According to Rasmussen it’s true … Top box approvers are fairly constant … bottom box disapprovers appear to be growing … hmmmm
Source article:
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/daily_presidential_tracking_poll
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Adopting a European welfare-based economic model requires taxing about 50% of labor costs.
Question: if the bottom 50% pay no income taxes, then how much does the top 50% have to pay?
Do the math … you can take 50% from 100% of the citizens … or 100% from 50% of the citizens.
Technical note: the top 50% of the citizens is a broader group than the targeted top 2%
![[Labor's European Model]](https://i0.wp.com/s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AJ163_1labor_NS_20090315205002.gif)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123716333620835923.html
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Excerpted from Knowledge @ Emory, “Positive Feedback: Why Customer Satisfaction Means More than Just Happy Customers,” February 12, 2009
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Businesses are wielding a new weapon these days in the battle to survive economic uncertainty: the chopping block. No longer just a kitchen accessory, the chopping block has become a fixture in divisions and boardrooms across the country, claiming budgets, superfluous expenses and, yes, jobs.
Managers may want to hold off, however, on hauling that block into the marketing department. Market research firm Gartner recently reported that companies eager to cut their marketing budgets in a weakened economy risk damaging their ability to hold and add customers when conditions improve. Marketing, while possibly appearing to be the low-hanging fruit, is not necessarily ripe for chopping.
Sundar Bharadwaj … would welcome Gartner’s support of marketing budgets … “When most organizations are under spending pressure or they have to cut costs, marketing is one of the first things to go … If you can’t demonstrate its value to the bottom line or to metrics that matter to senior managers, then it becomes difficult to justify the existence of such spending. So, there’s a growing area of research in marketing that looks at marketing’s impact on the financial performance of a firm.”
Bharadwaj and colleague, Kapil R. Tuli, are the latest marketing mavens to contribute to this body of research. In their paper, “Customer Satisfaction and Stock Returns Risk,” they study the impact of customer satisfaction on stock returns risk—both systematic risk or beta … as well as idiosyncratic risk … The authors set out to develop, test, and find empirical support for the hypothesis that positive changes in customer satisfaction result in negative changes in overall and downside systematic and idiosyncratic risk. In doing so, they test the effect of changes in customer satisfaction on changes in risk …
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The results of the analysis … indicate that customer satisfaction does indeed lower a firm’s overall and downside systematic and idiosyncratic risk. Ultimately, customer satisfaction has a vigorous impact on stock returns risk …
“The argument of the paper is that if I’m satisfied with the firm as a customer, I tend to be loyal and I tend to buy more from the firm. The firm has a richer understanding of my needs so they can more efficiently sell to me, which lowers their costs … They can plan their internal operations given that they understand me very well. That could lower their costs. I’m less prone to switch to other companies even if other companies come up with better offers. So, I stay with this firm and work with them. The firm’s cash flow therefore is not volatile. This is important because the financial market stock price is actually the present value of future cash flows. That’s why you would expect that firms with greater satisfaction would have much lower idiosyncratic and systematic risk” …
The study also proves that customer satisfaction is a metric that offers valuable information to financial market … “Customer satisfaction is critical,” stresses Bharadwaj … The results also underscore the holistic value of overall marketing efforts on a firm’s strength.
This is not only important for company managers, but the investment community and regulators, as well … customer satisfaction is a vital component of a firm’s performance and possibly worthy of more widespread public distribution. “Companies need to start thinking about reporting customer satisfaction numbers,” in annual reports and other investor relations material, suggests Bharadwaj. “Given their implications for risk, it will help investors to be more informed about how the company is doing in the marketplace” …
Edit by SAC
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Full Article:
http://knowledge.emory.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1216
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Hint: They were promised a tax cut during the Obama campaign.
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Excerpted from WSJ, “Who Pays for Cap and Trade?”, March 9,2009
Cap and trade is the tax that dare not speak its name, and Democrats are hoping in particular that no one notices who would pay for their climate ambitions.
Perhaps Americans would like to know the deeply unequal ways that climate costs would be distributed across regions and income groups.
