Fleming

Since nobody here seemed to understand what I was asking, I'm withdrawing my question... however, in case anybody else ever wonders about this, I've found this article, http://www.sbshlaw.com/joint-accounts-with-children-a-bad-idea/, that tells me what I need to know... Good day..............

Thanks, rockfl9, but that's not really what I was asking... I know about the exclusion limit for gifts, which by the way is currently $14,000 per person (http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employed/What's-New---Estate-and-Gift-Tax).. I was really wanting to know if opening a joint bank account with my child would be taxable as a gift... when the RV comes, I'll be giving lots more than $14,000... just trying to figure out how to keep it from being taxed to death...

Somewhere I think I remember somebody suggesting opening a joint bank account with one's child instead of gifting IQD or after-RV USDs... I think the point was that the gift tax could be avoided, as well as avoiding the child's tax liabilities... does anybody have any more info about this course of action?.. Thanks!..

ronscarpa, I hope you'll post the phone # for the replay of tonight's CC, like you did last Friday... thanks for doing that, btw... (I'm assuming tonight's call will have a different PIN).. I loved listening to Frank, his enthusiasm is contagious...

His son passed away suddenly last week... understandably, he hasn't posted much...

Love it!.. thanks, I needed a laugh this morning...

Well, isn't that interesting?.. the liberal U.S. news media was just saying how the whole country of Venezuela was mourning Chavez's death... I think they (the U.S. news media) were the ones in mourning... they'll miss his Bush-Bashing............

yes, yes, yessssssssssssss..... sorry, that was tacky... anyway, I think she's got the anti-rape campaign confused with the anti-drug campaign... Just Say No..... that hasn't had all that much effect there either.........

This thread is a great lesson in economics... so, thanks to all who contributed... On the other hand, the first thing I thought of was "machismo"..... oh, well, we can't all be geniuses.....

Beautiful!!!.. thanks, Adam... great job....... GoRV!!!!!!!!!!..

I saw that yesterday evening & was wondering if anybody else had noticed it... thanks, pokerplayer, for posting... GORV...

Thanks NeedRv... article saved in my Favs...

HuffPost article http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/04/trillion-dollar-coin-petition_n_2409704.html : White House Pushes for Trillion-Dollar Platinum Coin There's a push to have the president create a special weapon to avert another debt ceiling crisis. That special weapon is a trillion-dollar platinum coin, and it's a proposition the Obama administration may be forced to soon consider. The movement is gaining steam, and the latest indication is a new White House petition calling for the measure. Created on Thursday, the petition already has gained 2,067 signatures as of 1:17 p.m. Friday. Any petition that garners 25,000 signatures requires a White House response. From the petition: With the creation and Treasury deposit of a new platinum coin with a value of $1 trillion US Dollars, we would avert the absurd-yet-imminent debt ceiling faceoff in Congress in two quick and simple steps! While this may seem like an unnecessarily extreme measure, it is no more absurd than playing political football with the US -- and global -- economy at stake. Thanks to a quirky law, the government can mint a platinum coin worth any amount. It then can deposit it at the Federal Reserve to pay off $1 trillion in debt, which would swing the government far below its debt limit. There are questions about whether this really would be legal or constitutional though. Supporters argue this is the only way Obama can avoid cutting Social Security and other social insurance programs. Congressional Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have demanded spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, which the government technically has hit already. The Treasury Department now is taking special measures to prevent default, measures that can last only until around February. Not raising the debt limit would have catastrophic consequences. It would force the U.S. government to default on its debt by preventing it from borrowing to pay its existing bills. It could even cause a financial crisis, market crash and recession, since so many investments hinge on the bet that the U.S. is unlikely to default. But the coin idea is problematic to some, who warn that it could be a slippery slope toward hyperinflation, since the government would have created new money specifically to finance borrowing. Petition at https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/direct-united-states-mint-make-single-platinum-trillion-dollar-coin/8hvJbLl6

Please forgive me if this has already been posted... I looked through the posts & didn't see it, so here goes...... North Carolina POLICE LIEUTENANT WARNS Of Plans For MARTIAL LAW IN 2013 In this broadcast of the Cybertribe News Network, a North Carolina Police Lieutenant calls in to give his first hand knowledge of preparations being made within his own department to train and prepare for martial law in the United States, possibly in the coming year. Many similar reports are starting to trickle in from all across the country, through various independent media resources and even organizations like Oath Keepers. The consensus is that a major economic event is expected, and that it will be used to provide cover for the institution of draconian policies being readied behind the curtain. The exact timing of this event is not clear, but we do know the planning is being done, and that provisions are being put in place. Go to website to view video: http://www.secretsofthefed.com/north-carolina-police-lieutenant-warns-of-plans-for-martial-law-in-2013-video/

Who cares...................

