Primeiro, é frustrante que continuemos a discutir aumentos de impostos.
Segundo, poucos discordam que o nosso principal problema é a enorme dívida externa. Reduzir o ritmo a que o Estado se endivida é importante, mas tão ou mais crucial é aumentar a poupança privada em Portugal. O que taxa o imposto sucessório? As poupanças. Não pode haver pior altura para desencorajar a poupança em Portugal.
Terceiro, a experiência mostra que é difícil cobrar imposto sucessório aos mais ricos... não só é difícil medir a riqueza móvel que as pessoas têm, em empresas ou investimentos, como também esta é, quase por definição, facilmente transferível sem pagar imposto uns dias antes da morte.
Quarto, a experiência portuguesa mostra que o imposto sucessório irrita sobretudo as classes média-alta urbanas. Muitas pessoas que estão longe de ser ricos capitalistas herdaram um ou dois prédios de família.
Ricardo Reis
03/09/2011
Imposto sucessório
Can Buy Me Love
Before Libyans rose up against him, Muammar Gaddafi used money, and well-timed diplomatic overtures, to worm his way into the West’s good graces. How Bush, Blair, and Berlusconi gave the brutal dictator a makeover.
Daily Beast
Tripoli Files Show CIA Working With Libya
The Central Intelligence Agency and Libyan intelligence services developed such a tight relationship during the George W. Bush administration that the U.S. shipped terror suspects to Libya for interrogation and suggested the questions they should be asked, according to documents found in Libya's External Security agency headquarters.
WSJ
Joint Special Operations Command
The CIA’s armed drones and paramilitary forces have killed dozens of al-Qaeda leaders and thousands of its foot soldiers. But there is another mysterious organization that has killed even more of America’s enemies in the decade since the 9/11 attacks.
CIA operatives have imprisoned and interrogated nearly 100 suspected terrorists in their former secret prisons around the world, but troops from this other secret organization have imprisoned and interrogated 10 times as many, holding them in jails that it alone controls in Iraq and Afghanistan.
WP
01/09/2011
Inflation Treath
"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens."
"Lenin was certainly right," John Maynard Keynes continued in his 1919 classic, "The Economic Consequences of the Peace."
"There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."
PJB
31/08/2011
E por que não taxar os ricos, prostitutas e solteiros?
Os impostos servem essencialmente para duas coisas: financiar o Estado nas suas funções sociais e de soberania e para se fazer uma redistribuição mais justa da riqueza criada na sociedade. Nós, pelos vistos, não estamos a fazer nem uma coisa, nem outra. O que estamos a fazer, nós que nos orgulhamos de dizer que vivemos num sistema capitalista e numa economia de mercado, é simplesmente a demonizar a riqueza e o capital. Riqueza que também se cria com mérito e trabalho, e capital que muitas vezes gera emprego.
A continuar assim, nesta discussão ridícula, um destes dias estaremos como os alemães que esta semana decidiram criar um novo imposto de seis euros/dia para as prostitutas em Bona; ou como aquele Czar da Rússia, Pedro o Grande, que resolveu taxar as pessoas que andavam com barba, chapéus e botas, as chaminés, os nascimentos, funerais e casamentos. E já agora não se esqueçam de Oscar Wilde: "Os solteiros ricos deviam pagar o dobro de impostos. Não é justo que alguns homens sejam mais felizes do que os outros".
Económico
29/08/2011
Is Capitalism Doomed?
To enable market-oriented economies to operate as they should and can, we need to return to the right balance between markets and provision of public goods. That means moving away from both the Anglo-Saxon model of laissez-faire and voodoo economics and the continental European model of deficit-driven welfare states. Both are broken.
The right balance today requires creating jobs partly through additional fiscal stimulus aimed at productive infrastructure investment. It also requires more progressive taxation; more short-term fiscal stimulus with medium- and long-term fiscal discipline; lender-of-last-resort support by monetary authorities to prevent ruinous runs on banks; reduction of the debt burden for insolvent households and other distressed economic agents; and stricter supervision and regulation of a financial system run amok; breaking up too-big-to-fail banks and oligopolistic trusts.
