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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (37588)	1/11/2013 11:26:51 PM
From: Sdgla	5 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

What you see in Ca is the result of what liberals do. Point in fact Browns new budget which ignores the massive unfunded pension obligations and the double digit unemployment. Liberals leave fiscal train wrecks everywhere they have been in control.

To: koan who wrote (37588)	1/12/2013 10:00:16 AM
From: Broken_Clock	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

What Obama did....he forced congress to give $76,000,000,000 to GE and other corporate cronies and he paid for it by stealing from the poorest workers.....and he lied about right to our faces while he partied in Hawaii. And he gave the $$$ to GE that doesn't even pay taxes! ++++ The "fiscal cliff" legislation passed this week included $76 billion in special-interest tax credits for the likes of General Electric, Hollywood and even Captain Morgan. But these subsidies weren't the fruit of eleventh-hour lobbying conducted on the cliff's edge -- they were crafted back in August in a Senate committee, and they sat dormant until the White House reportedly insisted on them this week. A Republican Senate aide familiar with the cliff negotiations tells me the White House wanted permanent extensions of a whole slew of corporate tax credits. When Senate Republicans said no, "the White House insisted that the exact language" of the Baucus bill be included in the fiscal cliff deal. "They were absolutely insistent," another aide tells me. (The White House did not return requests for comment.) washingtonexaminer.com ++++ Americans feel austerity's bite as payroll taxes rise Reuters – 17 minutes ago By Jason Lange WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Americans are beginning to feel the pinch from Washington's decision to embrace austerity measures aimed at bringing down the nation's budget deficit. Paychecks across the country have shrunk over the last week due to higher federal tax rates, and workers are already cutting back on spending, which will drag on the economy this year. In Warren, Rhode Island, Ben DeCastro got his first paycheck on Friday in which taxes on his wages rose by 2 percentage points. That works out to about $30 a week. "You sit back and do the calculation, and that's $30 I'm not going to spend at a restaurant," said DeCastro. He said he worries that people hit by higher taxes will spend less at the chain of furniture stores where he works as a marketing manager. Politicians in Washington made much hubbub last week about a bipartisan deal to soften or postpone some $600 billion in scheduled tax hikes and government spending cuts. President Barack Obama said the deal would shield 98 percent of Americans from a middle-class tax hike. Nevertheless, for most workers, rich and poor alike, taxes went up on December 31 as a temporary payroll tax cut expired. That cut - a 2 percentage point reduction in a levy that funds Social Security - was put in place two years ago to help the economy, which was still smarting from the 2007-09 recession. About 160 million workers pay this tax, and the increase will cost the average worker about $700 a year, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank. "It stinks," said Beverly Renfroe, an accountant for a realty firm in Jackson, Mississippi. "I definitely noticed a decrease." The pain will trickle through the economy over the next few weeks. Already, the new rate of 6.2 percent has trimmed paychecks for about half of the 200,000 employees whose paychecks are processed by Advantage Payroll Services, a payroll firm based in Auburn, Maine. "HEADWIND TO GROWTH" Economists estimate the payroll tax hike will reduce household incomes by a collective $125 billion this year. Some households could reduce contributions to retirement accounts or other savings, but most are also expected to cut back on spending. That alone could reduce economic growth this year by about 0.6 percentage point, said Michael Feroli, an economist at JPMorgan in New York City. "The headwind to growth should be noticeable," he said. Most mainstream economists say the government should still be trying to stimulate the economy by lowering taxes or raising spending to help bring down the 7.8 percent jobless rate. Even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has said Congress could consider short-term stimulus measures if they can be coupled with a plan to tame the deficit over the long run. But a consensus has emerged between Congress and the White House that the federal government should step up the pace at which it cuts the deficit, which ballooned during the recession. That decision is having repercussions across the country. In Bergenfield, New Jersey, Evelyn Weiss Francisco has put off plans to upgrade her cell phone and thinks she might go to fewer music concerts. A director at a public relations firm, she thinks the higher payroll taxes will cost her about $1,000 this year. Some Americans will also pay higher income taxes this year. Congress and Obama let income tax rates rise for households making more than $450,000 a year, a partial repeal of tax cuts put in place under President George W. Bush. The wealthy will also pay a new tax to help fund a health insurance reform passed in 2010. These will have a smaller impact on the wider economy because they affect fewer people. But taken together, this year's tax hikes could subtract a full percentage point from growth, Feroli said. Most economists see economic growth of roughly 2 percent this year, a lackluster pace held back by the government's austerity measures that is likely to do little to reduce unemployment. Failure to postpone government spending cuts due to begin around March would slow growth more, further frustrating the economic recovery. DROP THAT BAGEL The blow to the economy from the tax hikes will hurt the most during the first half of the year as people adapt to their smaller paychecks. Consumer spending, which drives more than two thirds of the economy, will likely grow at a mere 1 percent annual rate in the first quarter, and 1.5 percent in the second, said Sven Jari Stehn, an economist at Goldman Sachs in New York. Nicki Hagen, who received her first reduced paycheck on January 4 and then another on Friday, estimates the higher taxes will shrink her paychecks by about $10 a week. She has already started holding back from coffee-and-bagel runs made by coworkers at the home improvement company where she works as an office administrator in New York City. She expects a much bigger hit to her family's income when her husband gets his first paycheck for 2013 on Tuesday. The two will then sit down and figure out how to budget their money. They might cut cable channels, or take vacation days when their daughter is out of school to save on babysitter expenses. "This is going to affect our lives," she said.

