About 5 million to 7 million properties are potentially eligible for foreclosure but have not yet been repossessed and put up for sale. Some economists project it could take nearly three years before all these homes have been put on the market and purchased by new owners. And the number of pending foreclosures could grow much bigger over the coming year as more distressed borrowers become delinquent and then, if they can’t obtain mortgage relief, wade through the foreclosure process, which often takes more than a year to complete.

Some bankers still say yes.

That is hard to believe considering the drought in lending. U.S. banks posted a 7.5% decline in 2009 in total loans outstanding, the steepest percentage drop since 1942, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Consumer lending fell by 3.8% as roughly 7,200 banks and credit unions pulled back on mortgages, credit cards and other loans, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal.

THE Obama administration introduced a plan this week to encourage defaulting homeowners to sell their houses at a loss, the latest in a long line of reform packages promising to break the logjam of underwater mortgages. But without major changes to the bankruptcy system, such measures won’t aid the American families torn apart by the economic upheavals of the last two years.

AUSTIN - The State Board of Education tentatively approved new standards for social studies on Friday with members divided along party lines - some blasting them as a fraud and conservative whitewash, others praising them as a tribute to the Founding Fathers that rightly portrays America as an exceptional country.

The standards, which will influence history and government textbooks arriving in public schools in fall 2011, were adopted by 10 Republicans against five Democrats after weeks of debate and across a racial and ideological chasm that seemed to grow wider as the proposal was finalized Thursday.

AUSTIN, Tex. - After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

IF THERE IS A RECOVERY IN AMERICANS’ FINANCES, they don’t see it.

The Federal Reserve reported Thursday that the net worth of U.S. “households” increased at about a 5% annual rate in the fourth quarter, a good deal slower than the blistering 20% pace over the two previous quarters, but still a solid increase.

Not long after the news was posted on the Wall Street Journal’s Web site early that afternoon, the vituperative comments began to flow. Many simply dismissed the data as inaccurate or worse. The numbers simply didn’t jibe with what they were seeing in their own finances or those around them.

Link.

The proposal would connect Fort Worth, Oklahoma City, Wichita and Kansas City and could be moving full speed ahead if supporters can get lawmakers on board.

“It’s been an exciting project to be a part of because it keeps gaining momentum as it goes along,” said Joni Johnson of the Northern Flyer Alliance, a group who’s lobbying for the project.

Of the state’s major population centers, Wichita leads the state in unemployment at 8.6 percent. Wichita has been hit hard by job losses in the aerospace industry. Unemployment was lowest in Lawrence at 5.8 percent.

Kansas won its 2,000th game on Thursday, joining Kentucky and North Carolina in the elite club. Taylor has been around for 57 of those wins, but he feels enough ownership that he would prefer he didn’t have to give the shirt to his mother, Jeanell. She is from Hoboken, N.J., she now lives in Lawrence and she inevitably ends up with the spoils of victory that her talented son receives on days like these.

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TOPEKA, Kan. - Kansas would impose a new tax on soda - a penny for every teaspoon of sugar - under a proposal that a key legislator outlined Tuesday while lawmakers considered raising taxes to erase a projected budget shortfall.

The soda tax advanced by Sen. John Vratil, a Leawood Republican, would increase the cost of a 12-ounce can of soda by a dime and raise an estimated $90 million during the fiscal year that begins July 1.

Shannon Wilkinson, 42, of Prairie Village, faced a Johnson County judge again Thursday after she was arrested on Christmas Day in Leawood for what court records state is her fifth driving under the influence infraction.

Stephen Maxwell, a former assistant attorney general in the Phill Kline administration, has been subpoenaed to testify against his former boss and Eric Rucker, Kline’s chief of staff in the attorney general’s office.

Reid Holbrook, an Overland Park attorney representing Maxwell, said Tuesday his client would testify in state ethics cases against Kline and Rucker.

Unless Stanton Hazlett, state disciplinary administrator, calls to say he doesn’t need him, “Maxwell will be available to come in to testify,” Holbrook said. “He doesn’t have any choice.”

CBS CEO Leslie Moonves put two groups on notice Tuesday that they will be paying the network more in the future than they have in the past.

Advertisers will pay more in the form of higher prices for commercials. And the network’s local TV affiliates will pay more too, in the form of substantial portions of the retransmission consent fees they receive from cable operators-or they will risk losing their network affiliations.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin adores the company’s social network called Google Buzz. We know this because an engineer working five feet from Brin used Google Buzz to say so. “I just finished eating dinner with Sergey and four other Buzz engineers in one of Google’s cafes,” engineer John Costigan wrote a day after the Twitter-and-Facebook-esque service was announced. “He was particularly impressed with the smooth launch and the great media response it generated.”

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WHEN: Saturday, May 15th, 2010
WHERE: Cook Center at Mid America Nazarene University, Olathe, KS
WHAT TIME: Registration starts at 9am, Walk starts promptly at 10am!
PRICE: Registration is $35 per adult (age 10+) and $150 for a family of 5+ adults. Each registered walker gets a t-shirt!

