We just survived some pretty heavy weather here in Raleigh – Glad to say all are okay. However, I saw this report on the tornado that hit Tracy, MN – a small town just 3 water towers from Walnut Grove of Laura Engels fame. And, I might add, just a short 45 minutes from my own home.
An amazing storm to say the least.
Wow:
Sen. Diane Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum won a construction contract for California’s high-speed rail project, reports the California Political Review.
Author Laer Pearce says Perini-Zachary-Parsons, a construction group partially owned by Blum’s investment firm, Blum Capital, and their investors, bagged the nearly billion dollar contract:
Pays to be connected.
North Carolina is firmly red, much to the joy of NC State fans the world over!
But seriously, some folks are not overly happy that the republicans are in power:
We don’t take civil disobedience lightly. But the avalanche of extreme policies from Gov. Pat McCrory and the North Carolina General Assembly — attacking the poor and unemployed, cutting crucial funding from public education and dismantling voting rights — left us no choice. From teenage college students to elderly grandmothers, we are assembling in the State Capitol, week after week, to sing, pray and force politicians to hear our voices.
After our first nonviolent protest, 17 of us were arrested and jailed. The next Monday, 30 moral witnesses were carted off in handcuffs, and the next week the number was 49. Last week, 57 protesters were arrested and jailed. Still more of us are prepared to put our bodies on the line to oppose the backward, far-right ideological vision taking hold in our state.
Here’s why.
In the first 50 days of this session alone, the General Assembly and McCrory cut the earned income tax credit for more than 900,000 poor and working people. They rejected federal funding to expand Medicaid to cover 500,000 North Carolinians without health insurance. They slashed state unemployment benefits and rejected federally funded Emergency Unemployment Compensation to 170,000 laid-off workers. This vicious war on the poor will devastate hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians who are already suffering. And with no checks on the Republican hold on the legislature and governorship, these laws are only the beginning.
Piling further indignities on the poor, they also want to require people applying for temporary assistance or benefits to submit to criminal background checks, and force applicants to a job training program for low-income workers to take a drug test, for which they have to pay.
Now the legislature wants to increase and expand taxes on groceries, haircuts and prescription drugs. They’re even taking aim at poor children with a bill to lower the income requirement for North Carolina’s prekindergarten program, making it off limits to nearly 30,000 children who would have previously qualified.
Perhaps most terrifying is that the politicians who have seized control are trying to rig the state’s election rules, seeking to remain in power far after this legislative session. In their kitchen sink approach to voter suppression, they have pushed bills to require strict forms of photo ID for voting, repeal same-day registration, cut early voting from 17 days to six and ban early voting on Sundays.
Mr. Barber is the President of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP. And he’s been instrumental in the Moral Monday protests at the capital.
Personally, the protests smack of laziness and juvenile tendencies. These people are getting arrested to see their names in the paper. To back slap each other at the Occupy Nowhere bonfires. They fuel themselves.
The Tea Party rallied, to be sure. But they were legal. They weren’t arrested. They left the grounds better than they found them
These people? Occupy Wall Street retreds.
Posted in Government, Politics: North Carolina, Politics: State
Tagged Moral Monday, NAACP, William Barber
And I thought that I had it bad when I discovered I paid a higher effective tax rate than Obama:
More than 8,000 French households’ tax bills topped 100 percent of their income in 2012, according to a French newspaper report.
Jackers.
Recently, The Heritage Foundation published a report saying that immigration reform would cost us $6.3 trillion. I’m posting late on this but it’s been in my stack for awhile. The report struck me wrong because I’ve never considered immigration to be a financial transaction. It’s always been a primal “yawlp”. America is less a physical location than it is a “way of living”.
Beyond that, I couldn’t get over the numbers. And then CATO helped me out:
The Heritage Foundation has released a study claiming an immigration amnesty will cost the U.S. Treasury $6.3 trillion. Many other free-marketeers — of which I am one — decry that report’s methodology as ignoring the economic growth effects and resulting tax revenues of open immigration.
I’ve always thought that immigration brought the folks most willing to work for a better life. And not those who simply want to live at the government’s expense.
So, how do immigrants that are willing to work and work hard help the new nation?
A 2009 study prepared for the Cato Institute employed a dynamic economic model called USAGE to estimate the economic change caused by immigration reform. It found that a bill similar to that proposed in the Senate added $180 billion to U.S. household income a year.
Another paper commissioned by Cato employed a similar analysis using a model called the GMig2. The study found that immigration reform would increase U.S. GDP by $1.5 trillion in 10 years.
