated-cash-register, point-of-sale tax. Restaurant food is taxed >>>> whether you eat it there or not. I can't imagine how you could work a >>>> thing like this all the way back up the VAT chain. >>>> >>>> It would be easy to structure a national sales tax to exempt the >>>> things poorer people actually need. There would be some cheating >>>> around the edges, but there always will be some cheating. But things >>>> like VAT carousel fraud couldn't happen. >>>> >>>> (One shop near here sells " *WARM* " corned-beef sandwiches because >>>> hot ones have a higher tax rate.) >>>> >>>> I like the sales tax, as opposed to income tax, because it puts >>>> business on a better basis against imports, so saves jobs. And because >>>> it would be enormously simpler and cheaper to comply with. No >>>> accountants, no tax returns, no exemptions, no deductions, no >>>> quarterly estimates, no loopholes... almost. >>> Dream on. Why do you think that VAT was invented? >>> >>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_added_tax >>> >> The usual. To squeeze ever more taxes out of people. Whether you call >> them VAT, fees, surcharges, carbon credits or whatever, a tax is a tax >> is a tax. > > But some taxes require you to hire an army of bookkeepers and CPAs and > attorneys just to figure out how much taxes you should pay. Luckily, > all their fees are tax-deductable. This year, we will spend more on > the droids than we will pay in taxes. > Yup, I also pay a chunk of money to my CPA so my bases are covered and thing are all legit. I guess in technical terms that's called "compliance costs". And it doesn't move our country one iota farther in terms of technological leadership. -- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/ "gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam. Use another domain or send PM.
From: Joerg on 14 May 2010 12:17 John Larkin wrote: > On Fri, 14 May 2010 07:39:56 -0700, Joerg <invalid(a)invalid.invalid> > wrote: > >> John Larkin wrote: [...] >>> I like the sales tax, as opposed to income tax, because it puts >>> business on a better basis against imports, so saves jobs. And because >>> it would be enormously simpler and cheaper to comply with. No >>> accountants, no tax returns, no exemptions, no deductions, no >>> quarterly estimates, no loopholes... almost. >>> >>> Tax consumption. Don't tax savings or investment or job creation. If a >>> person is rich but doesn't spend any money, nobody can reasonably be >>> jealous of his wealth. >>> >> A serious problem with that: It punishes frugal people who have saved >> for their retirement and rewards those who squandered everything. The >> money they saved _has_ already been taxed. > > Simple fix: don't tax income. > Yeah, but how do you deal with income that _has_ already been taxed but not spent yet because people saved it for their retirement? A flat VAT-type tax is the same as confiscating xx% percent of that. Not fair at all. -- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/ "gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam. Use another domain or send PM.
From: Martin Brown on 14 May 2010 12:53 On 14/05/2010 16:06, John Larkin wrote: > On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:31:49 +0100, Martin Brown > <|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote: > >> Engels saw first hand what greedy industrialists were doing to their >> workers in the Lancashire cotton industry. Boiler explosions were >> commonplace up until the Vulcan insurers made a stand and insisted on >> proper boiler safety inspections. And in cases of tampering with safety >> relief valves they would not pay out. >> [snip] >> >> It makes reasonable sense to pay your workers a living wage for the work >> that they do rather than pay them less than they can sensibly live on. >> Ford was about the first in the USA to actually do this. > > It only makes sense if the money comes from somewhere. If all the > employers arbitrarily doubled wages, inflation would take it all away We are talking here of industrialised manufacture that was possibly two or more orders of magnitude more productive. All the profits went to the mill owners and their workers were left to starve on a subsistance level of pay because it was marginally better than being out of work. The mill owners lived like Gods as did the iron masters. One of our local iron masters who was pretty benevolent for the time was an inflation adjusted multibillionaire in the early 1900's. He and his mate Andrew Carnegie paid to endow Middlesbrough public library. Not all of them were miserly penny pinching scrouge type characters, but enough of them were to influence Engels and later Marx. > within weeks, maybe days. If a single employer did it, he's go out of > business. Shuffling paper money around is meaningless; productivity