How the Deep South doesn't pull in Dallas I don't know.

Appalachia extending into New Mexico is pretty amazing.

I found it just OK. Like you said, it's lacking...something. I can't quite put my finger on it. It kind of felt like I was listening to lines that for whatever reason didn't make it into his podcast. Bill's a very funny dude, though.

The Midwest is much, much smaller than I was led to believe and it excludes the entirety of Wisconsin and Minneosta!

Was about to go to war with this guy from an online professional group on social media as my knee jerk reaction was WTF but then I hesitated. Maybe I need to read up a bit? Anyone know about this Germany policy and its impact?

"This horrifies me. In countries like Germany they recognize that like an addiction, many people who experience paedophilia don’t want to act out.

Therefore in Germany they offer a free programs for people who identify as being attracted to children. There is no mandatory reporting unless a crime has been committed. The cases of child abuse have dropped dramatically since they enacted these enlightened laws.

Mandatory reporting has shown to cause an increase in child abuse as those who have this predilection, have nowhere to turn for help.

Let me be clear I’m not American.

If this guy has not acted out and not done any damage can’t someone help him as opposed to just ruin his life in the process potential he set him up to offend?"

Piece of advice, don't ever do unlicensed contractor work in CA (or probably anywhere else). Law is damn harsh--customer can get anything paid back, including for materials, even if the job was done well. Thankfully my client isn't the contractor. Also, doing unlicensed work is a misdemeanor the first offense and a felony the second.

It's not the American way to help people. Ruining lives is easier.

Stormy D is coming to a titty bar that’s next to a curry place I go to all the time. Might swing by for dinner and see what the crowd/entourage looks like.

Disagree. From the article:

So, the change is from around 25% to around 33%. A likely significant change, but not the massive increase the chart indicates on a casual perusal.

I'm not disagreeing with the premise of the article, but they should make their case without resorting to misleading presentations of their data.

Yeah, I mean, even leaving aside the fact that e.g. Minneapolis is a very, very different place and a different culture from what you see if you drive an hour south but stay in the purple, I'm also keeping myself entertained by trying to find the pair of most distinct cities that are in the same color. Las Vegas and Salt Lake City/Provo/Cheyenne? Austin, TX, and Charleston, WV? Also, how in the hell do the Dakotas deserve 3 colors?

Man, that is a terrible article. Putting aside the terribleness of the article, I don't think Hue's conclusion is right. (And as a preface, I don't actually like the tax plan.)

I think most economists would say that it's desirable for cash to move from firms without investment opportunities to firms with investment opportunities. Under the previous tax regime, the treatment of profits in foreign subsidiaries was a big problem in this regard - firms had an incentive to keep their foreign profits in the foreign subsidiary*** rather than distributing it to the parent company where it could be paid out to shareholders or invested in the U.S. So there was a big friction causing firms to retain cash even when they didn't have any good use for that cash.

The changing tax policy makes it easier/less costly to bring that money back to the U.S., where it can be put to better uses, whether those uses are investment in the firm or distributed to shareholders. The fact that most of the profits are being distributed is simply a sign that large profitable firms don't see a lot of opportunity to invest, so they're distributing money to their shareholders rather than letting it sit. Those shareholders, in turn, are presumably investing in other smaller firms that do have investment opportunities. The effective transfer of cash from low-opportunity firms to high-opportunity firms is a good thing.

You can argue about whether that's actually happening, but the fact that firms are paying out most of their money via share buybacks is not at all a sign that the tax plan will be unsuccessful in spurring massive investment. It's just not going to spur massive investment in the firms that have lots of cash to distribute.



***Even though the cash was held in the foreign subsidiary, it was most likely already sitting in a U.S. bank, just unavailable for investment in the U.S.

I don't consider it deceptive in general to use the whole space of the graph to show the change, as long as the axes are well labeled and continuous. Sometimes changes that are fairly small compared to the magnitude of the value are quite significant, like sprints won by tenths of a second. That can represent a huge chunk of space even if it's <1% of the race time. Insisting that all y axes start at zero for purity is often going to end up obfuscating the plot rather than illuminating it. A major point of that plot is to show that the magnitude and first derivative of the loan frequency for all those places are all pretty similar, and in that regard, starting from zero would hide that, as the space to illustrate it would be smaller.

While this may be true, the tax cut for corporations was sold as a way to increase worker salaries and create jobs. Implying that the only thing stopping corporations from doing this was money. Reports like this show that job creation and worker salary are not just a function of how much money a company has on hand. Which everyone but Trump knew anyway...

Did Republicans make bad faith arguments for the tax cuts? Sure.

But there's a big difference between:

1) The tax cut will increase worker salaries and create jobs at those established, profitable, low-growth companies who already had substantial cash available and who were likely to distribute their profits through dividends and buybacks.

2) The tax cut will increase aggregate worker salaries and create jobs in the U.S. economy by incenting the flow of capital from companies with excess cash to companies with cash needs and available investments.

Even if #1 isn't happening (which is obviously unsurprising), I think it's reasonable to point to #2 as a good potential outcome of the tax cuts. I don't have any idea if #2 is happening, and I think there will be a ton of academic studies that look at exactly that question once we start getting more data. I saw one presentation not too long ago that tried to get at this question by looking at the 2004 AJCA, but I'm pretty sure the authors didn't understand how foreign profit taxation actually worked, so I don't have any reason to believe their results:
https://sites.google.com/site/stefan...it_channel.pdf

My contribution (jk someone else's contribution) to Tax Chat

What is different from trickle down economics and what the Republicans promised with the tax cut?

How many places offer tax cuts to businesses to get them to operate in their location? It seems disingenuous to offer corporations tax cuts and then ***** about them taking them.

My read (could be wrong obv) is that the fault lies with the city/state/fed governments who give massive breaks to companies like Apple who don't really need them, not with Apple for taking free money

In general, I don't think there's any difference. I was focusing on one particular piece - the change in how foreign profits are taxed - and I think that particular piece is a little different from trickle down economics.

As a dumb analogy: Trickle down economics is saying that when a rich household gets some windfall, that windfall is going to end up generating a huge amount of economic activity that benefits everyone in town.

What I'm talking about is a rich household that already has a bunch of money, but it's in two different bank accounts, one of which is restricted and the other of which is not. (Like one is a normal account, the other is a retirement account that would apply penalties if money was withdrawn.) Here, the government is removing the restrictions from that second account, so that the rich household can spend it any way they want.

Is there a meaningful difference between those two? Probably not a huge one.

Random tidbit: in addition to the 124 degree record Algeria posted earlier that I think most of us saw, and dozens of locales in the US and around the world hitting all-time temperature records this summer - South Korea just set a record high temperature yesterday, and 29 people have died of heat stroke in their current heat wave. Japan also set a temperature record last week and has over 100 deaths from heat this year.

But climate change is fake news, or hey it's cold where I live so I'd love to get me some of this global warming, etc etc

You are conflating weather with climate. Your post is no different than the ones I see on Facebook when there is a big snowstorm and climate change gets declared fake news.

I say we go to war with China to save the planet.

In isolation, sure.

But, unlike "ermagerd so cold in Buffalo this winter, WISH I COULD GET ME SOME OF THAT GLOBAL WARMING", those data points are the highlights of heat waves of record strength and length. As far as climate goes, those heat waves fit into a pattern of the five hottest years on record coming in this decade, and the trend going up.

I'm sure you agree, right?

We haven’t had a good climate change sequence since ikes and domer left.

Don’t like any of this month’s choices, I’m going with Kirstjen Nielsen.