If Halloween by itself wasn’t frightening enough, this Oct. 31 has been set by U.N. demographers as the official day when the 7 billionth person will be born, as TIME says, “on a planet already strapped for resources.” No one knows where this 7 billionth person will “officially” be born, albeit TIME says he or she may be born in India, “which will be the world’s most populous nation by 2030.” Halloween...

Now there’s (guarded) good news on the economic front — good enough so it’s causing the growing pessimism and emerging pessimism about the economy to shrink. And another tidbit of good news within this good news: the good news is coming from not just the United States and from Europe. The U.S. economy grew at its fastest clip in a year during late summer as consumers and businesses shrugged...

Democrats offer a $3 trillion debt reduction of tax increases and spending cuts, including as much as $500 billion in savings from Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs to revive the Obama-Boehner Grand Bargain on the debt ceiling that Eric Cantor and his Tea Party House cohorts torpedoed last summer. The proposal would include as much as $300 billion to stimulate the economy, but this would require Republicans...

Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Someone has been dropping a flyer around the Occupy Wall Street protests that recycles a rant first circulated over a year ago. It reads: “We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring...

Hard times in the 1930s produced a golden age in Hollywood as Americans, helpless in real life, sought escape at neighborhood movie houses. Today, those Depression classics are being remade and brought into our living rooms to be sold as reality. The GOP is doing the horror films. Frankenstein has morphed into mad scientists working feverishly in the lab to animate a new Rick Perry from old political body parts...

RJ Matson, The St. Louis Post Dispatch GOP Blinded by Anti-Tax Madness this Halloween by Karl Frisch Every year at about this time, I break out my DVD of the 1936 anti-drug propaganda flick Reefer Madness. No, it’s not exactly the scariest movie one might choose when getting into the Halloween spirit, but few things are funnier than watching a film made more than 70 years ago as it attempts to frighten...

WASHINGTON — Will we soon see a distinguished-looking older man in long white robes walking among the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators in New York’s Zuccotti Park? Is Pope Benedict XVI joining the protest movement? Well, yes, and no. Yes, the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace issued a strong and thoughtful critique of the global financial system this week that paralleled...

Not that I would know. But Martin A. Sullivan, now he’s convincing: In the United Kingdom the government is led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. His government did not adopt stimulus. Instead it boldly enacted an economic program that cut spending and raised taxes. The chart below shows the results and compares it to the U.S. experience. After three and a half years, U.S. GDP is just about...

IF CAIN BECOMES PRESIDENT, GET READY TO PAY MORE FOR STAPLES I am not an economist nor did I stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night, but I have enough smarts (barely) to understand that the tax proposals being pushed by Republican president wannabes are, for the most part, flapdoodle in service of coddling the rich while further screwing the middle class and poor. That, of course, is exactly what Representative...

Keefe, The Denver Post Flat Tax or Flat-Out Dead by Michael Reagan Despite the recent chatter about a flat income tax — a tax that every income earner pays regardless of their level of income — the idea is dead unless its supporters figure out a way to get together and support the idea that a flat tax is a fair tax. I believe we can unite. In a system of flat taxation there is only one level of...

Rick McKee, The Augusta Chronicle This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

Asked recently if the U.S. could build the Hoover Dam today, historian Michael Hiltzik doesn’t hesitate to say that it probably could not. The Hoover Dam, of course, was built at the depths of the Great Depression, a magnificent monument to modern engineering, the bravery of its fearless hardhat builders and the “Can Do” ethic that not even the depression could vanquish. Today America is...

Anti is a revolutionary prefix. When joined with the right name, system, or organization, it can change the course of a nation. Anti topples entrenched regimes and tyrannical dictatorships. Anti unites diverse factions under a shared purpose; a purpose often rooted in anger and frustration. Anti is seldom a solution for the future. Instead, it is a judgement on the past. Anti might not know how to solve...

I’ve been surprised about all the flat tax talk this October by Republican presidential candidates. The flat tax idea usually doesn’t surface much until April, when taxpayers and their helpers gather around dining room tables to figure out how much they can get away with in their tax reporting. The fact that flat tax mania among Republican White House aspirants has come to the fore this early thus...

As inured as I should be to Republican obstructionism at this point, it still boggles my mind that with 14 million Americans unemployed and the economy taking only baby steps toward a recovery, the GOP continues to block President Obama’s job creation bill despite its overwhelming popularity among voters. With that in mind, the president sets out today on a three-day tour of Western states with a new...

President Obama today announced an expansion of the program to help homeowners who need to modify their mortgage. Specifically the program will now allow those who are significantly underwater on their loans to qualify for the program. Previously the program only allowed those who were within 25% of value to participate. This left many out in the cold in states like Florida, Arizona, Nevada and California because...

What is each of the two wars and the total cost of war costing the United States? Click HERE to see the constantly rising figure.

WASHINGTON — It’s one of the strangest things in our politics: The only “big” ideas Republicans and conservatives seem to offer these days revolve around novel and sometimes bizarre ways of cutting taxes on rich people. Given all the attention that Herman Cain’s nonsensical and regressive 9-9-9 tax plan has received, the Republican debates should have as their soundtrack that...

There it is in black and white and in the Washington Post: a certain relationship is growing between the new Occupy movement and the tea party movement, or at least among the foot soldiers of the Tea Party Movement BC — Before Corporate interests bought it out. Although many organizers of the two populist efforts view their counterparts from the other end of the spectrum as misguided or even evil, attitudes...

A headline in today’s New York Times reads: “Occupy Wall Street Not Like Us, Tea Party Says.” The subhead then goes on to read: “Where Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party differ is in where they place the blame.” Nonsense. The Tea Party blames government for the country’s present economic problems. The Occupiers blame the heavies in the financial community. But these aren’t...

I am told that in my “Cain’s ‘Simple’ 9-0-9 Plan Variation and ‘Opportunity Zones‘” I was a little tough on Mr. Cain. So to balance things out, let me review an article that comes — somewhat — to the defense of Mr. Cain and his x-x-x Plan. It is from an unlikely source, TIME’s Fareed Zakaria. Starting with the premise that “Herman Cain’s “9-9-9” plan...

Cain’s Half-Baked Candidacy by Peter Funt Barack Obama has a permanent place in history as the man who proved Americans would elect, and likely re-elect, a black president. Whatever else historians conclude about Obama, the racial breakthrough is certain to grow in significance over time. Herman Cain’s legacy, although lesser, will also be noteworthy because he has morphed into the nation’s...

As we all knew he would, and after weeks of stubbornly and condescendingly defending it, Mr. 9-9-9 is now changing that “simple,” magic combination. After finally admitting that his plan to impose a flat 9 percent income tax on low-income Americans would in fact result in a tax increase for those Americans, Cain has now modified his “simple” plan to a 9-0-9 plan for those below or at poverty level. ...

by Walter Brasch “Got any idea how to make a frozen daiquiri?” Saturday. 6 a.m. A question no one else would have asked at that hour. I knew it had to be Marshbaum, my faux-friend foil. “Too early to be drinking,” I mumbled, then hung up. The phone rang again. “It’s not for me,” said Marshbaum, but since I’m going to own a bar, I should learn how to make drinks.” “Marshbaum,” I said,...