great article.. do you have a link to the entire one?
I’m sorry, rare for me, I didn’t highlight the site.
This was another part of the same article and anybody with an IQ above 50 will see it tells a very uncomfortable truth.
Heaven knows how we get on the road to recovery - when we talk of cutting the deficit, just look at the figures - with seven months of fiscal 2011 elapsed, the US government has spent $869.90 billion more than it has collected.
Impose the world's highest corporate income tax rate, and we can expect the result will be too few corporations and too much government.
"The United States may soon wind up with the distinction that makes business leaders cringe -- the highest corporate tax rate in the world," wrote New York Times reporter David Kocieniewski last week.
"Topping out at 35 percent, America's corporate income tax rate trails that of only Japan, at 39.5 percent, which has said it plans to lower its rate," reported Kocieniewski.
Include additional taxes imposed at the state level, and the corporate tax rate in the U.S. jumps to more than 40 percent in 19 states.
Leading the pack are Iowa and Pennsylvania with corporate income taxes, respectively, of 12 percent and 9.99 percent, creating the nation's highest barriers via taxation to new corporate investment and associated new jobs.
Similarly in relation to obstacles to business expansion: Create an education system that produces four times more college graduates in social science and history than in engineering and computer science, and we can expect to see too many American firms unable to compete in the global marketplace and too many academics writing papers on America's lack of competitiveness.
In "We've Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers" Stephen Moore, senior economics writer for the Wall Street Journal, reported that in the U.S. today, "there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million)."
In short, we got better at expanding bureaucracies than manufacturing cars, better at making rules and regulations than producing clothes or oil.
It wasn't always this way. The world's first automatic transmission was invented in 1904 in Boston. The year before, Orville Wright became the first person in history to be a passenger in a machine that had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight.
In 1960, the aforementioned 2-to-1 ratio between government employees and manufacturing workers in America was weighted precisely in the opposite direction, as Moore reported, with "15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government."
Add to manufacturing the other key sectors in the American economy where people still make something tangible, something touchable, and the total employment still doesn't equal the bloated payroll levels in the government.
"More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined," explained Moore.
"Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital," reported Moore, "have more government bureaucrats than people making things."
Well, not exactly. It's not fully accurate to say that government bureaucrats aren't "making things."
They made a federal anti-poverty program that's produced a price tag of more than $13 trillion since the mid-1960s, plus trillions more at the local and state levels.
"The federal government now has 122 separate anti-poverty programs" with a cost of "$591 billion in 2009," recently reported the Cato Institute's Michael D. Tanner in Investor's Business Daily.
That averages out to "$14,849 for every poor man, woman and child in America," Tanner explained.
That's $59,396 for a poverty family of four -- in a nation where the median household income that same year was $49,777.
Much of that $59,396 never gets to the poor, of course. It goes to the bureaucrats who "manage" the poor, the poverty experts who'd be out of work if they eliminated poverty.
So it's just not true that the government bureaucrats aren't "making things."
They've been experts at making expensive jobs for themselves, experts at creating perpetual dependency and everlasting victimhood, experts at creating the road to national bankruptcy.
Wejo, This law does apply to Wheating and the rest. This is a pretty recent change. A couple of years ago it was based on event duration (i.e a marathon would be 1/365 or 2/365 with an expo+travel dates) rather than % of events. I assume there is some type of tax credit involved (i.e. if you pay 50% tax to the brits I doubt you have to pay the full 35% to the US feds).The only nonstandard part here is the taxing of endorsement income. Baseball players for example owe state/city taxes in every city they play in but I am pretty sure it is just a percentage of their salary not endorsement income.
wejo wrote:
DontFeedTheTroll wrote:The UK tax law is pretty stupid, but I'm wondering why it doesn't affect other sports. Tennis players and golf players can make some serious bank from endorsements and people still play The Open and Wimbledon.
I think there are a few things going on that make Bolt unique, but would love to see someone from the UK chime in.
First Bolt competes much less than a golfer/tennis player. Bolt will likely compete less than 10 times this year. (A golf tennis player will compete 20+ times.) Say one of those is in Britain. The UK authorities are not only going to tax Bolt's appearance fee/prize money they are going to say "We want to tax 1/10th of your endorsement income as well".
And the second thing going on is he has way more endorsement income than other track athletes.
So say Bolt gets $250k to show up at a meet. The UK wants 50% off the top. If he has $5 million a year in endorsement income, 1/10th of that is $500,000. UK tax people want half so for Bolt to show up and run in the UK getting $250k, he ends up paying $125 tax on the appearance fee, $250k tax on his endorsement income so a total of $375k in taxes to get $250k and he loses money.
I wonder if for Wimbledon and the British Open if endorsement income is not taxed. Perhaps it is and the players figure they have to show up. But you don't see Tiger playing any other events in Britain.
My question is why this doesn't apply to lesser stars. Do the UK authorities not bother looking into what Andrew Wheating gets in endorsement income? A US distance star like Andrew Wheating likely makes way more from Nike than he will from appearance fees/prize money. I guess Wheating can easier argue that Nike is not sponsoring him to reach the British market so it doesn't matter if he competes in Britain or not and thus his endorsement income shouldn't be taxed by the UK. That's all speculation.