Tag: Budget

I Hope That This Means Something

No Comments

The New York State Senate has appointed a vociferous critic of Amazon “HQ2” deal to the Public Authorities Control Board, which has the power to stop the deal.

I think that there are a couple of things going on here, first the Senate is feeling its oats in challenging a governor of their own party who attempted to keep the body in Republican hands, and second, after the Foxconn debacle in Wisconsin, this deal has become much less popular with the general public.

In either case, :

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and newly emboldened Democrats in the State Senate appeared headed for open warfare on Monday over a plan to bring Amazon to New York City after the Senate leader named a critic of the $3 billion deal to a state board that could scuttle it.

 The decision to choose the critic, Senator Michael Gianaris, for the board immediately presented a direct political challenge for Mr. Cuomo — who must decide whether to refuse the Senate’s selection. And it demonstrated the ability of the Democrat-led State Legislature to call into question the governor’s control over the kinds of state boards that, in recent years, he had been mostly able to bend to his will.

 ………

 Mr. Cuomo could reject the pick, though doing so could create a protracted standoff with the Senate leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, and her fellow Democrats. Already, the battle lines were hardening on Monday as Mr. Cuomo’s office reacted angrily to Mr. Gianaris’s appointment.

 ………

 It was yet another sour note in the Amazon deal. Company executives have bristled at the intense criticism and, last week at a City Council hearing, seemed to float the notion that Amazon could reconsider its commitment to New York.

 The ability of a local legislator to block the deal to bring a major new Amazon campus to Long Island City was exactly what Mr. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio had tried to avoid when they decided to use a state development process and to bypass more onerous city rules. Opposition, while vocal, seemed futile.

 But now, with the insistence of Senate Democrats on appointing Mr. Gianaris to the little-known Public Authorities Control Board, those who want to stop Amazon from coming to Queens have gotten their most tangible boost yet. The board will have to decide on the development plan for Amazon, Mr. Cuomo has said, and could veto it.

 ………

 The obscure state board does have a history of blocking major deals: 14 years ago, it helped derail former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plans for a new stadium in Manhattan.

 ………

 He would be one of three voting members of the board; any voting member of the board has the power to stop projects that come before it.

………

Lawmakers have used the Public Authorities Control Board — whose voting members are appointed by the Senate, the Assembly and the governor — as a roadblock to big projects before. In 2005, Mr. Bloomberg saw his plan for a stadium on the West Side of Manhattan, part of the city’s bid to host the 2012 Olympics, shot down in front of the board by the vote of one state lawmaker, Sheldon Silver, who was then the Assembly speaker. Mr. Silver said he could not support a deal that could harm the district in Lower Manhattan that he represented.

(emphasis mine)

I doesn’t help that Amazon has stated that it will continue to aggressively sabotage any unionization efforts in the state.

Why Scott Walker Lost His Bit for Reelection

No Comments

Because he offered over $4 billion in subsidies to the electronics manufacturer Foxconn to build a factory, an amount that could never be recouped.

It gets even better, because now Foxconn has announced that it won’t be building the factory after all.

It appears that there wasn’t a, “No backsies,” provision in the contract:

It was heralded a year and a half ago as the start of a Midwestern manufacturing renaissance: Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics behemoth, would build a $10 billion Wisconsin plant to make flat-screen televisions, creating 13,000 jobs. President Trump later called the project “the eighth wonder of the world.”

Now that prospect looks less certain.

Pointing to “new realities” in the market, the company said Wednesday that it was reassessing the plans, underscoring the difficult economics of manufacturing in the United States. “The global market environment that existed when the project was first announced has changed,” Foxconn said in a statement.

Company officials had signaled for months that their emphasis was increasingly on research and development rather than large-scale production, dampening the potential for blue-collar job creation.

………

The Foxconn statement followed a Reuters report that Louis Woo, a special assistant to the company’s chairman, Terry Gou, had said the costs of manufacturing screens for televisions and other consumer products were too high in the United States.

“In terms of TV, we have no place in the U.S.,” Mr. Woo told Reuters. “We can’t compete.”

………

Mr. Walker and state lawmakers had agreed to more than $4 billion in tax credits and other inducements over a 15-year period, an unusually high figure, for a plant in Mount Pleasant, near Racine.

That sound you hear is the final nail being hammered into the coffin of Scott Walker’s political career.

Trump is Being Owned by Pelosi Right Now

No Comments

Trump has blinked, making an offer to extend DACA status and TPS status for 3 years in exchange for wall funding.

Pelosi turned it down flat:

President Trump on Saturday offered Democrats three years of deportation protections for some immigrants in exchange for $5.7 billion in border wall funding, a proposal immediately rejected by Democrats and derided by conservatives as amnesty.

Aiming to end the 29-day partial government shutdown, Trump outlined his plan in a White House address in which he sought to revive negotiations with Democrats, who responded that they would not engage in immigration talks until he reopened the government.

