Paying 0% Tax On Capital Gains And Dividends

Smart Money (via Ritholtz):

Some Examples

Example 1: Married Joint Filer.

You're a married joint filer with two dependent children and show the following on your 2012 Form 1040.

• $110,000 salary.
• $11,000 of 401(k) contributions at work.
• $20,000 of itemized deductions for mortgage interest, state and local taxes, charitable contributions and so forth.
• $15,200 write-off for four personal exemptions ($3,800 each).

Your 2012 taxable income is $63,800 ($110,000 minus $11,000, minus $20,000, minus $15,200). You have $6,900 of "room" left within the 15% bracket ($70,700 ceiling for 15% bracket minus your $63,800 of taxable income). That means you could have up to $6,900 of long-term gains and dividends that would be taxed at the 0% federal rate. Any additional 2012 long-term gains or dividends would be taxed at the maximum federal rate of 15% (still pretty good).

Example 2: Single Filer.

You're unmarried with no kids and show the following on your 2012 Form 1040.

• $45,000 salary.
• $4,500 of 401(k) contributions at work.
• $5,950 standard deduction.
• $3,800 personal exemption deduction.

Your 2012 taxable income is $30,750 ($45,000 minus $4,500, minus $5,950, minus $3,800). You have $4,600 of "room" left within the 15% bracket ($35,350 ceiling for 15% bracket minus your $30,750 of taxable income). That means you could have up to $4,600 of long-term gains and dividends that would be taxed at the 0% federal rate. Any additional long-term gains or dividends would be taxed at the maximum 15% rate.

I've actually qualified for zero percent tax on some of my dividend income, because all of my deductions went against my earned income.  So even though I had income that would have been taxed at regular tax rates, once my charitable deductions were taken out, the first $35,350 was taxed at 0%.  Some schmuck going to a job everyday to get that $35,350 would have paid tax on that money.  Thank you George W. Bush for looking our for all us folks wealthy enough to get $35,350 in dividends.  Divide that by a utility stock's 5% dividend yield, an that would indicate the person had $707,000 invested.  You know, the struggling middle class.  Paul Ryan would make all dividend income and capital gains untaxed, even if the person was making, say $20 million a year, like his running mate.  Fucking jackasses.

Fun With Excel

At least somebody is having some:

Taking Down Niall Ferguson

Noah Smith does a damn fine job of it:

Niall Ferguson wants the United States to be an empire. An historian, Ferguson has always been enchanted with the British Empire of his forebears. He has also long been enchanted with the notion that the United States can and should become the successor to the British Empire, and that we Americans have been shirking our duty by pretending to be just another live-and-let-live nation-state. He seems to have been especially enchanted by that magic moment in 2003 and 2004, when it seemed that under George W. Bush and the neoconservatives, America was finally taking up the mantle of empire. The failure of the Iraqi adventure, and the collapse of popular support for similar adventures, must have felt to Niall Ferguson like something beautiful was being snatched from his hands.

Now, Ferguson hopes, under a Romney/Ryan (or Ryan/Romney?) presidency, America has a chance at completing the mission that George Bush started, and returning to its path to glory as British Empire II.

But - and this is why he makes me so angry - Niall Ferguson badly misunderstands my country. We are a Republic, not an Empire, and we always will be. We rejected the mantle of Anglo-Saxon world domination in the Philippines, again in Vietnam, and again in Iraq. And we will always reject it. We do not want to go forth and educate and enlighten the brown people at the point of our Tomahawk missiles, Mr. Ferguson. We want to invite them here, to live with us, to work for us and hire us, to marry our children, to become part of this country. Even, yes, to lead this country, as Barack Obama, for all his faults, has done. We do not want to conquer the world. We want to become the world.

The British Empire is over, Niall. It had its day. We can debate eternally how much good it did, but now it is done, and it is not coming back. Stop trying to screw up my Republic in your doomed effort to bring it back.

One can look at most of the really screwed up places in the world, and see the hand of the British Empire.  We do not need another British empire.  Probably the greatest accomplishment of World War II after destroying the Nazis was the fact that afterwards, the European overseas empires finally collapsed and died.  The Neocolonialists in the Republican party, and their fellow travelers in the Democratic party can piss off.  We don't need them or an empire.

Solid Smoke Improves

BBC:

Aerogels have been around for a long time, and have been described as "solid smoke" because they are so light.
But these traditional types - made from silica - are fragile and brittle.
By altering the composition and structure of these materials, scientists have now produced aerogels that are hundreds of times stronger.
The advances were described at the 244th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Philadelphia.
Traditional aerogels developed decades ago and made from the silica that is found in beach sand are brittle, and break and crumble easily.
The new varieties are made by altering the innermost architecture of traditional silica aerogels.
Scientists use polymers, a plastic-like material, to reinforce the networks of silica that extend throughout an aerogel's structure.

Never heard of the stuff.  Learn something new every day.

The Largest Library On Earth

Wired:

And it’s Kahle’s impulse to copy and preserve that prompted the Internet Society to induct the serial entrepreneur and digital archivist into the Internet Hall of Fame on April 23 in its inaugural year.
Kahle took the library of libraries — the internet — and made a couple of copies of it, and keeps making copies. One he keeps in servers in San Francisco, the other in mirror servers in Alexandria, where the world’s most famous library burned 2,000 years ago. (His data survived the Egyptian revolution unscathed.)
Through the Wayback Machine, you can see what the web looked like in 1996. And 1997. And 2011.
It’s just one arm of Kahle’s ambitious goal to provide the world with universal access to all knowledge.
His vehicle is the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization Kahle founded in 1996, the same year he started analytics firm Alexa Internet, a pioneer in collaborative filtering, which he sold in 1999 to Amazon for $250 million.
“I won the internet lottery,” Kahle says.
Or, more aptly, the internet won the internet lottery. Since selling Alexa, Kahle has grown the Internet Archive, which he refers to as Alexandria 2.0, into a massive digital repository that has not only made copies of the internet, but has made available 200,000 e-books (and digitizes 1,000 more each day), 100,000 concert recordings, and some 700,000 films.
All are available online for free.

