intuitive ink

Where did the information asymmetry in stock options come from?  "Bill Clinton in 1992, one of his campaign causes, was that no company should be able to deduct the cost of executive compensation in excess of $1,000,000. But when it came to actually implementing, the treasury department decided:  As long as CEO pay is linked to company performance, you could deduct over a million dollars. Well, that was a signal to a lot of these executives and to their boards of directors to make more and more of executive pay into stock options. That's where the whole stock option thing came from. It was a kind of a perversion of Bill Clinton's promise in the 1992 election."  -- Robert Reich,  Inequality for All   ~ :47 minutes  Executives -- especially unethical executives -- thrive on information asymmetry. In fact, many will go out of their way to create as much asymmetry as possible and to prevent employees from being able to access or get the data...

photo credit:   http://www.flickr.com/photos/42621781@N08/ Seed money.  Angel investing.  Venture capital.  Funding start-ups that aspire to be "big business" has become a strange beast.   Today is the official effective date for Title II of the JOBS Act, which many are hopeful can kick off a New Great Era of fundraising.   But in many ways, this is a huge red herring. Once upon a time pretty much any company that wanted to could raise money according to a broad array of " blue sky " laws which varied by state: Blue sky laws developed in the frenzied years leading up to the Great Depression, in response to fact that more and more ordinary investors were losing money in highly speculative or fraudulent schemes promising high investment returns, such as oil fields and exotic investments in foreign countries .  But after the hype, boom, bust and onset of the Great Depression, thinking changed a bit.  The passing of the Securities Act of 193...

Part II -- Closing Compensation Loopholes In Part I we established that for this thought experiment, we need a new way of thinking about our be- loathed tax system.  It just doesn't make sense to keep gluing new doodads (exclusions / extensions) onto the old one; the best thing we can do with the rusted old contraption is to toss it out and start over from scratch.  Starting from scratch, we can implement 21st century concepts, materials, and thinking applicable to our 21st century economy. Because this new system of taxation is being designed specifically to encourage businesses, organizations and/or entities with excessive profits to more generously reward the "low men on the totem pole," the progressive tax bracket system makes the most sense.  A business can choose to minimize total tax payments by paying its workforce more, or it can voluntarily pay more in tax than it must to when it chooses to keep profits concentrated among the few at the top.  This s...

Part I:  Income Tax One of my favorite time-killing activities is fairly nihilistic. It involves thought experiments where obviously broken systems are annihilated: figuratively blown apart, sending all the blazing, broken, smoking pieces careening into smithereens.  No more  WD-40 hastily applied to the rusting, booby-trapped secret compartments designed for special circumstances almost two centuries (or even two decades) ago. Indeed, the defunct system we're talking about here is the US Tax Code.   Not just income tax (which gets most of the attention), but sales tax, property tax, the death tax, etc -- the whole shebang.  We need to re-engineer the very framework underlying concepts and philosophy of tax. In Part I today, we'll focus on the Income Tax, because income is the source of all the grease in the wheels in our economy.  After studying and pondering the current tax code, which starts taxing AT 25 PERCENT ($70,700 for a married couple), ev...

" They get away with this treatment of people because they call these men who work under them "sub-contractors," which essentially means that they need to have a CPA to understand all the wonderful tax deductions available to them.  If only those construction workers had business degrees!  " My father was a construction worker. He measured out, cut, and lifted heavy sheetrock onto bare frames of houses, fitting things together like puzzle pieces with precision and speed. He did this manual labor in the most extreme climates from Las Vegas to Alaska to Utah to Florida. He wore flannels and had a beard, and drank whiskey to ease the pain of the dental work he needed, but couldn't afford. He passed away  too young, as a single parent: zero health insurance, no life savings, no life insurance.  He spent his life building houses for other people, but passed away in a small trailer that didn't even belong to him. Everything he'd worked f...

As far as airports go, there is only one word to describe DXB, AKA Dubai International Airport: Big. Actually, scratch that.  There are two words to describe it:  big and busy.   This was my first experience in an airport outside the US, so I can't say I had any expectations upon arrival.  My initial mindset when getting off the plane was to immediately find my connecting gate. . . But then I remembered that I would have quite a bit of time to kill.   Local time in Dubai was 7:20 PM when we landed, and my connecting flight to Bangalore wasn't scheduled to leave until 3:30 AM.   Eight full hours with change to kill:  more than enough time fully restore the blood flow through my veins, to wander around the 18.6 million square feet  of floor space and become as acquainted as I could with the International Airport Scene . One of my first challenges was refueling.  While the airplanes in the 90 degree heat outside were sucking down on w...

"Ice is way too dangerous for airplanes  . . . "   The conversation with my little brother seemed a distant memory as I sat shivering in my airplane seat with nothing more than a thin blanket to cover my lap.  I'd been carefully following the route on the screen in front of me, and we were just southeast of the dot that represented the Northernmost place on the planet. Although my seat in this Boeing 777 was an aisle seat, it was toward the rear of the airplane.  So only the aisle and two seats separated me from that little window which offered a real-world peek of the Arctic. The people occuping those two seats were a couple -- tall, blond, Nordic-looking.  They wore matching white sweaters and khaki pants.  They did everything in a strange kind of synchronization, including consuming massive quantities of red wine.  I lost track of the number of mini-bottles they'd consumed, but luckily for me, they also visited the lavatory simultaneously. ...