What presidential candidate would be most beneficial to the climbing community and land access?

D B wrote: god forbid you should have to sell your third boat so people can afford to take their kids to the doctor

You are barking at the wrong tree here... very few people (professional athletes comes in mind) make millions of regular income. All your bankers, execs, CEOs and sports team owners pay at a much lower percentage than their tax bracket would indicate b/c of special tax benefits/loopholes or b/c the income is considered capital gain.

Bill Kirby wrote: Eric G, dude! We gotta get out one of these days I'm up your way.

Anytime my friend. Always looking for new partners.

D B wrote: god forbid you should have to sell your third boat so people can afford to take their kids to the doctor

Straw man. Our inequality problems are much too complicated to paint it with such a broad class-warfare brush.

Bill is not your enemy. His successful business ventures are not the cause of your hardships.

Vote for Me. I Donald John Trump, will be the best President of the United States. I will build a wall for my fellow climbers. It'll be HHUUGGE. If you're lucky maybe I'll build one on the Canadian border too. I love winning almost as much as I love climbing. Not only will I climb the the Great Mexican Wall, but I love climbing the Polls. I'm #1! All of you are weak climbers; like Bernie. Feel the bern now? They had to create a new rating for my climbing. 11.16 because that's when I win. I'll explain 11.16 for you losers. 11 is November and 16 is 2016. Don't ask again! I like my ABC. Anybody but Clinton. And by anybody, I mean ME. Look at my fellow republican competitors. If you can call them that. Cruz was born in Canada. Presidents need to be natural born citizens. That means mamma gave birth in the United States. Which Cruz was not! Rubio sounds like a cheese. John Kasich, I don't know who that is. To my fellow climbers if you want to have your wall and climb it to, vote for me Donald Trump this 2016 election year.

Bill Kirby wrote: Excess for me and my broker. Essential for my foreman, operators and any other guy making 50-90k for Christmas. Year End bonuses have saved quite a few Christmas round here.

That's not what I (or the IRS) mean by "excess" here. Essentially, the IRS has to have an estimate of your income at the beginning of the year, find the effective tax rate (which for most people is much lower than their tax bracket), then withhold that percentage off each of the paycheck.

If you get a bonus, then this income is on top ("excess") of all the benefits of exemption/lower tax brackets applicable to you (i.e., the estimated income at the beginning of the year becomes too low). If this was rolled into each paycheck, then each of the paycheck would have had to be taxed at a higher effective rate. There really isn't anything special happening here other than balancing the numbers.

Bill Kirby wrote: The only problem with a consumption tax is the wealthy save everyone else spends.

If you are wealthy but invest the money in the economy instead of spending them on the 3rd boat or the 8th house, why should the government tax you a lot? :) After all, companies can write-off their research & development costs, and you aren't taxed on stock/property value gain until you sell them. I'm not saying consumption tax doesn't have its problems, but it'd be simpler to reach a fair tax distribution than it currently stands.

Some of what I want in a El Presidente and why I like trump.. (Not supported by the real Donald Trump and not all ideas are his)

Presidential plan:

Build Mexican Wall-
1.Creates construction jobs for US citizens and Mexican citizens.
2.More jobs for law enforcement and border patrol. And other business in general.
3.Tourist attraction. Think. Berlin Wall.
4.Revenue from climbing permits
5.keeps illegal immigrants out.

Flat tax-
Pros-
1.Simply 10% of your income is 10% of income. Wether you make $10,000 or $1,000,000 it's 10%.
$10,000=$1,000 $1,000,000=$100,000
2.Eliminate tax breaks and all the other BS.

Cons-
1.Eliminates tax breaks.
2. Eliminates the need for all the jobs created based off of a complex tax system. H&R Block,Turbo Tax,etc.

China is becoming a super power and Donald Trump would be the only one with enough balls to fight back.

^^^^^
I don't think his short stubby will scare anybody when he gives China "the finger" though, lol.

D B wrote: I totally agree with you, which is why I'm supporting the only candidate who has consistently voted to keep jobs in the US, pay them a fair wage, decrease military spending, and re-build our infrastructure (creating more jobs).

