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People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off.
—Warren Buffett: via NYT
You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work—and much of the profits—remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed?
—Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel. He goes on to quote Alan Blinder, who wrote, “as TV sets became ‘just a commodity,’ their production moved offshore to locations with much lower wages. And nowadays the number of television sets manufactured in the U.S. is zero. A failure? No, a success.” Grove, however, warns, “…abandoning today’s “commodity” manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industry.”: via Bloomberg BW
Arguably, the most important economic trend in the United States over the past couple of generations has been the ever more distinct sorting of Americans into winners and losers, and the slow hollowing-out of the middle class. Median incomes declined outright from 1999 to 2009. For most of the aughts, that trend was masked by the housing bubble, which allowed working-class and middle-class families to raise their standard of living despite income stagnation or downward job mobility. But that fig leaf has since blown away. And the recession has pressed hard on the broad center of American society.
—Don Peck: via The Atlantic
I’ve had the date circled in red for 35 years, and now it’s time to move. Year after year after year you are going to see more and more songs coming back to songwriters and having more and more influence on the market. We will own that music, and it’s still valuable.
—Rick Carnes, president of the Songwriters Guild of America, remarking on the prospect of exercising termination rights as allowed by the 1976 Federal Copyright Act. The rights allow performers to reclaim copyright for songs after 35 years. Because the Act was passed in 1978, the earliest expected termination will be in 2013: via NYT
This is a life-threatening change for them, the legal equivalent of Internet technology.
—Kenneth J. Abdo, chair of the termination rights working group for the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences: via NYT
It’s a theory that’s out there. It’s got some gaps in it. In Texas we teach both Creationism and evolution.
—Rick Perry: via NYMag
We’re interested in the broader issue that states should keep their own fuel taxes. We don’t want it run through Washington. Why should Connecticut pay for what’s going on in Wyoming and Wyoming pay for the New York City subway system?
—Grover Norquist, indicating no real awareness of how cross-subsidies work and have worked in state, federal and local finances: via Bloomberg
My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.
—Warren Buffet: via NYT
Notwithstanding the merit of his @nytimes Op-Ed today, I think Warren Buffet is self-serving and frankly full of shit.
—Mo Koyfman, Spark Capital: via Twitter
The fundamental problem that much of the world faces today is that investors are overreacting to debt-to-GDP ratios, fearful of some magic threshold, and demanding fiscal-austerity programs too soon. They are asking governments to cut expenditure while their economies are still vulnerable. Households are running scared, so they cut expenditures as well, and businesses are being dissuaded from borrowing to finance capital expenditures.
The lesson is simple: We should worry less about debt ratios and thresholds, and more about our inability to see these indicators for the artificial – and often irrelevant – constructs that they are.
—Robert Shiller: via Al Jazeera
this american life – on patents, and those such as chris crawford’s that cover foundational aspects of our online existence that, in this particular instance, overlaps with 5303 other patents with similar claims, which happens to be not so unusual. It happens 30% of the time.
On the $4.5b Nortel patent portfolio sale to the Apple-led consortium…
That’s $4.5 billion on patents that these companies almost certainly don’t want for their technical secrets. That $4.5 billion won’t build anything new, won’t bring new products to the shelves, won’t open up new factories that can hire people who need jobs. That’s $4.5 billion dollars that adds to the price of every product these companies sell you. That’s $4.5 billion dollars buying arms for an ongoing patent war.
The Myth of the Sole Inventor, Mark Lemley, Stanford
There’s nothing that you can look at here that is signaling some revival in growth in the second half of the year, and in fact we may see another catastrophically weak quarter next quarter if things go wrong next week…[that is]…if Congress actually starts implementing a massive contraction by suddenly cutting government spending immediately”
—Nigel Gault, chief United States economist at IHS Global Insight, remarking on recent revision of economic data that indicates the current GDP remains below it’s high-water mark in 2007: via NYT
The word for this report is ‘shocking.’ With slow growth, higher inflation and almost no consumer spending growth, it is very tough to find good news.
—John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics: via NYT
Apparently, contrary to what as Representative Dave Camp and EVP of the US Chamber of Commerce Bruce Josten would have one believe, neither economist is in on the joke.
Stilltitled 