To: koan who wrote (37588)	1/12/2013 10:41:01 AM
From: Brumar89	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

Gore sells out; NYT kills Environmental Desk Al Gore Declares Mission Accomplished; Gray Lady Hardest Hit January 11th, 2013 - 10:31 pm “Lack of Global Warming Means Cold, Empty Chairs at New York Times Environment Desk,” Jim Lakely writes on the Heartland Institute’s blog: From Inside Climate News [emphasis mine]: [iframe style="BORDER-BOTTOM: 0px; BORDER-LEFT: 0px; BORDER-TOP: 0px; BORDER-RIGHT: 0px" id=google_ads_iframe_/1011927/PJM_300_by_250_middle_0 height=250 marginHeight=0 frameBorder=0 width=300 allowTransparency name=google_ads_iframe_/1011927/PJM_300_by_250_middle_0 marginWidth=0 scrolling=no][/iframe] *The New York Times* will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments*. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated. No decision has been made about the fate of the Green Blog, which is edited from the environment desk. Eliminated. Done. Over. Kaput. And if the Green Blog is not* being edited by a non-existent environment desk, the blog may just go away, too — or end up lightly managed by a Times editor who is paid and pressured by a dying paper to do the important work of the newspaper. Any way you want to spin it, America’s “paper of record” no longer considers alarmist, sky-is-falling coverage of the climate and energy beats worthy of the full-court press of a dedicated staff. Go figure. How can they, when Al Gore has just declared Mission Accomplished for environmentalism? He’s got his $100 payout, and the rest of the world is left wondering why we should care about a religion when its chief practitioner has just signed his non-aggression pact with Big Oil. At Ricochet, Britain’s James Delingpole piles on: “New York Times Closes Its Environment Desk. Please, Nobody Laugh.” That desk has been the launching pad for “some of the most compelling and moving news stories of the last four years:” Among them: Every time you take an unnecessary shower a baby polar bear dies. No, it’s getting hotter. Really, it’s getting hotter. Dr James Hansen says so and he works at NASA. Just because global warming stopped in 1997 doesn’t mean it’s not going to start again, no sirree – and when it does it will be worse, much, much worse. Al Gore: why selling my environmental channel Current TV to oil-funded Jew-haters for $100 million was the morally right thing to do. Much more on that last thought right after the page break. Delingpole’s last quip dovetails perfectly with John Podhoretz’s brilliant observation about why Al-Jazeera paid so much to acquire Current TV in the latest Ricochet podcast, alongside Jonah Goldberg and Rob Long: JONAH GOLDBERG: I remember writing a column five years ago. Remember when [the first Cars movie from Pixar] came out? Al Gore has this whole thing in his books about how the internal combustion is the central focus of evil in the modern world, and we have to wean people off of it. I remember writing this column saying, how come Al Gore isn’t condemning this movie, which is indoctrinating little kids to love cars? Al Gore plays this game all the time, where he says this stuff to the rubes on the left, that they all eat up, while he’s now worth more than Mitt Romney from playing this sort of crony capitalist stuff, and the story ends with him taking nearly 100 million dollars in petro-dollars from the Middle East! It’s a fascinating, Tom Wolfe-ian kind of thing. JOHN PODHORETZ: Well, I think it’s a little more