The Truth About Oil Price Increases

 

                       

The left-wing political drill: Every time the price of oil and gasoline goes up, call for a congressional hearing and put oil company CEOS on the grill.

                       

Of course, the results, after all the political hoopla, will be the same. The politicos find nothing, despite all their efforts. The media get their headlines and stories. But the facts will be overlooked--again.

                       

The oil companies pay an effective tax rate of 39.8%, much higher than most corporations, far too high in an industry where exploration is so necessary and so expensive. They make about 8 cents on each dollar.

                       

Facts: Oil prices are determined by expectation of future long-term oil production. Supply and demand for oil play an important part, and the left does all it can to reduce supply. So the left-induced Merry-go-Round goes on and on. (See the Earl J Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole tweets.)

Wall Street Gibberish

                       

There’s an old saying: Nothing is new under the sun. Especially on Wall Street, where the merchandisers are constantly coming up with terms for marketing old investing concepts.

                       

I have heard a new term to offer investors a means of  beating the odds of investment success. Unfortunately, it has little to do with needed discipline. The term is applied to “tactical investing.”

                       

However, it’s the same old tactic used to time the market, a strategy where the odds for best-price success are rather small, researched at about 5% for those seeking optimal in-and-out transactions. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinesNewshole at Twitter.)

Special High Schools Are Needed

                       

Readers know my position on the poor K-12 schools, as well as my feelings about the lax, ineffective education most colleges offer in their run-of-the-mill, time-consuming college courses.

                       

My attention now is on the over 22,500 high schools who turn out so many unfinished products, as well as drop-outs who never complete the easiest of work entailed.

                       

I have always said, high school grads with special achievements ought to get diplomas that note grade honors, to distinguish them from ho-hum students.

                                           

Then we should have more, better, specialized high schools. But we now have only about 165 of them. On this subject I recommend a book by Chester E. Finn and Jessica A. Hockett about schools for which exams are needed to enter. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at twitter)

Our Energy Shortage Myth

 

                       

The U.S. imports about 20% of the world’s oil supply. That’s lots of dollars lost that hurts our international economy as well as foreign relations.

                       

Yet, we have enough oil and other at-hand energy in the country for our own needs, and for export, were we to politically decide to develop them.

                       

Take natural gas as just one example as a source of energy that has little environmental downside. We have enough in America to last at least 250 years. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at twitter)

The Future State of Business

                       

When you listen to politicians, you easily see how deceived too many are by the illusion that the huge federal and state debts will somehow disappear down the road. If only the problem is swept under the proverbial rug and forgotten, until the next election.

                       

Another problem too many politicians are overlooking: The need for ever-increasing telecommunication needs. It ought to be expanding at a rate beyond even our current imagination. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at twitter)

Why Lawyers Are Often Political Liberals

                       

In The Princeton Review’s 2013 edition, the publication lists what it considers the 168 best law schools. They also determined from a study of about 18,000 students, where the most politically-liberal-minded were.(Reputed by the survey to be at Northeastern University.)

                       

In real life, you can run a poll of existing lawyers by looking at their political donations, about 95% to the party we know that generally opposes tort reform or any legislation that would tend to diminish law fees.

(See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at twitter)

A Real Stimulus is Possible

                       

A stimulus ought to be a genuine job generator. Experience shows it should work quickly and be practical, not designed to be effective after the eventual, normal recovery would have occurred. After all, there are frequent, normal, recovery cycles in an economy.

                       

Moreover, a real stimulus will not change the country’s political and social infrastructure. To many politicians, a stimulus is the only hope of special political opportunity.

                       

The stimulus should not be an excuse to provide political payoffs. A stimulus is not supposed to promote voter turnout or change the form of government. And it certainly should not cause inflation to endanger our children and grandchildren in the future. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinesNewshole at Twitter.)

Communist China Avoids Keynesian Stimulus Economics. Why Not Us?

                       

It’s interesting to see a noted economics professor, Zhang Weiying, at a major Chinese university advise the Communistic China government on what it did wrong in the  past, using Keynesian stimulus efforts which had failed to keep their economy functioning at an even keel, despite all the funds thrown at the problem.

