http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/...-wall-street-sin-tax?lite

"The first big protest of this weekend's NATO summit descended on Chicago when a nurses' union called Friday for a Wall Street "sin" tax of 50 cents on every financial transaction of over $100."

http://www.payscale.com/.../US/Job=Registered_Nurse_(RN)/Hourly_Rate
or
http://tinyurl.com/2n2qxf

so, basically, the nurses want to pay a mininum of an extra 50 cents to a maximum of $1 in taxes for every 5 hours that they work. show me the moneys honeys. i'd really like to track down how many strikes it took before they got to make that much money per hour, but i don't have the resources or attention span required.

Say, anyone else want to decrease the deadweight loss of taxation before imposing new taxes?

Just a thought.

I once read somewhere that in terms of manpower, the IRS alone was second only to the entire US Department of Defense (the entire Department of the Treasury remains smalled than the DoD). If this is true, that's kind of scary.

Just another thought.

I imagine if the tax code were to hit you in the stomach, it would probably hurt pretty badly.

Yet another thought.

I imagine companies wouldn't spend millions of dollars taking advantage of tax loopholes if they didn't have too...if the taxcode wasn't so burdensome as to make the tax lawyers pay for themselves.

Roll on thoughts, roll on.

I imagine the US government wouldn't have to spend so much money collecting taxes if it were easier to catch people evading taxes because it was easy for people to pay their taxes in the first place.

Do all these thoughts qualify me as a philosopher?

I imagine that between the cost savings to companies and the efficiency gains, the government could even increase the tax rate while lowering the effective tax rate if they simiplified the tax code.

Isn't thinking nice?

i'd like to see the financial institutions in america strike. see how many people complain about capital gains taxes when you can't get a quick twenty out of the ol' abm, and they have nobody to blame but themselves for being communist/anarchist pricks.

@Angle1:

True. I have a lawyer friend who is a wiz with this kind of thing (government drains on the economy, tax code, etc.) and he pointed out to me last year that the IRS is a $540B drain on the economy each year. That's just what it costs them to enforce the tax code!

While my companies are all small market/local companies I, much like larger companies, consult with various accountants on "evading" (legally) taxes. It's done a number of ways, but my point here is simple: I spend almost as much time trying to move money to keep it out of government hands as I do finding the money/contracts in the first place. Highly inefficient, but necessary. If I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have made it through my first year. Simplifying the tax code would make more small business successful, lower the enforcement drain on the economy, lead to high revenues overall and probably reduce the tax crimes in the country over all.

Thinking rules.

take your ABM back to canada! we use ATMs here :)

Any of you work in a hospital?

Some nurses have it great, others work their asses off for OT (@120k a year).

Very few nurses are overpaid.

We never attacked how much nurses were paid. Matter of fact, I stayed purely on their topic of taxes. Dibs merely made the point of what that would mean if applied to nurses. In fact, in a twisted way, you comment actually supports us in not wanting to pursue additional taxes right now.

would repairing trash trucks count as an equivalent to working in a hospital? i did it for 3 days for around $10 an hour. though i basically got fired because i wouldn't quit school and wasn't getting enough sleep to handle both the job and school.

if 3 billion people on the planet live on $2.50 a day, who the heck in the US isn't being overpaid?

the real problem is that they're taking tax money from me to pay for the nurses and i'm not even using their services. and the nurses aren't paying 100% of their own taxes. the employers pay a portion of it.

so, as far as i'm concerned, they are overpaid. heck, i think they're overpaid simply because they're in a union and are blocking non-union members from pursuing the same career.

i was also looking at the US box office gross for 2011. i'm not really sure if the 10b total is limited to just the US or if it's total world sales, but geez louise, i think it's silly to complain about billionaires if you're just going to hand over 10b to them just for watching a movie.

It depends what type of nurse and what the comparison it too. APRNs make pretty good money, especiallys as NPs in outpatient primary care. Your IM/GP MDs in primary care don't make much mroe. That's somewhere where I think nurses won the scope battle and made off like bandits.

The problem is in presuming it's all a cost argument. Realistically outcomes, quality, safety, etc all come into play. And while the nurses will profess to deliver the highest care of all of the above, the reality is they're just not trained to the same degree as mds.

Everyone, other than gigantic corporations who have teams of accountants and lawyers to evade taxes, wants a simpler tax code.

I agree. Our tax code in the US is just about retarded. It needs to be simple and fair. Not overly complicated, for no good reason, and confusing.

When companies such as GE can make billions of dollars and not pay their fair share and people like trumper who pay their fair share its just not right!

Looking at it on a world wide perspective we have one of the worst, if not the worst, tax code for a developed country.

Also random fact: The US taxcode is 4 times longer than Shakespeare's complete works.

I liked the part where that police van drove right through those protesters lol

offtopic sorta i skipped down the fed reserve is not even part of the govt its owned by a board of 13 ppl =p and the way its set up is that we cant pay off debt to it just intrest so we will never be out of debt correct me if im wrong though

No we'll likely never be out of dept you're correct.

A better question would be: How long can we sustain our dept and not go bankrupt?

You are also correct that the Federal reserve is an independent agency under the executive branch. It is ran by a board whom are appointed by the president and approved by the senate.

+1

Dibs: The tax idea you mentioned sounds poor without further reading. I think it is one small voice in what is a large and diverse group uniting into the OWS movement.

