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Old 11-26-2011, 07:51 PM
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Sauron Sauron is offline
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Default Georgia moron: "We're not hiring until Obama is fired"

This idiot in Georgia has a crane company. He's decided to put up a sign on his trucks that says "we are not hriing until Obama is gone".



This, folks, is why wingnutters and teabatters shouldn't be allowed to breed without a license.

US companies are sitting on mountains of money right now - they have more money on their hands than they've had in decades. Do you know what they're doing with it?

(1) mergers & acquisitions;
(2) stock buybacks and dividend payments;
(3) going to the credit markets and issuing corporate debt at the lowest rate in history.

But one thing they are not doing, and that is hiring.

Jobless Suffer as Corporate Cash Hits $1.18 Trillion (Update1) - Bloomberg

Quote:
A majority of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index increased cash to a combined $1.18 trillion while simultaneously reducing spending, keeping a jobs recovery on hold.
[...]
Based on the latest quarterly reports from S&P 500 companies, the 256 companies increased cash and short-term investments by a combined 78 percent from a year earlier while reducing spending by $30.5 billion to $41.2 billion. For all current S&P 500 members, cash rose about 14 percent to $2.18 trillion, the most on record in nine years of Bloomberg data.
And this:

Companies Puzzle Over Record Cash Hoards - BusinessWeek

Quote:
A Standard & Poor's analysis of large-cap companies found them with a record amount of cash and equivalents at the end of the fourth quarter. Excluding financial, transportation, and utility companies (which hold lots of cash to operate), S&P 500 companies had $831.2 billion in their coffers, 36.3% more than when the recession officially began at the end of 2007.

Bloomberg data based on the most recent reporting period show that the full S&P 500 has $1.28 trillion on hand, more than twice the $596.5 billion on hand in 2003 after the end of the last recession.

After deep spending cuts, companies keep pumping out cash. According to Bloomberg, the companies in the S&P 500 generated free cash flow over the past 12 months of $883.4 billion, 119% more than in 2006.
Are companies doing that bad? Apparently not as far as taxes go:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...7A261C20111103

Quote:
(Reuters) - Thirty large and profitable U.S. corporations paid no income taxes in 2008 through 2010, said a study on Thursday that arrives as Congress faces rising demands for tax reform but seems unable or unwilling to act.
Pepco Holdings Inc, a Washington, D.C.-area power company, had the lowest effective tax rate, at negative 57.6 percent, among the 280 Fortune 500 companies studied.

The statutory U.S. corporate income tax rate is 35 percent, one of the highest in the world; but over the 2008-2010 period, very few of the companies studied paid it, said the report.

The average effective tax rate for the companies over the period was 18.5 percent, said Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, both think tanks.

Their report also listed General Electric Co, Paccar Inc, PG&E Corp, Computer Sciences Corp, Boeing Co and NiSource Inc as among the 30 that paid no taxes.
In fact, most US corporations pay ZERO taxes:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1249465620080812
Quote:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Most U.S. and foreign corporations doing business in the United States avoid paying any federal income taxes, despite trillions of dollars worth of sales, a government study released on Tuesday said.
The Government Accountability Office said 72 percent of all foreign corporations and about 57 percent of U.S. companies doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005.
More than half of foreign companies and about 42 percent of U.S. companies paid no U.S. income taxes for two or more years in that period, the report said.

So back to this Georgia clown: he's a small business owner. Are regulations killing small businesses? The small businesses themselves say no:

Quote:
WASHINGTON — Politicians and business groups often blame excessive regulation and fear of higher taxes for tepid hiring in the economy. However, little evidence of that emerged when McClatchy canvassed a random sample of small business owners across the nation.

"Government regulations are not 'choking' our business, the hospitality business," Bernard Wolfson, the president of Hospitality Operations in Miami, told The Miami Herald. "In order to do business in today's environment, government regulations are necessary and we must deal with them. The health and safety of our guests depend on regulations. It is the government regulations that help keep things in order."

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is among the most vocal critics of the Obama administration, blaming excessive regulation and the administration's overhaul of health care laws for creating an environment of uncertainty that's hampering job creation.

When it's asked what specific regulations harm small businesses _which account for about 65 percent of U.S. jobs — the Chamber of Commerce points to health care, banking and national labor. Yet all these issues weigh much more heavily on big corporations than on small business.

"When you look at regulations in many respects, what a lot of people don't take into account is their secondary impacts," said Giovanni Coratolo, the vice president of small business policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

"They pay the price, regardless of whether they are primarily the recipient of the regulation or they are secondarily getting the impact of it. They pay the price in higher costs, whether it is fuel or health care or whether it's being able to find access to capital."

McClatchy reached out to owners of small businesses, many of them mom-and-pop operations, to find out whether they indeed were being choked by regulation, whether uncertainty over taxes affected their hiring plans and whether the health care overhaul was helping or hurting their business.

Their response was surprising.

None of the business owners complained about regulation in their particular industries, and most seemed to welcome it. Some pointed to the lack of regulation in mortgage lending as a principal cause of the financial crisis that brought about the Great Recession of 2007-09 and its grim aftermath.
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Last edited by Sauron; 11-26-2011 at 08:15 PM.
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Old 11-26-2011, 07:57 PM
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Default Re: Georgia moron: "We're not hiring until Obama is fired"

And apparently this business owner, Bill Looman, is a member of the North Georgia Militia and Oathkeepers.



Why, oh why, did I *not* see that coming....:popcorn:

Another group of overweight rednecks running around the woods -- plenty of marshmallow moonpies and cans of vienna sausages in their backpacks -- just wannabe soldiers pretending to defend democracy.


* If this movement actually cared about limited federal government and the Constitution, then where the hell were the teanutters. Oathkeepers, etc. back when the Bush administration was suspending habeas corpus and working with the telecom companies to conduct warrantless surveillance on US citizens?

* If this movement was about fiscal responsibility, then where was the teabagger movement back when Bush and the GOP-controlled Congress took a budget surplus, turned it into a deficit, and paid for two Mideast wars by selling Treasury bills to China? That one act alone eroded the buying power of the US dollar by 43% - almost half. Where was the grassroots rage then?

* And another thing: Bush paid for these wars this by moving the costs of the war "off the books", to keep it from being fully reviewed by Congress or the public. What would the original Founding Fathers think of an imperial president who operates above the review of Congress or the people? Where were the teanutters marching on the White House over this? Where were the veiled threats from Oathkeepers then?

* Where was this movement when George Bush - that's right, BUSH - bailed out the Wall Street investment banks, the insurance companies (AIG), worked deals with Goldman Sachs, and bailed out the auto companies? How come we didnt' see tea parties back then, hmmm?

* Where was this movement when Dick Cheney tried to evade accountability by declaring that the office of Vice President didnt' fall in to Executive, Legislative OR Judicial branch? What would the Founders think of that, I wonder.

Just a bunch of far right wingers filled with unfocused rage and conspiracy theories. They were perfectly happy to sit on their fat behinds while Bush and the GOP shredded the Constitution and spent like drunken sailors. No tea parties then - no marches on Washington - nothing. That's because they agreed with expanded government and deficit spending, as long as Republicans were doing it.

In reality, the people in this movement are a bunch of hypocrites who only got motivated when a black man won the White House. Everything else is just window dressing to make naked hypocrisy and racism sound less obscene.
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Last edited by Sauron; 11-26-2011 at 08:16 PM.
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