Archive for category: Management

Is touted as the most comprehensive tax reform since the 80s.
Leading the proposed changes is a 15 percent reduction in corporate income tax.

As for the individual tax — the front runners here are:

• eliminating inheritance tax and
• eliminating the deduction for state and local taxes.

But the much promised tax overhaul is being marred by feuds.

The proposed tax reform plan has attracted some high profile critics, such as Warren Buffett.
Buffett thinks that a lower corporate tax would not help our deficit.

In Congress, divisions among the legislators do not mark this as an auspicious beginning for the tax reform.
There is a lot of talk about Adult care center, Liddle  Bob. And more of the same.

Amidst these and other similar Washington “grown-up” talk the tax reform is slowly moving.
If moving at all.

Let’s hope it doesn’t take the same “route” as the Affordable Care Program.

“How do hemlines affect the economy?”
(No, this is not a fashion review article.)

In one of my workshops someone asked for a book recommendation on investing.
So I mentioned Stock Market 101.
The author, Michele Cagan, gives you the basics of stock market investing.
And keeps you entertained with tidbits like the following:

“When hemlines go up and skirts get shorter the economy and the stock market tend to be on the rise as well.
Longer skirts coincide with declining stock markets.”

Another indicator, according to Cagan, is the Super Bowl indicator:

“… when teams from NFL and the AFL first battled it out on the field.
According to legend, the market soars when an original NFL-based team wins,
and it tanks when an AFL team takes the game.
This indicator has proven to be 80% accurate since the 1960s.”

And then there is this highly “scientific” index (saving the best for last ; )

“The Hot Waitress Index, which gauges the strength of the economy based on the attractiveness of food servers.
When there are more good-looking waiters and waitresses, according to this indicator, the economy is struggling.”

(Stocks, dividends, trading on the primary or secondary market:
Reading about this and other investing information can be fun.
Who knew!)

Wishing you success in all you do.

Charities helping lower-income patients pay for expensive drugs.
Worthy and noble, right?
That’s exactly what attorneys for Good Days, a patient-assistance charity, will try to prove in courts.

Good Days (formerly Chronic Disease Fund) receives donations from large drug makers such as
Bayer, Johnson and Johnson, Novartis, and others.

Good Days and its attorneys will try to prove that the charity is independent of its donors.
That no drug-maker donor can influence what medicine is covered under its co-pay assistance programs.

The attorneys won’t have an easy job.
Why?
According to an IRS’ analysis of the charity’s records:
90 percent to a full 100 percent of its co-payments support went to patients taking drugs made by the very company that donated the money.

Charity or profitable marketing?
When the court day arrives, attorneys from each side will try to make their case:
One side will say how much the patients benefited by being helped to pay for medicine they couldn’t otherwise afford.

The other side will say that, by helping patients pay for expensive medicine, the drug-maker donors help themselves
to collect millions of dollars from Medicare.
And that this in fact is a profitable marketing strategy for the donors.

Charity or profitable marketing — what do you think?