"The free-ride zone is not a privilege but a right, and it should be something Seattle people should be proud of having," said Whitney Knox, caseworker for Catholic Housing Services. To her, the repeal "seems kind of mind-boggling, with all the wealth we have in this country."
Even by this lax standard, Romney too often fails. Not to put too fine a point on it, he lies. Quite a bit.
"Since President Obama assumed office three years ago, federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history," Romney claims on his campaign website. This is utterly false. The truth is that spending has slowed markedly under Obama.
An analysis published last week by MarketWatch, a financial news website owned by Dow Jones & Co., compared the yearly growth of federal spending under presidents going back to Ronald Reagan. Citing figures from the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office, MarketWatch concluded that "there has been no huge increase in spending under the current president, despite what you hear."
In the post-war era, federal spending as a percentage of the U.S. economy has hovered around 20 percent, give or take a couple of percentage points. Under Obama, it has hit highs not seen since the end of World War II — completely the opposite of the point asserted by Carney. Part of this, of course, is a consequence of the recession, but it is also the result of a sustained higher level of spending.
I suppose it's too much to ask that you actually read what I wrote. My column says that Romney's claim that under Obama "federal spending has accelerated at a pace without precedent in modern history" is a lie. It remains, in fact, a lie. Glenn Kessler's fine Fact Checker column is an assessment of a claim the president made about spending. While Glenn disagrees with the central assertion of the Market Watch column that I cite -- that spending has risen at only 1.4 percent a year under Obama -- he sets the actual figure at 3.3 percent for the period in question. This is still far, far lower than the rate at which spending increased under Bush, Bush or Reagan. Funny how the big-spending presidents are all Republicans... I should add that Poynter's Politifact truth-squad accepts the 1.4 percent figure, but I included the 3.3. percent number in my column because one doesn't diss the home team. Glenn makes the point that Obama would have spent more if the Republicaans in Congress had let him. I acknowledge that fact, but still there is still no way to justify Romney's false claim.
In theory, one could claim that the budget was already locked in when Obama took office, but that’s not really the case. Most of the appropriations bills had not been passed, and certainly the stimulus bill was only signed into law after Obama took office.
Bush had rescued Fannie and Freddie Mac and launched the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which depending on how you do the math, was a one-time expense of $250 billion to $400 billion in the final months of his presidency. (The federal government ultimately recouped most of the TARP money.) So if you really want to be fair, perhaps $250 billion of that money should be taken out of the equation — on the theory that it would have been spent no matter who was president.
Under these figures, and using this calculator, with 2008 as the base year and ending with 2012, the compound annual growth rate for Obama’s spending starting in 2009 is 5.2 percent. Starting in 2010 — Nutting’s first year — and ending with 2013, the annual growth rate is 3.3 percent. (Nutting had calculated the result as 1.4 percent.)
Junior Magali Flores, 20, said she experienced culture shock when she arrived on the Berkeley campus in 2009 after graduating from a predominantly Latino high school in Los Angeles.
Flores, one of five children of working-class parents from Mexico, said she feels the university can feel hostile to students of color, causing some to leave because they don't feel welcome at Berkeley.
"We want to see more of our people on campus," Flores said. "With diversity, more people would be tolerant and understanding of different ethnicities, different cultures."
With affirmative action outlawed, Asian American students have dominated admissions. The freshman class admitted to UC Berkeley this coming fall is 30 percent white and 46 percent Asian, according to newly released data. The share of admitted Asians is four times higher than their percentage in the state's K-12 public schools.
In the next few weeks, I will sign an executive order clearing away the red tape that slows down too many construction projects. But you need to fund these projects. Take the money we’re no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home. (Applause.)
This is because wealthy tax filers make most of their income from investments. Such income is taxed once at the corporate rate of 35% and again when it is passed through to the individual as a capital gain or dividend at 15%, for a highest marginal tax rate of about 44.75%.
