I think anyone purchasing a product from outside the country will be paying the taxes, so anyone who repurchases something made from those imports will also have a hand in paying the bill. It will be a hidden purchase tax that gets collected when it enters the country “Legally”. Just think of how many tax collectors you will need to track what comes in, we are already do it currently with customs. So no one will be able to escape paying taxes except those who are to poor or the smugglers.
There is so much to say here.
I really like the Google comments about freedom, Google got so big because they gave their employees freedom to explore and BE CREATIVE!!! Now they don’t want to loose their control by allowing others to show their Creativity.
also, this spun out of talking about NOT getting rid of income tax because it doesn’t “help everyone”. The reality. If I didn’t pay $100K/yr in income tax, I wouldn’t need social security when I retire. My father would not have needed Social Security. The 2/3 remaining sons could have given him 15% of that tax savings and he would have had more!
What you tax, you destroy. When you tax income, you get people like me who OFTEN stop working (or slow down) after my nominal tax rate skyrockets to the maximum.
I believe this is because, in your day, companies were much smaller. But the risk taker deserves the biggest cut. Especially when 100 companies fail before 1 makes it. I don’t fault the payouts. I do fault the system.
The over financialization of this stuff is a big part. That wasn’t available. MSTR is a great example of a GOOD company with TONS of cash, but because it didn’t have DEBT, the bankers wouldn’t help boost it. They bankers told Saylor “Cash is Trash, you need a lot of DEBT on your balance sheet for better growth!” (WTF? This is a perversion of taking advantage of INFLATION, and then using Leverage). It hides a lot of TERRIBLE companies, that become RENT SEEKERS to cover their CDOs.
They have gamified the entire system. And so much “value” is stripped from the company having nothing to do with what value the company actually brings.
i worked for mega energy companies - not small. The compensation of the executives grew from reasonable 40 years ago to obscene theft today.
Now, if executives of large corporations (not small entrepreneurs) were actually taking risk, you’d be right. However, in the last 20 years, executives could take their multimillion $ compensation for a few years, run the company into the ground, stiffing vendors and stockholders and leaving employees on the street AND get away with the hundreds of millions they had “made” by mismanaging the company in order to maximize their own personal short term gains.
At a larger scale, stockholders and executives and financial institutions have been allowed to shift risk to small stockholders, employees, vendors and the taxpayers who bail out these “too-big-to-fail” predators.
You are mistaking toxic corporations for entrepreneurs. They are not and are therefore generally not good job creators and they executives who call the shots have NO personal risk.
A huge risk in the last 30 years was to be an employee of a large corporation where you could easily loose your job due to executive mismanagement (generally mismanaged in order for executives to loot the company via bizarre compensation packages not related to the long-term health of a company.
I don’t know about you, but as a stockholder getting older, I want the companies to be around paying me dividends in 20 years. I don’t want a short-term gain today only to have my stock worthless in 5-10 years.
Agreed. This ties into the financialization I mentioned. They come in, and put lipstick/makeup on the Balance Sheet. With crazy stock options, and Voila, they get huge profits, and they leave the company worse off for their tenure.
The corruption starts at the banks. Printing Free money isn’t good enough. They then have to make 100x on their investments. And they need insiders to pull off the scams for plausible deniability. When was the last time a BANKER went to Jail? (Notice EVER Rogue trader gets caught and serves jail time). But banks who launder money. They get tiney fines. And the JOKE. The fines are PAID to “The Federal Reserve”… LOL. Who just redistribute amongst themselves, or buy more of that banks stock, so they can share in the profits.
Those fines should be 3x (Triple Damages), the amount of money laundered, not the “profits” made.
Reading this thread makes me remember all of the bad business decisions I made based upon the tax consequences rather than what was good for the company. Income tax skews reality. It removes incentive and destroys innovation. It makes it almost impossible for a father who built a good solid business over decades to pass it on to his son as a going concern.
America became great because it allowed unfettered enterprise and did not penalize hard work with punitive taxes. When income taxes began in 1913 (along with the creation of the FED) the American dream began its great decline to the present where we are only one step removed from a banana republic.
God willing, Mr Trump may be the catalyst to turn around the decline and restore manufacturing to America.
This is what we need. More value added in America. Less taking in each other’s washing. That is how to Make America Great Again.
Worse than you think. My buddy worked for FMC (Ford Motor Credit).
There were a few cars where they lost money making them, but the used part market kept them alive because they consumed that inventory, and it was shared across so many models. The Ford Taurus being one of them.
