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Comment Re:Everything gave us civilization (Score 4, Interesting) 325

Vessels that had been used for making beer are identified by beer specific chemical traces on the inside of conatiners. Soot residue is a terrible indicator; and no, you do not need to place a container on the fire to boil water. You can boil water in water-tight weaved baskets by placing rocks that have come off of the fire. They hold a lot of heat and with multiple rocks you can boil for as long as you need.

Comment Re:Ah tax season (Score 1) 526

Then when they used it to buy more candy bars it was taxed again...

Usually, products that are purchased for resale are exempt from sales tax. Sales taxes are not calculated until it is sold to the end user.
Candy purchased by a mini-mart at Costco -> no sales tax Me buying the candy bar from that mini-mart -> sales tax calculated

Comment Re:Ah tax season (Score 1) 526

A business can deduct any expense that is used for the operations of running a business. Dividends are payed after taxes because paying dividends is not essential to the running of a business. Anyways, dividends are not payed out to shares held by the company.

Comment Re:Its not Jonathons song (Score 5, Insightful) 307

Yes, he did a cover. However, he did a specific arrangement of the song that the show took as their own. From the opening chorus to the way the guitar is played, it's the same arrangement of Baby Got Back. I have a feeling that the music arranger for the show might be let go for getting credit where credit wasn't due.

Comment Re:time for a outsouring tax? (Score 1) 427

True that. Taxing a corporation results in those taxes (if paid) being classified as expenses. Added to costs. Added to prices. Paid by you and me.

Really? Since when? Under the current US tax law, taxes are paid on net profits (income minus expenses). An expense is the money spent on things that are necessary for the operations of a business. The more expenses you have, the lower the tax burden. More expenses than income? You pay $0 taxes and deffer the remaining expenses to future tax seasons. Fees for government inspections/registration are expenses, not taxes; they can be written off. If we want companies to grow, we need to minimize their expenses and not just by having fewer people on staff.

Dividends on stocks are paid after taxes because the payment of dividends is not essential to the running of a business. If the tax rate on businesses were to go down further, we would see an increase in dividends paid. With taxes on dividends paid at a top rate of 15% (no FICA either), that is a massive amount of taxes being avoided. The companies that are actually creating jobs are not the ones paying out dividends. The ones creating jobs are in their first five years of growth and generally paying fewer taxes. The Bush era tax cuts increased the amount of time that start-up costs for a business had to be amortirized from 5 years (for any amount) to 15 years (for any amount over $5000).

Comment Re:Unions protect jobs just fine (Score 1) 510

Except that public employee workers are generally paid less than their counterparts in other industries and the pension system has been paid into for every year of their work anyways. The problem stems from from three things:
1. Public employees being laid off, therefore reducing the pool paid into the pension system.
2. Retroactive changes to the pension payouts that had the optimism of a 90's internet IPO
3. "Fraud" by high level public employees, who can get away with it because of their connections in city hall and poorly written union contracts. Really no different than corporations moving money to the Cayman Island's to avoid paying taxes, it's perfectly legal but what has been the cost to this country? Or how about upper management in corporations getting paid in stock, which when sold, would be taxed as capital gains(15% in the USA)? Still perfectly legal, but now they're paying less as a percentage of their income than you are in taxes.

Comment Re:School::politics (Score 1) 386

Surprise, you didn't RTEFA. The very last paragraph of your article says:

"Both lobbyists must make payments to the pension plan to purchase credit for their past union years, and they are required to pay compounded interest. Over the last five years, after the lobbyists joined the plan, the two men and their union have made standard payments into the fund."

Basically they have to pay for every year they're claiming plus the interest that it would have netted.

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