See now all that sounds awesome! And that's before I know who you're voting for (if you said it earlier in the thread, I didn't read it). But before I know who you're voting for, how do they plan to keep jobs in the US? How do they plan on ensuring employees are paid a fair wage, and what is "fair" to them? And how do they plan to pay for rebuilding our infrastructure? The military thing is pretty straight forward, so I don't need an answer on that.

reboot wrote: All your bankers, execs, CEOs and sports team owners pay at a much lower percentage than their tax bracket would indicate b/c of special tax benefits/loopholes or b/c the income is considered capital gain.

That is not true. The compensation of doctors, lawyers, and business executives is generally taxed as ordinary income. Such people have very limited opportunities to convert ordinary income to capital gain. Business owners can get the benefit of capital gains treatment when they sell, but income earned along the way is either taxed as ordinary income, or dividends subject to both corporate and individual tax. Some people (hedge fund managers, for example) can take advantage of the carried interest loophole, but that is the exception and not the rule.

powhound84 wrote: There should be a flat tax rate with the only break being you don't pay income tax if you are under a predetermined income.

Agreed.

Fair wage:
- $15 an hour minimum wage by 2020 (which in July was supported by 63% of the population). A living wage. Welfare for working people is essentially a payout to large corporations who don't pay their employees enough to live on.

Only problem I see is if the wages go up. How do you prevent products costs from going up. You're basically raising income and raising the end cost. Now they have to pay more for the same product. Basically everything stayed the same. Also a worker that's been there for 10 years is only making $15. Now a noobie is making $15. How would that make them feel? Now the 10 year employee wants a raise too. And so on up the chain.

Brian Scoggins wrote: Again, the cost of labor, materials, etc, sets a *minimum* price on goods, consumer value sets a *maximum*. Together they create a range. Both are open to negotiation. I can make a compelling argument for why you should value my labor more. You can make a compelling argument for how intangibles associated with my position add value that aren't reflected in my wage. But the fact still remains: I cannot, sustainably, accept wages lower than what I can negotiate my cost of living down to, and you cannot, sustainably, pay higher wages than you can negotiate your product value up to.

If everyone in America understood economics that well.

PRRose wrote: That is not true. The compensation of doctors, lawyers, and business executives is generally taxed as ordinary income. Such people have very limited opportunities to convert ordinary income to capital gain.

Very few of them make millions & millions of dollars. The higher up business execs also receive a lot of stock/option for compensation instead of ordinary income. It's a weird system in that people who generate wealth primarily off of their personal talent (the professionals you mentioned that practices or possesses specific expertise) in the field or domain of business (in the case of execs) are actually taxed at quite a high rate. But once you rise above that, things starts to shift the other way.

2016- There's no way Trump will win the general election
2018- There's no way President Trump would fire the missiles at China
2020- Get your hands off me, you dirty damn ape!

Mathias,

You've brought up an interesting point about keeping jobs in this country which applies to our economy as a whole.

Why don't we see our economy as our responsibility? It seems like everyone wants the president to save them from...themselves.

If we buy products made outside the US then we are exporting our own jobs. If we choose and lower priced product made by slave labor we are devaluing our own labor. We don't need government to change our reality. We need to change ourselves and the rest will work itself out. We enable and support harmful business practices by funding them.

We can support a real economy through your own spending practices regardless of who the president is. We can create the world we want to live in by living our values.

We sow the seeds of income inequality, environmental destruction, and unending war through each of our own individual choices and actions.

Being rich is not ok and should not be admired or even condoned. Excessive wealth is a result of an extremely sinful life fueled by pride, envy, gluttony, lust, and greed.

We all pay the prices for these sinners.

Long Duk Dong wrote:We can create the world we want to live in by living our values. We sow the seeds of income inequality, environmental destruction, and unending war through each of our own individual choices and actions.

This.

