Category: News and Views

15 Companies That Paid Zero Income Tax Last Year (Despite $23 Billion In Profits) | Co.Exist

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downloadOnly small businesses pay taxes. Big companies often pay nothing at all.

Think that’s an exaggeration? Look at a new report from Citizens for Tax Justice, a Washington, D.C. group. It finds that some of nation’s most famous brands have paid remarkably little to the government over the last five years. In fact, many actually enjoyed a negative tax rate: They received a nice rebate check from the U.S. Treasury.

The 15 giants highlighted by CTJ were chosen to represent a wide range of industries among Fortune 500 companies. They include CBS, Mattel, Prudential, and the California utility PG&E. Together, they paid no federal income tax in 2014, despite profits totaling $23 billion. CTJ’s point is that these companies are not anomalies, they are examples.

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The Middle Class Is Worse Off Than You Think | Bloomberg View

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If you worry about the declining fortunes of the U.S. middle class, take heed: It might be worse than you realized.

Tracking the middle class can be difficult, because the group is hard to define. Typically, researchers look at households with incomes or net worth in the middle of the entire population. This approach, though, might provide a falsely rosy picture. It doesn’t, for example, capture the fates of families that start out in the middle and — due to a job loss or other setback — end up in the bottom.

Two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis — William Emmons and Bryan Noeth — sought to address this shortcoming by focusing on households’ demographic characteristics, rather than income or wealth. Specifically, they looked at families whose breadwinner was at least 40 years old and had achieved a level of education that would typically allow a middle-class standard of living. Whites and Asians needed exactly a high-school diploma to qualify. For blacks and Hispanics, it took a two-year or four-year college degree — a stark recognition of persistent racial inequality.

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Why the middle class is still getting snared by the ‘wealth tax’ | Money Cnn

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You may vaguely recall that in 2012 Congress “fixed” the Alternative Minimum Tax — or what the Tax Policy Center dubbed “the epitome of pointless complexity.”

But that doesn’t mean the so-called “wealth tax” was simplified or eliminated.

The AMT is still alive and complicated. What lawmakers did was permanently tie the amount of income exempted from the AMT to inflation.

Those income levels, however, are still fairly low ($52,800 for singles this year; $82,100 for married couples filing jointly).

And the set of rules that governs what can and can’t be deducted under the AMT means it’s still hitting a fair number of people for whom it was never intended — those in the middle class and upper middle class.

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12 Industries to Keep An Eye On | Small Biz Trends

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As technology evolves and startups jump on these advancements, a few industries are fundamentally changing. And as these industries push forward, they create even greater advancements of their tech.

Curious what market sector is most likely to be disrupted in the next few years, we asked a group of startup founders the following question:

“What industry do you believe is going to have the biggest advancements in technology in the next five years, and why?”

Here’s what YEC community members had to say:

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Some Popular Supplements Still Contain Untested Compound | Live Science

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A number of supplements marketed for weight loss and improved athletic performance contain a synthetic compound that is similar to the drug amphetamine, and that compound has not been tested in people, according to a new study.

What’s more, the Food and Drug Administration has known about the presence of this drug in supplements for two years, but still has not warned consumers about the issue or acted to take the supplements off the market, according to the study.

The FDA “did a lot of hard work to figure out this brand-new designer stimulant was in supplements … and then failed to inform the public,” said Dr. Pieter Cohen, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the new study. “It’s inexplicable and inexcusable,” Cohen said.

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Buying a watch in 1880 — history you probably didn’t know! | Author Unknown

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watchIf you were in the market for a watch in 1880, would you know where to get one? You would go to a store, right?

Well, of course you could do that, but if you wanted one that was cheaper and a bit better than most of the store watches, you went to the train station!


Sound a bit funny?

Well, for about 500 towns across the northern United States , that’s where the best watches were found.

Why were the best watches found at the train station?

The railroad company wasn’t selling the watches, not at all.

The telegraph operator was.

Continue reading “Buying a watch in 1880 — history you probably didn’t know! | Author Unknown” →

The Rationale Behind Soaring App Development Prices | TechCrunch

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During the last quarter of 2014, we were approached by a funded startup based in Boston to identify an app development company to build an app for their European launch. The skill sets were quite niche, and the yearly spend would cross $100K, so we had to approach platform evangelists to identify some development studios that they’d recommend based on first-hand experience.

We picked the Australia and Indonesia markets because we knew we had to provide some choice at both ends of the spectrum, and the startup had an Australian connection.

The platform company’s Australian and Singaporean offices recommended their preferred teams in the above markets, based on first-hand experience of launching some very popular apps. While we did expect price differences for comparable quality, we did not expect a 15x difference between geographically close markets with identical skills.

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These Are The People Who Graduate From Code Bootcamp | WIRED

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142841102-1024x722THE LEARN-TO-CODE MOVEMENT has expanded well beyond the realm of hobbyists. As President Obama acknowledged just last month, the many coding bootcamps that speckle the country are becoming important economic drivers, helping train American workers in the skills they need to fill an ever expanding pool of tech jobs and in a fraction of the time it would take them to pursue a four-year degree.

But just who are these daring folks who drop their day jobs in pursuit of a career in tech, and what, if anything, do they get for the $10,000 price of admission that most of these bootcamps charge?

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How the Decline in Community Banks Hurts Small Business | Entrepreneur

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A recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond reveals that the number of community banks dropped by a whopping 41 percent between 2007 and 2013. That’s bad news for small business owners, who rely heavily on financing from small, local banks.

Even more troubling is the potential culprit. Analysis by the Fed suggests that the Dodd-Frank Act is at least partially responsible.

A Harvard University study shows that the rate of decline in the community bank share of commercial banking assets has doubled since the passage of the law in 2010. Moreover, almost all of the decline in the number of community banks in recent years has resulted from a cessation in bank formation during the current economic recovery, the Richmond Fed reports.

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