Obama threatens veto of bill combining tax cuts for middle class, top earners. President Obama is threatening to veto any legislation that extends all the tax cuts set to expire at the end of the year, as he presses Congress to extend those cuts only for families whose yearly income is less than $250,000 -- and raises taxes on everyone earning more. The veto threat sets the early tone for what is expected to be a contentious battle between Democrats and Republicans through the rest of the year as they seek to avoid the so-called "taxmageddon" -- the sudden increase in taxes on all Americans that will occur if Congress doesn't vote to extend some or all of the Bush-era tax rates.
Obama will press his case Tuesday afternoon during an address at a community college in Iowa. Ahead of that speech, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus told Fox News that the president's proposal is a "sham" which, if enacted, would cut into already meager economic growth. He accused Obama of playing a "divisive rich versus poor game. " Mitt Romney's campaign also pounced. Michael Boskin: Washington's Knack for Picking Losers. Gallup Finds Unemployment Climbing to Nine Percent in February. A man looking for work stands on a street corner in Portland, Maine. (AP) (CNSNews.com) – Unemployment in the U.S. rose to nine percent in mid-February, up from 8.3 percent a month earlier, according to a new Gallup survey.
The polling company said this suggests that it is “premature” to assume the economy will not feature prominently in the 2012 election season. Gallup figures typically provide an indication of what the government will report at the end of the month. “The U.S. unemployment rate, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment, is 9.0% in mid-February,” Gallup said in its mid-month unemployment survey , released on February 17. “The mid-month reading normally reflects what the U.S. government reports for the entire month, and is up from 8.3% in mid-January.”
Gallup said the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) would likely report a rise in the official unemployment rate in early March, when it publishes its February figures. Editorial: Golden State on road to Greece, by way of Detroit | tax, detroit, government - Opinion. Editorial: Golden State on road to Greece, by way of Detroit A woman begs in central Athens, opposite the Finance Ministry on Thursday.
Confusion over whether Greece will get vital bailout cash to avoid defaulting next month is rekindling fears that Europe's debt crisis will spread to bigger countries, like Italy. California's tax burden, according to the Tax Foundation, is heavy. The Register reported that per-person state and local taxes, fees, licenses and "intergovernmental revenue" amount to $8,634, ranking California 13th-highest among the states.
California businesses fare worse, the Tax Foundation said, ranking 48th in tax climate, based on corporate, income, sales, property and unemployment insurance taxes. What's unsaid is the effect on individuals of extremely high corporate taxes. But high taxes are needed to pay for leftist policies that interject government into private life, while heaping generous benefits on government workers who do the interjecting. Overstatement? Review & Outlook: The Amazing Obama Budget. Rick Perry: Texans Are Baffled by the Keystone Decision. An economy drowning in Obama's 'fairness' The Future of the World Economy. "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. "-- L.P. Hartley, English novelist WASHINGTON -- It must now be obvious that, economically speaking, we're in another country.
Things we once took for granted no longer apply; things we never imagined occur all the time. We've entered a zone of ignorance where familiar experience and ideas count for less. "Thirty years ago, if you'd said that the United States and Europe were going to be the centers of financial crises, people would have thought you were crazy," says economist Fred Bergsten. The unforeseen is now routine. Profound changes to the global economy contributed to today's crisis and make it harder to resolve.
First is the rise of "emerging market" countries, led by China, India and Brazil. Second, the United States has moved from the largest-creditor to the largest-debtor nation. Finally, financial crises have mushroomed. Globalization, it turns out, is a double-edged sword. We don't know. Maybe. Obama’s Silly Rule - Rich Lowry. President Barack Obama is making his reelection about raising the taxes of an Omaha billionaire who is volunteering for the honor. The so-called Buffett Rule to make millionaires and billionaires pay at least 30 percent in taxes is such an obvious exercise in poll-driven populism, it should come with cross-tabs attached.
It shows that as an economist, David Axelrod is a hell of a political consultant. It is a non-solution to a non-problem, the intellectual basis of which is a badly distorted anecdote repeated over and over. By now, if you haven’t heard that Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary, you have never turned on a TV news program or checked your Twitter feed. Surprisingly tightfisted for perhaps the world’s third-richest man, Buffett reportedly pays his secretary only about $60,000 a year, yet she supposedly pays a higher rate than his roughly 17 percent.