                       

As a result, they put a stop to this loose money policy, something to which our pundits of monetary policy at the Fed and fiscal policy at the Treasury are still committed. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinesNewshole at Twitter.)

Corporate Taxes Make No Sense

                       

All politicians want the creation of jobs. Some of them want corporations to pay their “fair share” of taxes while producing work openings.

                       

But U.S. corporations pay more corporate taxes than all others world-wide.  So how are they to compete in the world markets?

                       

Furthermore, our Keynesian politicians spend and spend and print  more paper money to stimulate the economy. Yet, U.S. corporations have well over $1.7 trillion in overseas earnings that they do not bring back because those earnings, already taxed overseas, would be taxed again by Uncle Sam.

A reduced U.S. tax rate would provide much of those funds as a genuine stimulus. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at twitter)

Big Banks are Too Big

  

                   

Federal regulators keep trying to cut the size of big banks which they claim have become too big to fail. The clumsy Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 has staggered along with its thousands of pages of bureaucrat lingo, that included an attempt to keep banks secure. All it has done so far has made banks larger.

                       

Breaking them up isn’t easy, nor will it solve the problem of safety. Smaller banks will have to work with each other to accommodate the economy, and this keeps stacking a potential house of cards. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at twitter)

                       

Use of an Independent Corporate Board?

                       

Investors all agree that an independent board of directors is important and they would hope all companies in which they invest, as opposed to merely trade, would have a truly independent board.

                       

The question is: What is a truly independent board of directors? I would say, the one primarily in charge of spending, costs, and audits. Also, the CEO and the board chairman should not be the same executive.

                                                   

Who is a good manager or not is often too subjective to be a critical factor in determining how effective the board can be. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at twitter)

Media Views of Unemployment Figures

                       

When reported month-to-month new net job increases are running about half the rising number of Americans, and you, yourself, see more and more unemployed around you, but the media insists on reporting a drop in the official unemployment rate, you just know something is wrong.

                       

You do, but most of the media doesn’t.

                       

When a skilled worker can’t find a permanent job but instead gets part-time, temporary work for a couple of weeks, he is considered employed by the media when it suits them fine to parrot the resultant employment numbers.

                       

Nor does the media tell you how the employment numbers are actually estimated by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Not by accurate head-count but a sort of poll subject to the pitfalls of such a system. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at twitter)

Restraining Economic Confidence

                                                   

You will never really get this from the media headlines, who repeat anti-business threats from politicians who should know better.

                       

You will never create jobs when business owners and managers are unsure of the future, or fear what government will throw in their paths in the future.

                       

So the best way to keep an economy in a recession or the doldrums, is to rant at businessmen, or threaten them with more taxes, or raise their costs in many bureaucratic ways. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at twitter)

A Real Government Stimulus

 

                       

A stimulus planned during a recession must act quickly, if it is to be practical. It’s supposed to stimulate the economy with minimal cost.

                       

A government really fully aware of how to stimulate a morbid economy would institute a quick tax cut on all types of personal income; that always works,

Tax cuts on interest and capital gains.

                       

Corporate tax cuts also are tremendous boosts to an overall depressed economy especially when most foreign country rates are much lower than those in America. (See the Earl J Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole tweets.)

                   

Cheaper College Tuition

                       

There’s no reason college cannot be cheaper;  if colleges were only under pressure to try to reduce costs.

                       

Take a study done by Christopher Matgouranis, Jonathan Robe, and Richard Vedder, a Professor of Economics at Ohio University, and the director of the Center College Affordability and Productivity group.

                       

Reporting data at the main campus, at Austin of the University of Texas, the study says tuition fees could be cut in about half by asking 80% of the faculty with the lowest teaching loads to teach half as much as the 20% with the biggest loads. The top 20% now cover 57% of the teaching.

                       

Many professors simply do not teach but spend time on research, much of questionable utility. Also, student-teacher ratio standards make little sense, while college bureaucracies are in need of major cost-saving overhauls and streamlining which can reduce tuition costs even more. (See the Earl J. Weinreb NewsHole® comments and @BusinessNewshole at twitter)