Posts Tagged ‘government’

While I’ve pointed you from time to time to real opportunities to obtain “free government money” in situations I would consider a crisis for most people, usually there is a nasty price to pay.

I was talking to local car dealer yesterday and his experience is mirrored by dealers across the country. They have sold dozens of autos through the “Cash for Clunkers” program…the government program owes them between $100,000 and $200,000 and they have, to date, only been paid for ONE transaction.

So the promise of “free government money” sounded good. The car dealers jumped on it with abandon, but they are facing some serious cash flow issues while they wait for payment.

When the government is the one paying you, they take their own sweet time and do things their way…

It’s like government health plans designed to save money on Medicaid… doctors found they didn’t pay well in the first place, paid late most of the time while medical offices had bills to pay NOW, and sometimes didn’t pay at all and these HMO’s went bankrupt.

Looking for that “Free Government Money”? While some “free government money” may be viable options for you… most may be more trouble than they’re worth.

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photo credit: Hey Paul

Business Week:

Missing from Washington’s health-reform discussion is a simple change that would make insurance more affordable for millions of the nation’s smallest business owners by letting them fully deduct the cost of their health insurance premiums.

By a quirk in the tax code, self-employed workers who buy their own health insurance essentially pay an extra tax on their premiums. They’re the only taxpayers in the system who pay taxes on premiums, which count as a business expense for corporations and pretax income for employees. Because self-employed workers have no corporate employers to match their payroll tax contributions to Social Security and Medicare, they pay double the rate of wage and salary workers in a levy known as the self-employment tax equal to 15.3% of their net earnings. That’s on top of regular state and federal income taxes, and the income they spend on health premiums is not exempt.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Al’s Morning Meeting:

The U.S. Patent Office is sitting on a mountain of applications that would take at least six years to clear, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found in a two-part investigation.

The newspaper points out that a patent could be the key that protects an upstart company or idea. It could ignite the economy, but the backlog of applications means an inventor can wait at least three and a half years to get action.

The Journal Sentinel contends the Patent Office’s practice of publishing detailed applications on its Web site 18 months after the inventor files them — regardless of whether the office has begun to examined them — invites competitors anywhere in the world to steal ideas.

“For more than a dozen years starting in 1992, Congress siphoned off a total of $752 million in fees from the Patent Office to pay for unrelated federal projects, decimating the agency’s ability to hire and train new examiners.

“Staff turnover has become epidemic. Experts say it takes at least three years for a patent examiner to gain competence, and yet one examiner has been quitting on average for every two the agency hires.

“In many cases, applications languish so long that the technology they seek to protect becomes obsolete, or a product loses the interest of investors who could give it a chance at commercial success. ‘Patents are becoming commercially irrelevant to product life cycles,’ said John White, a patent attorney and former examiner.”

Photo by USPTO.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.