is > real. Ford increased wages because he had a revolutionary > super-efficient way of making cheap cars, and most workers found the > pace and discipline tiring and tended to quit after a few months. He > needed the best workers to stick around, so he golden-handcuffed them; > this was *before* they were unionized. The "invisible hand" was at > work. Productivity was the key. > > This is good: > > http://www.amazon.com/Ford-Men-Machine-Robert-Lacey/dp/0517635046/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1273849223&sr=1-1 The same was true of industrialised machine based cotton mills powered by steam engine. The difference was they could prey on large numbers of starving unemployed penniless former handloom weavers. The profits were entirely for the mill owners and were immense whilst life expectancy for the workers housed in slums was poor at about 40. It was even worse in the iron & steel industry just with a few notable exceptions they were quite happy to evaporate a few more employees if it made them extra profit. Fettlers were relatively well paid but died even younger than the already low average. >> In the UK there were some decent industrialists mostly of quaker >> families who did treat their workforce fairly - examples include some >> household names like Pilkingtons, Cadbury, Bournville, Marks&Spencer. > > A decent industrialist realizes that a partnership with workers is > mutually beneficial, but must still compete with company owners who > don't agree with this philosophy. A company can't arbitrarily give > away high wages without achieving corresponding competitive benefits. This wasn't about competition though it was about screwing the poor sods at the bottom of the pile into the ground knowing full well that they were individually powerless and a consumable item. Regards, Martin Brown
From: John Larkin on 14 May 2010 13:03
On Fri, 14 May 2010 16:53:49 +0100, Martin Brown <|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote: >On 14/05/2010 16:25, John Larkin wrote: >> On Fri, 14 May 2010 08:50:11 +0100, Martin Brown >> <|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote: >> >>> A pure sales tax paid only by the non-business end user would be a lot >>> simpler. Allowing businesses not to have to fight with badly paid VAT >>> advisers. I have had some amusing run-ins with them on reclaiming VAT >>> for a charity making disabled access improvements. >> >> There's nothing wrong or difficult about having businesses pay sales >> tax. We in California pay sales tax on anything we consume, like > >I see that as faintly odd. Taxing businesses for buying stuff to help >run their business and new equipment doesn't really make any sense. > >> equipment and furniture and supplies, and pay no tax on parts or >> subassemblies that will go into sellable products. But it probably >> makes sense to exempt productive equipment, since that would encourage >> long-term productivity and job creation. > >It does provide the odd interesting loophole. My supervisor at >university tried a lawnmower as a company expense (ruled invalid). >We tried company bicycles and that was accepted! >> >> If there's an opamp in stock and I pull it out to make a breadboard or >> a test fixture, I should in theory note the event and pay sales tax on >> it. And if I buy a bunch of parts for engineering, taxed, but some >> wind up in a shipped product, we should get a refund on the taxes. > >It is different to what I am used to and just as messy to implement. Well, nobody actually implements it at the opamp level. We do not pay sales tax on anything that we buy "for resale", which isn't much of a hassle. It's mostly an honor system. If >anything you have the same nightmare scenario as UK fast food places >where the price you pay depends on whether you take away or eat in VAT=0 >or 17.5 respectively. I presume that noone bothers in the US like buying >stuff from another state to evade state sales taxes. People make a great effort to buy out-of-state to avoid sales taxes. In theory, one should confess an ebay buy and voluntarily report it to the state, and pay sales tax. Nobody does, at least not individuals. Companies are subject to audit, and submit sales tax reports and checks anyhow, so most do keep the records properly. We collect sales tax on stuff we sell to end users in California, so we do send in reports and checks, and we include our own equipment purchases. >> >> VAT sounds like a mess to me. Accountants and attorneys and >> bureaucrats are all useless, expensive overheads on society. > >It is relatively straightforward provided that you do not have too many >different rates and/or wierd exemptions. Different to what you are used >to - but I think an end user purchase/sales tax would be a lot cleaner. It won't happen, because it's too visible. John |