Expenses in the billions may not attract much attention these days, but when it gets to the trillions, people sit up and take notice. In a CNN/Opinion Research poll conducted in January, 83% of those polled thought the federal budget deficit was extremely important or very important. The debt and the deficit are enormous political issues and will likely play a big role in the 2012 elections.
There is just one problem: If you live in one of 20 states with a state estate tax, you could find your existing estate tax plans causing more harm than good.
State estate taxes are not new. They had just been a secondary element in the course of figuring out the much higher federal estate tax.
Some of the nation’s biggest oil companies are looking at permanently reducing how much gasoline and diesel fuel they make, a move that analysts say would almost certainly trigger higher prices for drivers.
Energy companies are suffering huge losses from refining because of slumping gasoline use — a product of the economic downturn and changing consumer habits and preferences. Energy experts say refining cutbacks have begun and will accelerate as corporations strive for profits.
Is China broke?
It seems like a silly question, right? China’s foreign-exchange reserves stood at $2.4 trillion at the end of 2009. Yes, China announced that its proposed annual budget for 2010 would produce a record deficit, but the deficit is just $154 billion, or 2.8% of China’s gross domestic product. In contrast, the Congressional Budget Office projects the U.S. budget deficit for fiscal 2010 at $1.3 trillion. That’s equal to 9.2% of GDP.
NEW YORK (Fortune) — A few nights ago in the historic Renaissance Grand Hotel in St. Louis, Mo., President Obama reassured a crowd of Senator Claire McCaskill supporters that health-care reform wouldn’t just be good for their health, it would be good for the health of the country: “I said at the beginning of this thing we would not do anything that adds to our deficit,” he said to the clapping audience. “This plan does not do anything to add to this deficit. And that’s how we should be operating.”
In this bluest of blue states, I had been following Republican state legislator Scott Brown and Democratic gaffe master and Attorney General Martha Coakley as they weaved their way toward Tuesday’s finish line in Boston. I had spent hours talking to union members, former Democrats, current Democrats, Kennedy voters, and gay rights campaigners who were-as almost all of them said-Scott Brown supporters worried about the “explosive growth of government.” All natives of the Commonwealth and reflexively Democratic, they kvetched about what they viewed as reckless government spending, rising taxes, and a risky overhaul of a health care system that treats them rather well. As one member of a pipefitters union told me, “None of the guys in my union trust that Obama won’t hit us with that 40 percent health care tax.”
Several public opinion surveys over the last ten or eleven months make it clear the American people do not want the health care reform legislation currently before Congress to pass. It’s a sea change in the public’s attitude since from the days immediately following the 2008 election, when Democrats from the newly-elected Barack Obama on down universally proclaimed that the people had given them a mandate, that they had embraced the idea that the government should increase its control of the health care system and, with it, nearly one-sixth of the U.S. economy.
Washington (CNN) — As House Democratic leaders advised their members Friday to prepare for a legislative battle over health care that could stretch through next weekend, four additional rank-and-file Democrats have come out against the Obama administration’s signature domestic priority.
The Obama Administration and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government both chose to meet the credit crisis and subsequent recession with huge increases in public spending and debt. Brown even boasted that by doing so he had “saved the world.”
The president has nominated Janet Yellen to be vice chair of the Federal Reserve. Ms. Yellen is a distinguished economist who unfortunately subscribes to the Phillips-curve model that trades off unemployment and inflation. In other words, rather than excess money creation as the cause of rising prices, she focuses on the unemployment rate, the volume of new jobs being created, and the growth of the overall economy. For Ms. Yellen, inflation is caused by too many people working and too much economic prosperity.
The Cuban regime knows no shame.
On March 8, Granma, the Communist Party daily, foretold the death of Guillermo Farinas Hernandez. On a hunger strike since Feb. 24, he is demanding that two dozen political prisoners in ill health be freed. Cuba can’t be blackmailed or pressured, Granma noted, nor would it be ethical to force-feed him while conscious.
According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the percentage of its sexual harassment filings that are made by men has doubled over the last two decades. And, although the agency does not compile data on the gender of those being accused, anecdotal evidence suggests that most of those filings are for male-to-male harassment.