I dare you to come up with a formula that makes sense for when to get rid of your used car, though. I tried for years. I got roughly to… When the cost of repairs for 1 year exceeds 30% of the cost of the payments of a new car. But even that wasn’t good enough. Had a 21 yr old car, but new cars were costing 2x the old ones, payments are insane. (Most people will use a reliability/missing work function… BEFORE I lose my damn job b/c of this car, LOL).
Very difficult. I drove a 5 series BMW for 21 years. Maintained it properly so that it was running like new and looked great. To replace it with an equivalent vehicle in 2020 would have cost north of $60k. I drove it from Massachusetts to California in 2020 (my way of defying the lockdown) and it never flickered. I would be driving it still but it was destroyed in a road accident in Colorado on the way back (not my fault). Insurance company wrote it off and I received a check for $2600.
Not sure what you mean by part of that text. I interpreted that having functional, despite resale value is below 5000$, used car, that is infinitely better as long as it works, than getting new or used car with those terms(especially if you dont have 10k to 60k in bank account to just buy with straight cash). This is way different than buying overpriced 1500$ newest iphone every year, as that price is high, it is still doable to pay off in couple months for many to get rid of loan. Car however can be 10-30k loan which can be over 1 year of “savings” from net income.
Also, I need my smartphone less at work now, than as “free citizen” coz at work I concentrate on work tasks, and phone is for calls and whatsapp messsages. Before work, it was “everything”. Car however, I doubt anyone keeps it for long if they dont have mandatory commute, is needed for work. Some people can have it for hobbies, pets or kids and not commute, then it is about how much they want to spend on it and at what rate of use(eg skip 1000mile trip this month as it is not 120% needed to see friend or relative this weekend or train is actually a bit more convenient for that trip).
How does it work in US if company A and B manufacture parts for company C and company D sells t hem to customers, that do they need to pay some amount of taxes every step of this process? This is brutal with current complex and long supply chains to tax every piece of it. Without dismantling that, manufacturing can never work in west. Sheer bureacratic complexity prevents it with needed workforce just to oversee these tax details and other bureacratic demands.
I guess in 1970s US didnt have much of them. Sure, simple things like company A produces and sells and markets to consumers some part is workable but that is very very mom n pop shop thing and robotized instantly.
Saw somewhere in US is sock factory where they hardly have any workers but it produces millions of sock pairs in month, as machines in rows make them day and night.
I like that car aesthetic, doesnt look too fancy, which means spare parts would have been cheaper (not curvy weird custom windshield or lights)
With people back in some 1920s,30s reality to struggling to afford things at all, they’d be happier to have simpler but functional designs. Tesla always boasted that but in functional way those are as bad as iphone to repair and switch broken parts.
you’ve only touched on a teeny tiny piece of it. I could write a freaking book on the whole subject. I was rare, in the sense I could see the 30,000 ft level and still deal with the details. I’m typed and deleted and retyped this 3 times already. I have to be very cautious as I had high level exposure to vehicle development over several decades. Too many execs are full of themselves, thinking their stuff doesn’t stink, and unable to understand detail financial data, or worse, making decisions on their “gut feelings”. Look at how Ford and GM both abandoned the ICE auto market, throwing everything into EV and trucks. Both have lost revenue from ICE auto, and that revenue was covering a lot of legacy expenses. Cash flow is ALWAYS king. Cash flow can cover a lot of problems… until it can’t. It’s going to be interesting and frightening watching the next decade in the auto industry.
Oh, don’t get me started about the EV fiasco coming. But the COMPETENCY issue is huge. These places have been hiring their regular college grads for decades. Slowly replacing the old with the new.
I remember telling my daughter how the Communists used to define capitalism as a system of exploiting others to make a profit. Later, she was tutoring a friend in a University class in the United States. And she read that SAME definition. She gasped. Took a picture with her phone, and shared it with me later.
She asked, “What does this mean?” (Wondering if we are becoming communist) I simply replied “That we will have some tough years ahead”.
Trust me, I spent decades on automotive industry. The stories I could tell. One of my favorites to your competency, I had an engineer that literally told me that he was hired because the existing staff was incompetent… and yet, he mixed up lbs and kg on reporting the weight of his products. OEMs track wt in fractions of ounces during development… mixing up lbs and kg, well, it caused some huge issues. Then there was the millennial that went from college graduate program for high potential new grad hires directly to supv, which I had never ever seen before. Six months later she was gone from the OEM. Apparently she had conned enough people, until it came time to actually produce.
