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Income taxes aren’t the only way for the government to take your money. With all the talk about taxing the rich, we hear very little talk about taxing the poor. Yet the marginal tax rate on someone living in poverty can sometimes be higher than the marginal tax rate on millionaires.

While it is true that nearly half the households in the country pay no income tax at all, the apparently simple word “tax” has many complications that can be a challenge for even professional economists to untangle.

If you define a tax as only those things that the government chooses to call a tax, you get a radically different picture from what you get when you say, “If it looks like a tax, acts like a tax, and takes away your resources like a tax, then it’s a tax.”

One of the biggest, and one of the oldest, taxes in this latter sense is inflation. Governments have stolen their people’s resources this way, not just for centuries, but for thousands of years.

…..read more HERE

…..focuses on the NHL Hockey industry. Owners, Players and the media complex built around the game:

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1. In the beginning Govt created the heavens and the earth.

2. Now the economy was formless and void, darkness was over the surface of the ATMs, and the Spirit of Govt was hovering over the land.

3. And Govt said, “Let there be spending,” and there was spending.

4. Govt saw that the spending was good, and that it separated the light from the darkness.

5. Govt called the spending Investments, and this he did in the first day.

6. Thus Govt made the infrastructure and the patronage jobs for eternity under the firmament from the Potomac which was above the firmament; and it was so.

9 Then Govt said, “Let the regulations and the guidlines under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the Bureaus appear”; and it was so.

14. On the fourth day Govt said, “Let Us make the economy in Our image, according to Our likeness; let it have dominion over the cars of the road, over the appliances of the supercenters, and over the pet groomers of the strip malls, over all the clickthroughs of Amazon and over every creepy thing of the Dollar Stores.”

15 So Govt created the economy in His own image; services and wholesale and retail He created them.

16. And Govt said to them, “Be fruitful and use the multiplier effect; fill the land with jobs; thou have dominion over thy realm, within limits, as long and thou remember to get thy permits and tithe thy taxes, for they are good. Hope to see you at the fundraiser.”

17. And on the fifth day Govt made an official Govt holiday, and headed off for a 3-day golf weekend at Camp David. But first Govt said to the economy, “you are free to eat from any tree in the garden, except the tree of Knowledge. There is a serpent in that thing, and thy health care does not cover it.”

….read 1-40 HERE

Scant Evidence That Salt Raises Blood Pressure

Posted by Chris Kaiser - MedPage Today

on Friday, 7 December 2012 0:40

Salt360x215The evidence for health benefits associated with salt reduction is controversial and the “concealment of scientific uncertainty” is a mistake, researchers suggested.

Controversy about what effect too much sodium intake has on the body goes back to the early part of the 20th century, according to Ronald Bayer, PhD, and colleagues from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York City.

But in the last few years, the discourse has reached a fever pitch, they wrote online inHealth Affairs.

In 2011, for example, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study by Stolarz-Skrzypek et al. that found only a weak correlation between salt and blood pressure. An editorial in the Lancet lambasted the JAMA study as “disappointingly weak” and “likely to confuse public perceptions of the importance of salt as a risk factor for high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke.”

Also in 2011……

…..read more HERE

Government securities are the default safe haven in times of heightened risk aversion. But what happens when Government finances are the cause of the tension? Where are the safe havens then? 
 
I wrote a few weeks ago that I feared a Great Disorder and that I remain bullish on ‘safe havens’. But what exactly are suitable safe havens for such a circumstance? 
 
What constitutes a ‘safe haven’ changes over time. It’s important to remember not only that government bonds aren’t always the market’s safe haven, but that that there will always be a safe haven somewhere. For all the headlines about the billions wiped off stock market values during market routs, that money had to go somewhere. It doesn’t just disappear. It will go into whatever the safe haven is, which in normal times will be bonds. But what happens when government bonds themselves fall victim to the primary ills of the day? In the 1970s, bonds were no place to seek refuge from the inflation and so the safe haven mantle passed to gold. This is one reason I remain a gold bull. 
 
The eurozone throws up other interesting examples. Before the crisis, Spanish investors, for example, would normally have considered their sovereign bonds a safe haven on ‘risk-off’ days. But that stopped working when their sovereigns became the source of risk rather than a shelter from it. German bonds undoubtedly caught some of that safe haven bid, but did the very high quality, zero debt, local-champion-made-good retailer Inditex catch a similar bid too? 
 
A similar picture emerges with the standard quality equity names in countries afflicted by the eurozone sovereign crisis. For example, Hellenic Bottling (Greece), Luxoticca (Italy) and Kerry Group (Ireland) all followed a similar pattern, outperforming their domestic equity indices and performing the safe haven role vacated by their government bonds. 
 
So besides gold, another candidate for safe haven status in the event government bonds become unreliable are equity securities in high quality and robust businesses. I therefore remain very bullish on these too. 
 
Expected returns should be consistent with the long-run average return for quality equities, which has been around 6-7%. That’s hardly a once in a lifetime return, but for now, and for a potential safe haven I find it quite attractive because it comes with an embedded robustness. Suppose I’m all wrong in my fears. Suppose that we go all Japanese and the next decades are low-growth environments.  A 6-7% return isn’t a bad prospect at all. 
 
Now suppose I am right, and government bonds cease acting as safe havens. Owning such equities implies owning the new safe havens (especially if the rest of the portfolio is made up of cash and gold). So we’re on high ground with this strategy, and have a degree of robustness to the reality that we just don’t know what the future holds. That doesn’t guarantee survival from the worst case scenario, but it gives a better chance.

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