Since the end of World War II, our country has had three great presidents: Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.
Their politics varied, but these giants stand in sharp contrast to our last three presidents, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and now Barack Obama. The first two presided over gravely flawed presidencies; the third is on his way to outright failure.
What makes these two presidential trios so different? A recent visit to the Truman Museum and Library in Independence, Mo., made me ask what made those great presidents great.
Above all other reasons, voters who oppose ObamaCare cite their fear over costs: They think it will cause their insurance premiums to soar and result in far higher taxes to fund a vast new entitlement. The public is right on both counts, which is why White House smokejumpers have been dispatched to put out this fire as the final votes approach.
Let’s take their claims one by one, as a public service while everyone else focuses on the whip count.
Link.
We’re all entitled to our own man-crushes-heck, I think Jeff Flake’s a dreamboat-but we are not entitled to our own facts. And on the facts of Obama’s actual governing policies, Brooks does some quick hand-waving about how the administration’s crack financial team have “tried with halting success to find a center-left set of restraints to provide some stability to market operations” (what does that even mean?), points out that lefties and righties both critize Tim Geithner, and so therefore MODERATE AND REASONABLE PROGRESSIVE. Here’s an example of his logic:
Did the fall of Saddam Hussein and the violent birth of Iraqi democracy really empower Iran?
That conventional wisdom might have been true in the shorter term during the chaotic Iraqi insurrection, but it was never an accurate assessment over the longer haul - as we are beginning to see, nearly seven years after the Iraq War began.
Netanyahu sensed a political advantage, and he’s pressing it. Martin Indyk, former American ambassador to Israel, explains Netanyahu’s remarkable decision to taunt his country’s most important ally.
What happened to Vice President Biden this week in Jerusalem was egregious but hardly new. Right-wing governments in Israel have regularly embarrassed high-level U.S. officials by making announcements about new settlement activity during or just after their visits. But it usually happens to secretaries of state. It infuriated James Baker, confounded Condoleezza Rice, and appalled Madeleine Albright.
ELSEWHERE in the world, Europe is widely regarded as a continent whose economy is rigid and sclerotic, whose people are work-shy and welfare-dependent, and whose industrial base is antiquated and declining-the broken cogs and levers that condemn the old world to a gloomy future. As with most clichés, there is some truth in it. Yet as our special report in this week’s issue shows, the achievements of Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, tell a rather different story.
The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has begun to scale back its political engagement because the results have been few, government repression continues, and other opposition groups mistrust the movement. Instead it will focus on a traditional religious, educational, and social agenda. The consequence result will be an even greater lack of political competition.
In a detailed profile of the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities over the last decade, this paper examines the Brotherhood’s relations with the Mubarak regime and other opposition groups, its legislative priorities and accomplishments, and its internal debate over the value of political participation.
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley described the nearly 45-minute phone conversation in unusually undiplomatic terms, signaling that the close allies are facing their deepest crisis in two decades after the embarrassment suffered by Vice President Biden this week when Israel announced during his visit that it plans to build 1,600 housing units in a disputed area of Jerusalem.
(Reuters) - Attorney General Eric Holder failed to tell the Senate about seven legal briefs he signed when lawmakers considered his nomination to his current job, according to a letter released on Friday.
Virtually every budget expert knows that the U.S. federal debt is on an unsustainable course. This means that something beyond our control is eventually going to force us to live within our means. Historically, it has been foreign bond holders who ultimately imposed fiscal austerity on profligate nations. That is why America’s growing foreign debt should be a matter of concern to policymakers.
Reading the findings this morning about how Lehman executives went about destroying a bank that was too big to fail reminded me that perhaps it’s time for the investigators, whether they be from Congress or the Angelides Commission — the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that is supposed to tell this country what really happened — to interview the real bad guys, the guys who bankrupted and crushed their own institutions.
NEW YORK (Fortune) – Unraveling the biggest-ever U.S. bankruptcy case isn’t cheap.
A report released Thursday by the examiner in the Lehman Brothers Chapter 11 case exposed the games the defunct investment bank’s executives played to stay in Wall Street’s good graces.