"Very few nurses are overpaid"

This is mendacious at best. Nursing is one of, if not the only, general profession in the US where pay has not stopped increasing over the last few years.

The point of nurses unions is to keep the salaries low for workers in the first 5 years [aka: The vast majority] so that the soon-to-retire workers can inflate their pensions and hourly wages. Nursing unions are extraordinarily confrontational to the day-to-day management of hospitals - and have more in common with Wall Street than actual nurses.

Furthermore, there's nothing that the nurse union provides that administration does not seek to give - other than, of course, skimming those union fees each pay period off the nurse paychecks.

I find it ironic that anyone could actually knee-jerk support a "nursing union" -- the average margin of hospitals in the US is 1% between income and expenses, and so the only way they get support is when people don't pay attention to the economics within the US of hospital systems.

Unions server as a vital and necessary way for individual employees to gain leverage in wage negotiations. I know very little about the nursing unions of which you are talking Unsympathetic, but the idea of unions in general are very good. As the percentage of unionized workers has dropped from over 60% in the 1950's to less than 12% today, wage disparity has skyrocketed.

do you mean the tax idea that i quoted and made fun of in the first post? if i was going to suggest a tax idea, it'd probably involve taxing the entertainment industry 75% for each sale. that way when people decide to waste their money on it, instead of using it for the things they need, they wouldn't have to get other people to pay for it.

Aponic, if a union decreases wages of its members, by definition it's not good for those employees.

The sole point of a nurse union is to get higher wages that they magically assume are possible.. only with the union. However, the reality is that those unions deliver LOWER wages to the rank-and-file because the pool of wage dollars is not increasing like the union propaganda presumes is possible. Again, the whole point of staying in the union is to fatten those who are 3y or less until retirement -- at the expense of all the rest. Non-union nurses make more per hr than union nurses with equivalent experience/skill.. because union dues come out of the take-home pay, not the hospital pocket. Also, unions initiate conflict unnecessarily with management over wages - health care is a competitive environment, of course wages have to be equal or else one hospital poaches all the nurses from another whether the union is there or not.

Dibs: Yes, in the initial post.



This was a very short sighted and stupid thing to say. By your definition it costs employees money. It does not mean that 'it is not good for those employees'. I could talk about the potential benefits to employees but I already did that and you paid no attention.

Look at history, wage disparity always decreases with an increase in unionized workers.

This blanket statement makes no sense.

First, you have no context. How can you say wages would not have decreased even further in the absence of a union defending worker wage levels? So the purely wage=value argument is dead there.

But let's also look at the potential benefits workers are "buying" when they "employ" a union to protect their rights...

1. better working conditions
2. lower health costs (both from above and employer contributions)
3. more stability (less firing without cause)
4. better retirement options

If you step back and you look at working conditions before unions grew in America, a lot of it was awful. People were dying on the job due to unsafe and unsanitary conditions, long working hours, etc.

Today, we have a mix of employers with unions and without. But all employers face the potential threat of unionization and all employers must compete for employees in a market where unions do exist. Thus, even companies where there are no unions must assemble compensation packages and working conditions that are "competitive" or even more than competitive to incent their employees NOT to unionize.

A total absence of unions would put too much power back in the hands of employers.

Now, with all of the above, there are some bad union leaders out there and corruption is always a concern when you concentrate distributed resources and power into the hands of a few people. As with any representative system, the members must be vigilant to hold their leaders accountable and willing to run in opposition to them if they fail to adhere to the right path.

As a further aside, minimum wage laws, OSHA, etc. are, in essence, a form of unionized enforcement on employers. In their case, they are the acts of a union to which we all belong in our states and federal government. But I don't think either would last long if all private unions were banned or torn apart.

Atryn, context matters. I can say with knowledge of HR discussions that wages in hospitals wouldn't decrease because.. you would know that if you had taken the time to read my entire post. If wage doesn't equal value, unions in hospitals offer zero differential over non-union shops b/c the task in question is precisely the same from hospital to hospital. As to why they wouldn't decline: Show me a hospital that's decreased nurse salaries from year to year before vaguely asserting that "it's possible." You're wrong: It's not possible to decrease someone's hourly wage from year to year, and it's not done. ironically, you're certainly talking like a union person-- someone who seeks to assume negative intent before bothering to understand the business or the people in it.

You want to assert that unions inherently provide a nonzero benefit, go for it. Hint: I've had precisely these discussions with nurse managers, have you? To be specific: Your points 1-4 above flat-out do not exist in health care. Using your language, that argument is dead.

+1 - Hit the nail on the head

Unsympathetic: Your view is very myopic.

Unsympathetic... you are missing the broader context which was the central point of my post.

I am not discussing the impact of a union in *any specific hospital* or as compared to a *specific* non-union hospital.

The market is competitive. That includes competition for labor and in nursing there is certainly competition for labor.

What I was asserting is that the presence of unions, over time, has positively affected worker benefits and rights which the *entire* market, union or not, now has to match to be competitive in attracting labor.

The absence of unions from the market as a whole, not from a specific hospital, is what would threaten to precipitate a decline in workers benefits and rights, especially if the supply of labor in the profession winds up outpacing demand for labor in the future (not currently a problem in nursing from what I understand).

my·o·pi·a (m-p-)
n.
1. A visual defect in which distant objects appear blurred because their images are focused in front of the retina rather than on it; nearsightedness. Also called short sight.
2. Lack of discernment or long-range perspective in thinking or planning