That model also ran a simulation in which all unauthorized immigrants were removed from the U.S. economy — a policy favored by Heritage’s study. The result was a $2.6 trillion decrease in estimated GDP growth over the same decade, confirming the commonsense observation that removing workers, consumers, investors, and entrepreneurs from America’s economy will make us poorer.
The Cato studies provide dynamic tools that count the unambiguous economic gains from increased immigration as part of any reform. The consensus among economists is that immigration is good for the vast majority of Americans and the immigrants themselves, and makes both the U.S. and world economies larger and more productive.
A Reagan-era amnesty confirms that legalized immigrants experienced wage increases of up to 15 percent just by working legally. Those higher wages are a result of more productive workers who then pay higher taxes. But employers, shareholders, consumers, real estate owners, and most workers also see their incomes and productivity increase from immigration.
Not only is more open and freer immigration consistent with Liberty lovers, it makes financial sense.
Posted in Economics, Immigration, Politics: International, Politics: National
Tagged CATO, Heritage Foundation
As I’m keeping bees, all thing bees are interesting:
(Reuters) – Bees at a cluster of apiaries in northeastern France have been producing honey in mysterious shades of blue and green, alarming their keepers who now believe residue from containers of M&M’s candy processed at a nearby biogas plant is the cause.
Since August, beekeepers around the town of Ribeauville in the region of Alsace have seen bees returning to their hives carrying unidentified colorful substances that have turned their honey unnatural shades.
Mystified, the beekeepers embarked on an investigation and discovered that a biogas plant 4 km (2.5 miles) away has been processing waste from a Mars plant producing M&M’s, bite-sized candies in bright red, blue, green, yellow and brown shells.
Awesome.
The economic well being of America and Americans is dependent on education. But not just any education – the worlds doesn’t need “Women’s Studies” majors or those who wanna spend 4 years investigating “Migration Art of the 4th Century”. Indeed, such degrees might have some value in a “education for education” sense, but practitioners of such majors should walk in eyes wide open – employment opportunities are going to be few and far between for such majors. And on top of that, the salaries are going to be smaller than the harder sciences.
The U.S. economy is strengthening, adding an average of 208,000 jobs a month over the past six months.
“The private sector is generating jobs and also producing output growth of about three percent,” says Wells Fargo economist John Silvia. “It’s the public sector that’s continuing to restructure and lose jobs.”
And education has been a dividing line in the recovery. While well over two million jobs have been added in the past year for workers with at least some college education, for workers with a high school degree or less, more than half a million jobs have been lost.
“We’re hiring scientists, engineers, people with deep mathematical backgrounds,” Mehren says.
…
Mehren says people with the required skills “are few and far between.”
“The economy is not creating the kinds of workers that we need to move into the future,” he says. “And, you know, I think that’s a challenge for all of us and something we should examine.”
Wanna job that pays? Study math, engineering and computers. Wanna hobby? Go to school for a soft science and take pleasure in the knowledge that you know a lot about your hobby.
I’ve been following the plight of the honey bee for years now. But with me recent plunge into the whole apiary business, I’m much more interested. Back when I first started reading about the problem of hives dying off, Colony Collapse Disorder, the leading theory was that cell phones and cell phone towers were interrupting the ability of the bee to travel.
They were getting lost and dying.
Since then, theories abound. However, the most recent and loudest has to do with the whole issue surrounding GMO crops. Is it the pollen from the crops themselves that are killing the bees? Is it the herbicides and pesticides that can now be used with much more freedom that are killing the bees?
Sadly, we don’t know:
WASHINGTON — The devastation of American honeybee colonies is the result of a complex stew of factors, including pesticides, parasites, poor nutrition and a lack of genetic diversity, according to a comprehensive federal study published on Thursday. The problems affect pollination of American agricultural products worth tens of billions of dollars a year.
The report does not place more weight on one factor over another, and recommends a range of actions and further research.
Honeybees are used to pollinate hundreds of crops, from almonds to strawberries to soybeans. Since 2006, millions of bees have been dying in a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder. The cause or causes have been the subject of much study and speculation.
The federal report appears the same week that European officials took steps toward banning a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, derived from nicotine, that they consider a critical factor in the mass deaths of bees there.
But officials in the United States Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency and others involved in the bee study said that there was not enough evidence to support a ban on one group of pesticides, and that the costs of such action might exceed the benefits.
I’m happy with the approach. I like the idea of scientific study of causes and reactions. I also like it when those scientists admit that they don’t yet know and need more time.
Let’s take it.
An interesting intersection. I’m pretty hawkish on going after and getting bad guys. However, I’m not sure if I would be cool with just sending in policeman to go ahead and shoot them.