How do you keep an archive of everything on the internet?  That seems impossible to keep up with.

Can You Root Against The Nationals?

Charlie Pierce:

On a purely baseball level, there's very little not to love about these guys. They're a young team led by an old guy; manager Davey Johnson looks at this point like nothing more than Hubie Brown coming out of the past to lead the Memphis Grizzlies a few years back. They have a legitimate rookie star in Bryce Harper, who broke out of a terrible slump Sunday with a triple and a monstrous home run, and who, at the end of a season in which he became both a baseball and YouTube sensation, shows all the signs of a man exhausted by a year's worth of clown questions. On those occasions, being able to lapse into fluent Belichickian is a valuable skill, bro.
"It doesn't matter whether my numbers are crappy or not," Harper said Sunday. "We're in first place, that's all that matters."
"I think he was trying to send a message to me — 'Don't bench me.' That's what you're missing," Johnson said. "I think that, sometimes, he just gets a little frustrated and overaggressive."
And, Sunday, they were led by pitcher Gio Gonzalez, who earned his 16th win on a day in which he left his best stuff back around noon, when he prepared for a game that wouldn't actually begin until four hours later. Gonzalez is a throwback — a Whitey Ford–size guy in an era in which the gap between major league pitchers and NBA three-men is closing rapidly. On Sunday, with almost everything he threw staying up and dangerously over the plate, Gonzalez battled out of deep trouble on several occasions — most impressively in the fourth inning, which began with a leadoff triple by New York's Ronny Cedeno — and kept his game alive long enough for the Nationals offense to build him a cushion.

I love to see former Reds manager Davey Johnson doing well (fired from the Reds for living with his girlfriend), but if the Reds meet up with the Nationals in the playoffs, I'll be damn sure to be rooting that the Nats lose like Teddy Roosevelt in the Presidents' race.

Chart of the Day

Boy, that Obama is just strangling the economy with his tax increases.  Wait, what?  Oh, the facts:

In some ways I agree with Republicans that we need to go back to just before the 1960's ruined America.  Lets have some of those Republican President Eisenhower tax rates, thank you very much.

Rubber Cartel Tries To Drive Up Prices

WSJ:

The three Southeast Asian countries that control 70% of the world's supply of natural rubber said Thursday they would withhold supply now and keep supply tight by burning older rubber trees, hoping to boost prices, which have fallen 60% since their February 2011 peak.
The move by the Bangkok-based International Tripartite Rubber Council, which represents Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia and is the OPEC of the rubber market, rippled through markets. At one point on Friday, benchmark rubber futures at the Tokyo Commodity Exchange were up 9% from a nearly three-year low on Tuesday before settling at ¥221 ($2.78) a kilogram, 7% above the Tuesday low.
Higher rubber prices would hit tire makers, the largest consumers of natural rubber, as well as makers of rubber gloves, shoes, condoms and toy balloons.
But the Rubber Council faces challenges to its effort to boost prices.
"It's something like OPEC. There's always cheating somewhere," says Alvin Tai, plantations analyst for OSK Investment Bank in Kuala Lumpur.
Adding to the challenge, the world's fourth-biggest rubber exporter, Vietnam, isn't part of the club, despite recruiting efforts by the other three.

I'm surprised this doesn't involve Goldman Sachs. Damn, condom prices may go up?  Oh wait, that really isn't going to cut into my disposable income. 

Are We Worse Off Than Four Years Ago?

Since George W. Bush is not president now, I'm guessing the answer is no:

As Fallows points out in the post accompanying this graph, Niall Ferguson puts together a really shitty argument about why the country would be better off with Republican dumbfucks running this country instead of Obama.  Not surprisingly, at least one of the right-wing loons I graduated with in high school (well, I think he graduated) liked a photo of the Newsweek cover.  Geez, this is going to be a really long next couple of months.

State Budgets And Local Services

Camden, New Jersey looks to a county police force to police the city, since budget cuts from the state leave the city unable to afford its police force:

Though considered one of the most dangerous places in the country, past budget cuts in Camden, N.J., have forced police layoffs. Now the city is considering even more dramatic steps: replacing the city's police force with one operated by the county.
Camden is on pace to break a record for homicides and shootings this year, and many in the crime-ravaged city say something has to change.
"The status quo is not working with our current policing model," says Camden City attorney Marc Riondino. He says it's time for Camden to take a new approach to public safety, with a new police force operated by the county.
"We have explored our options and the best model for us is shared services," he says. "In Camden, it's well-known we have an uptick in violence; we have to enter into a new paradigm and make residents feel safe and that's the only reason we're doing this."
Camden City Council President Frank Moran, who was born and raised in Camden, says even with financial help, Camden is struggling to protect itself.
"We are under a transitional aid agreement with the state and every year the state will reduce our aid and it's what the governor has implemented," Moran says. "Unfortunately we have to live with [it], so we have to do everything in our power to be creative."

Since Camden has no real tax base, they need help from county or state residents.  The Republican plan in state governments is to cut state taxes and leave local communities on their own.  This screws inner cities and rural areas and benefits the already wealthy suburbs.  In the Republican plan, this is a feature, not a bug.  So the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and any semblance of an equal opportunity for all goes out the window.