Buffett benefits from lower rates on investment income. Will it make the tax system fairer? Michael Kinsley: A 'Buffett Rule' for tax equality? - latimes.com. As everybody knows by now, Warren Buffett — class traitor — pays a smaller share of his income in taxes than does his secretary, Debbie Bosanek. In his State of the Union address Jan. 24, President Obama proposed "the Buffett Rule" to rectify this with a phased-in requirement that all taxpayers making more than $1 million a year must pay federal taxes of at least 30% of their adjusted gross incomes.
Who could object? Well, Newt Gingrich — class clown — called the idea "stupid. " And Mitt Romney — class president — said he doesn't believe in raising taxes on anybody under any circumstances: a nice, nuanced view that at least saves us the trouble of arguing about it. It's really impossible to defend a system in which people at the bottom pay 30% or 35% (including Social Security and Medicare) while people at the top who've arranged their affairs correctly — not all that hard — pay 15%, as Romney did last year. Democratic politicians can be eloquent about the struggling middle class. Bye-Bye Keynes? "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. "-- John Maynard Keynes, 1936 WASHINGTON -- The eclipse of Keynesian economics proceeds. When Keynes wrote "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" in the mid-1930s, governments in most wealthy nations were relatively small and their debts modest.
Deficit spending and pump priming were plausible responses to economic slumps. Now, huge governments are often saddled with massive debts. Standard Keynesian remedies for downturns -- spend more and tax less -- presume the willingness of bond markets to finance the resulting deficits at reasonable interest rates. Countries then lose control over their economies. There is no automatic tipping point beyond which a country's debt -- the sum of past annual deficits -- causes bond markets to shut down. Thankfully, the United States is not now in this position. I am less sure. Congress May Try Blocking Cuts If Debt Panel Fails. WASHINGTON – Congress is facing automatic cuts of $1.2 trillion over 10 years if a 12-member Super Committee can't agree to a package of expanded tax revenues and spending cuts, but lawmakers are looking for a way around the "sequestration" and avoid any painful reductions to their favored programs.
Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., say they are writing legislation to prevent what they say would be devastating cuts to the military. Democrats maintain they won't let domestic programs be the sole source of savings. Lawmakers have until the end of the day to get a plan out to the Congressional Budget Office to evaluate the numbers and still give two days for it to be presented by the Nov. 23 deadline.
With that in mind, lawmakers are looking for an end run to their own law since cuts won't hit until 2013. "I am committed to insuring that the American people get that deficit reduction that they were promised," committee co-chairman Rep. Sen. Committee co-chair Sen. Dire U.S. economy is best form of birth control as birth rates fall. By Associated Press Updated: 23:22 GMT, 19 November 2011 The economy may well be the best form of birth control. U.S. births dropped for the third straight year - especially for young mothers - and experts think money worries are the reason. A federal report released Thursday showed declines in the birth rate for all races and most age groups. Special delivery: Birth rates dropped for the third consecutive year, leading some observers to suggest one child families could be the new norm Teens and women in their early 20s had the most dramatic dip, to the lowest rates since record-keeping began in the 1940s.
Also, the rate of cesarean sections stopped going up for the first time since 1996. Experts suspected the economy drove down birth rates in 2008 and 2009 as women put off having children. With the 2010 figures, suspicion has turned into certainty, the Associated Press reports. 'I don't think there's any doubt now that it was the recession. But a few of the findings did startle experts. Wealth Gap Grows Between Young And Old. The wealth gap between younger and older Americans has stretched to the widest on record, worsened by a prolonged economic downturn that has wiped out job opportunities for young adults and saddled them with housing and college debt.
The typical U.S. household headed by a person age 65 or older has a net worth 47 times greater than a household headed by someone under 35, according to an analysis of new census data. While people typically accumulate assets as they age, this wealth gap is now more than double what it was in 2005 and nearly five times the 10-to-1 disparity a quarter-century ago, after adjusting for inflation. The analysis reflects the impact of the economic downturn, which has hit young adults particularly hard.
More are pursuing college or advanced degrees, taking on debt as they wait for the job market to recover. Others are struggling to pay mortgage costs on homes now worth less than when they were bought in the housing boom. Tom Petruno: Turn outrage over bank fees toward financial industry - latimes.com. Popular outrage forced Bank of America Corp. to drop the idea of a $5-a-month debit card fee. Now imagine what that outrage could achieve if it were let loose across the financial industry. How many mutual funds, if faced with that kind of people-power backlash, could justify the management and marketing fees they're charging investors?
