Pushing his agenda for higher taxes on “the rich,” President Obama kicked off his December 6 speech in Kansas by saying his Kansas grandparents “shared the optimism of a nation that triumphed over the Great Depression.”
In fact, the 1929 stock market crash turned into the long-running Great Depression because the counterproductive soak-the-rich policies of the federal government hadn’t “triumphed” in reversing the downturn.
General Electric, one of the largest corporations in America, filed a whopping 57,000-page federal tax return earlier this year but didn’t pay taxes on $14 billion in profits. The return, which was filed electronically, would have been 19 feet high if printed out and stacked.
It is time to stand up and be counted. I am the 1 percent. Let’s be plain about this. Though I have a good job and a good paycheck, I have virtually no wealth, no savings and no need for tax shelters. I have substantial debt. My family owns three vehicles, the newest of which is a 1999 Ford Windstar worth about $2,000. That’s our “good” car. If it breaks down, we would have to go further into debt to fix it or replace it. I cannot afford to put my three children — the oldest of whom is in high school, the youngest in diapers — through college. We vacation 20 miles away in Whitefish because we can’t afford airfare or gas for a long trip. We live in a hundred-year-old house without central heating and we are happy to have it. Sometimes we do look with envy at a our neighbors’ houses that have modern plumbing and electric systems that don’t short out when you run the pancake griddle and the space heater at the same time, and sometimes we do wonder why we can’t own a brand-new SUV like so many other families do. But envy is cheap; SUVs are not.
The recently deceased Apple honcho Steve Jobs had a Manichean take on the digital marketplace. As he saw it, Apple — with its closed systems; its elegant simplicity; and its organic, innovative thoroughly integrated hardware and software — reflected the good, spiritual world of the light.
On the dark, material side of the digital divide — with its open operating systems, all promiscuously licensed, and its imitative, inorganic content and applications — loomed Microsoft.
A Long Island couple wants to trademark the slogan “Occupy Wall St.” with the intent to sell sweatshirts, T-shirts, bumper stickers and hobo bags, among other merchandise.
“I’m no marketing genius, but when you got something that’s across 50 states, it’s a brand now,” said 44-year-old Robert Maresca of West Islip, New York.
Maresca’s wife, Diane, filed a trademark application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office on October 18 and paid a fee of $975.
Look for moments of maximum pessimism. To the legendary value investor Sir John Templeton, this was the secret to learning how to buy low and sell high.
In recent months, I’ve been feeling the pessimism in a big way. You probably have too. Watching the scroll of headlines on cable news channels this summer, I thought I was in an overdone disaster film. Riots break out across the globe, screamed a Drudge headline. Markets were crashing. An earthquake cracked the Washington Monument. In my hands, Mark Steyn’s new book After America — a rollicking read that makes a strong case that we should prepare for the apocalypse — arrived perfectly timed with the S&P’s downgrade of the United States’ credit rating. The end, surely, seems nigh.
The mission of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, also known as the Atlas Network, is to discover, develop and support Intellectual Entrepreneurs worldwide who advance the Atlas vision of a society of free and responsible individuals.
Achieving Atlas’s vision of a “peaceful and prosperous society of free and responsible individuals” requires respect for the foundations of a free society: individual liberty, property rights, limited government under the rule of law, and the market order. To move public policy debates toward these classical liberal ideas, Atlas discovers and assists those Intellectual Entrepreneurs who have the talent and willingness to create effective institutions and programs – programs that will improve the climate of ideas over time via research, education, and advocacy. Atlas remains faithful to ideas of its late founder, Sir Antony Fisher, whose life story demonstrates how an Intellectual Entrepreneur with principles and perseverance can be the catalyst to enormous positive change.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s attempt to liken Occupy Wall Street protesters to Tea Party activists demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of both movements.
In a video from a town hall meeting, which my colleague Charlie Spiering posted below, Christie responds to a question on the Wall Street protests by arguing that, “I think if you look at the Occupy Wall Street folks and the Tea Party folks, that they come from the same perspective, they just have different solutions. ”
“Starting with nothing and working hard all of his life….”