Apparently some conservative churches want to be politically active AND keep their tax exempt status. I hope this issue provokes a serious reconsideration of the rationale for special tax treatment.
I have never been much of a fan of the idea of tax exempt status. It seems to me that these organizations use the resources of the community as much as anyone else: Police, Fire, EMS, Street maintenance, Water, Sewage… And to the extent that they do not share in the tax burden the rest of us have to pay more than our fair share. I can accept that these spiritual operations may be providing some services that benefit the community such as feeding the poor that deserve some consideration. Perhaps they can pay slightly lower taxes in proportion to the services they provide or the government can pay them for the services provided.
This is true also for the tax exempt status of government entities. Here in Austin the land and buildings owned by the State and Federal government do not pay property taxes and their holdings are significant. In downtown Austin the State owns more than 13,000 parking spaces in the form of lots and structures. Again, to the extent that these entities do not pay property taxes the higher are those taxes for the rest of us.
I used to think that the GOP would be the party to lead the effort to revisit the long term habits of government that may no longer be reasonable or justified. The current effort of the White House to resist excessive farm subsidies is welcome but it is only a tiny bite of a very large problem. All of our taxes would be lower if the exemptions were as few as possible.
We in America can talk about the virtues and vices of presidential candidates we support.
We in America can argue about which political party is going to destroy or uplift the country.
We in America can pontificate about race baiting, race hustling, race pitching, race riding, race stirring, race healing, race blah blah in this political season.
We in America can scream about who’s elitist, has testicular fortitude, is Maverick like, old, black, a woman, has four legs, flies to the moon, lives on the moon, tough on terrorism, is Messiah-like, prone to “Pastorgates”, has toxic spouses, etc this silly season.
We in America can just shut up.
Because the game changing $4.00/gallon gas is upon us. When the average reaches that mark, we in America are going to feel it and feel it good. Our very lifestyle is at serious risk. The very American “going out for a ride” will lose its luster. The family road trip will be shelved or shrunk in distance. The weekend getaway becomes a weekend DVD fest at home. The grocery store becomes ominous because of prices. I can go on and on.
Senators Clinton, Obama, and McCain aren’t ready to deal with the way this will change American life. Heck, Washington likes to play games with itself. But for millions of Americans who lives will be affected detrimentally by ever increasing fuel costs, the word bitter and the feeling of bitterness will just become part and parcel of American life. No matter how many despots we depose, that will play second fiddle to the new American way of life.
Are you ready to ride my fellow Americans? Are we as a country ready to deal with this issue head on without politics?
The world’s second most populous nation is up-in-arms over remarks recently made by President Bush, as he attempted to explain rising food and energy prices to an audience in Maryland.
The president said the following:
“There are 350 million people in India who are classified as middle class. That’s bigger than America. Their middle class is larger than our entire population,” said Bush. “And when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food. And so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.”
Minister of State for Commerce, Jairam Ramesh: “George Bush has never been known for his knowledge of economics. And he has just proved once again how comprehensively wrong he is.”
West Bengal’s Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee: “It is preposterous for anyone to say that global food crisis, including the crisis in America, is because Indians are eating more. It is needless to say what the Indians get to eat or what they (Americans) eat. This only shows how he has lost his senses” … he added that Bush’s remark was nothing more than a “cruel joke.”
But striking a conciliatory note, Surojit Chatterjee writes for the Business Times: “Being well-informed or choosing words carefully are not his specialty. … Let’s be forgiving to the U.S. President. … Let us stop pointing fingers at one another and receive Bush’s remark with a pinch of salt and a hearty laugh.” Read the rest of this entry »
And now it moves to media center stage: the trend of Republicans crossing over to vote in Democratic primaries. But the New York Times reports that many GOPers aren’t doing this because they’re “dittoheads” obeying the wishes of mega-partisan talk show host Rush Limbaugh, but disgruntled Republicans who feel their party has left — or is leaving — them:
INDIANAPOLIS - Until now, Shirley Morgan had always been the kind of voter the Republican Party thought it could count on. She comes from a family of staunch Republicans, has a son in the military and has supported Republican presidential candidates ever since she cast her first ballot, for Richard M. Nixon in 1972.