Oh don’t get me started about the useless children graduating from college these days. They all think they deserve 6 figure salaries and 35hr work weeks and have the anti-midas touch. I hate cleaning up after their shit messes. The sad part of all of this is I deal with the kids who are baby engineers and metallurgists. Its even worse in some other fields.
Shit, they all claim depression or anxiety or both. I had one kid tell me he had been diagnosed tourettes. I said hell, you could diagnose over half the guys out on the floor with that by listening to them. This is heavy industry we take our cursing seriously. The reason some of these young guys claim depression is because i think they realize deep down inside that they are truly NPCs in their own lives and haven’t figured out how to make life meaningful yet. They are so starved for meaning that they cling to all this cult like woke shit instead of really sitting down and evaluating who they are as a person.
I was on a trip to a supplier mfg plant with a young engineer. The plants chief engineer was not degreed, but his side business, building nascar level race car frames. Not a light weight “engineer”. Anyway, I had a young and upcoming newly minted engineer in my tutelage. He said, “I don’t how they hired someone that is that slow to be in this position”. It was all I could do to not come unglued on him. They guy talked slow, and had a TN draw that was actually hard to hear, but when he spoke, I always carefully listened to what he had to say. 99% of the time he was spot on. That 1%, was actually was a serious problem I caught that he kind of rationalized. 6 months later there was an industrial accident that I recognized… but it was so far out of my wheelhouse, I didn’t pursue it.
The debt maturity chart & discussion ~50min mark is very interesting…
What would be even more interesting/enlightening would be the same chart at 1 yr intervals over each of the prior ~10yrs, to see if this year is truly unique.
The cars scam
Like a lot of you, I drive my cars forever. However, they can be hard to maintain in a cost-effective way.
When my daughter was turning 16, planned to give her the Camry I’d been driving since she was a toddler – but had an oil leak around the gasket. $50 for the gasket, $500 for the repair (add 60-70% inflation), since I didn’t have a way to lift the motor. Finally, my repair guy said – oops, it’s no longer safe to drive, so I had to give it up. Not going to give a new driver a new car to dent, so looked for a reasonable used car. 3–4-year-old cars were only 10-15% less than new -oops, not sane. We found a few cheaper Detroit models, but they were so uncomfortable to drive we all rejected them as unsafe (dodging insane Houston traffic at the time). Ended up letting my 16-year-old drive a new car off the lot.
Later, I went to a used Prius V (wagon) hybrid and would still be driving it if it hadn’t been totaled when I was rear-ended (got $9000 toward a new hybrid). Haven’t been able to replace it with anything as good. My old eyes and slower reflexes need the cameras, radar, etc. however, you can’t get any high-end safety features as an add on to a base model. You have to buy the oligarch package (leather, sunroof, etc. just to get side cameras. Bling, not utility! What a scam. My dealer tells me these things are NOT safety features, but luxuries?
In the really bizarre world of government mandated market dysfunction, I got home solar and wanted to get a plug-in hybrid, since the solar charging would give me a back-up during gas shortages. The Midwest dealers tell me they were NOT allowed to sell them in the Midwest because the plug-in versions were ONLY MANDATED in coastal states. Then a Subaru dealer told me the following – Subaru discontinued their plug-in-hybrid because of poor sales – well duh, if you won’t let people buy your product your sales won’t be as good – INSANE. I’m out in the country on snowy back-roads. No way I can safely drive an EV in winter – won’t keep me warm if I slide off in a ditch.
@TimoHallikainen – I also run my computers forever too. Still operating 2 Win 7 because MS no longer supports the drivers for the printers attached to them. They say security – makes sense for old wireless printers, but hard to see how a wired printer presents a security issue - for me? Wonder if they really mean they can’t monitor these old machines.
I would love to have a non-car option, but makes no sense in low-density rural areas. Which is why I want a really safe-to-drive car as I get older.
I inherited a 1930 Chevy that my Dad restored. You’re right. Much easier to work on, although vintage parts are a pain.
Used to work in open pit mining. The company that made the trucks had only college grads that had never driven a large truck or worked in civil or mine construction. They literally had no clue. Kind of like the stupid design of 1950’s appliances where only men who’d never run a stove in their lives were doing the engineering. As Chris says, you need the real world for competency. You can’t get it from books. And back to cars, if you don’t have competent, efficient design, then you must sell bling, not value – Detroit’s problem forever. The first Prius was an engineering wonder (no bling! It just worked). The new ones are overpriced bling the left uses to virtue signal.
