Author: Staff (Page 12 of 27)

      Debating tax policy

      December 11, 2012 /

      Should the top 2 percent be taxed more? That’s the big debate in Washington these days, and you might be surprised as to what some big business people are saying about it.

      On Tuesday, FedEx Chairman and CEO Fred Smith, an adviser to Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign, said that the notion that tax hikes on the richest Americans would kill jobs was simply “mythology.”

      And on Monday, a gathering of the nation’s top defense executives took a surprising turn when they endorsed tax rate increases on the wealthy and cuts of up to $150 billion to the Pentagon’s budget. Top executives from Northrop Grumman, Pratt & Whitney, TASC and RTI International Metals appeared at the National Press Club at an event organized by the Aerospace Industries Association, the top defense contractor lobbyist.

      David Langstaff, CEO of TASC, said that the executives were speaking out because so far leaders of the defense industry were “talking a good game, but are still unwilling to park short-term self-interest.” After the event, he told a defense reporter for Politico that tax rates need to go up.

      “In the near term, [income tax rates] need to go up some,” Langstaff said. “This is a fairness issue — there needs to be recognition that we’re not collecting enough revenue. In the last decade we’ve fought two wars without raising taxes. So I think it does need to go up.”

      David Hess, head of Pratt & Whitney, said his parent company, United Technologies Corp, believed personal income tax rates should be on the table; Dawne Hickton, CEO of RTI, said he would back a rate hike if it led to a deal.

      The CEOs join other high-profile executives who are willing to chip in more. Following a meeting with President Barack Obama last week at the White House, executives emerged to endorse higher rates. “There needs to be some revenue element to this, and [Obama] started with rates,” said Joe Echeverria, CEO of Deloitte LLP. “And he started with rates on what we would define [as] the upper two percent … that we have to pay our fair share. And I think everybody was in agreement with that notion.”

      With the end of the election, more people are willing to call out the absurdity of Republican dogma. Basically, it’s silly to argue that behavior will be affected at all by top rates going from 35% to 39.6%.

      Uncategorized

      Growth of frack water treatment

      December 7, 2012 /

      With the fracking boom, we’re seeing an explosion of related industries as well. One issue relating to hydraulic fracking has to do with the massive amounts of water used in the process. The water gets contaminated, and then it has to be dealt with. This is even bigger than the problem of potential ground water contamination.

      Start-ups, venture capitalists and large companies, including Veolia and Siemens, see riches in water cleanup and are developing and testing various technologies. They are also working in other areas besides shale gas, including Canada’s oil sands and the use of water to pressure oil out of wells.

      One of these companies is Ecosphere Technologies of Stuart, Florida, which uses ozone as a disinfectant to clean water in a process called advanced oxidation. The treatment, which does not use chemicals, can both eliminate the chemicals typically used for bacteria control and scale inhibition during fracking and recycle 100 percent of the water, according to Charles Vinick, the company’s chief executive.

      Ecosphere says it has cleaned more than two billion gallons of water and eliminated the need for more than 1.7 million gallons of chemicals at approximately 600 oil and natural gas wells in U.S. shale fields since 2008.

      The developments are very encouraging, both from an economic point of view and an environmental point of view, and this should help the overall fracking business which has been an economic boom for the US.

      Economy, Energy, General Business, Manufacturing

      Great news from Apple regarding US manufacturing

      December 6, 2012 /

      This is big news, and frankly it’s nice to see a company like Apple put its excess billions to use here in the United States.

      Apple CEO Tim Cook says the company will produce one of its existing lines of Mac computers in the United States next year.

      Cook made the comments in part of an interview taped for NBC’s “Rock Center,” but aired Thursday morning on “Today” and posted on the network’s website.

      In a separate interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, he said that the company will spend $100 million in 2013 to move production of the line to the U.S. from China.

      “This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people and we’ll be investing our money,” Cook told Bloomberg.

      Here’s more context about why so much manufacturing has been done in China.

      Cook said in his interview with NBC that companies like Apple chose to produce their products in places like China, not because of the lower costs associated with it, but because the manufacturing skills required just aren’t present in the U.S. anymore.

      He added that the consumer electronics world has never really had a big production presence in the U.S. As a result, it’s really more about starting production in the U.S. than bringing it back.

      There has been a trend in bringing some manufacturing back from China to the US. But this is big as it relates to technology manufacturing from a tech giant like Apple. Of course Apple has had to deal with Foxconn problems, so that may be driving this, along with the huge PR push Apple will get. But this move could help spur a new tech manufacturing hub, that would be great for the US and for Apple as well.

      Economy, General Business, Manufacturing

      Will Windows 8 change the office environment?

      October 25, 2012 /

      Microsoft is making a huge push today to promote the new Windows 8 operating system along with the Surface tablet. It’s a huge bet for Microsoft, as the try to take on Apple directly and get into the game in the tablet market, while still retaining its stranglehold on the corporate PC market.

      We’ll see what happens. Radical upgrades often don’t work well for Microsoft. Remember Vista? I do. It was a complete disaster. Then Microsoft righted the ship with Windows 7, where execution was more important than bells and whistles. So we’ll see how consumers react, and then we’ll see how businesspeople react. The tablet revolution does have the potential to shake things up a bit in the workplace.

      Still, we’ve reached a point where the changes affect how we use computing services and devices, but does it change other areas of business much? So much has already changed in the past 30 years that there might be areas immune to advances in the devices we use. Businesses still use brochures for some types of promotion despite PowerPoint, though they might use online printing and ordering brochures at UPrinting in order to save money. Even at the Microsoft event, you can be sure they have printed posters and displays to go along with the big tech screens.

      We just seem to have reached a point where these upgrades make a big difference in some areas, but others just stay the same.

      Advertising, Retail, Technology

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