BRUTAL: Cain Struggles To Defend 9-9-9 Plan, Admits Some Poor People Will Pay More Taxes

GOP front-runner Herman Cain struggled to defend his 9-9-9 tax plan on NBC's Meet The Press, admitting for the first time that some people with lower incomes would pay more under the plan.

"Some people will pay more," he told David Gregory. "But most people will pay less... The people who spend more on new goods will spend more."

Cain's plan would establish a 9 percent flat tax and sales tax — drawing criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike.

Cain said you can't consider state taxes when evaluating his plan because "these are replacement taxes."

"There are invisible taxes built into everything we buy. The price of goods goes down [under 9-9-9]," he said.

Cain said his tax plan would pass because its simplicity resonates with the American people — and that even those who see their taxes increase will see benefits under the 9-9-9 plan.

On foreign policy, Cain said he is informed by the writings of former UN ambassador John Bolton and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger — but insisted he was not a neo-conservative. "I'm not familiar with the neo-conservative movement," he admitted.

Cain added that he opposes abortion is all instances — including rape and incest — unless the life of the mother is at risk, in which case "it is up for the family to decide."

Watch the video below:

On Foreign Policy:

Please follow Politics on Twitter and Facebook.
Follow Zeke Miller on Twitter.

x

To embed this post, copy the code below and paste into your website or blog.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Confirmed (Again): Turntable.fm Finally Admits It Raised $7 Million

Earlier this summer we reported that Turntable.fm raised between $7 and $7.5 million dollars.

A lot of people didn't believe us. But, we were right.

On stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt, the group music listening company is announcing that it raised a $7 million round led by Union Square Ventures.

Turntable.fm was a pivot from a failed startup, Stickybits. Stickybits' original investors, First Round Capital, Polaris Venture Partners, and Lowercase Ventures, also participated in the round.

In addition, a number of entertainment and Internet industry executives invested. Some declined to be named (we speculate Kanye West and Lady Gaga). Other investors include Lady Gaga's manager, Troy Carter, MTV's Courtney Holt, former Facebook executive Tim Kendall, The Roots, and Madonna's manager, Guy Oseary.

Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson will be joining Turntable.fm's board. 

The founders had a relationship with Fred Wilson that goes back 15 years. They've pitched him before, and Wilson has turned them down before. While west coast investors wanted in on the deal, the founders say that, because they're a New York company, they wanted to choose nearby investors.

Turntable.fm has been used by 600,000 people (40% are active users), and 1 million songs are streamed on the music site per day.  Turntable.fm was founded in May, 2011 by Billy Chasen and Seth Goldstein.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Microsoft Finally Admits Windows Media Center Is A Dud (MSFT)

Microsoft has admitted that people just don't use the Media Center interface in Windows all that much.

Media Center gives people a special remote-controllable interface for watching TV and video, listening to music, and viewing photos.

It was introduced as a special version of Windows XP almost a decade ago, and later put into the high-end versions of Vista and Windows 7. PC makers sold a lot of copies of Windows with Media Center, and it has a devoted and vocal fan base.

But toward the end of today's post on the Building Windows 8 blog, Windows chief Steven Sinofsky shot down comments from Media Center enthusiasts who claimed that lots of people use it.

In fact, only 6% of Windows users ever open Media Center, and most just look at it for a minute or two. As Sinofsky wrote:

Our opt-in usage telemetry shows that in July, Windows Media Center was launched by 6% of Windows 7 users globally with the heaviest usage in Russia, Mexico, and Brazil (frequency and time). However, most people are just looking around; only one quarter (25% of 6%) of these people used it for more than 10 minutes per session (individual averages), and in 59% of Media Center sessions (by these 6% of users) we see almost no activity (less than a minute or two of usage). TV was the most common scenario we observed, and not surprisingly, traditional media (DVD and CD) are less common (and declining over time) than streaming and file-based content. By comparison, Media Player (66% of Windows users in July) and IE (88%) are popular rendering engines for all types of media content, including an increased volume of "premium" and streaming content.

Sinofsky insisted that Microsoft is still committed to Media Center, and it will be released in Windows 8 in some form. But it won't be in the early test versions -- including the build that Microsoft is showing off at its BUILD developers conference later this month.

In the same post, Sinofsky also addressed the feedback Microsoft has gotten about some parts of the Windows 8 interface, like the Windows Explorer, and said that the company is already making some changes based on that feedback.

Whether or not you agree with all the design choices Microsoft is making, this blog is proving to be a very interesting spotlight into how Microsoft works.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Bernanke Finally Admits Economic Realities And Still The Fed Does Nothing

One positive thing in Bernanke’s speech — I’m trying to look on the bright side — is that for what seems to me the first time he has more or less acknowledged that we are not, in any real sense, experiencing a recovery:

Notwithstanding these more positive developments, however, it is clear that the recovery from the crisis has been much less robust than we had hoped. From the latest comprehensive revisions to the national accounts as well as the most recent estimates of growth in the first half of this year, we have learned that the recession was even deeper and the recovery even weaker than we had thought; indeed, aggregate output in the United States still has not returned to the level that it attained before the crisis. Importantly, economic growth has for the most part been at rates insufficient to achieve sustained reductions in unemployment, which has recently been fluctuating a bit above 9 percent.

Indeed. I usually illustrate the unrecovery using the employment-population ratio, but here’s an alternative, the ratio of real GDP to the CBO estimate of potential (which is the level consistent with stable inflation, not the absolute maximum the economy can produce):

Does that look like a solid if slow recovery? Of course not.

Ideally, the realization that the economy is not healing would spur the Fed to take the kind of action Bernanke recommended a decade ago when Japan was similarly in a long-term trap.

Not yet, however.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.