I am! Lucky me! I can't wait for them to go higher so we can bail our gov't out of its immense debt! Thank you, Bailout. Thank you, Healthcare.

I think I'm going to fire my employees, sell the business, pay one last tax bill, then become homeless and on welfare driving across the country in an old Mercedes.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Nearly-half-of-US-households-apf-1105567323.html?x=0&.v=1

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- Brian


1989 500SEL Euro
1966 250SE Cabriolet
1958 BMW Isetta 600

Go for it, wish you the best.

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1979 Black on Black, 300CD (sold), 1990 Black 300SE, Silver 1989 Volvo 780, 1988 300CE (vanished by the hands of a girlfriend), 1992 300CE (Rescue).

ExxonMobil paid no federal income tax in 2009. (Updated)

Last week, Forbes magazine published what the top U.S. corporations paid in taxes last year. “Most egregious,” Forbes notes, is General Electric, which “generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, but ended up owing nothing to Uncle Sam. In fact, it recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion.” Big Oil giant Exxon Mobil, which last year reported a record $45.2 billion profit, paid the most taxes of any corporation, but none of it went to the IRS:

Exxon tries to limit the tax pain with the help of 20 wholly owned subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands that (legally) shelter the cash flow from operations in the likes of Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi. No wonder that of $15 billion in income taxes last year, Exxon paid none of it to Uncle Sam, and has tens of billions in earnings permanently reinvested overseas.

I got almost my entire federal witholding back, and most of the state taxes. Before being condemned by the rest of the forum...I don't make a whole lot. The tax return was a blessing, allowing me to pay off a chunk of my school loans (okay, a little fraction...) and get my 300E after my DD was totaled.

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TC
Current stable:
- 2004 Mazda RALLYWANKEL
- 2007 Saturn sky redline
- 2004 Explorer...under surgery.

Past: 135i, GTI, 300E, 300SD, 300SD, Stealth

How dare those pesky poor be broke.

Yes, let's give them no ambition to not be broke anymore.

Hey, don't work and we'll pay for food, health care, shelter, and some spendin' money on your drug of choice. You'll also be providing well for your children because they'll be able to go to college for free. In fact, each baby you make gets you more money!

For every one person on hard luck that needs these programs, I'd bet there are three moochers. How do we fix that?

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1985 500SL Euro w/ AMG bits 130k
1984 300SD Turbodiesel 192k
1980 240D Stick China 188k
2001 CLK55 AMG 101k
2007 S600 Biturbo 149k Overheated Project, IT'S ALIVE!!!

We could increase the size of the g'ment so those moochers might be weeded out.

How do you figure that? Unemployment is 10% because there are no jobs not because no one wants work and gets benefits.

We pay more than our share of taxes but also have more money to live on than the median family. In four years we will pay even more because we will have no dependents or mortgage deductions but we will be better off financially.

You have never been poor or down on your luck if you think people do it by choice.

Yup, plus a nice healthy AMT on top of it. I like how they make you go through the trouble to figure out your deductions, then they rip em right out again. No help on tuition expenses either, even though I have 3 in college. This government isn't delivering much bang for the buck, considering how much I pay in. That's the plight of us HENRYs -no matter what we do we get fleeced.

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1985 380SE Blue/Blue - 230,000 miles
2012 Subaru Forester 5-speed
2005 Toyota Sienna
2004 Chrysler Sebring convertible
1999 Toyota Tacoma

The 9-10% they count are people who are actively seeking jobs, they don't count the ones that have given up. As of now 64.9% of people of employable age are working. How many of those are stay at home parents, who knows... Perhaps 1-3 was too much in the current economic situation... how about 1-2 or 1-1?

For example, my cousin got laid off, but she took her time finding a job because of unemployment benefits. She took a multi-month break.

I have an entire wall of file cabinets in my office devoted to keeping employee records because of the disgusting amount of unemployment claims. They really can't find another fast food restaurant to work at? Seriously? All you have to do is show up on time and not be under the influence and you're hired on the spot.

Then there's the other group of people with higher paying jobs, families, etc. that need these programs. I wish someone knew how to weed these people out of the rest, but I don't see how.

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1985 500SL Euro w/ AMG bits 130k
1984 300SD Turbodiesel 192k
1980 240D Stick China 188k
2001 CLK55 AMG 101k
2007 S600 Biturbo 149k Overheated Project, IT'S ALIVE!!!

This is the real problem, the corporate lobbyists bribing the congress whiich willingly accepts the money and then fashions tax laws that let this happen.


Corporate greed rules this country.

Period.

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1991 560 SEC AMG, 199k <---- 300 hp 10:1 ECE euro HV ...

1995 E 420, 170k "The Red Plum" (sold)

2015 BMW 535i xdrive awd Stage 1 DINAN, 6k, <----364 hp

1967 Mercury Cougar, 49k

2013 Jaguar XF, 20k <----340 hp Supercharged, All Wheel Drive (sold)

Factually incorrect.