This double taxation is one reason the U.S. has long had a differential tax rate for capital gains. Another reason is because while taxpayers must pay taxes on their gains, they aren't allowed to deduct capital losses (beyond $3,000 a year) except against gains in the current year. Capital gains also aren't indexed for inflation, so a lower rate is intended to offset the effect of inflated gains.
A brief thought on something I’ll try to expand on later. Leaving aside all the questions about what Mitt Romney did or didn’t do at Bain — and about his self-aggrandizing double standard — there’s an even broader question: why does anyone believe that success in business qualified someone to make economic policy?
For the fact is that running a business is nothing at all like making macro policy. The key point about macroeconomics is the pervasiveness of feedback loops due to the fact that workers are also consumers. No business sells a large fraction of its output to its own workers; even very small countries sell around two-thirds of their output to themselves, because that much is non-tradable services.
The bigger question is why Republicans oppose an agency that would stop financial companies from cheating and taking advantage of ordinary Americans, which happened to millions during the mortgage mania. They complain that the current setup leaves the bureau "unaccountable" to the American people, in part, because its funding comes automatically out of the Federal Reserve's budget rather than through the congressional appropriations process.
Unfortunately, the interests of the American people and individual members of Congress are not always one and the same. The funding mechanism was created precisely to remove the power of the purse from the industry's handmaidens in Congress. During 2007 and 2008, the height of Wall Street excess, conservatives cut the funding for the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose job it was to patrol the markets. They apparently want the ability to deny the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau the means to stand between the unscrupulous financial salesmen and their unsophisticated prey.
Seattle police arson/bomb-squad investigators and the FBI are trying to determine who left an incendiary device at a Southeast Seattle bank early Friday.
The device, which one witness described as two bottles wrapped in tape in a box with wires, failed to ignite. Seattle police are calling the incident an attempted arson.
Police spokesman Mark Jamieson said that someone who apparently saw the device inside the secure ATM area at the Chase Bank, at 7100 Martin Luther King Jr. Way S., flagged down a patrol officer at 6:37 a.m.
Fights are erupting among Occupy Wall Street protesters, so much so that one corner of Zuccotti Park has emerged where protesters say they won't go for fear of their safety, the New York Daily News is reporting.Police officers also have been warned of "dangerous instruments" being concealed in cardboard tubing, the News says it has been told by unidentified police sources.
BOSTON - A man and woman who have been living in a tent with Occupy Boston protesters have been arrested for allegedly selling heroin to an undercover police officer.
Issac Bell, 34, and Charlene Dumont, 31, both pleaded not guilty to drug possession and distribution charges at their arraignments Monday. They were released on their own personal recognizance and ordered to stay away from the Occupy Boston encampment.
Prosecutors say police set up a sting after learning of drug activity in the encampment.
Dallas Police continue to investigate whether a teenage runaway was sexually assaulted by an adult male at the Occupy Dallas encampment behind City Hall.
A source within the Dallas Police Department who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation said the girl ran away from home in Garland last month and that she is now refusing to cooperate with investigators. She initially told officers that she had sex with a man in his early twenties and had engaged in sexual activity with several other people.
Some members of the group told CBS 11 the girl identified herself as a 19-year-old and never knew she was 14.
Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.
Cleveland police are investigating an alleged sexual assault incident that occured Saturday at the "Occupy Cleveland" rally involving a 19-year-old female student.
According to police reports, the 19-year-old student was instructed by "Occupy Cleveland" personnel to "share a tent with the suspect due to a shortage of tents."
Thanks to some watchful officers and Occupy Seattle protesters, police have arrested a man suspected of exposing himself to children at least five different times throughout Seattle.
Police had been searching for suspect since the incidents, which occurred between September 29 and October 3.
“During the course of their investigation, detectives discovered that the suspect had been at Westlake Park, participating in Occupy Wall Street,” said detective Reneee Witt “Flyers of the suspect was circulated to officers and the public at the event.”
