in NY, due to arcane and idiotic rules, you cannot volunteer and at the same time collect unemployment benefits b/c such activity is classified as 'working'. at least, you have to report the number of days you 'work'/volunteer each week, which in turn reduces pro rata the benefits you receive for that week (which benefits are already quite low relative to neighboring states like NJ). talk about a Kafka-esque system of incentives, as a great way to try to get a new job is to volunteer, but only those who can afford to have their benefits reduced can pursue this option.

1 = EPIC FAIL. No one's reading anything that long, and certainly not in the morning docket.

Hey 3 - if you were in NYC with half a brain, you'd read it and weep ...

Please stand up to corrupt politicians and the big pharma lobby for your right to legal marijuana. At least do it for medical patients who would be able to grow their own (literally) dirt cheap, effective pain-relieving anti-nausea appetite stimulant.

For God's sake even George Washington grew his own cannabis. Wake up America.

"All you NYC boosters on this site, see today's NY Post story..."

Please cite a more respectable news source. WSJ, for example.

How can obama claim that his new health insurance system will actually cut the costs associated with health insurance, while at the same time acknowledge that we need to increase taxes to fund his new system? If his system actually cut total costs, then there should be no need for additional taxes, right?

From the source of the Post's article:

http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/24864.html

July 14, 2009

House Leadership's Health Care Plan Pushes Top Tax Rates Over 50% in 39 States

Couples Earning More than $1 Million Hit with 5.4% Surtax

Washington, DC, July 14, 2009 - A third updated Tax Foundation report shows that 39 states would see top tax rates exceed 50% under a health care funding plan announced today by House Democrats.

The latest proposal—one of several floated on Capitol Hill in the past few days and the third analyzed by the Tax Foundation since Friday—would impose a surtax of 1 percent on married couples with adjusted gross incomes (AGI) between $350,000 and $500,000 (singles between $280,000 and $400,000); 1.5 percent on couples with incomes between $500,000 and $1 million (singles earning between $400,000and $800,000); and 5.4 percent on couples earning more than $1 million (singles beyond $800,000).

The Tax Foundation released an initial report Friday based on another plan that had been floated that included a 4 percent surtax, as well as an updated report yesterday based on a three-tiered structured with a maximum rate of 3% for couples earning more than $1 million.

"More than three-quarters of the states would face combined top income tax rates exceeding 50% under this latest health care funding proposal," Tax Foundation President Scott Hodge said. "That means government would be taking more than half of every additional dollar from high-income taxpayers. The lowest top tax rate would be about 47%—and that's in the nine states that don't tax wages."

Tax Foundation Fiscal Fact No. 178, "If Health Surtax Is 5.4 Percent, Taxpayers in 39 States Would Pay a Top Tax Rate Over 50%," may be found online at http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/24863.html.

The hardest-hit states would be Oregon (57.5%), Hawaii (57.2%), New Jersey (57.1%), New York (56.9%), California (56.8%), Rhode Island (56.2%), Vermont (55.8%), Maryland (55.6%), Minnesota (54.4%) and Idaho (54.3%). Washington, DC, and New York City would see their top effective marginal rates rise to 55.0% and 58.7%, respectively. The effective marginal tax rate takes into consideration deductions and adjustments in order to present a truer measure of an individual's rate.

Top tax rates in the remaining 11 states range from 47.3% to 50%.

The Tax Foundation is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that has monitored fiscal policy at the federal, state and local levels since 1937.

Yes, wealthy people with $1 billion qualify as "small business".

Moron.

OK 6 - From yesterday's WSJ:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124753106668435899.html

The Small Business Surtax
The Obama Democrats pick income redistribution over job creation and economic growth.
Article Comments (141) more in Opinion »Email Printer
Friendly Share: Yahoo Buzz ↓ More
facebook
MySpace
LinkedIn
Digg
del.icio.us
NewsVine
StumbleUpon
Mixx
Save This ↓ More
Text
Jason Furman owes an apology to Michael Boskin, the Stanford economist who wrote a year ago on these pages that Barack Obama would raise American income tax rates nearly to 60%. Mr. Furman, then in the Obama campaign and now at the White House, claimed this was wrong and that Democrats would merely raise taxes back to their Clinton-era level.

House Democrats are now proving that Mr. Boskin had it right, and before it's over even he may have underestimated how high taxes will go. In the middle of a recession and with rising unemployment, Democrats have been letting it leak that they want to raise U.S. tax rates higher than they've been in nearly 30 years in order to finance government health care.

Every detail isn't known, but late last week Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel disclosed that his draft bill would impose a "surtax" on individuals with adjusted gross income of more than $280,000 a year. This would hit job creators especially hard because more than six of every 10 who earn that much are small business owners, operators or investors, according to a 2007 Treasury study. That study also found that almost half of the income taxed at this highest rate is small business income from the more than 500,000 sole proprietorships and subchapter S corporations whose owners pay the individual rate.