The New York Times December 5, 2012 U.S.-Approved Arms for Libya Rebels Fell Into Jihadis’ Hands By JAMES RISEN, MARK MAZZETTI and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT WASHINGTON — The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats. No evidence has emerged linking the weapons provided by the Qataris during the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to the attack that killed four Americans at the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in September. But in the months before, the Obama administration clearly was worried about the consequences of its hidden hand in helping arm Libyan militants, concerns that have not previously been reported. The weapons and money from Qatar strengthened militant groups in Libya, allowing them to become a destabilizing force since the fall of the Qaddafi government. The experience in Libya has taken on new urgency as the administration considers whether to play a direct role in arming rebels in Syria, where weapons are flowing in from Qatar and other countries. The Obama administration did not initially raise objections when Qatar began shipping arms to opposition groups in Syria, even if it did not offer encouragement, according to current and former administration officials. But they said the United States has growing concerns that, just as in Libya, the Qataris are equipping some of the wrong militants. The United States, which had only small numbers of C.I.A. officers in Libya during the tumult of the rebellion, provided little oversight of the arms shipments. Within weeks of endorsing Qatar’s plan to send weapons there in spring 2011, the White House began receiving reports that they were going to Islamic militant groups. They were “more antidemocratic, more hard-line, closer to an extreme version of Islam” than the main rebel alliance in Libya, said a former Defense Department official. The Qatari assistance to fighters viewed as hostile by the United States demonstrates the Obama administration’s continuing struggles in dealing with the Arab Spring uprisings, as it tries to support popular protest movements while avoiding American military entanglements. Relying on surrogates allows the United States to keep its fingerprints off operations, but also means they may play out in ways that conflict with American interests. “To do this right, you have to have on-the-ground intelligence and you have to have experience,” said Vali Nasr, a former State Department adviser who is now dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, part of Johns Hopkins University. “If you rely on a country that doesn’t have those things, you are really flying blind. When you have an intermediary, you are going to lose control.” He said that Qatar would not have gone through with the arms shipments if the United States had resisted them, but other current and former administration officials said Washington had little leverage at times over Qatari officials. “They march to their own drummer,” said a former senior State Department official. The White House and State Department declined to comment. During the frantic early months of the Libyan rebellion, various players motivated by politics or profit — including an American arms dealer who proposed weapons transfers in an e-mail exchange with a United States emissary later killed in Benghazi — sought to aid those trying to oust Colonel Qaddafi. But after the White House decided to encourage Qatar — and on a smaller scale, the United Arab Emirates — to ship arms to the Libyans, President Obama complained in April 2011 to the emir of Qatar that his country was not coordinating its actions in Libya with the United States, the American officials said. “The president made the point to the emir that we needed transparency about what Qatar was doing in Libya,” said a former senior administration official who had been briefed on the matter. About that same time, Mahmoud Jibril, then the prime minister of the Libyan transitional government, expressed frustration to administration officials that the United States was allowing Qatar to arm extremist groups opposed to the new leadership, according to several American officials. They, like nearly a dozen current and former White House, diplomatic, intelligence, military and foreign officials, would speak only on the condition of anonymity for this article. The administration has never determined where all of the weapons, paid for by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, went inside Libya, officials said. Qatar is believed to have shipped by air and sea small arms, including machine guns, automatic rifles, and ammunition, for which it has demanded reimbursement from Libya’s new government. Some of the arms since have been moved from Libya to militants with ties to Al Qaeda in Mali, where radical jihadi factions have imposed Shariah law in the northern part of the country, the former Defense Department official said. Others have gone to Syria, according to several American and foreign officials and arms traders. Although NATO provided air support that proved critical for the Libyan rebels, the Obama administration wanted to avoid getting immersed in a ground war, which officials feared could lead the United States into