$85.98 per sheet of plywood that cost $14.06" -- AP report.

[Gatekeeper]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that Halburton is politically connected and can charge what it damn well pleases? There is no way regulation and inspection costs 70$ a sheet. Costs my ass, defense contractors are among the most profitable companies there are.

Must ... resist ... urge to ... buy ... their stock ... YAAHHHH!!! **runs off to broker**

Gatekeeper

[Sten Sture]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
defense contractors are among the most profitable companies there are.

Not technically true - defense contractors don't make shyte for profits. Of course if they have stupid wages and waste a bunch of money, then they can take a profitable business model and actually lose money.

If you look at operating margin (that is sales divided by materials and labor) for some major companies:

Lockheed Martin 7.33% or ~ $0.07 per dollar of sales
Halliburton -1.73% or ~ $-0.02 per dollar
General Electric 14.14% or ~ $0.14 per dollar
Exxon Mobil 8.37% or ~ $0.08 per dollar
Microsoft 44.32% or $0.44 per dollar - that is not a typo.

Most of the money that companies bring in in sales gets pissed away on labor and raw materials. (which is good for the workers of the world )

You can see, by looking at the huge number that MS puts up, why a lot of dotcoms were able to attract greedy sons of britches during the tech boom. The profit margins are potentially huge and way different than any of the usual suspect industries.

[SlowwHand]

Actually, and here I attract more flames I'm sure, but pride in work is very evident at defense contractors.

[chequita guevara]

Didn't Haliburton become an ex-pat corporation? They move their profits out of the US so they don't have to pay taxes.

In the last three years, corporations share of taxes has dropped from 10% of the total to 7% of the total.

[TCO]

Che a corporation is just an arrangement for people to own a business. Plus they get double taxed for the pleasure...

[chequita guevara]

And avoid liability for crimes and damages.

I get double taxed too. I pay an additional tax every time I spend my money. On some things, I get even more taxes, and then I'm tripple or quadruple taxed.

[Sten Sture]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Didn't Haliburton become an ex-pat corporation? They move their profits out of the US so they don't have to pay taxes.

About 60% of Halliburton's revenue comes from operations outside the US, but they are still a US, Delaware in fact, company. It doesn't do them much good to hide 'profits' overseas if the management or shareholders don't benefit. That is not to say that they don't or wouldn't do it, but the officers, directors and shareholders would actually make some money on the share price appreciation if they could turn a decent profit.

I guarantee you that most company managements don't try to reduce profits to not pay taxes. They try to increase profits to make it look like they are doing well so the stock price will go up and they can keep their jobs!

Halliburton has 83,000 employees worldwide. Most are working stiffs. The CEO makes $+3MM a year, but that works out to less than $40 per employee, and the next guy down on the ladder makes about $1MM. That is a lot of money, but frankly, I know salesmen that do those numbers.

They don't look much like a big, bad, evil corporation; at least from a quick first glance. There are probably other companies that are more deserving of a kick in the shins.

[TCO]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
And avoid liability for crimes and damages.

I get double taxed too. I pay an additional tax every time I spend my money. On some things, I get even more taxes, and then I'm tripple or quadruple taxed.

And if you decide to own shares, you are quintuple taxed. Guess you are better of keeping it private.

[Apocalypse]

You have to realize that defense contractors getting more money than they theorectically should isn't all bad.

Look at Texas Instruments. Some of their defense money has gone to things like graphic calculators which many students use. Thus people really shouldn't automatically complain when there is much more defense spending than education spending.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Been there, done that. Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. aka "The Lazy L", now Lockheed-Martin Space Systems.

Sloww is more or less technically right, but here's the deal: A lot of that crap isn't necessary, it's cooperative between procurement types in the services and the DoD and the defense contractors themselves. Cost plus works well only if you have a basis for padding costs to the moon. You only get a markup on your "costs" but the more you can spend and "justify" the more your markup grows.

Many if not most of the military side procurement pukes retire to defense contractor jobs. The Lazy L had hundreds of lifers who'd been pushed out the door finally, although by all appearances they'd gone ROAD at least a decade before their 20 or 30 were up.

