Goldman Sachs Makes Profit and Pays Little Taxes

  They got $10 billion and debt guarantees from the U.S. government in October because they are supposed to be strapped for operating cost, yet they had an $2.3 billion profit for the year after paying $10.9 billion in employee compensation and benefits ( read: Bonus ). On top of that, the company only has a tax liability of $14 million for the year after having had a $6 billion tax liability the year before. Those are word-wide numbers.   What is wrong with this picture?

  Bloomberg

The company’s effective income tax rate dropped to 1 percent from 34.1 percent, New York-based Goldman Sachs said today in a statement.

  So just how was their tax rate lowered. Can you say offshore?

         Goldman Sachs, which today reported its first quarterly loss since going public in 1999, lowered its rate with more tax credits as a percentage of earnings and because of “changes in geographic earnings mix,” the company said.

The rate decline looks “a little extreme,” said Robert Willens, president and chief executive officer of tax and accounting advisory firm Robert Willens LLC.

“I was definitely taken aback,” Willens said. “Clearly they have taken steps to ensure that a lot of their income is earned in lower-tax jurisdictions.”

U.S. Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat who serves on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said steps by Goldman Sachs and other banks shifting income to countries with lower taxes is cause for concern.

“This problem is larger than Goldman Sachs,” Doggett said. “With the right hand out begging for bailout money, the left is hiding it offshore.”

   This is what happens when there is no oversight from our government officials. I'll bet that the Republicans, and some Democrats, are making a fistful in kick-backs for passing this kind of shit ( bailout ).

Technorati Tags: Goldman Sachs,Wall Street,Taxes,Lloyd Doggett,Economy

Time Magazine's 2008 Person Of The Year: Barack Hussein Obama

   As if there would have been any other person to choose for this slot.

   Congratulations President-Elect Obama

  Person of the Year 2008

But crisis has a way of ushering even great events into the past. As Obama has moved with unprecedented speed to build an Administration that would bolster the confidence of a shaken world, his flash and dazzle have faded into the background. In the waning days of his extraordinary year and on the cusp of his presidency, what now seems most salient about Obama is the opposite of flashy, the antithesis of rhetoric: he gets things done. He is a man about his business — a Mr. Fix It going to Washington. That's why he's here and why he doesn't care about the furniture. We've heard fine speechmakers before and read compelling personal narratives. We've observed candidates who somehow latch on to just the right issue at just the right moment. Obama was all these when he started his campaign: a talented speaker who had opposed the Iraq war and lived a biography that was all things to all people. But while events undermined those pillars of his candidacy, making Iraq seem less urgent and biography less relevant, Obama has kept on rising. He possesses a rare ability to read the imperatives and possibilities of each new moment and organize himself and others to anticipate change and translate it into opportunity.

...Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich reminded the country that some aspects of politics will never change. Government is a human enterprise, after all, and Obama, like everyone else, is bound by its limits and subject to human frailty. Nevertheless, if he has shown anything this year, Obama has made it clear that he knows how to write new playbooks and do things in new ways. Which is a compelling quality right now. His arrival on the scene feels like a step into the next century — his genome is global, his mind is innovative, his world is networked, and his spirit is democratic. Perhaps it takes a new face to see the promise in a future that now looks dark. What's in store for Obama's America? "I don't have a crystal ball," he says. But the measure of his success in menacing times can be found in the number and variety of people who consider the question with eagerness alongside their dread.

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama,Time Magazine,Person Of The Year