91–100 of 191 posts
I have a feeling these graphs do more to explain the problems that Berkeley professor wrote about ( http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/08/24/a-letter-to-my-students... ) than the explanations he proposed.
After this one gets to +250 can we have a politics moratorium for a while?
What, you don't thing that a State (especially California, the startup capital of the world) in a serious budget crisis has anything to do with entrepreneurs that may be attempting to start their own businesses in such a climate?
After this one gets to +250 can we have a politics moratorium for a while?
At the same time, many current and aspiring startup founders have embraced the cultural shift to learning about traditionally non-technical areas such as sales and marketing. And rightfully so; this is after the previous shift (or "great opening up") to learning about design and a good user experience.
We've done all this because there's no escaping the cold, hard reality that the success of our companies depends on getting the word out and selling people on our ideas. Good code is not enough.
The skyrocketing cost of public pensions in California affects the solvency of the state government. When the state government is desperate and must make ends meet, tax hikes are the first and most obvious options, and are always taken into consideration. When you're thinking about starting a company and setting up shop in Silicon Valley, the tax burden is a huge factor to take into account.
As things stand today, the benefits of the personal network, concentration of talent, and the established tech ecosystem in Silicon Valley are still more than enough to outweigh the comparatively high tax burden for those who wish to start and operate a successful company. "Political" articles like this are of interest to us because they tell us about important future changes in the formula we use to calculate where we want to set up shop.
No mention of Prop 13 eh? PG&E etc. are able to pay insanely low property taxes, often creating shell companies so the property can be passed between owners, while regular working schmoes pay sky high property taxes. And what about Arnold's refusal to tax offshore drilling the same way red states like Alaska do? Yes there need to be cuts in spending but refusing to raise a single tax is simply absurd. Both things nee…
The 2/3 requirement for raising taxes also comes from Prop. 13. Best proposition ever!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a GOP strategy called "starve the beast", and Paul Krugman has been writing about it for years: http://www.google.com/search?q=starve+the+beast+krugman
Ah yes, I never understood why on earth anyone would elect someone to public office that hates government so much they would try to destroy it... It would be like hiring a developer that hates code so much he would delete it from your repository to reduce kloc counts.
For what it’s worth, I think starve-the-beast is empirically a bad strategy. But it’s not a logical fallacy, as people sometimes seem to think.
About 25 years ago in California, Orange Country went bankrupt and public employees had to do "give backs" of (if I remember correctly) about 1/2 of their retirement funds and other concessions. I think that this will be the model for the future, but a state levels. It may not seem fair to change the rules on public employees, but effectively the rules have changed for private employees because the economy at federal…
> It may not seem fair to change the rules on public employees, but effectively the rules have changed for private employees It's possible this has happened some places, but not at any major companies I know about. Companies that have phased out defined-benefit pensions have generally not done so retroactively, but only closed them to new hires. Phasing them out retroactively would be a breach of contract, since the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My downvote signals that if you want people to take interest in claims like that, you need to substantiate them. It also expresses disapproval at the insertion of a tangentially-related, flamebait ad hominem into a thread discussing a particular set of economic statistics. EDIT: I retract my statement that it's an ad hominem . I think the parent has a reasonable point.
This is disorienting. What is your recount of what happened in the California Energy Crisis involving Enron? Can you tell me which of those points are questionable, please?
I have a feeling these graphs do more to explain the problems that Berkeley professor wrote about ( http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/08/24/a-letter-to-my-students... ) than the explanations he proposed.
I was thinking exactly the same thing. In addition when you know an employee is going to cost you a lot of money in pension, the incentive to reduce the work force as much as possible is high. You end up in a situation where your budget is used to pay for the retired employees and you have nothing left for active employees. One of the reasons you are there is that it's pretty tempting for someone in command to offer…
I have a feeling these graphs do more to explain the problems that Berkeley professor wrote about ( http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/08/24/a-letter-to-my-students... ) than the explanations he proposed.
I have a feeling those graphs are more than a little fishy - the bottom one especially. Retirement costs went up ~5X from 2000 to 2010? And they'll go up by the same from 2010 to 2020? I call BS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This same thing is also an extreme Liberal strategy. Sorry, I can't remember the name to look it up. The theory is that you can so overload the government that it simply can't stand up anymore (like the USSR I suppose). It crumbles, and that gives you the opportunity to erect a new one in its place, doing away with all those things that stand in your way, like Constitutional restrictions on the government. UPDATE: th…
Except there's no mainstream, tea-party-a-like leftists loudly advocating that strategy in the US.