sinister than that, in this one sense. ROB LONG: How can it be more sinister than that? PODHORETZ: Well, here’s why. [What Jonah is describing is] hypocrisy, and comic hypocrisy. [But] Al Gore, the student of Marty Peretz, his intellectual sponsor, the former editor and owner of the New Republic, who is basically the leading and maybe the last sort of hard-line Zionist Democrat, the man who chose Joe Lieberman as his running mate, is 12 years after that, selling out — literally selling out — to a network that regularly hosts Islamists and anti-Semites, and people who say things like, “Israel will be gone in ten years,” ominously. Now: here’s the sinister part: Al-Jazeera apparently paid about $500 million for Current TV. It is not worth $500 million. Glenn Beck would not have offered it $500 million. Nobody would have offered it $500 million. Its revenue, which is about $100 million, came entirely from the fees that cable companies paid to have it on the air. That number was going to go down, and go down over time as they cancelled it, because it drew nobody, and there was no longer any reason to make nice to Al Gore, who no longer had any political power. So the question is: why did Al-Jazeera pay $500 million, and who from Current is going to be on Al-Jazeera’s board? Well, the answer is, it’s not Joel Hyatt, Gore’s partner, the son-in-law of former Senator Howard Metzenbaum, and an ambulance-chasing lawyer, who started an ambulance-chasing firm, one of the first to advertise on television in the 1980s. It is Al Gore, former vice president of the United States, winner of the popular vote in the 2000 election. They [Al-Jazeera] paid $500 million to get Al Gore as their front man, and that is sinister. That is sinister. LONG: That’s interesting; I hadn’t quite worked it out that way. But it is true. Assuming for a minute that Al-Jazeera wants a cable channel. These channels do get sold. They get bought, and they got sold, and sometimes you buy a channel that has a very low value, and has a very low audience, and you revamp it, and you turn it into something big. That happens all the time. So I’m not sure about the actual price that Current would fetch, if it were up for auction. But if you were Al-Jazeera, with those pockets, you’d probably spend a little bit more, and get a whole lot more, than spend $100 million [sic], or whatever it was, to buy Current. It just doesn’t seem like a very good deal for Al-Jazeera, unless, as John says, they were buying some other product, which I guess, is Al Gore. PODHORETZ: For you, it doesn’t mean anything. For [Al-Jazeera] to say that they have such credibility that the former Vice President of the United States is on their board, and is a consultant to them, was worth several hundred million dollars. That’s, I think, an inarguable fact. Indeed. Incidentally, Delingpole links to his article in the London Telegraph titled, “Now even Pravda admits the ‘global warming’ jig is up,” with Pravda as a joking euphemism for the Gray Lady. But that seems awfully unfair to the real Pravda, which lately has been making far more sense on several issues than America’s MSM — and not coincidentally staking out territory to the right of America’s MSM. http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2013/01/11/gray-lady-hardest-hit/?singlepage=true Lack of Global Warming Means Cold, Empty Chairs at New York Times Environment Desk http://blog.heartland.org/2013/01/lack-of-global-warming-means-cold-empty-chairs-at-new-york-times-environment-desk/