Originally Posted by gemstone
NO IF you look again it says TOP 1% the TOP 25% which would inclued the 1%.
To get back on track! You can't blame Chris for his stance but you have to understand it. Essilor if his competition. The more Crizal that is sold the less AR coat he sells.
Bash the competition! That is part of business as well!
Chris you should start buying up labs yourself. Then stock them with your products.!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The chart states that if your adjusted gross income in 2004 was $60,041, then you were in the top 25% of income earners. The chart also states that the top 25% income earners were responsible for 85% of the personal income taxes paid.
The charts note that the source of the data is from the IRS. Look here...
http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/indtaxst...=96981,00.html
...or here...
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04in14ar.xls (Careful... this is an xls file!)
I tend to agree with you, and so does this data.
Last edited by 1968; 06-20-2007 at 11:39 PM.
Anything you can do...................
There is no rule you can set to prevent acquisitions unless you would have some valid laws preventing cartels and price fixing.
What is happening in the USA, is happening every were else. In Canada as far as I know there are 2-3 independent labs left and the rest is controlled by Essilor. Same in Germany, Switzerland, France and many other countries. Hoya and Zeiss also have a fair share in the same department.
It is fascinating to see the progress of takeovers internationally, and I have been watching and following it for the last 7 years.
The multinational corporations are not producing anymore in Europe or the USA, they moved production to the far east, from Thailand to China and India and so forth.
However they did not give the retailers the break of selling their products in the ratio of new, so much lower manufacturing cost.
Therefore selling at the old prices and in many instances at increased ones their gross profits have heavily increased and give them plenty of cash to feed their steamroller tactics.
Some post's say that in a capitalistic system that the way business is done. It has never been done the same way, this is a first.....going visibly for full world wide domination.
It will be interesting to see what is going to happen to the retail market in the future.
Wonder what kind of taxes Chris pays.
Thanks for the suggestion, I have owned labs in the 1970s, even had to fight unions that tried to tell me how to run it. Thanks I am keeping my nose out of it.
Whoeever wants my product can get on the tollfree line to order and will get them by UPS from us, a distributor or our stock office in North Carolina.
Besides that who wants an optical lab if the corporations will ration you on selected products as soon as they can get away with it. :D
Chris: <<There is no rule you can set to prevent acquisitions unless you would have some valid laws preventing cartels and price fixing.>>
Contradictory. The laws preventing cartels and price fixing must have metrics to enable enforcement.
It is easier to complain than to propose a solution that can work. Free enterprise and capitalism will lead to winners and losers. There is a need to constrain things as market shares expand too far. My original question remains open for your comments Chris.
Many more than that Chris
Chris, thanks this is precisely the point I'm trying to get to in a roundabout way...Free trade and multinationals have it made it so that these corporate interests make more and more money while the jobs left in the "first world" nations are all service industry, no skill. Manufacturing has almost been entirely outsourced from the US. even the chips that make our weapons work are made in China. If for no other reason, capitalist conservatives should be concerned about what this does for our vulnerability. if we don't make the stuff that protects us, not even the uniforms or the boots of the soldiers, than what happens if we go to war with one of our manufacturers (who coincidentally also own 24% of the US national debt).
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Prognatus ex Alchemy ad Diligo
Eliza Joy Martius VIII MMVIII
I agree with you,there Grube, and I am a capitalist conservative. It worries the dooky out of me. The jobs go with all this. We should have listened to Ross Perot. What would you propose?
I stand corrected. I was remembering the numbers a little bit incorrectly.
The top 10% pays about 65% of the tax burden. It's the top 25% that pays 85% of the tax burden. (Hereinabove I state it was the top 10% that pays 85%.)
Sorry. I'm getting old enough that my memory is about as long as my... morning runs.
Should have check my sources before spouting exact numbers.
Apologetically,
dbracer
"Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor; act as if you do." C.S. Lewis
Sorry Optirep...................you are pulling the wrong rope on the church bells and it sounds off key.