I was a landlord for a while and I had a few section 8 tenants. The gov gave them huge rent subsidies every month. Then they got food stamps and help with utilities. They also knew it was nearly impossible for me to kick them out if they failed to pay their tiny share of the rent. Mind you these were not disabled people in any way, and in fact were bright enough to navigate the entitlement system to the point that they could write books about how to scam the system. They had decent cars and new computers. They just didn't want no yucky job. Holding a regular job would have ended the gravy train.

__________________
1985 380SE Blue/Blue - 230,000 miles
2012 Subaru Forester 5-speed
2005 Toyota Sienna
2004 Chrysler Sebring convertible
1999 Toyota Tacoma

It is indefensible when the very wealthy and large corporations pay no taxes.

The rich should pay more in taxes than the middle and lower taxes because they make more money.

However, there is something wrong with the system when half the country pays nothing in taxes.

__________________
Paul S.

2001 E430, Bourdeaux Red, Oyster interior.
79,200 miles.

1973 280SE 4.5, 170,000 miles. 568 Signal Red, Black MB Tex. "The Red Baron".

Today's WSJ op-ed

Joblessness: The Kids Are Not Alright

Will the U.S. accept youth unemployment levels like Europe's?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303411604575168492894541142.html

Unemployment today doesn't look like any unemployment in the recent American experience. We have the astonishing and dispiriting new reality that the "long-term jobless"—people out of work more than six months (27 weeks)—was about 44% of all people unemployed in February. A year ago that number was 24.6%.

This is not normal joblessness. As The Wall Street Journal reported in January, even when the recovery comes, some jobs will never return.

But the aspect of this mess I find more disturbing is the numbers around what economists call "youth unemployment." The U.S. unemployment rate for workers under 25 years old is about 20%.

"Youth unemployment" isn't just a descriptor used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It's virtually an entire field of study in the economics profession. That's because in Europe, "youth unemployment" has become part of the permanent landscape, something that somehow never goes away.

Is the U.S. there yet?

No public figure has ever taken more flak for a comment than former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for "old Europe." These are the Western European nations that spent the postwar period free of Soviet domination. With that freedom they designed what came to be called the "social-market economy," a kind of Utopia where a job exists to be protected and the private sector exists mainly to pay for the state's welfare plans.

Alas for Utopia it came to pass that the marginal cost of adding employees increased so much around Europe that private-sector hiring of new workers slowed and "youth unemployment" rose. And stayed.

Eight years ago, a bittersweet movie about this tragedy of fallen expectations for Europe's young, "L'Auberge Espagnole," ends with a bright young Frenchman getting a "job" at a public ministry, where on the first day his co-workers explain the path to retirement. He runs from the building.

In the final month of 2009, these were European unemployment rates for people under 25: Belgium, 22.6; Spain, 44.5; France, 25.2; Italy, 26.2; the U.K., 19; Sweden, 26.9; Finland, 23.5. Germany, at 10% uses an "apprentice" system to bring young people into the work force, though that system has come under stress for a most relevant reason: a shortage in Germany of private-sector jobs.

In the U.S., we've always assumed that we're not them, that America has this terrific, unstoppable job-creation machine. And that during a "cyclical downturn," all the U.S. Congress or the states have to do is keep unemployment benefits flowing and retraining programs running until the American jobs machine kicks in and sops up the unemployed.

But what if this time the new-jobs machine doesn't start?

In the U.S., we've thought of youth unemployment as mainly about minority status linked to poor education. Not in Europe. German TV recently broadcast a sad piece on Finland, which has the continent's most admired school system. It showed an alert, vivacious young woman—she looked like someone out of an upper-middle-class U.S. high school—roaming Helsinki's streets begging waitress jobs, without success.

It was during the Reagan presidency's years of strong new-job growth, with an expansion that lasted 92 months between 1983 and 1990, that Europeans began to envy the employment prospects for American graduates. The envy continued through the dot.com boom of the Clinton years. Some of Europe's most ambitious young workers emigrated to the U.S.

Which brings us to the current American presidency. Last March, its admirers proclaimed that the Obama budget drove "a nail in the coffin of Reaganomics." And replaced it with what?

Mr. Obama spent his first year saving the public economy (the stimulus's money mainly protected public-sector jobs) and designing a U.S. health-care system led, if not run, by the public sector. The year's most significant U.S. fiscal policies created an array of new taxes to finance the congressionally designed health system, and raised federal spending to 25% of GDP. Another broad tax increase begins Jan. 1.

The only new-jobs idea the philosopher kings around Mr. Obama have had is the "green economy." No doubt it will create some jobs. But an idea so dependent on subsidy economics is not going to deliver strong-form employment for the best, brightest or willing and able in the next American generation. The path we're on is toward a flatter, gentler U.S. economy.

This is not the way forward to the next version of an American economy that once created Microsoft, Intel, MCI, Oracle, Google or even Twitter. The United States needs tremendous economic forces to lift its huge work force. Since 1990, roughly 80 million Americans have been born. They can't all be organic farmers or write scripts for "30 Rock."

Many upscale American parents somehow think jobs like their own are part of the nation's natural order. They are not. In Europe, they have already discovered that, and many there have accepted the new small-growth, small-jobs reality. Will we?
Write to henninger@wsj.com