Over time, advanced economies will need to invest in human capital, skills and social safety nets to increase productivity and enable workers to compete, be flexible and thrive in a globalized economy. The alternative is – like in the 1930s - unending stagnation, depression, currency and trade wars, capital controls, financial crisis, sovereign insolvencies, and massive social and political instability.
Nouriel Roubini
TSU
E aqueles que pensam, baseados em modelos com hipóteses simplistas, que reduzir a TSU vai criar emprego, preparem-se para criar mais um problema sem qualquer tipo de resultado.
A função investimento, entre outras coisas, depende dos niveis de taxas de juro e das expectativas sobre o nivel de procura dos produtos de uma empresa.
Em Portugal, as primeiras são altissimas e as segundas são negras a nivel interno e em desaceleração a nivel externo.
Possivelmente tinha mais impacto aumentar na mesma o IVA e começar a pagar aos bancos as dividas das empresas públicas e do próprio Estado. A probabilidade das taxas de juro começarem a caír seria bem maior e certamente as expectativas sobre a recuperação económica melhorariam bem mais depressa. E aí o Investimento aparece e o desemprego começa a baixar.
Sedes
A guerra inútil
A ideia da criação do Dia do Orgulho Heterossexual em São Paulo, apesar de idiota, é coerente. É para esse tipo de aberração que a história “progressista” caminha. O Brasil elegeu e santificou um ex-operário, o mundo achou que estava salvo com a eleição de um presidente americano negro, o Brasil se achou moderno ao passar a ser presidido por uma mulher.
Os politicamente corretos não descansarão enquanto pretos e brancos, ricos e pobres, gays e héteros não entrarem definitivamente em guerra.
Rvista Época
26/08/2011
Diversidade Artificial
Elmhurst College to Ask About Sexual Orientation
A "yes" answer could put students in line to qualify for a scholarship
NBC
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/executive-order-to-push-agencies-on-federal-workforce-diversity/2011/08/18/gIQAng5POJ_story.html
Washington Post
22/08/2011
19/08/2011
17/08/2011
14/08/2011
Abdi Ismail Samatar
«O grupo [Al Shabab] é um dos culpados pela fome na Somália hoje, os outro são, a guerra americana ao terror, a UE pela manipulação da produção de alimentos no país, o Governo Federal Transitório e a ONU. Essas são as organizações que produziram a fome na Somália.»
Folha
10/08/2011
09/08/2011
Multiculturalism at Work
Critics claim that the spread of Sharia law is creating a parallel legal system that opposes equal rights. We get a rare glimpse of an Islamic court at work .
Daily Telegraph
07/08/2011
06/08/2011
Guerrinhas
"A Ongoing há-de pagar pelos prejuízos causados à Impresa e aos accionistas", garantiu Francisco Pinto Balsemão em entrevista
CM
04/08/2011
New identities
But today's European Right is a changed animal from even a decade ago, as neoconservatism and neoliberalism have largely replaced the more fascistic ideologies of old. In particular, as Breivik took pains to point out in his manifesto, the European New Right has gone out of its way to disassociate itself from the rank anti-Semitism that still characterised them only a few years ago.
Al Jazeera
02/08/2011
30/07/2011
The Identity Ideology of Anders Breivik
The book 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence which, interestingly enough, was first made publicly available on the Internet by Kevin Slaughter, an ordained minister in Anton LaVey (1930-1997)’s Church of Satan.
Looking at his Facebook profile, one immediately notices Breivik’s strong interest in Freemasonry and his photograph in full Masonic regalia. The apron identifies him as a member of a St. John’s Lodge of the Norwegian Order of Freemasons, the “regular” Masonic obedience in Norway. The circumstance that he was indeed a member of the Søilene St. John’s Lodge in Oslo has been confirmed by the Order, which proceeded to expel Breivik only after his imprisonment.
By Massimo Introvigne
22/07/2011
Como chegamos ao estado a que chegamos
O Pacto de Estabilidade e Crescimento (PEC) é um instrumento «estúpido» e «rígido», uma vez que não permite alterar decisões em conjunturas adversas. Quem o diz é o presidente da Comissão Europeia.