But this year Mrs. Morgan exemplifies a different breed: the Republican crossing over to vote in the Democratic primary. Not only will she mark her ballot for Senator Barack Obama in the May 6 primary here, but she has also been canvassing for him in the heavily Republican suburbs of Hamilton County, just north of Indianapolis — the first time she has ever actively campaigned for a candidate.
“I used to like John McCain, but he’s aligning himself too closely with what Bush did, and that’s just not what I want for this country,” Mrs. Morgan, who is 56, said when asked to explain her rejection of the presumptive Republican nominee.
This should be a warning flag to John McCain. As I’ve predicted many times on this site, there is a large segment of voters that aren’t going to look at political party at all this year — but want to take a big broom and sweep away the people who are in charge who have brought the United States a war seemingly without end (even if X voter originally supported the war), a decimated economy, a sagging dollar, an epidemic of home foreclosures and plummeting local property values, and an economy peppered by massive corporate cutbacks or failures and employment ills.
Seen from this perspective, the decisions of Democratic rivals Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to ignore Democratic progressives’ demand to boycott Fox News, makes political sense: Republican voters are in play in these primaries and they all can’t be dismissed as participating in Limbaugh’s call to basically sabotage the Democratic primaries.
This suggests that indicates that the potency of the Democratic party’s most progressive wing, is now being offset in some primaries by more conservative and centrist voters who are cross-over Republicans who feel their party has failed them. And they’re shopping around.
The Times confirms this:
Since the start of the primary and caucus season in January, Republican voters have been crossing over in increasing numbers to vote in Democratic contests — supplying up to 10 percent of the vote in states that allow such crossover voting — and they are expected to play a pivotal role in the fiercely contested primary here. What is less clear, however, is the motivation for their behavior: are they genuinely attracted by the two Democratic candidates? Or are they mischief-making spoilers, looking to prolong a divisive Democratic fight or support a candidate Mr. McCain can beat in November?
Local Republican Party leaders in Indiana concede the attraction of the Democratic candidates to some of their party members. And interviews with roughly a dozen Republican voters in central Indiana suggest that they are driven mainly by concerns about the economy, with discontent over Bush administration policies driving their involvement in the Democratic race.
What’s now happening between Obama and Clinton is competition for some of these Republicans — Republicans probably dismissed as “well-they-must-be-Rinos” by lockstep Republican partisans who will adjust their positions or jettison previous principles according to the latest pronouncements from the White House or EIB Radio Network. The Times again: Read the rest of this entry »
Being held up at gunpoint is a minor problem for most Americans compared to having money stolen from them by credit-card companies. Now, as the economy worsens, regulators are finally bestirring themselves to prevent some of the theft.
The Washington Postreports: “The Federal Reserve and two other banking regulators are set to unveil today one of the most aggressive efforts in decades to crack down on the credit card industry, prohibiting practices such as arbitrarily raising interest rates on outstanding balances.
“The proposed regulations, which could be finalized by year’s end, would label as ‘unfair or deceptive’ practices that consumers have long complained about. That includes charging interest on debt that has been repaid and assessing late fees when consumers are not given a reasonable amount of time to make a payment.”
More than a year after hearings on the industry’s “unfair or abusive” practices, Congress has done nothing about the loan-shark tactics of large banks that charge as much as 30 percent interest for late payments and cash advances.
After being burned by the sub-prime mortgage scandal, federal regulators are taking some action to head off massive credit-card defaults beyond their efforts to educate consumers on how issuers use fine print to steal from them.
The government is sending out a one-time $130 billion gift to American taxpayers in hopes this will reanimate the U.S. economy. It’s a nice gesture but not an especially fair one. Washington should be gifting us to the tune of $150 billion a month. Every month.
Consider. We’re spending $12 billion a month supporting Iraq and its people. That country’s population being 24 million (we’ll overlook the millions who have fled since we arrived), that comes out to $1 billion a month for every 2 million Iraqis. There are 300 million Americans. So a comparable monthly donation made to us would total $150 billion.
I’m not suggesting that our government should support its own people at a more generous level than we now support the people of Iraq. Heaven forbid. But as a simple matter of equity, might we not at least get an equal per capita dollop of Washington’s largess?