Efforts by the Occupy Baltimore protest group to evolve into a self-contained, self-governing community have erupted into controversy with the distribution of a pamphlet that victim advocates and health workers fear discourages victims of sexual assaults from contacting police.
The pamphlet says that members of the protest group who believe they are victims or who suspect sexual abuse "are encouraged to immediately report the incident to the Security Committee," which will investigate and "supply the abuser with counseling resources."
Bear in mind, too, that experience has made it painfully clear that men in suits not only don’t have any monopoly on wisdom, they have very little wisdom to offer. When talking heads on, say, CNBC mock the protesters as unserious, remember how many serious people assured us that there was no housing bubble, that Alan Greenspan was an oracle and that budget deficits would send interest rates soaring.
So what? Two years ago the administration promised to run large surpluses. A year ago it said the deficit was only temporary. Now it says deficits don't matter. But we're looking at a fiscal crisis that will drive interest rates sky-high.
Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.
Seattle police arrested 25 people on Wednesday as they clashed with protesters and hauled away tents. The protest continued after arrests were made.
Wednesday's showdown — in one of downtown's most popular gathering spots — began just after lunchtime, as some demonstrators refused a city order to remove the tents.
Several influential New York state lawmakers have received threatening mails saying it is “time to kill the wealthy” if they don’t renew the state’s tax surcharge on millionaires, according to reports.
“It’s time to tax the millionaires!” reads the email, according to WTEN in Albany. “If you don’t, I’m going to pay a visit with my carbine to one of those tech companies you are so proud of and shoot every spoiled Ivy League [expletive] I can find.”
These are the shocking scenes that have led some people to accuse the Occupy Wall Street protesters living rough in New York's financial district of creating unsanitary and filthy conditions.
Exclusive pictures obtained by Mail Online show one demonstrator relieving himself on a police car.
Elsewhere we found piles of stinking refuse clogging Zuccotti Park, despite the best efforts of many of the protesters to keep the area clean.
Thousands of Occupy Wall Street protesters swarmed the Brooklyn Bridge Saturday, shutting down car lanes and setting up yet another tense showdown with the NYPD.
Roughly 700 people were arrested after standing in the roadway, blocking the Brooklyn-bound lanes. Traffic in the opposite direction was slowed -- but still running after the 4 p.m. standoff.
At least 500 Longshoremen stormed the Port of Longview and broke out windows in the guard shack, according to Longview Police Chief Jim Duscha. As men wielding baseball bats and crowbars held six guards captive, others cut brake lines on boxcars and dumped grain, according to Duscha.
This puts us in a world of topsy-turvy, in which many of the usual rules of economics cease to hold. Thrift leads to lower investment; wage cuts reduce employment; even higher productivity can be a bad thing. And the broken windows fallacy ceases to be a fallacy: something that forces firms to replace capital, even if that something seemingly makes them poorer, can stimulate spending and raise employment. Indeed, in the absence of effective policy, that’s how recovery eventually happens: as Keynes put it, a slump goes on until “the shortage of capital through use, decay and obsolescence” gets firms spending again to replace their plant and equipment.
And now you can see why tighter ozone regulation would actually have created jobs: it would have forced firms to spend on upgrading or replacing equipment, helping to boost demand. Yes, it would have cost money — but that’s the point! And with corporations sitting on lots of idle cash, the money spent would not, to any significant extent, come at the expense of other investment.
So why not force corporations to build ice sculptures in their cafeterias or something? At least that would look nice.
GOP aims for end to payroll tax break
Neither House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, nor Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has taken a firm stand on whether to extend the one-year tax cut.
Valentini enlisted in the Army in 2000 primarily for the G.I. Bill and ended up in heavy combat a year later, even though he's generally antiwar. He hung a "Veterans for Peace" sign on his dorm room door at the vet center, and when Zenner objected, Valentini hung it on Zenner's door.