How many banks would find their deposits running out the door if savers really took the time to shop around for the best rates? How many company 401(k) retirement savings plans would offer better investment choices if workers took an active role in monitoring the plans and agitating for improvements? None of this is easy — certainly not as easy as posting an angry comment on a blog trashing BofA. But the potential savings or added income for investors, savers and borrowers could far exceed the $60 a year that BofA would have siphoned away with the debit card fee. And we aren't just talking about the poor or uneducated. Where to start? Bank savings. In MF Global, Sad Proof of Europe’s Fallout. The World Economy Adrift. WASHINGTON -- There was something fitting about Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou's reckless call for a referendum on the latest rescue package for his country.
World leaders gathering in Cannes for a G-20 summit face stark realities. The global economy is faltering, and no country has assumed leadership in organizing recovery. There is a loss of control, a vacuum of power. Papandreou's disruptive decision -- now apparently withdrawn -- symbolizes this larger erosion of collective purpose. We are moving from Globalization 1.0 to Globalization 2.0. Time was when the United States automatically assumed the leadership role. But under President Obama -- possibly no one else could have done differently -- America's capacity and desire to lead have flagged. Europe represents a fifth of world economic output, about equal with the United States. China is one obvious answer, along with other Asian nations and oil producers with huge foreign exchange reserves. Occupy Singapore Flop | ASEAN Beat. The first effort at replicating the Occupy Wall Street protests in Singapore was a flop. What went wrong? Inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, last week saw hundreds of protests against corporate greed and economic inequality spring up around the world.
In Singapore, similar action was organized in the financial district to highlight the widening economic gap in the country and to ‘engage the public in creating a new form of democracy.’ But it seems Singaporeans had other things on their mind, because nobody showed up in Raffles Place. Even the organizers didn’t identify themselves to the media, which went there to document the protest. Is this a sign that Singapore’s ‘99 percent’ is satisfied with the economy?
The ‘Occupy Raffles Place’ flop shouldn’t allow us to forget that Singapore has by some measures the highest rate of inequality among developed nations. - The Washington Post. AS WEDNESDAY’S European financial summit approached, the continent’s leaders squabbled as if the European Union had never existed: French President Nicolas Sarkozy snapped at his English counterpart, Prime Minister David Cameron. TV cameras recorded Mr. Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel smirking at the latest factional uproar in Italy. Enraged, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi declared: “No one in the E.U. can nominate themselves commissioner.” Of course, someone leaked a recording of Mr. Berlusconi’s purported vulgar comments about Ms. These leaders have to get a grip on the situation soon, or else investors may finally pull the plug on the continent’s sovereign debt, bringing down the E.U.’s biggest banks with it. Europe would not be in this mess if it had a joint fiscal policy to go with its currency union.
Austerity, Germany’s prescription for Greece and its fellow debtors, only shrinks the numerator in the debt-to-GDP ratio. Obama's Great Depression. Last week the White House picked a Virginia fire station as the venue for the president's principal campaign stop—er, legislative sales pitch. The choice was apt. At roughly the same time the president was lamenting how "cities and states like Michigan and New Jersey . . . have had to lay off big chunks of their forces," Sen.
Majority Leader Harry Reid declared, "It's very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it's the public-sector jobs where we've lost huge numbers. " Oh. Guess you can go home now, Wall Street occupiers! All those unemployment reports? False alarms. To be fair to Reid—which may be more than he deserves—he was defending the part of the American Jobs Act that would appropriate $35 billion for state and local government hiring. The situation looks much worse for the private sector.
The parallels with Hoover don't end there. Hoover's massive government interventionism did not end the Great Depression. How many moons orbit the planet they're living on? Losing the Economic Battle. Amity Shlaes: Three Policies That Gave Us the Jobs Economy. Detroit contracts expose autoworkers' anger. Congress Tackles Chinese Currency Manipulation. Expect the ‘Unexpectedly’ - Jim Geraghty. The Refi Delusion - Kevin D. Williamson. Obama: Public is 'sold' on tax increases in a debt-ceiling deal. Heavy Hand. How the West Was Drilled - By Charles Homans. Harvey Golub: My Response To Buffett And Obama. US and Europe 'dangerously close to recession' Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes? | Rolling Stone Politics.
Opinion: India's Energy Security - the Smarter Way. Borrowing from the Communists to Pay the Jihadis - Clifford D. May. Tumult on Wall Street threatens to spook consumers. The Indecisive President: Obama's Weakness Is a Problem for the Global Economy - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International. The Myths of the High-Tech Worker Shortage. Hispanic Families, Isolated and Broke. Neb. mine find to challenge China’s dominance of vital rare minerals.