TSF
20/07/2011
A History of College Grade Inflation
'A' is the most common grade in US Colleges: «A stunning 43% of all grades in the United States are now A's... By the end of the last decade, A’s and B’s represented 73 percent of all grades awarded at public schools, and 86 percent of all grades awarded at private schools».
NYT
The Clash of Generations
“When the cold war ended, we thought we were going to have a clash of civilizations. It turns out we’re having a clash of generations.”
Thomas Friedman, NYT
11/07/2011
Don’t blame Moody’s for a messy euro crisis
In the short run, the only way to bring the private sector into a voluntary scheme is a debt swap, to be organised by the European financial stability facility. That is currently not possible because the EFSF is not allowed to purchase bonds in secondary markets.
If the rules on the EFSF were relaxed, it could offer to buy up Greek debt at a discount, say 20 per cent, in exchange for its own AAA-rated bonds. The sellers would have to register a loss, but at least they end up with good securities. There would be no reason for the rating agencies to act.
In the long run, the only solution is a eurozone bond, which you can think of as an extended secondary-market purchase programme by the EFSF. This is why the short-term and long-term solutions are identical. Of course, it will not be called a eurozone bond. The Germans had a wonderful euphemism to describe the debt they raised to pay for unification: Sondervermögen, or “special wealth”. The EU will come up with a similarly misleading name. let us not kid ourselves however: a eurozone bond it will be.
FT
09/07/2011
O Perigo das Leis Raciais
Eles são gêmeos idênticos, mas...segundo a UnB, um é branco e o outro é negro. A decisão da banca da Universidade de Brasília que determina quem tem direito ao privilégio da cota mostra o perigo de classificar as pessoas pela cor da pele - coisa que fizeram os nazistas e o apartheid sul-africano
Veja
08/07/2011
Voluntary Greek debt plan ‘unrealistic’
“I think we have to accept that a voluntary contribution is unrealistic,” Mr de Jager told the Dutch newspaper Financieele Dagblad after a meeting on Wednesday in London with George Osborne, the British chancellor.
FT
07/07/2011
27/06/2011
2004: Friedman: 'Strong possibility' of euro zone collapse
Milton Friedman, the Nobel-Prize winning US economist and one of the most influential economists of the 20th Century believes there is a "strong possibility" that the 12 member euro zone could collapse "in the next few years".
EuObserver
Economy: Global shocks to become more frequent, says OECD
Disruptive shocks to the global economy are likely to become more frequent and cause greater economic and societal hardship. The economic spill-over effect of events like the financial crisis or a potential pandemic will grow due to the increasing interconnectivity of the global economy and speed with which people, goods and data travel, according to a new OECD report.
“Future Global Shocks” analyses five potential major risks in the years ahead: a pandemic, a cyber attack disrupting critical infrastructure, a financial crisis, socio-economic unrest and a geomagnetic storm.
OCDE
24/06/2011
ERC em Incumprimento
O presidente da Entidade Reguladora para a Comunicação Social (ERC), vice presidente e restantes membros do conselho regulador não têm actualizadas, no Tribunal Constitucional (TC), algumas declarações de rendimentos e património.
CM
Who Spends More on Social Welfare: the United States or Sweden?
If the adjustments for purchasing power are correct, net public social expenditures by government in America in 2003 ranked roughly in the middle of the Nordic countries. Per capita net public social welfare spending in 2003 (in 1990 dollars) in the U.S. was $5,400, while Sweden’s was $6,300, Norway’s $5,900, Denmark’s $5,472, and Finland’s $4,200.
The U.S. differs from the Nordic countries in that it is a safety-net society. Workers and people with adequate incomes purchase directly, or receive through their employer, private life insurance, health insurance, and pension plans. Many make charitable donations for social welfare purposes. Public benefits are available for the elderly, for the disabled, and for families whose incomes fall below various poverty lines. Meanwhile, the Nordic countries adopt a more universal, government-sponsored approach. If we take into account these differences in style, the appropriate measure is net public and private social welfare expenditures per capita. By this metric, the U.S. then leads the way at $7,800, followed by Sweden at $6,700, Norway at $6,300, Denmark at $5,800, and Finland at $4,900.
Freakonomics
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