In addition, many more smaller business owners with lower profits would be hit by the Rangel plan's payroll tax surcharge. That surcharge would apply to all firms with 25 or more workers that don't offer health insurance to their employees, and it would amount to an astonishing eight percentage point fee above the current 15% payroll levy.

Here's the ugly income-tax math. First, Mr. Obama has promised to let the lower Bush tax rates expire after 2010. This would raise the top personal income tax rate to 39.6% from 35%, and the next rate to 36% from 33%. The Bush expiration would also phase out various tax deductions and exemptions, bringing the top marginal rate to as high as 41%.

Then add the Rangel Surtax of one percentage point, starting at $280,000 ($350,000 for couples), plus another percentage point at $400,000 ($500,000 for couples), rising to three points on more than $800,000 ($1 million) in 2011. But wait, there's more. The surcharge could rise by two more percentage points in 2013 if health-care costs are larger than advertised -- which is a near-certainty. Add all of this up and the top marginal tax rate would climb to 46%, which hasn't been seen in the U.S. since the Reagan tax reform of 1986 cut the top rate to 28% from 50%.

States have also been raising their income tax rates, so in California and New York City the top rate would be around 58%. The Tax Foundation reports that at least half of all states would have combined state-federal tax rates of more than 50%.

Mr. Rangel also wants to apply his surcharges to investment income like capital gains. So the combined effect of repealing the Bush tax cuts and the new surcharges would be to raise the tax on stock appreciation by at least 60% -- to as high as 24% from 15% today. President Obama has been worrying about a capital squeeze on small businesses, but raising the capital gains tax would only further starve them of funds.

Democrats claim these tax increases on the rich won't do any economic harm. They should read the work of Christina Romer before she became chief White House economist. Ms. Romer and her husband, David Romer, a Berkeley economist, have published multiple studies on the impact of tax policy changes over the past 100 years. One of their findings is that "tax increases appear to have a very large, sustained and highly significant negative impact on output." In other words, tax hikes are an antistimulus.

Another implication of the Rangel plan is that America's successful small businesses would pay higher tax rates than the Fortune 500, and for that matter than most companies around the world. The corporate federal-state tax rate applied to General Electric and Google is about 39% in the U.S., and the business tax rate is about 25% in the OECD countries. So the U.S. would have close to the most punitive taxes on small business income anywhere on the globe.

Mr. Rangel and House Democrats are also banking on the idea that raising tax rates by 20% will raise 20% more tax revenue, but that's like telling Wal-Mart it can raise prices by 20% and get 20% more profit. When taxes on the rich rise, their reported income tends to decline. The last time the top federal income tax rate was 50%, the richest 1% paid only about 25% of all income taxes. Today, at a 35% rate they pay nearly 40%.

A new study by the Kaufman Foundation finds that small business entrepreneurs have led America out of its last seven post-World War II recessions. They also generate about two of every three new jobs during a recovery. The more the Obama Democrats reveal of their policies, the more it's clear that they prize income redistribution above all else, including job creation and economic growth.

lol, there has to be some income to redistribute before you can have income redistribution.

From today's Washington Examiner:

WHEN IN DOUBT, SOAK THE RICH

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/When-in-doubt_-soak-the-rich_-whoever-they-are-7976178-50866797.html

When in doubt, soak the rich, whoever they are
By: Chris Stirewalt
Political Editor
July 16, 2009

The productive Americans who pay for government are precariously close to becoming a political irrelevancy. The only good news for them is that the folks trying to take their money may have jumped the gun.

And in the showdown between resentment and entitlement, timing is everything.

The current recession is so big and bad that people are anxious about the future, but it hasn't been terrible or long enough to change the balance between the producers and the takers.

One reason liberal economists are so nostalgic for the Great Depression is that the depth of despair in the nation -- a quarter of able men out of work and upheaval of the old social order -- made lawmakers and voters open to a major shift in the way government operates.

By the time the New Deal got cooking in 1933, people had been traumatized by more than three years of brutal retraction. The newly industrialized economy had promised improvement for all, but instead delivered a series of shattering blows and raised serious questions about the viability of capitalism.

Plus, most Americans weren't paying much for the cost of government. The bottom federal tax bracket of 1 percent started at $4,000 at a time when the estimated median income was $3,100. The top bracket, starting at $1 million, paid 63 percent to the federal government.

The income tax functioned as it had been designed to in 1913 -- a tax on the wealthy to pay for the (comparatively) modest services provided by the federal government. Tariffs, excise taxes on liquor, and other income sources could handle most of the cost.

That's not where we are today.