Now as President Bush prepares to leave office and the ‘Three Amigos’ have said their last goodbyes, Mexican columnists have begun to weigh in on the success of their final NAFTA Summit.
While NAFTA has become increasingly unpopular in the United States, the same can be said in Mexico - but for far different reasons.
There, the dissatisfaction stems from the feebleness of NAFTA’s mechanisms for enforcing its decisions on the three federal governments, and the perceived lack of respect given Mexico in relation to its two other North American Read the rest of this entry »
Papa says he’s gonna fill Ole Bessie up with some of that McClinton gas
John McCain’s embrace of a summer gasoline tax holiday is an idea so economically unsound but is such terrific feel-good political theater that Hillary Clinton soon joined him in an effort to pander to voters that will be tough to top. But then it’s still six months to the election, so who knows?
Why is suspending the federal gas tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day so unsound?
Because as any economics major knows, there are few commodities more affected by the law of supply and demand than gasoline.
Strong demand and a limited supply of gasoline has led to price increases. Artificially lowering the price will only stimulated more demand, which will inevitably lead to . . . you guessed it, class — even higher prices.
You really don’t need a calculator… you get $600/person or $1200/couple unless you make either very little money or lots’o'money. None if you owe back taxes.
The U.S. government’s recently announced $153 billion stimulus package is supposed to rejuvenate the economy and stabilize the market.
Will the current plan achieve its goal? That depends.
The field of behavioral economics has rather convincingly shown that money given in different forms can have different effects. For example, paying for dinner in cash feels very different than paying the same bill with a credit card. And an increase in monthly salary has a different effect on a person’s spending than the same amount in an equivalent yearly bonus.
These results suggest that how you deliver the stimulus package will have a considerable effect on how the money is spent. Individual tax relief is different than tax rebates, which is different from giving money toward retirement saving, gift certificates, or pre-paid debit cards.
Given that the method of delivery could make a large difference, which approach should we choose? The reality is that we just don’t know. Which is why we should conduct an experiment.
We force drug companies to test the efficacy of their drugs before rolling them into the market. So shouldn’t we ask the government to first test its ideas before it invests billions of dollars of our tax money into some stimulus package?
Well, yes, we should. And maybe if the goal were really stimulus rather than the quicker and easier political benefit of a check in the mail to constituents, we would.
Let’s imagine a nice little community of 400 homes. It’s a perfectly average American community, and it could be anywhere: in town, in the ‘burbs, in the countryside.
Thanks to the often-cited statistic that 68% of Americans own their homes, we can deduce that perhaps as many as 32% are rental homes, or 128. However, we are going to assume there is an apartment complex down the road, and that only a third of that number are in fact rental homes. We’ll round down to 42.
Because it is a perfectly average community, roughly 5% are currently available. Most of them are for sale or lease. A few have sales/leases pending — the sign is still up, but only because the deal hasn’t actually closed yet. Another few are being prepped for sale/lease, but frankly if you made the owner an offer out of the blue he or she would likely take it.. That’s 20 homes. A lot of these homes are currently not occupied. Read the rest of this entry »
Even under ordinary conditions, if you are the newly-elected president of a small Central American nation like Guatemala, coming to Washington to meet the U.S. president is a singularly important and daunting event.
Unfortunately for Guatemala, President Alvaro Colom’s visit comes during an election year in which the idea of legalizing the undocumented is the political kiss of death. According to this editorial from Guatemala’s Prensa Libre, the trip also proved a lesson in the global pecking order:
“Meetings between Guatemalan officials and their Washington colleagues stand out, due to a failure to comprehend how the complicated American political system works Read the rest of this entry »
April 30th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
In this Guest Voice post, journalism professor and author Walter Brasch who is also a syndicated newspaper columnist and radio commentator, and president of the Pennsylvania Press Club, looks at labor unions and Campaign 2008. Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Moderate Voice or its writers.
John McCain Won’t Be Looking for the Union Label
by Walter Brasch
Don’t expect any labor union to endorse John McCain for president in the general election. The wounds from the Bush-Cheney Administration are just too deep. But, their reasons aren’t because of social justice issues that once pervaded the labor movement, but on bread-and-butter issues that have dominated unions the past five decades.