Politicians love cap and trade because they can claim to be taxing “polluters,” not workers. Hardly. the costs would inevitably be passed on to all consumers in the form of higher prices. Stating the obvious, Peter Orszag — now Mr. Obama’s budget director — told Congress last year that “Those price increases are essential to the success of a cap-and-trade program.”
The Congressional Budget Office — Mr. Orszag’s former roost — estimates that the price hikes from a 15% cut in emissions would cost the average household in the bottom-income quintile about 3.3% of its after-tax income every year. That’s about $680, not including the costs of reduced employment and output. The three middle quintiles would see their paychecks cut between $880 and $1,500, or 2.9% to 2.7% of income. The rich would pay 1.7%. Putting a price on carbon is regressive by definition because poor and middle-income households spend more of their paychecks on things like gas to drive to work, groceries or home heating.
Hit hardest would be the “95% of working families” Mr. Obama keeps mentioning, usually omitting that his no-new-taxes pledge comes with the caveat “unless you use energy.”
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But the greatest inequities are geographic and would be imposed on the parts of the U.S. that rely most on manufacturing or fossil fuels — particularly coal, which generates most power in the Midwest, Southern and Plains states. It’s no coincidence that the liberals most invested in cap and trade — Barbara Boxer, Henry Waxman, Ed Markey — come from California or the Northeast.
Coal provides more than half of U.S. electricity, and 25 states get more than 50% of their electricity from conventional coal-fired generation.
In Ohio, it totals 86%, according to the Energy Information Administration. Ratepayers in Indiana (94%), Missouri (85%), New Mexico (80%), Pennsylvania (56%), West Virginia (98%) and Wyoming (95%) are going to get soaked.
Cap and trade, in other words, is a scheme to redistribute income and wealth — but in a very curious way. It takes from the working class and gives to the affluent; takes from Miami, Ohio, and gives to Miami, Florida; and takes from an industrial America that is already struggling and gives to rich Silicon Valley and Wall Street “green tech” investors who know how to leverage the political class.
Full article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123655590609066021.html
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This is the first of several posts extracting some key points from the book Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, Little Brown, 2008
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Gladwell’s Observation
When you’re born significantly impacts the likelihood that you’ll be successful.
On a macro level, outliers reach maturity in the early stages of a “transformational era”. For example, Bill Gates was wildly successful, in part, because he caught the early wave of PCs.
On a more micro level, your specific birthdate matters because of “relative age”. Many schools and sports have cut-off dates for admitting annual cohort groups. For example, little league baseball leagues typically place kids in age brackets that run from Aug.1 to July 31. Schools may require that a student turn 6 by a certain date (say, Sept.1)
Kids born right after a cut-off date have an advantage — they’re older. At young ages, there’s a big proportional maturity difference (physical & intellectual) between the oldest and youngest members of the cohort. So, the oldest tend to outperform the youngest by a big margin.
And, the advantage tends to be an accumulative because early high achievers are often “steamed” or “tracked” — think fast reading groups and competitive travel teams — with their sub-cohorts getting more attention, more resources, and better teaching & coaching.
Generally speaking people born on the right date are beneficiaries of more and more specialized opportunities to succeed.
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Excerpted from IBD, ” Friendly Fire Shows Obama Losing Focus”, Barone, March 13, 2009
Driven by Rahm Emanuel’s advice to “never let a serious crisis go to waste”, Pres. Obama continues to assert that we can solve our economic problems only by advancing national health insurance, a cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gases, and the end of secret ballots in unionization elections.
But, none of the issues … was in any way a cause of the financial crisis.
We did not have a housing bubble collapse because we don’t have a national health insurance program.
We don’t have toxic waste clogging the balance sheets of the banks and other financial institutions because of carbon emissions.
The Bush tax cuts were not a proximate cause of the giant public debt being run up under the Toxic Assets Relief Program or the 2009 stimulus package.
Perhaps the President should heed Warren Buffett’s advice to “pay attention to the first thing on your platter : the financial crisis”.
Full column:
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=321836253252674
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