Now, personal income taxes account for 45 percent of federal revenues, with 12 percent coming from corporate taxes. And it's not just the very wealthy who pay.

As government grew, the very wealthy could no longer shoulder the burden, so over the decades, the income tax became a common bond for working Americans. There was also the addition of a federal payroll tax for Social Security, later expanded to cover Medicaid.

Reflecting this shared sacrifice, today the bottom tax rate of 10 percent starts at $16,050, reaching up to a top rate of 38 percent for incomes over $357,700.

But we've seen in the past 30 years another major shift. As Republicans preached the virtues of low taxes, Democrats usually agreed only when taxes were cut for the bottom brackets.

Today, nearly 40 percent of American workers pay no income tax whatsoever thanks to things like the Earned Income Tax Credit and other deductions. On the other side of the ledger, the top 6 percent of earners cover 60 percent of all income taxes.

In 1980, the bottom half of earners accounted for 7 percent of all income taxes. Today it is less than 3 percent. Conversely, the top 10 percent once paid half of the taxes, rather than the 70 percent they do today.

The trend is away from the shared sacrifice of the post-New Deal era and a return to the old model of soaking the rich. The problem now, though, is that the price of government requires defining rich down. To make the nut on government spending, congressional mandarins have included your dentist and high school principal.

Still, somehow, non-taxpayers were still eligible for "tax refunds" when Washington sought to "stimulate" the economy out of its deepening torpor. By sending poor people $300 or $600, the hope was that they would act irrationally and buy Chinese-made, big-screen televisions or knobby tires for their pickup trucks, or whatever congressmen suppose their constituents like to buy.

Many of these poor folks were not as stupid as lawmakers had hoped and paid off bills or socked the money away in the face of a deepening economic storm.

Now Congress is preparing to help these folks again, whether they like it or not, with a massive new health care program. When magical thinking about long-term savings and other painless options came to naught, Democrats have fallen back on the old idea of going after Daddy Warbucks, who now more closely resembles a working stiff.

But this isn't 1933 and there seems to be widespread horror at the lazy, expensive Washington way of doing things. That may not hold as the balance between consumers and producers continues to shift, but for now, the line is holding.

5 - Put the pipe down, get off the couch, walk out of your parents home, and find a job.

BHO's tax increases won't stop there. Cash comp. > 250K will increasingly be "spread around." But don't worry associates, law firm layoffs and pay cuts will keep you from being affected.

guess "barry" missed the lafer curve day in school

let me say that i'm impressed that all of you unemployed people are up this early.

5 probably once had a good, nimble mind. Now it probably takes forever to get simple concepts and points across to him. I've seen too many bright people fry their brains.

I have a friend who a decade ago could debate and raise counterpoints with lightning speed. Now thanks to pot he stares vacantly and asks me to repeat myself on the most basic of points.

the Bloomberg article is pretty funny, if you want DC try Baltimore or Richmond?

Hard to believe some people are still that naive about the state of the legal industry, those regional markets aren't any better than DC, they aren't hiring either.

I think the bloomberg article has some merit if you are at a top school. Firms in those areas fight for HLS, Yale etc. because they get fewer applicants from top schools. The problem is that it will make it more competitive for other applicants. Take St. Louis for example, Bryan Cave wants HLS, U of C, NW, but tends to hire a lot of Wash U, SLU, etc. If you are at SLU, you still have hometown advantages but you have to know that a slot or two may be lost to candidates from better schools.

I somewhat agree with 17 except in moderation anything is fine. However; 5, if you feel society's most pressing need is the legalization of marijuana, not only are you a moron you're probably mentally addicted to pot.

"I think the bloomberg article has some merit if you are at a top school. Firms in those areas fight for HLS, Yale etc. because they get fewer applicants from top schools. "

Hunton & Williams and McGuire Woods care more about where you went to high school than they do if you're a Harvard or Yale grad. They'd rather hire a University of Richmond student that went to St. Chrisopher's than a HLS that's simply trying to get a job because NYC and Boston firms aren't hiring.

HLS/Yalies can believe every market worships the ground they walk on, but its not the case, particularly now.

18 is smarter than HLS Career Services.

There are no jobs in Milwaukee or Richmond.

TWITTERTRACKERTWITTERTRACKERTWITTERTRACKER!!!

YOU CAN'T BEAT OUR TWEETS!!!

Wow. I can't believe Harvard is trying to pitch Body-more, Murderland as an alternative to D.C.

Twitter hacked? That's just one of the many reasons why you should be careful about what you write on all these social networking sites.

"For God's sake even George Washington grew his own cannabis. Wake up America."

Actually, I think George Washington's slaves grew the cannabis.

26, actually, God made the cannabis and made it grow. But that is entirely irrelevant to the main point.

27=fail