Chris does not make, nor sell any AR coatings...............and is not in competition with anybody that makes AR coatings and sells them. A
Actually I am not bashing any competiton. Actually I am in another field of the optical supply business. I have no business interest if you or your company, (Luxottica) buy's up the whole balance of optical retail stores in the US, as well as I have none, if one or all of the multinationals purchase the whole lab and distribution businesses as well.
I am an independent business owner that watches the happenings and post's them first thing in the morning on the Optiboard if I catch any, as I did yesterday without any comments.
\
Gemstone,
I know I saved money on the tax cuts. I'm not rich. 'Course I'm not poor either. Well ... my inlaws call me a poor sona... let's not get into that.
If the rich got a tax break in equal percentage, it doesn't bother me any. What? Are we now supposed to get in to class distinction on these tax cuts?
I still don't understand why we whine about the advantages of others and blame others for our disadvantages. It doesn't work that way. Well unless you just want to whine.
Now didn't we start talking about Essilor? I'm lost.
Respectfully,
dbracer
"Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor; act as if you do." C.S. Lewis
Coincidence or not..........................
Interesting coincidence.....................Essilor announces enlargement of their distribution net.......................and Lux announces purchase of Oakley................both June 30, 2007.................as of today the daylight hours are getting shorter.
It's Fair Trade vs. Free Trade. The whole Thomas Friedman thing is putting a noose around our own necks. The World is not Flat. Every other country (with the exception of a trend in Europe) still have a very strong tariff system to protect their own industries. We had strong industries here until we started eliminating tariffs. Switch back to a tariff, protectionist style economy (within reason of course) and things would get better.
Another BIG problem with the system is our lack of federalized healthcare. half the price in every car we sell is the health insurance Detroit has to pay for. This is one of the biggest reasons we have so many of our US companies moving overseas. Medicare may not be perfect, but that's because its only insuring those at high risk. if it was universal it would work even more efficiently, and as it is it operates at a 3% overhead, while the health insurance industry (for profit) operates at 20% overhead. The CEO of United Healthcare made 1.7 BILLION in salary last year. this is why we are bleeding.
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Eliza Joy Martius VIII MMVIII
Well, if you listened to him you would believe he'd fix everything in six months.He might have been able to, if we disposed of all the checks and balances and granted him total power.
This is really a concern.
Item: I used to get my stock SV polys from Atlanta Optical. Got a good deal, and the lenses were made in the US. Essilor buys them, now the same lenses are made in Thailand. So I go to JG optical, which still carries the US made lenses, and turns out, get a better deal.
DragonlensmanWV N.A.O.L.
"There is nothing patriotic about hating your government or pretending you can hate your government but love your country."
Is younger the only decient progressive still made in the US?
Seems someone told me that we tried the tariff system. Just before the great depression. I guess that's where the "within reason" comes in. I agree with tariffs though. We are getting our clocks cleaned.
As for the health care, ask Chris what health care really cost in that system. The only cure for the health care problems here would be to totally out law health insurance. It'd be a terrible four or five years, people would die, but things would work out real well in the long run.
Doesn't Younger have its lenses in Hakim, Lenscrafters, and such?
I have heard they do sell to chains. Don't everybody?
Actually the tariff system was used since 1776. it was the nation's sole source of income until the Civil War. Tariffs work great, in fact every other nation uses them. when we are the only free trade nation, we get screwed. China has a 20% tariff on any American cars entering the country. India has a law against chain stores. Corporations virtually don't exist there because no one can own more than one location.
As for making insurance companies illegal I'm all for that....I've been the victim of their abuses for years with my health problems. I had to declare bankruptcy because, as an insured patient, i still had almost 30,000 in bills for my services that i was responsible for.
Certianly India is an extreme I don't think we need to emulate, but the elimination of tariffs is precisely why we have such insane trade imbalances and why virtually nothing is made here anymore. In 1980 we were the world's largest exporter of finished goods. we are now the world's largest importer of finished goods. that's practically the definition of a Third World nation...a nation which does not produce finished goods and needs to buy everything from someone else.