another quagmire in the Middle East. As a result, the White House largely relied on Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, two small Persian Gulf states and frequent allies of the United States. Qatar, a tiny nation whose natural gas reserves have made it enormously wealthy, for years has tried to expand its influence in the Arab world. Since 2011, with dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa coming under siege, Qatar has given arms and money to various opposition and militant groups, chiefly Sunni Islamists, in hopes of cementing alliances with the new governments. Officials from Qatar and the emirates would not comment. After discussions among members of the National Security Council, the Obama administration backed the arms shipments from both countries, according to two former administration officials briefed on the talks. American officials say that the United Arab Emirates first approached the Obama administration during the early months of the Libyan uprising, asking for permission to ship American-built weapons that the United States had supplied for the emirates’ use. The administration rejected that request, but instead urged the emirates to ship weapons to Libya that could not be traced to the United States. “The U.A.E. was asking for clearance to send U.S. weapons,” said one former official. “We told them it’s O.K. to ship other weapons.” For its part, Qatar supplied weapons made outside the United States, including French- and Russian-designed arms, according to people familiar with the shipments. But the American support for the arms shipments from Qatar and the emirates could not be completely hidden. NATO air and sea forces around Libya had to be alerted not to interdict the cargo planes and freighters transporting the arms into Libya from Qatar and the emirates, American officials said. Concerns in Washington soon rose about the groups Qatar was supporting, officials said. A debate over what to do about the weapons shipments dominated at least one meeting of the so-called Deputies Committee, the interagency panel consisting of the second-highest ranking officials in major agencies involved in national security. “There was a lot of concern that the Qatar weapons were going to Islamist groups,” one official recalled. The Qataris provided weapons, money and training to various rebel groups in Libya. One militia that received aid was controlled by Adel Hakim Belhaj, then leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, who was held by the C.I.A. in 2004 and is now considered a moderate politician in Libya. It is unclear which other militants received the aid. “Nobody knew exactly who they were,” said the former defense official. The Qataris, the official added, are “supposedly good allies, but the Islamists they support are not in our interest.” No evidence has surfaced that any weapons went to Ansar al-Shariah, an extremist group blamed for the Benghazi attack. The case of Marc Turi, the American arms merchant who had sought to provide weapons to Libya, demonstrates other challenges the United States faced in dealing with Libya. A dealer who lives in both Arizona and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Turi sells small arms to buyers in the Middle East and Africa, relying primarily on suppliers of Russian-designed weapons in Eastern Europe. In March 2011, just as the Libyan civil war was intensifying, Mr. Turi realized that Libya could be a lucrative new market, and applied to the State Department for a license to provide weapons to the rebels there, according to e-mails and other documents he has provided. (American citizens are required to obtain United States approval for any international arms sales.) He also e-mailed J. Christopher Stevens, then the special representative to the Libyan rebel alliance. The diplomat said he would “share” Mr. Turi’s proposal with colleagues in Washington, according to e-mails provided by Mr. Turi. Mr. Stevens, who became the United States ambassador to Libya, was one of the four Americans killed in the Benghazi attack on Sept. 11. Mr. Turi’s application for a license was rejected in late March 2011. Undeterred, he applied again, this time stating only that he planned to ship arms worth more than $200 million to Qatar. In May 2011, his application was approved. Mr. Turi, in an interview, said that his intent was to get weapons to Qatar and that what “the U.S. government and Qatar allowed from there was between them.” Two months later, though, his home near Phoenix was raided by agents from the Department of Homeland Security. Administration officials say he remains under investigation in connection with his arms dealings. The Justice Department would not comment. Mr. Turi said he believed that United States officials had shut down his proposed arms pipeline because he was getting in the way of the Obama administration’s dealings with Qatar. The Qataris, he complained, imposed no controls on who got the weapons. “They just handed them out like candy,” he said. David D. Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from Cairo. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/world/africa/weapons-sent-to-libyan-rebels-with-us-approval-fell-into-islamist-hands.html?hp&_r=0

