When they talk about high US Taxes

The right is always talking about high US corporate tax rates.  You could compare us to places that have legalized slavery and always make us look uncompetitive.  Instead lets compare us to a successful industrialized country, one that is essentially eating our lunch in the marketplace.  Let's look at Germany.

First let's start with the VAT (Value Added Tax).  That is essentially a sales tax, that is tacked on to each transactions at each level.  The rate is generally 19% but for certain foods, books, magazines, flowers, some transportation, it is 7%.  And some things are exempt.  Doctors do not charge VAT tax, nor do public theaters, museums.  This is not a complete list of things that have a reduced or waived VAT tax, but you get the idea.

The tax is charged by the seller. The manufacturer pays it on the raw materials they buy.  The distributor pays it on the finished goods they buy, the consumer pays it.

Let's take the case of the manufacturer.  On a quarterly basis they will pay the tax that they charged to their distributors, minus the tax they paid buying raw materials.

Then there is the corporate tax rate.  According to taxrates.cc the combined (federal and local) tax rate for corporations is 33.3%.  This is actually a rough summary of three different taxes applied to corporate income.  And unlike US corporations, German corporations are taxed on their world wide income, minus of course any taxes paid on income in other countries.  So they cannot hide their income in low tax countries.

Now let's talk about the other two facets of this.  How are German companies doing under this burden, and what do the German people get for their money?

Well, you know that in manufacturing and exports, they are beating us in the marketplace and have been for years.  So paying employees a decent wage, a mandatory 25 vacation days, and taxes on their world wide income does not seem to have stoped them from doing well.  And look at CEO salaries, well in 2009 Deutches Bank CEO Josef Ackermann had a total compensation 9.55 million euros.  He was the higest paid CEO in Germany that year.  It does not compare to some of the packages US CEOs were getting in that same year, but he is still getting rich.

And what do the people of Germany get for these taxes?  How about universal health care, pensions, and tax-funded child care, housing, and educational allowances?

So our taxe rates are not, and never have been what is killing our manufacturing, destroying our middle class.  Rather it is the blind faith that if you only appease the oligarchy that owns this country enough, that they will eventually share a few crumbs with the rest of us. 

You want to see jobs moving back to this country?  Stop giving businesses a free ride to hide their profits overseas forever. When you give them economic incentives to send your job overseas, what do you expect?

Lenovo - How Slow can you Go

 In my lifetime I have owned 2 Macintosh computers, two Windows laptops, and two Windows workstations.  That is until my last Windows workstation died.

Fortunately, I was taking a break from work, so there was no immediate need.  Having a functioning laptop, I didn't feel the need to rush out and replace it.  When I did get around to it, I went looking with some very specific criteria.

• Plenty of USB ports
• Support for dual monitors
• Dual disk drives

Not a really challenging list of requirements.

 I ended up at Office Max, where I found a Lenovo desktop that seemed to meet all my criteria.Just in case it means something to anyone, the product number is 90T2000SUS.  I picked up a couple of reasonably priced monitors at Costco and proceeded to assemble my workstation.

I didn't have a lot of software to add.  I use UEStudios (UltraEdit, UltraCompare, UltraFTP), Oracle client software, Peoplesoft client software.  I also added LibreOffice.  Not a big load for what seems like a reasonably beefy workstation.

From pushing the start button to being presented with a logon page takes somewhere between 3 and 5 minutes.  It seems to vary.  Once logon credentials are entered (it asks only for a passcode, no user id/password combination), it is going to be at least another 3 to 5 minutes before you get either your desktop, or about 25% of the time, the black screen of death.

With the black screen of desth, all is not lost.  Clicking on that page give you a drop-down list   offering to log out, launch task manager, or restart.  If you select task manager, and then close that window, you finally see the you desktop, and are able to actually use your computer.

Did I mention, Lenovo keeps trying to sell me shit? The app where you would check for updates to any of the Lenovo installed software is essentially a come-on to sell you a service contract, software to 'enhance your performance' (so they admit that they deliberately slowed down the machine) and software to help locate the machine if it is lost or stolen.  For a desktop?

Because I have a network file server, I do not have a whole lot of data saved on this machine.  So I won't have a lot of reinstalling to do when I wipe down the hard drives and install vanilla windows, rather than the ad-ware version of Windows 11 that came on this machine.