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Eliza Joy Martius VIII MMVIII
I Googled "medicare efficiency". The first two hits suggest Medicare is not nearly as efficient as you suggest:
http://www.nber.org/papers/8395
http://www.managedcaremag.com/archiv...icare_eff.html
Unfortunately, trade between nations is not the bleak either/or scenario that you have portrayed. Import growth tends to go hand-in-hand with economic growth. And it is possible to export a lot of things while importing a lot of things:
http://www.ita.doc.gov/press/publica.../2006_0207.asp
Well to discuss those specific links, the first one really is so vague as to be almost pointless in its complaints on costs.
The second one has it's own sets of issues:
This is a common way of complaining about Medicare. 'It's so expensive, just look at how much it cost to pass this bill' but that bill was pushed through by the members of congress who want to see Medicare shrunk and/or eliminated."Just imagine all of the congressional and administrative staff time and effort devoted to creating, debating, promoting, opposing, and ultimately passing the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003," the study states. "[N]ot one dime of the money and time spent on that . . . debate appear[s] in Medicare's administrative costs."
and if we were to include the cost of congressional debate on everything that is managed by the government or private industry all of them would be inflated. It's a false argument.
I will admit that not counting the salaries of some administrators is misleading, but even with that, who in Medicare earsn 1.7 Billion a year in salary? That is money being paid by the insured and not being spent on healthcare plain and simple.
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Eliza Joy Martius VIII MMVIII
and the fourth google listing gives us:
Medicare efficiency
Looking back over the period from 1970 to 1997, Medicare's cost containment performance has been better than that of private insurance. Starting in the 1970s, Medicare and private insurance plans initially grew very much in tandem, showing few discernible differences (see Chart 1). By the 1980s, per capita spending had more than doubled in both sectors. But Medicare became more cost-conscious than private health insurance in the 1980s; and cost containment efforts, particularly through hospital payment reforms, began to pay off. From about 1984 through 1988, Medicare's per capita costs grew much more slowly than those in the private sector.
This gap in overall growth in Medicare's favor stayed relatively constant until the early 1990s, when private insurers began to take the rising costs of health insurance seriously. At that time, growth in the cost of private insurance moderated in a fashion similar to Medicare's slower growth in the 1980s. Thus, it can be argued that the private sector was playing catch-up to Medicare in achieving cost containment. Private insurance thus narrowed the difference with Medicare in the 1990s, but as of 1997 there was still a considerable way for the private sector to go before its cost growth would match Medicare's achievement of lower overall growth.
It should not be surprising that the per capita rates over time are similar between Medicare and private sector spending, because all health care spending shares technological change and improvement as a major factor driving high rates of expenditure growth. To date, most of the cost savings generated by all payers for care has come from slowing growth in the prices paid for services but making only preliminary inroads in reducing the use of services or addressing the issue of technology. Reining in the use of services will be a major challenge for private insurance as well as Medicare in the future, and it is not clear whether the public or private sector is better equipped to do this. Further, Medicare's experience with private plans has been distinctly mixed.
Reform options such as the premium support approach seek savings by allowing the premiums paid by beneficiaries to vary so that those choosing higher-cost plans pay substantially higher premiums. The theory is that beneficiaries will become more price conscious and choose lower-cost plans. This in turn will reward private insurers that are able to hold down costs. And there is some evidence from the federal employee system and the Calpers system in California that this has disciplined the insurance market to some degree. Studies that have focused on retirees, however, show much less sensitivity to price differences. Older people may be less willing to change doctors and learn new insurance rules in order to save a few dollars each month. Thus, what is not known is how well this will work for Medicare beneficiaries.
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Prognatus ex Alchemy ad Diligo
Eliza Joy Martius VIII MMVIII
The first link is not vague. It states: "Using linear and semiparametric instrumental variables, we find that a large component of Medicare expenditures -- $26 billion in 1996 dollars, or nearly 20 percent of total Medicare expenditures -- appears to provide no benefit in terms of survival, nor is it likely that this extra spending improves the quality of life." That does not support the assertion that Medicare is efficient.
The second states that the figures from the study you cited earlier don't take into account all Medicare's administrative costs; one could assume that the article in the fourth link did not either. It's certainly not a false argument to point out that government involvement increase costs.
No one in Medicare should earn $1.7 billion/year... they chose to "serve the public".
Last edited by 1968; 06-21-2007 at 07:11 PM.
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