A simple test -- which party historically has shut down private or public lands to climbers, the drilling of anchors, the development of cliffs, etc. because of environmental and/or cultural (e.g., Indian) issues? Those are the core reasons climbers lose.

Todd.... the Democrats.

reboot wrote: Very few of them make millions & millions of dollars. The higher up business execs also receive a lot of stock/option for compensation instead of ordinary income. It's a weird system in that people who generate wealth primarily off of their personal talent (the professionals you mentioned that practices or possesses specific expertise) in the field or domain of business (in the case of execs) are actually taxed at quite a high rate. But once you rise above that, things starts to shift the other way.

Equity compensation is taxed as ordinary income. The exception is for a special type of option known as an incentive stock option; those are limited to $100,000 per year and thus are not very popular with the C-level executive crowd, who prefer another zero or two tacked on.

D B, I haven't looked into the Oregon wage increase very much yet. But having a wage increase and also a couple thousand new job (just from what I've read now) sounds like something else is going on. I'll look into it more.

As far as trying to keep US companies in the US and paying more taxes by force, has that ever worked out well? Worst comes to worst, they'll liquidate their assets and set up in another country under a new name. Then you'll have to legislate import tariffs to try and get them. Of course you'd have to get all this legislation through Congress and meanwhile, the reduction in available jobs will make US workers suffer. Not sure force is the best way to attain the goal. Lowering the tax rate and simplifying the tax code would incentivize them to stay.

Rebuilding infrastructure would create job, temporary though they'd be. But taxing offshore wealth would prove very difficult. All 'Widget Corp' has to do is create 'Widget International' in some other country and now getting taxes from them is much harder.

Subsidies to all business should end, not just to the oil and gas industry. But being as how we're running a deficit ever year as it is, how long do you want to keep putting the difference on the national credit card? Renewable Energy is a difficult subject because, it's expensive. A new fuel efficient car might be nice, but when your household bills already put you in the hole deeper every month, it's hard to justify that new car. I have think we need to get deficit neutral and create a plan to deal with the debt before we go spending more money.

Colin ... agreed. A very simple economic axiom = when you raise the cost of something you get less of it. Raise the cost of labor to an employer? You get less labor. Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winning economist, called the minimum wage law "the most anti-black law on the books."

From Milton Friedman:

"The fact is, the programs labeled as being “for the poor,” or “for the needy,” [by politicians like President Obama] almost always have effects exactly the opposite of those which their well-intentioned sponsors intend them to have.

Let me give you a very simple example – take the minimum wage law. Its well-meaning sponsors [like President Obama]– there are always in these cases two groups of sponsors – there are the well-meaning sponsors and there are the special interests, who are using the well-meaning sponsors as front men. You almost always when you have bad programs have an unholy coalition of the do-gooders on the one hand, and the special interest on the other. The minimum wage law is as clear a case as you could want. The special interests are of course the trade unions – the monopolistic trade craft unions. The do-gooders believe that by passing a law saying that nobody shall get less than $9 per hour (adjusted for today) or whatever the minimum wage is, you are helping poor people who need the money. You are doing nothing of the kind. What you are doing is to assure, that people whose skills, are not sufficient to justify that kind of a wage will be unemployed.

The minimum wage law is most properly described as a law saying that employers must discriminate against people who have low skills. That’s what the law says. The law says that here’s a man who has a skill that would justify a wage of $5 or $6 per hour (adjusted for today), but you may not employ him, it’s illegal, because if you employ him you must pay him $9 per hour. So what’s the result? To employ him at $9 per hour is to engage in charity. There’s nothing wrong with charity. But most employers are not in the position to engage in that kind of charity. Thus, the consequences of minimum wage laws have been almost wholly bad. We have increased unemployment and increased poverty.

Moreover, the effects have been concentrated on the groups that the do-gooders would most like to help. The people who have been hurt most by the minimum wage laws are the blacks. I have often said that the most anti-black law on the books of this land is the minimum wage law.

There is absolutely no positive objective achieved by the minimum wage law. Its real purpose is to reduce competition for the trade unions and make it easier for them to maintain the higher wages of their privileged members."