YIPPEEEEEEEE!!!.. thanks Easy, I'd give you 10 pluses if I could...

That was fun!.. 96%... thanks........

I just now visited Wells Fargo Foreign Exchange https://www.wellsfargo.com/foreignexchange/ & the VND is not in the drop-down menu of available currencies... what does this mean?????..

Not necessarily my opinion... please don't shoot the messenger... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/opinion/buffett-a-minimum-tax-for-the-wealthy.html?ref=todayspaper The New York Times The Opinion Pages November 25, 2012 A Minimum Tax for the Wealthy By Warren E. Buffett Omaha SUPPOSE that an investor you admire and trust comes to you with an investment idea. “This is a good one,” he says enthusiastically. “I’m in it, and I think you should be, too.” Would your reply possibly be this? “Well, it all depends on what my tax rate will be on the gain you’re saying we’re going to make. If the taxes are too high, I would rather leave the money in my savings account, earning a quarter of 1 percent.” Only in Grover Norquist’s imagination does such a response exist. Between 1951 and 1954, when the capital gains rate was 25 percent and marginal rates on dividends reached 91 percent in extreme cases, I sold securities and did pretty well. In the years from 1956 to 1969, the top marginal rate fell modestly, but was still a lofty 70 percent — and the tax rate on capital gains inched up to 27.5 percent. I was managing funds for investors then. Never did anyone mention taxes as a reason to forgo an investment opportunity that I offered. Under those burdensome rates, moreover, both employment and the gross domestic product (a measure of the nation’s economic output) increased at a rapid clip. The middle class and the rich alike gained ground. So let’s forget about the rich and ultrarich going on strike and stuffing their ample funds under their mattresses if — gasp — capital gains rates and ordinary income rates are increased. The ultrarich, including me, will forever pursue investment opportunities. And, wow, do we have plenty to invest. The Forbes 400, the wealthiest individuals in America, hit a new group record for wealth this year: $1.7 trillion. That’s more than five times the $300 billion total in 1992. In recent years, my gang has been leaving the middle class in the dust. A huge tail wind from tax cuts has pushed us along. In 1992, the tax paid by the 400 highest incomes in the United States (a different universe from the Forbes list) averaged 26.4 percent of adjusted gross income. In 2009, the most recent year reported, the rate was 19.9 percent. It’s nice to have friends in high places. The group’s average income in 2009 was $202 million — which works out to a “wage” of $97,000 per hour, based on a 40-hour workweek. (I’m assuming they’re paid during lunch hours.) Yet more than a quarter of these ultrawealthy paid less than 15 percent of their take in combined federal income and payroll taxes. Half of this crew paid less than 20 percent. And — brace yourself — a few actually paid nothing. This outrage points to the necessity for more than a simple revision in upper-end tax rates, though that’s the place to start. I support President Obama’s proposal to eliminate the Bush tax cuts for high-income taxpayers. However, I prefer a cutoff point somewhat above $250,000 — maybe $500,000 or so. Additionally, we need Congress, right now, to enact a minimum tax on high incomes. I would suggest 30 percent of taxable income between $1 million and $10 million, and 35 percent on amounts above that. A plain and simple rule like that will block the efforts of lobbyists, lawyers and contribution-hungry legislators to keep the ultrarich paying rates well below those incurred by people with income just a tiny fraction of ours. Only a minimum tax on very high incomes will prevent the stated tax rate from being eviscerated by these warriors for the wealthy. Above all, we should not postpone these changes in the name of “reforming” the tax code. True, changes are badly needed. We need to get rid of arrangements like “carried interest” that enable income from labor to be magically converted into capital gains. And it’s sickening that a Cayman Islands mail drop can be central to tax maneuvering by wealthy individuals and corporations. But the reform of such complexities should not promote delay in our correcting simple and expensive inequities. We can’t let those who want to protect the privileged get away with insisting that we do nothing until we can do everything. Our government’s goal should be to bring in revenues of 18.5 percent of G.D.P. and spend about 21 percent of G.D.P. — levels that have been attained over extended periods in the past and can clearly be reached again. As the math makes clear, this won’t stem our budget deficits; in fact, it will continue them. But assuming even conservative projections about inflation and economic growth, this ratio of revenue to spending will keep America’s debt stable in relation to the country’s economic output. In the last fiscal year, we were far away from this fiscal balance — bringing in 15.5 percent of G.D.P. in revenue and spending 22.4 percent. Correcting our course will require major concessions by both Republicans and Democrats. All of America is waiting for Congress to offer a realistic and concrete plan for getting back to this fiscally sound path. Nothing less is acceptable. In the meantime, maybe you’ll run into someone with a terrific investment idea, who won’t go forward with it because of the tax he would owe when it succeeds. Send him my way. Let me unburden him. Warren E. Buffett is the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway.

I don't believe O'blahblah has control over the RV either, but I do think maybe he has the power to stir things up over there... how convenient was it that Biden was over there, then a short time later al-Maliki pounced on Dr. S!.. an uproar in the ME (or anywhere else in the world) always serves to draw attention away from domestic hanky-panky, especially effective right before a big election... JMDO...

Me too!..

Doesn't surprise me a bit...

Two peas in a pod...........

I was impressed -- Romney proved to be even more presidential than I thought... watching Obumma's facial expressions, I could see his confidence is broken...