Waaay too many Mexican appetizers last night, not to mention margaritas and beer. Anyway, another national football excess is in the record books, congrats to Tom Brady and the Patriots.
Get your day started with this hilarious meditation on football vs. baseball by the great George Carlin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-ts=1422579428&v=qmXacL0Uny0&x-yt-cl=85114404
Monday’s hot links:
There’s no such thing as Nacho cheese. On the day after the Super Bowl, when so much nacho cheese was consumed, this shows how little can be taken for granted. Inquiring minds are wondering—do people expect nacho cheese to be a particular flavor? Or color? Or texture? Or is it just any cheese that happens to be on nacho chips? Here’s the truth: There are no standards for nacho cheese, it is just whatever we believe it to be. Does this bring up deeper, non-cheese-related existential questions?
Yosemite Park reported the first confirmed sighting of a rare Sierra Nevada red fox (Vulpes vulpes necator) in nearly 100 years. Park wildlife biologists documented a sighting of the fox on two separate instances (December 13, 2014 and January 4, 2015) within the park boundary. The Sierra Nevada red fox of California is one of the rarest mammals in North America. Estimates say there are fewer than 50 in the US. Check it out:
Mississippi has the highest vaccination rate for school-age children. It’s not even close. Last year, 99.7% of the state’s kindergartners were fully vaccinated. In California, epicenter of the Disney measles outbreak, almost 8% of kindergartners (41,000 children) were not immunized against mumps, measles and rubella. In Oregon, it was 6.8%. In Pennsylvania, it was nearly 15%! The secret of Mississippi’s success stems from a strict mandatory vaccination law that lacks the loopholes found in almost every state.
Leaving Afghanistan has become one of the most difficult operations the US military has ever undertaken. A Colonel in charge of packing up Afghanistan last year called it “a logistics Super Bowl.” Here is Lt. Gen. Raymond Mason, who headed Army logistics until he retired last year:
Certainly in our lifetime, it’s one of the biggest, if not the biggest operation in terms of complexity, size, and cost.
The dirty little secret is that our military knows how to get people, weapons and supplies into a war zone, but has little experience getting them back out. This may cost the taxpayers more than $2 billion before it is done.
China has sent drones to Nigeria. As the Boko Haram insurgency enters its 7th year, China is busy building a better relationship by selling drones, MRAP vehicles and smart bombs to Nigeria, (most of which the US has been unwilling to provide to Nigeria due to human rights concerns). China wants to become a first tier exporter of military equipment, and is looking to lock up Nigeria as a supplier of oil. On January 25, 2015, a photo appeared online showing a Chinese CH-3 UCAV drone which crashed in Nigeria’s Borno Province. Borno is the area where much of the Boko Haram violence occurred in 2014.
Your thought for the week: We hear all the time from yahoos on the web and yahoos in Congress something like this:
Isn’t it unfair that corporate dividends are taxed twice?
The answer is no, and here’s why:
A corporation is a legal entity. If it has an “accession to wealth” (meaning, a profit in tax legalese), in our system, the corporation must pay taxes. A stockholder is also a legal entity. If a stockholder receives a dividend, he/she also has an “accession to wealth”, and thus, pays a tax.
Why is this hard to understand? No one claims that when a worker gets paid a wage, and pays a tax on that income, and later spends some of that after-tax income paying someone to mow their lawn, that it is double-taxation for the lawn guy to pay income tax.
This is really simple folks: Money moves from entity, to entity, to entity, and each time, income tax applies.
And, if someone makes the argument that the shareholder is the corporation, they don’t get what a corporation is. It’s a separate legal entity that exists to protect shareholders from the business’s liabilities. The fact that it pays taxes is a normal consequence, and the entire point of its existence.
Funny about the crocodile tears from the well to do about the taxation of dividends. The never seem miffed at the sales taxes (the bulk of which is paid by workers and the middle class) even though these dollars too went through the mill several times before they were spent and taxed at the point of sales.