The examples of total waste were amazing:

Computer programmers hired without clearances to work on programs that required clearances. While their clearance apps and FBIs were pending, the government paid for them to be assigned to this program. They were prohibited from doing any work on it, since they had no clearances, but they were also prohibited from doing any other work for LMSC, since they would no longer be chargeable to this particular program, and the government wouldn't pay for them. They spent 11 months, doing nothing (except working on the side, using government funded computers, in government funded office space (part of the GA&OH markups). Any secrets or "wrongdoing" about this? Hell no, they were right in the same building as the Defense Contract Audit Agency office. When they first got there, half the building was empty, because all the walls and partitions had been removed and the space cleared out (government expense, from the prior contract). During that time, they played board games, hackysack, and made no secret of the fact they were on the payroll to do nothing. The empty space they did this in didn't even have a door, it was right at the end of an open corridor, so everybody saw this every day.

"PB man" - I used to work next to this ******* who had a claimed soft injury in his back, and also milked his race. The company policy was that employees had essentially unlimited sick time, but you had to have a written statement from a doctor if you were out more than two full days. But..... if you "worked" (i.e. showed up) at least four hours, and left for "personal business" you got paid for the day. So "PB man" would be sick Monday and Tuesday, show up Wednesday, put in his four hours of getting in people's face and accusing them of being prejudiced, sign out and put "PB" on the bulletin board where people in his department signed out. Thursday and Friday, sick again. He did that at least two weeks out of every month. Just more overhead. He got away with it for years, and managed to get pay raises higher than everyone else, to the limit of his pay grade. The trick was, the first time, he got slammed in a review, challenged it, claimed racism and disability, and they backed off and bumped his raise up. The second year, he appealed his ****ty review to higher management, and pointed out the changed rating after he challenged his first review. Nobody at the Lazy L wanted to challenge this, because they didn't want to rock the boat wrt all those fat Federal contracts, and they didn't care, because he was just one factor in an overhead number that the government accepted without question.

Copy request forms: Hourly pukes were all union, typical of government contractors. Salaried pukes were non-union. One of the union jobs was document processing and copying. Thus, a salaried puke couldn't make his own copies (he'd be taking away a union job. ) The excuse with the copiers themselves is that this is a defense contractor, with all sorts of serious stuff, so we can't just have copiers all over (never mind I had no problem bringing cameras to work, and few problems getting into many places where I didn't have proper access and shouldn't have been able to get into) To get a copy made, you had to go to a copy center, stand in line, fill out a "copy request form," give the department you were charging the copy to, your name and employee number, and all this crap. God help you if you wanted a copy of a classified document. All this, for one friggin copy of a one page item! The best part was you had to kiss the ass of the copy center employees (although Kim was pretty cute, so that wasn't so bad... ), because if you didn't, or they didn't like you, they'd tell you they couldn't get to it immediately, and to come back in a few minutes, when they'd look it up for you and pull it out of the outbox to give you. All in all, to make one single copy, might take you 15 minutes of time, plus the charges to your department.

But hey, it's defense, who cares...

There is no way in hell a company can survive with that sort of dysfunction, unless it's feeding at the government trough. And this was a company that had 26,000 full time employees and 10,000 contract employees at one extended site, and was only a subsidiary of the parent company.

I know plenty of people who are still working defense, and it ain't changed.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Slow:

They actually made this point on the West Wing. I was shocked! The West Wing backing the 'right-wing' military?

[MichaeltheGreat]

Only because they're ignorant, as usual for the West Wing. There are "justifications" for the costs, but no justification. It's fun and games, but done well on the books, according to unnecessary rules that both sides have a vested interest in maintaining as is.

BTW, why are you watching that commie drivel, anyway?

[Imran Siddiqui]

You tell me what to watch on Wednesdays after 9:30 .

Bernie Mac only goes a half-hour .

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by GP
Che a corporation is just an arrangement for people to own a business. Plus they get double taxed for the pleasure...

So how much tax have these large corporations been paying? I wager most of them have an army of accountants to use every loophole in the book to avoid taxes.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by GP
And if you decide to own shares, you are quintuple taxed. Guess you are better of keeping it private.

How so?