iphone4casessite: Making Money Your

Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, recently created a media flap when she said:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you!

But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea—God bless. Keep a big hunk of it.

But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Conservatives and libertarians took offense at Warren’s claim that the government has a superior claim to “a hunk” of people’s earnings merely because every individual lives in and benefits from a society to whose creation many other people have contributed.

The critics might well have been grateful for small blessings, however. Warren was prepared, rhetorically at least, to let people keep “a big hunk” of their earnings.

U.S. government officials in earlier times were sometimes unwilling to admit that people had a right to retain any of their earnings, and forthright in their declarations that everything people possessed really belonged to the government.

Striking examples of such views may be found in the recently published book by Burton Folsom and Anita Folsom, FDR Goes to War. There the Folsoms present a meaty discussion of the congressional debate that occurred in 1943 in regard to bills eventually enacted in compromise form as the Current Tax Payment Act of 1943—the statute that, among other things, established income-tax withholding at the source. In that debate, the following statements were made in Congress:

Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-N.Y.)—The government can at any time make income taxes as thumping big as the necessities of war require. Thus, if any plan does not raise enough money, taxes can at any time be increased. The government always has a moral if not actual lien on all our income. (p. 200, emphasis added)

Sen. Happy Chandler (D-Ky.)—[A]ll of us owe the government; we owe it for everything we have—and that is the basis of obligation—and the government can take everything we have if the government needs it. . . . The government can assert its right to have all the taxes it needs for any purpose, either now or at any time in the future. (p. 200, emphasis added)

Rep. Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.)—The public, with money in its pockets, will inevitably try to use this money to buy what it wants, what it may need. . . . [T]o check the forces making for inflation, we must direct our tax policy toward diverting an ever larger part of the funds of persons above subsistence levels into the Public Treasury. (p. 201, emphasis added)

So, lighten up, small-government friends. Be grateful that you must contend only with Warren, and not with the likes of Celler, Chandler, and Mills. Maybe there is progress after all.

Back in September, we wrote about numberFire, a New York City-based startup that’s attempting to bring a deep, scientific approach to your fantasy football picks. At the time, the startup was preparing to graduate (along with ten other stalwart companies) from the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, a seed-funding, mentor-providing NYC-based startup accelerator, and we also reported that NumberFire was also on the way to closing a solid round of seed funding.

Last night, numberFire officially closed its first round of funding, nabbing a $750,000 seed investment, led by RRE Ventures, with contributions from private investment firm, Penny Black, and TechStars Managing Director David Tisch, among others. As a result of the funding, Eliot Durbin, the Managing Director of Penny Black, will be joining the startup’s board of directors.

NumberFire Founder and CEO Nik Bonaddio (who also won $100,000 from Regis Philbin on the one-and-only “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” back in 2010) tells us that, specifically, the startup closed a total of $650K yesterday, but the final $100K has been signed, and will be in-pocket once that pesky holiday paperwork clears. It’s not as easy as cashing a check from Regis Philbin, okay?

And to that point, that’s something that you have to admire about Bonaddio. Most people probably would have taken the money they won on a gameshow and bought a new Porsche, but Bonaddio used it as capital to start numberFire in true entrepreneurial fashion. (Though he’s probably tired of hearing about the show by this point.)

The founder first tested numberFire at TechCrunch Disrupt in NYC 2010, and since then the Pittsburgh native has graduated from ER Accelerator, relaunched numberFire, has seen traffic steadily grow, and a number of big-name partners come calling. NumberFire is currently at about 20K registered users and has partnered with ESPN, Bleacher Report, and SB Nation, and has contributed to blog posts for Sports Illustrated.

But what does numberFire do, you ask? You can read our most recent, in depth profile here, but, simply put, the team has created custom, proprietary algorithms that take all stat-crunching out of your hands when it comes to making predictions about your fantasy sports teams. This means that, as fantasy sports fans, you can import your existing teams from Yahoo or ESPN’s fantasy websites and quickly get started — or customize updates and activity feeds, following teams and players that they are interested in to receive news, updated projections, etc.

And, as mentioned, beyond operating as a tool for fans and fantasy gamers, numberFire works with writers and bloggers from sports content sites like ESPN and Sports Illustrated to enable them to embed widgets and take advantage of their stat machine to create season long projections and more. The startup initially targeted football, but they’ve since expanded to basketball, and, in turn, recently launched their own statistical NERD category that measures NBA players’ efficiency and value. It seems they’re trying to bring Bill James-style Sabermetrics to the NBA and beyond.

The startup will be going after some partnerships ahead of March Madness, so stay tuned for that. And while the mention of Bill James and stats might lead you to believe that baseball, the mother of all stat-driven sports, would be easy fodder for numberFire. But there’s also a lot more competition in baseball number crunching at this level, from FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus, etc., so numberFire is (for now) keeping to the sports where the demand is high and the market isn’t as saturated. Hopefully hockey is on the way, but I’m not crossing my fingers.

Of course, the big question is, how well does it work? Well, take this snapshot of some of the Web’s predictions for Week 15 of the NFL season, for example. NumberFire is at the top of the list. What’s more, as BetaBeat reported yesterday, a couple of months ago, the site took some bad flack from the blogosphere for predicting that three teams from the AFC North would make the playoffs. Well, contrary to popular belief, they did. How ’bout dem apples?

And the best part? NumberFire is free.

For more, check out numberFire at home here.

iphone4casessite

Monday, January 9, 2012

Making Money Your

No comments:

Post a Comment

Followers

Blog Archive

About Me