Please plan to join us at this family friendly event as we walk to benefit the Light House! Whether you’re an individual, family, youth group, classroom, or just a group of friends - if you want to make a difference, save lives, and get a little exercise while you’re at it, this is the event for you.

So lace up your walking shoes and tell your friends and family - we hope to see you there!

Two Records Set in 2008: Most Nonpayers and Highest-Earning Nonpayers

Nonpaying status used to be a sure sign of poverty or near-poverty, but Congress and the President have changed the tax laws to pull much of the middle class into the growing pool of nonpayers. The income level at which a typical family of four will owe no income taxes has risen rapidly, now topping $51,000.

As a result, recently released IRS data for the 2008 tax year show that a record 51.6 million filers had no income tax obligation.[1] That means more than 36 percent of all Americans who filed a tax return for 2008 were nonpayers, raising serious doubts about the ability of the income tax system to continue funding the federal government’s ballooning expenditures.

The Growth of the Nonpaying Population
Since it was enacted in 1913, the income tax code has contained provisions that exempt low-income workers or greatly reduce their income tax burden. These provisions include the standard deduction, personal exemption, dependent exemption, and the earned income tax credit (EITC). Between 1950 and 1990, the percentage of tax filers whose entire tax liability was wiped out by these provisions averaged 21 percent.

Since the early 1990s, however, lawmakers have increasingly used the tax code instead of government spending programs to funnel money to groups of people they want to reward. Credits have been enacted to subsidize families with children, college students, and purchasers of hybrid cars, just to name a few of the most well known. In terms of tax revenue, the most significant of these socially targeted credits was the $500 per-child tax credit enacted in 1997. The 2001 and 2003 tax bills doubled the value of the credit to $1,000 and added a refundable component.

Wow.  Big news.  After years of pork-barrel spending, the House GOP has decided to finally enact a unilateral moratorium on earmarks this year.

Here are some reactions:

REP. JEFF FLAKE: “This is a great day.  We’ve taken a big step toward fiscal responsibility. We’ve got a long way to go, but we’re headed in the right direction.  We now need to encourage the Democrats follow our lead.”

ROLL CALL: “Surprising his colleagues in announcing his support for the ban was Appropriations ranking member Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.), a longtime opponent of such a moratorium. Lewis told reporters during a break in the meeting that the move was only temporary.”

Casey B. Mulligan is an economics professor at the University of Chicago.

As I’ve discussed before, national trends suggest that the sharp fall in part-time work during the last five months of 2009 can be largely attributed to last summer’s federal minimum-wage increase. A look at job changes in individual states seems to confirm this conclusion.

Two months ago, I noted how national, seasonally adjusted part-time employment increased almost 2.5 million during this recession, but then it peaked in July 2009 and headed sharply downward. I thought that it was no coincidence that the federal minimum hourly wage was raised, on July 24, 2009, from $6.55 to $7.25 - especially since the inflation-adjusted federal minimum wage had already gotten pretty high.

At this time of high unemployment, one group of professionals has no shortage of job security: bad teachers. Few public school principals in the country are able to dismiss an incompetent teacher without a protracted, expensive struggle, and therefore firings rarely happen. Yet researchers agree that hiring good teachers, and ditching bad ones, is the best way to improve education.

Nationwide, 2% or fewer teachers are ever fired or fail to have their contracts renewed because of poor performance. Among tenured teachers - those who get job security, typically after two or three years of satisfactory performance - there are often no dismissals at all, according to the U.S. Education Department.

The other, more thought-provoking one, is whether jobless benefits, because of multiple extensions approved by Congress, have morphed into an entitlement.

The Depression-era program was originally intended as a temporary bridge to help the jobless until a recovery put them back to work - though nearly two-thirds of unemployed workers do not qualify. During a more normal downturn in the economy, states help people who have been laid off with jobless benefits lasting 26 weeks. But now, in some of the hardest-hit states, the long-term unemployed have been able to collect benefits for as long as 99 weeks - almost two years.

Just as most believe President Obama’s popularity is tied to a large extent by the economic outlook, there’s a clear correlation between governors’ approval ratings and their state’s unemployment rates. Using public polling available recently in 33 of the 50 states, we note the following trends:

The average unemployment rate of governors with a 50 percent or higher approval rating is 7.4, compared to 9.5 for governors under the 50 percent mark.
In the nine states were governors had approval ratings higher than 60 percent, the average unemployment rate was 6.9 percent. In the 10 states where governors’ approval ratings were lower than 40 percent, the average unemployment rate was 10.6 percent.
Of the states with unemployment rates of 7 percent or less, all but one governor had an approval rating above 50.
There are, of course, some outliers, and in several cases other factors are at play to explain a governor’s political weakness. For instance, Iowa’s unemployment rate is among the lowest in the nation, and yet Gov. Chet Culver (D) had an approval rating of just 41 percent in a February Rasmussen poll.