December 2010

The Great Fee Squeeze By State & Local Governments

Submitted by on

Here is comes, your State & Local Governments are so broke, they are now squeezing people with fees, digging up cash where ever they can. They are even charging non-profits and churches.

The Wall Street Journal:

Some cities are charging religious groups property taxes on buildings no longer used for worship. Other localities are soliciting voluntary contributions. Albany, N.Y., recently passed an ordinance asking schools, hospitals and other nonprofits to contribute to city services.

In Minneapolis, residents recently began paying a street-light fee that also applies to nonprofits, which in some places pay fees for elevator safety and fire inspection.

Drainage fees that apply to nonprofits have been adopted by cities that include Richmond, Va.; Lafayette, Ind.; and Verona, Wis. Such fees are emerging now because the federal government has been cracking down on how cities handle the rain that rolls off roofs, parking lots, and other impervious surfaces, sometimes causing floods and ripping up roads. The runoff can collect debris, oil and other pollutants and ultimately drag it all into the nation's waterways.

A Merry Christmas for the Inheritance Tax

Submitted by on

By Numerian
...nothing is more important to the establishment and continuation of a democracy than a rigorous inheritance tax.
/></a></p> <p>Merry Christmas to All! If it be more blessed to give than to receive, what better time than Christmas Day to discuss the Estate Tax. </p> <p>You might say to yourself: How dry, how dull – leave me to my eggnog and on some other day I will look into this subject. But there is no better day than Christmas Day to think about what any citizen of a democracy owes to his or her country, and this is especially true about the wealthier, and especially the wealthiest, among us. <a href=Image-Mark Fiore

My first Christmas gift to you is my most favorite of all quotes, from that most astute observer of democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville. He was a man who was intimately familiar with the social sclerosis that resulted from aristocracy, and he had a chance to compare it in the 1830s to the newly-invented American democracy. He said the following in Book I of his Democracy in America.

I am surprised that ancient and modern writers have not attributed greater importance to the laws of inheritance and their effect on the progress of human affairs. They are, it is true, civil laws, but they should head the list of all political institutions, for they have an unbelievable influence on the social state of peoples, and political laws are no more than the expression of that state. Moreover, their way of influencing society is both sure and uniform; in some sense they lay hands on each generation before it is born. By their means man is armed with almost supernatural power over the future of his fellows. When the lawgiver has once fixed the law of inheritance, he can rest for centuries; once the impulse has been given to his handiwork, he can take his hand away; the mechanism works by its own power and apparently spontaneously aims at the goal indicated beforehand. If it has been drafted in a certain way, it assembles, concentrates, and piles up property, and soon power too, in the hands of one man; in a sense it makes an aristocracy leap forth from the ground. Guided by other principles and directed towards other goals, its effect is even quicker; it divides, shares, and spreads property and power; then sometimes people get frightened at the speed of its progress; despairing of stopping its motion, men seek at least to put obstacles and difficulties in its way; there is an attempt to balance its action by measures of opposite tendency. But all in vain! It grinds up or smashes everything that stands in its way; with the continual rise and fall of its hammer strokes, everything is reduced to a fine, impalpable dust, and that dust is the foundation for democracy.

Tax Stocking Stuffers for Corporations

Submitted by on

We already know the rich and corporations got quite a haul in the tax bill. USA Today outlines some business tax credits as if the tax breaks under the great giveaway tree aren't enough.

The massive new tax bill signed into law by President Barack Obama is filled with all kinds of holiday stocking stuffers for businesses: tax breaks for producing TV shows, grants for putting up windmills, rum subsidies for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

There is even a tax break for people who buy race horses.

This is the most outrageous one, a tax break for corporations who invest overseas. Remember all of the rhetoric about banks not funding investment and growth in America, not loaning to businesses? This is the opposite, our Congress just made it pay to create economic growth abroad!

There is a generous tax break for banks and insurance companies that invest overseas, a tax credit for railroad track maintenance, more generous write-offs for upgrading motorsport race tracks,

I kid you not! Here is what this does. It's an exemption that allows banks, insurance companies and other financial firms to shield foreign profits from being taxed by the U.S. through 2011. Cost: $9.2 billion.

Happy Holidays From The Economic Populist

Submitted by on

homeless_santa

Ho Ho Ho and Happy Holidays! It's Christmas, the time of layoffs, of getting kicked out of your home and watching television commercials reminding you of all the stuff you cannot afford. It is surely a time of torture through Christmas music. Your kids need shoes and you can't find a job. Seasons Greetings! You better watch out and better not cry, below are stories that....

Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Glory to the Newborn King, we have Bank of America stealing a widow husband's ashes off the mantle.

When Mimi Ash arrived at her mountain chalet here for a weekend ski trip, she discovered that someone had broken into the home and changed the locks.

When she finally got into the house, it was empty. All of her possessions were gone: furniture, her son’s ski medals, winter clothes and family photos. Also missing was a wooden box, its top inscribed with the words “Together Forever,” that contained the ashes of her late husband, Robert.

The culprit, Ms. Ash soon learned, was not a burglar but her bank. According to a federal lawsuit filed in October by Ms. Ash, Bank of America had wrongfully foreclosed on her house and thrown out her belongings, without alerting Ms. Ash beforehand.

Durable Goods New Orders Down 1.3% for November 2010

Submitted by on

New Orders in Durable Goods dropped -1.3% for November 2010, after last month's -3.1% decrease, revised. New orders has declined 3 of the past 4 months. New orders in non-defense capital goods decreased -6.8%. Core capital goods new orders increased 2.6%. Nondefense aircraft & parts new orders dropped -53.1% and shipments declined -8.6%.

 

This is Just Too Much

Submitted by on

Huffington Post is reporting the leading candidate for Obama's Economic council chief, made millions from Wall Street, significant consulting fees from Goldman Sachs, while we experienced economic Armageddon.

Gene Sperling, a leading contender for a top economic post in the White House, made millions on Wall Street even as the economy faltered.

The adviser to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is near the top of President Barack Obama's list of candidates to replace Larry Summers as director of the National Economic Council, HuffPost reports. By appointing Sperling, the president would fuel perceptions that his administration is overly close to Wall Street, installing a policymaker who has not only overseen monumental deregulation of the financial sector, but has also collected hefty paychecks from its leading firms.

The next NEC director will help determine the administration's economic policy over the next two years. Summers, who last week left his White House post for a Harvard professorship, met with the president almost daily to discuss economic decisions. Long sympathetic to Wall Street interests, Summers pushed for deregulation of financial instruments under President Clinton, a policy that experts -- and Clinton himself -- now say was misguided, contributing to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Even worse, Sperling is a Rubinite. This is the same bad trade deals, the same lack of financial regulation which has lead us to where we are today. With anemic economic growth, no jobs and an unemployment rate that just isn't dropping.

Compensation by Counties for 2009

Submitted by on

The BEA released their breakdown of pay, or county compensation by industry for 2009. For all U.S. workers, total compensation contracted 3.2% for 2009. Compensation declined in two-thirds of the 3,113 counties in the U.S. Can you say out of a job and broke? The report is worth reading just for the maps. Below is the BEA percent change county compensation map for 2009.

Pages