On the other hand, it seems pretty reasonable that US citizens should be able to expect a trial.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that four American citizens –one of them a suspect in a North Carolina-based terrorist cell – have been killed in drone strikes since 2009 in Pakistan and Yemen. The disclosure to Congress comes on the eve of a major national security speech by President Barack Obama.
In conducting U.S. counterterrorism operations against al-Qaida and its associated forces, the government has targeted and killed one American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, and is aware of the killing by U.S. drones of three others, Attorney General Eric Holder said in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy.
Al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric, was killed in a drone strike in September 2011 in Yemen. Holder said three other Americans were killed by drones in counterterrorism operations since 2009 but were not targeted. The three are Samir Khan, who was killed in the same drone strike as al-Awlaki; al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, a native of Denver, who also was killed in Yemen two weeks later; and Jude Kenan Mohammed, who was killed in a drone strike in Pakistan.
Mohammed was born in the United States and dropped out of Fuquay-Varina High School in 2006. He left the U.S. two years later.
He was among eight men with Triangle ties indicted on charges they raised money, stockpiled weapons and trained in preparation for jihadist attacks against American military and foreign targets. Seven of them were arrested in Johnston County in July 2009. Mohammed, who was believed to be in Pakistan at the time, was never found.
All seven of Mohammed’s co-conspirators are serving prison time. Four were convicted and three, including alleged ringleader Daniel Patrick Boyd, pleaded guilty.
Again, a gut wrenching intersection.
Posted in Liberty, Politics: National
Tagged Barack Obama, Drone, Terrorists, War on Terror
North Carolina is dominated by republicans at the state level. Such domination can be dangerous. However, it can also make for change that has been decades in coming.
Tax reform is just that change.
Right now North Carolina has a very high corporate tax rate compared to other southern states. Additionally, the state income tax is also higher than our neighbors. The thinking is that we would be able to attract more businesses to North Carolina if only our tax structure was more competitive. I agree. However, while businesses do look at the corporate tax, I’m not sure how much they look at individual income taxes.
It is with this mix of taxes that the republicans in Raleigh are looking at tax reform:
RALEIGH — A far-reaching plan proposed by Republicans in the state Senate would slow government spending and affect the wallet of every North Carolinian as it slashes income tax rates and raises the cost of food, prescription drugs and more than 100 tax-exempt services.
Senate leader Phil Berger outlined the forthcoming legislation Tuesday, calling it a $1 billion tax cut that is the largest in state history.
“This is a huge change in the way North Carolina taxes its citizens, the way North Carolina generates its revenue to fund services that government provides,” said Berger, an Eden Republican and the Senate president pro tem.
It shifts the tax burden to consumption rather than income, a move that will disproportionately affect low-income taxpayers and families. A married couple with two children making $30,000 a year would pay an estimated $1,000 more in taxes each year, according to a calculator on a political website designed to support the plan. By contrast, a single taxpayer making $200,000 would get a $6,000 break.
Under the proposal: The state’s 7.75 percent personal income tax rate for the top bracket would gradually drop to 4.5 percent over three years, and likewise the 6.9 percent corporate income tax would fall to 6 percent. The estate tax, paid by only the wealthiest taxpayers in 2010, would be eliminated, and the business franchise tax would see a 10 percent reduction.
To offset the cuts, the state would apply a lower sales tax at 6.5 percent to roughly 130 services that are currently exempted, or essentially any service taxed by at least one state.
In short, the idea is to reduce the corporate tax -GREAT idea- reduce the income tax -perhaps a good idea- and lower the sales tax BUT widen the base of that lower sales tax.
In discussing the new structure, I think that the republicans are going to have to be honest and admit that it is what it is, a shift of taxes and a effective increase on the folks who make less money than the wealthy. It still might not be a bad idea, but it has to be recognized for what it is.
Personally, I would like to see a plan that is closer to revenue neutral for those who would be most negatively impacted. And this is where it can get tricky. For example, for those of us who are most poor, we would indeed be faced with a sales tax on food. However, we have to acknowledge that the money for that food is likely to have been supplemented by government to begin with.
Is taxing food stamps really taxing those that use them? Perhaps in a way, but not in the way that we generally use the term tax. What it would do is reduce the amount of food that would otherwise fit in the basket, but it would not be taxing the income of that individual purchasing the food.
The next idea would be that while the tax burden is certainly shifting, and no one should deny that, is it shifting into a more equitable position? After all, this is more of a “Flat Tax” solution than the traditional income tax only solution. In fact, other states are even more reliant on sales tax than income tax; think Washington state and Florida.
Regardless of what actually is passed into law, this is certainly an interesting conversation.
Posted in Economics, Politics: North Carolina, Politics: State, Taxes
Tagged Flat Tax, North Carolina, Sales Tax, Tax Reform