The Post Office is going to sue Lance Armstrong for running “the most sophisticated, professionalized, and successful doping program” that the world has ever seen which apparently hurts postal customers’ essential concept of the Post Office.
Yeah, I’d hate ever to think the Post Office might have the most sophisticated, professionalized, and successful program for anything. That would definitely give us the wrong idea about the Post Office.
The Postal’s Services own studies show that the service benefitted tremendously from its sponsorship — benefits totaling more than $100 million in sales.
Speaking of sophisticated, professionalized, and successful doping programs: Sequestration? Budget cuts?
I’ve been looking for a straight answer on how much will be cut from actual Federal spending this week. Best I can tell, the boogeyman will slice about $85 billion from the federal budget. And also, best as I can tell, total Federal spending for fiscal year 2012 reached $3.6 trillion and is due to rise for fiscal 2013. What do you bet the increase will be more than $85 billion? For the record, fiscal year 2012 marked the fourth consecutive year of trillion dollar deficits.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell: everyone is afraid that their personal ox will get gored.
Wow. That never happens in business.
Texas Instruments laid off 1,700 people. NBC dumped 500. Solel fired 140 of their remaining 430 workers. Xerox restructured 2,500 current employees into former employees. Stryker closed their facility in New York and plans to counter the medical device tax in Obamacare by slashing 1,170 jobs, some 5% of their global workforce. And those were just some of the announcements last November alone.
Nobody said boo when Citigroup slashed 11,000 jobs, when Dow “retired” Rufus, or when Motorola did the same for Liz Arden, but the Feds can’t handle a 2% cut in money they haven’t even spent yet?
Yesterday, Governor Martin O’Malley (D-MD) said, “We can’t cut our way to prosperity.” Perhaps not, but the stock market is up on news of the layoffs and faith in government is down on news of higher spending.
As Gail Collins wrote in the NYTimes, “Did you know one of the most popular TV shows in Norway was about firewood? Maybe you should have this discussion with a Norwegian.” Better yet, maybe we should have this discussion in Norwegian.
Today is the 100th anniversary of the certification of the 16th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
From ourdocuments.gov: “In 1909 progressives in Congress again attached a provision for an income tax to a tariff bill. Conservatives, hoping to kill the idea for good, proposed a constitutional amendment enacting such a tax; they believed an amendment would never received ratification by three-fourths of the states. Much to their surprise, the amendment was ratified by one state legislature after another, and on February 25, 1913, with the certification by Secretary of State Philander C. Knox, the 16th amendment took effect. Yet in 1913, due to generous exemptions and deductions, less than 1 percent of the population paid income taxes at the rate of only 1 percent of net income.”
My, how things have changed.
That surcharge is tied to a lawsuit settled last July. Visa, MasterCard and a group of other large financial firms agreed Friday to forfeit a total of $7.25 billion to settle a colossal anti-trust action. The defendants will offer cash payments worth $6.05 billion in total; Visa and Mastercard agreed to reduce their “swipe fees.” That’s the other $1.2 billion. As part of the agreement, retailers will soon be able impose a surcharge of up to 4% for credit card transactions in all but 9 or 10 states. Such surcharges will also apply to cardholders from other networks, like Discover and American Express.
Movie 43 will riff up blacks, the blind, dwarves, high school boys, women, homeless, homeless women, and pretty much every other politically incorrect group except straight middle-class white guys.