“Our economy is in crisis after years of failed Bush Administration policies that Sen. McCain has adopted as his own,” says Karen Ackerman, AFL-CIO political director. McCain, says Steve Smith, AFL-CIO senior media outreach specialist, “assails working families from worker health care and safety to trade policies.”
McCain, in agreement with Bush, has voted against protecting overtime pay and for trade deals that consistently send American jobs off-shore, often to countries where sweat shop labor is common. McCain has also voted against health insurance for children and worker safety and health. American labor also opposes his votes to privatize Social Security.
McCain, who has cultivated a media image as a straight-shooting maverick, during the past seven years supported Bush 89 percent of the time, with a record high of 95 percent support last year, according to data published in the Congressional Quarterly. The only reason McCain “has some appeal to working class voters,” says Smith, “is because they haven’t had a chance to learn about his policies.”
The 56-union federation, which represents about 13 million workers, intends to change that perception. It has developed a $53.4 million education campaign, largest in its history, to give its members information about McCain’s policies. The “McCain Revealed” campaign includes more than 425,000 flyers, a massive door-to-door canvas on May 17, a strong worker presence at all McCain events, and a website (www.mccainrevealed.org) with information not only about McCain, but also about the political beliefs of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Ron Paul.
The AFL-CIO itself has not endorsed any candidate-two-thirds of its unions must endorse a specific candidate for the federation to make an endorsement-but several member unions have already supported candidates. Read the rest of this entry »
Hillary Clinton and John McCain, each of whom has a hundred times the family money of Barack Obama, are out there claiming he is out of touch with the poor.
After drinking boilermakers with the boys a while back, Sen. Clinton is now telling Indiana’s blue-collar voters that “politics has become too abstract, too generalized” in Obama’s elitist world.
“Most people get a lot of meaning in their life from the work that they do,” Clinton says. “People want to be seen, they want to be appreciated, they want to be acknowledged.” And she is out there acknowledging the hell out of them with girlhood tales of helping out in her father’s fabric-printing plant and, according to the New York Times, “sounding less like a Wellesley alumna than Roseanne Barr’s old sitcom character, the den mother of her factory floor.”
Meanwhile, McCain is calling Obama insensitive to poor people by not endorsing his proposal to suspend the federal tax on gasoline this summer, a refusal “to giving low-income Americans a tax break, a little bit of relief so they can travel a little further and a little longer, and maybe have a little bit of money left over to enjoy some other things in their lives.”
McCain, who is still fielding questions about using his wife’s company jet during the primary season, and Clinton, who lent her campaign $5 million from her pin money, seem determined to educate Obama on what he failed to learn as an organizer in poverty-stricken communities.
Rising food and energy prices are scaring a lot of people. Not the folks at the Federal Reserve, though. They have found a revolutionary mechanism to address worries generated by these price increases. By creating its own preferred inflation measure, the so-called core rate, which factors out food and energy, the Fed can claim inflation is well under control.
Given that food and energy are core elements in sustaining human life, I used to be bothered by this curious approach to economic management. Now that I view the matter from a broader perspective, however, I see many valuable applications in other realms.
Take medicine, for example. Lots of people have cancer and heart disease. But a core rate of health, one that excludes these maladies, would improve our national health statistics dramatically at no extra cost to anyone.
In a related vein (so to speak), by excluding these unpleasant medical realities along with, say, diabetes and alzheimers as causes of death, the average American lifespan would be 102.6 years. And all without any more dieting or exercise. Yippee!
The weather. Boy, can that ever put people out of sorts. So why not just exclude temperatures over 80 degrees and under 70 degrees to get a core temperature of 74 degrees that’s reported on the local news every evening?
Crime! Poof!. Exclude murder, rape and assault from reporting of violent crimes, call what’s left the core crime rate, and there is no violent crime. Think of the money this will save on local police budgets.
Everything is beautiful when everything that isn’t is excluded. Thank you Chairman Bernanke for showing us the way. One thing, though. Could you loan me half a tank of gas and a couple of eggs until payd
Like many guys, I don’t like to shop. The Dear Friend & Conscience, on the other hand, loves to shop and just the other day we went out to drop off an old wrought-iron lawn chair at a repair shop so that it could be spot welded and came home with three new bras and an omelet pan.
