http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GZYNP3CZOw
Short version: it changed it from "Cina Bar" to "Cinnabon".
Shut up. You're a bank. Just move people's money around for them and don't try to have an opinion.
US banking regulations don't allow them to do so.
Financial institutions have all kinds of rules they must comply with. If there's any indication that the customer or the recipient of a payment is engaged in illegal activities, they are required to suspend the transaction.
You can complain about the rules being applied inconsistently or overzealously, but the banks are pretty much between a rock and a hard place: federal regulators get to scrutinize transactions with 20-20 hindsight and with knowledge the banks never had -- and then hold the banks responsible if they find something wrong.
Not that my anecdotal evidence has any weight, but I personally experience more like a 5 to 10% dropped call rate with AT&T (one time I was dropped 4 times in a half hour).
I don't have that kind of rate overall, but I have had the experience of being dropped multiple times in about 10 minutes. Each time, I used AT&T's "Mark the Spot" application to report a dropped call. On the last couple of reports, I added a comment to the effect of "Please get out here and fix this cell base station!" -- I was at home and never had any problems with dropped calls until then.
A couple of days later, I noticed that the signal strength on my phone was 0-1 bars, instead of the usual 4-5. I'm a couple of blocks from the nearest cell base station, so I realized they had shut down that cell for repair. A few hours later, my signal strength was at the usual level and I haven't had problems with dropped calls since then.
Add in the vegetarian Buddhists who'd consider your bacon cheeseburger inedible, and I suspect it's over half the world that considers it a foul sin of a meal.
Add in the lactose intolerant and people that avoid red meat, and I begin to wonder if anyone is left to eat bacon cheeseburgers.
With very few exceptions, no employee consent is ever required as part of a merger/sale/takeover/bankruptcy.
If employees own a substantial percentage of the stock, it's required.
The purchasing company can also require that a high percentage of employees accept the offer to work for them before the sale is completed. And no, that's not hypothetical.
Obama's promised to get us out of the wars, and so far he seems to be following through on that, for better or worse.
Obama has followed the plan to withdraw from Iraq that was put in place by the Bush administration.
Obama has also escalated the war in Afghanistan by sending more troops, but binding them with restrictive rules of engagement.
Figure 5: Share of capital income earned by top 1% and bottom 80%, 1979-2003
Did you bother to read the definition of capital income in your citation? It's only a subset of all income.
That one factor alone makes your following assertions demonstrably false. But, I'll leave it to you as an exercise: maybe you'll learn something. You can start with the CBO figures I started earlier.
Households making over $250,000 are 1.5% of the population.
And your citation is?
According to the CBO (in the same URL I cited above), there were 1.2 million households in the top 1% in 2007. That's 1.3% of the total.
The minimum adjusted income for the top 1% was $352,900 in 2007. That's normalized to a single person household. Multiply that number by the square root of the number of people in the household to calculate the amount for multiple-person households.
If we lower the threshold to the top 5%, then it's 5.9 million households, or 5% of the total. The minimum adjusted income was $141,900. That's closer to the $250,000 threshold for a couple with 2 children, but still not quite there.
Therefore, your assertion is demonstrably wrong, and I won't bother with the rest -- other than to point out that "wealth" is usually considered equivalent to "assets", neither of which are the same as "income".
The table also shows the top 10% earn 42% of all income so paying 55% of all the taxes isn't really such a big sacrifice.
I don't dispute that, and I don't remember saying that it was.
What I don't understand is how anyone can believe that the "rich" don't pay any taxes when the numbers clearly indicate that isn't the truth.
One can argue all day about how much the "rich" should pay. But, it's an outright lie to claim they don't pay a significant share.
These numbers have to be wrong, because I can guarantee you there are at least 2000 homes over 250K just because of sports (MLB has 1200 players with a minimum salary of $400K, NFL has 1280 players with a minimum of over $300K).
He didn't read the column header. Those numbers are thousands.
In response to your FYI, the top 5% is earners over $157K, and above 250K is a meager 1.57%. Thus that $700B will be distributed over a mere 1,699 households over the next 10 years.
Since I don't know how your citation's methodology compares to the methodology used by the CBO, I'll instead cite the CBO's table in the same URL that I provided earlier.
The first table on page 7 says there were 11.9 million households in the top 10% in 2007. There 5.9 million households in the top 5%, and 1.2 million households in the top 1%.
The last table on page 9 lists the minimum adjusted income for the various categories. For the top 10%, it was $102,900 for a single person household. The methodology is on the last page: multiply the number in the table by the square root of the number of family members. For married without kids, multiply by 1.414 = $144,500. For married with 2 kids, multiply by 2 = $205800.
It's not exactly $250,000 for a married couple, but I thought it was close enough for a rough estimate.
However, I think you might want to read your own citation a bit more closely. It's not 1,699 households. It's 1,699 THOUSAND households.
It's not a meme...it's a direct quote from Leona Helmsley.
Leona Helmsley said: "Only little people pay taxes".
And she was stupid, too.
Pulling out big numbers sure sounds impressive, but they're paying much less than the lowest groups pay relative to the income.
No, they aren't. Read the "big numbers" in the URL that I cited. The first table documents the effective tax rates, and it's highest for the top 1%, and lowest for the bottom 20%.
You sound like a smart guy. How about reading the data and interpreting it for yourself, rather than spouting someone else's taking points?
You (and others) also seem want to shift the discussion to "assets", rather than "income". In the US, we don't have an "asset" tax at the federal level (unless you count the estate tax).
Assets are less volatile, but aren't necessarily income-producing. In states with no income taxes, retired homeowners have to pay large property tax bills on homes they own outright, even though they may have little income. Their only recourse is to sell the home, or borrow money against the home.
Are you sure you want to tax assets?
According to the IRS last year, I made just over 90k last year (gross) and I was in the top 15% of income earners in the U.S. So the top 10% might be lower than you think.
The CBO documents their methodology in the URL that I cited earlier. They include some sources of income that the IRS may not include.
For 2007, the minimum adjusted income for the top 10% was $102,900 for a single person household. To calculate the number for multiple persons, multiply that number by the square root of the number of people in the household.
So, it's not likely that the CBO's methodology and the IRS's methodology line up exactly. But, I think the top 10% is close enough to the $250,000 threshold for couples with two children.
365 Days of drinking Lo-Cal beer. = 1 Lite-year