Now the DF&C needed bras and I needed an omelet pan because the old one was beginning to look like a Superfund site. But my point is that what was an enjoyable hour or so for her was painful for me.
Which got me to thinking about a larger painfulness as we strolled through an enormous but nearly deserted manufacturers’ outlet store complex:
Shopping has become an ordeal for the increasing number of people who don’t have a couple of hundred bucks to spend at the supermarket to keep their brood in Wheaties and peanut butter as food and gasoline prices skyrocket and they still have to make mortgage payments and fulfill other financial obligations.
In yet another sign that things are bad and getting worse, no less a capitalist bastion than the Wall Street Journal suggests that it may be time for Americans, who as it is spend far less on food than in most other countries, to begin stockpiling.
You’ve seen the TV footage of food riots in parts of the developing world. Yes, they’re a long way away from the U.S. But most foodstuffs operate in a global market. When the cost of wheat soars in Asia, it will do the same here.
Reality: Food prices are already rising here much faster than the returns you are likely to get from keeping your money in a bank or money-market fund. And there are very good reasons to believe prices on the shelves are about to start rising a lot faster.”
Now I’m not an economist, nor do I play one on TV. But it is obvious that there are several reasons for food shortages (principally rice, which is now being rationed by another capitalist bastion, Sam’s Club) and evidence that some Americans are indeed stockpiling.
The reasons for the shortages include dwindling food and fish stocks (duh!), inflation, climate change and the siphoning off food crops for fuel production. But the big engine is soaring oil prices, the Iraq war is the major cause for that and the Bush administration is of course the culprit.
No, this is not another exercise in Blame The Decider For Everything because this shoe fits.
One of the Forever War’s greater ironies is that we were led to believe that the fall of Saddam Hussein would, among other great and noble things, result in a windfall in U.S. oil imports and a more stable Middle East.
Just the opposite has happened, of course. Iraq is still struggling to bring production back to pre-invasion levels, a substantial amount of that oil is siphoned off for the gray and black markets, and the war has caused profound instability in the region, which has helped trigger ever higher crude oil prices.
Meanwhile, Barry Ritholtz, who is an economist and plays one on TV in talking head appearances on MSNBC and elsewhere, blames food shortages on the Federal Reserve’s “irresponsible bailout” of Wall Street bigs in a post at The Big Picture, for my dinero the best economics-oriented blog. (He also does some great stuff on jazz, typically on Fridays.)
So what’s the U.S. to do?
Getting the heck out of Iraq is the no-brainer solution, but that’s not going to happen. Taking the food crisis seriously would be a good start, but just as the Bush administration is only beginning to whisper that the U.S. economy might be in recession, it is nowhere near prepared to ask Americans to make sacrifices — be they for war or waffles.
Republicans might be interested to know that there are some people in the world, in this case in Brazil, who already assume that John McCain will beat either of his Democratic challengers.
April 19th, 2008 by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Here is another Guest Voice by Joel S. Hirschhorn who is highly critical of both parties.. Guest Voice columns do not necessarily reflect the opinion of TMV or its writers.
The Most Powerful People in America
by Joel S. Hirschhorn
They are not the rich and superrich, nor the politically powerful running the two-party plutocracy, nor the greedy heads of banking and finance companies, and certainly not the media moguls and bloviating pundits.
The most powerful people are US, American consumers that account for over 70 percent of the economy. It is exactly now, when the economy is in the toilet, that consumers hold the maximum power. So why are we the people still deluding ourselves that the path to a better future rests on electing a new president?
We are suckers, conditioned by decades of clever marketing and advertising to believe the lies of politicians, and worst of all to believe that elections and our votes provide us with power. Wrong. Our real power can only be manifest through our spending dollars.
The overwhelming majority of Americans have been severely damaged by economic oppression by government policies that have produced historic economic inequality. Yet, despite revolting conditions, Americans seem unwilling to revolt by using their remaining economic power. They have let themselves become economic slaves.
What is amazing and depressing is that there are no national leaders from the worlds of politics, religion, education, media or public interest that are attempting to harness consumer power at this critical time. No one is capturing the public’s attention by making it crystal clear that consumers could obtain any political or economic reform in the public interest by joining together to withhold their discretionary spending. Read the rest of this entry »
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