Trump proposed offering a reprieve on his attempts to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and temporary protected status (TPS) for immigrants from some Latin American and African nations, in exchange for building hundreds of miles of barriers on the southern U.S. border and hiring thousands of new law enforcement agents to be deployed there.

………

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) dismissed the proposal as a “non-starter” and vowed that Democrats would pass legislation in the coming week to reopen the government, putting the onus on the Republican-led Senate to follow suit.

“The president must sign these bills to reopen government immediately and stop holding the American people hostage with this senseless shutdown,” Pelosi said. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) also said he opposed the plan.

It’s pretty clear who is the tougher negotiator.

Pelosi knows the political dynamics of this situation, and she knows to count to 218, and Trump can do neither.

This Business Will Get out of Control. It Will Get out of Control and We’ll Be Lucky to Live through It.

No Comments

No, I am not referring to the “Black Budget” that covers things like our spy satellites, I mean pretty much everything, up to and including the Department of Housing and Urban Development:

………

The only thing that did not make the news was an announcement by a little-known government body called the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board — FASAB — that essentially legalized secret national security spending. The new guidance, “SFFAS 56 – CLASSIFIED ACTIVITIES” permits government agencies to “modify” public financial statements and move expenditures from one line item to another. It also expressly allows federal agencies to refrain from telling taxpayers if and when public financial statements have been altered.

To Michigan State professor Mark Skidmore, who’s been studying discrepancies in defense expenditures for years, the new ruling ­— and the lack of public response to it — was a shock.

“From this point forward,” he says, “the federal government will keep two sets of books, one modified book for the public and one true book that is hidden.”

Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy was one of the few people across the country to pay attention to the FASAB news release. He was alarmed.

“It diminishes the credibility of all public budget documents,” he says.

I spent weeks trying to find a more harmless explanation for SFFAS 56, or at least one that did not amount to a rule that allows federal officials to fake public financial reports.

………

In plain English, the new guidance allowed federal agencies to “modify” public financial statements, with essentially a two-book system. Public statements would at best be unreliable, while the real books would be audited in “classified environment[s]” by certain designated officials.

When I asked FASAB who would be doing the auditing in “classified environment[s],” they answered:

“Please contact the federal entity’s Office of the Inspector General for questions pertaining to who does the auditing in a classified environment.”

This new rule is not confined to a few spy agencies. It appears to allow a stunningly long list of federal agencies to make use of new authority to “modify” public financial statements.

The Treasury Department’s definition of a “component reporting entity” includes 154 different agencies and bodies, from the Smithsonian Foundation to the CIA to the SEC to the Farm Credit Administration to the Railroad Retirement Board. The notion that any of these agencies could now submit altered public financial reports under the rubric of national security is mind-boggling.

………

One thing is certain: the taxpayer who opens up a federal financial statement expecting to find correct numbers will no longer be sure of what he or she is reading. Bluntly put, line items in public federal financial statements may now legally be, for lack of a better word — wrong.

Moreover, the state is not required to include a disclaimer telling the reader that modifications have been made.

………

Reached by email, Austin Fitts was pessimistic about the meaning of the new rule.

“The White House and Congress just opened a pipeline into the back of the US Treasury,” she wrote, “and announced to every private army, mercenary and thug in the world that we are open for business.”

What the rule actually will mean in practice is not clear. But it’s not hard to imagine how it could be employed. A quick look in the historical rearview mirror offers more than a few hints.

The Iran-Contra affair was, at its core, an accounting issue. In it, a group of actors used proceeds of weapons sales to fund unauthorized support of Nicaraguan rebels. Money was moved from one place to another, with the public cut out of the loop.

This is in-f%$#ing-sane.

Snark of the Day

2 Comments
I am not a fan of Nancy Pelosi.

Whatever her personal politics, it is clear that as speaker she is hostage to the big dollar donors in her official capacity as Speaker, and her obsession with “pay-go” is a disaster for the party and the country.

That being said, her characterization of Trump’s wall proposal as a, “Beaded Curtain,” is brilliant:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) joked in a recent interview that President Trump‘s proposal for a wall along the southern border has shifted from a cement structure to a “beaded curtain.”

“First of all, the fact … that he says, ‘We’re going to build a wall with cement, and Mexico’s going to pay for it’ while he’s already backed off of the cement — now he’s down to, I think, a beaded curtain or something, I’m not sure where he is,” Pelosi said in an interview with USA Today published Tuesday.

I love it.

Unleashing the Power of the Private Sector

No Comments

The price inflation in medicaid has tripled after Iowa privatized the program.

Obviously, it’s a limited sample, but when one considers that this has almost always been the case with the private sector running healthcare, it should come as not surprise:

The average cost of insuring an Iowan on Medicaid has climbed nearly three times as fast since the state hired private companies to manage the program, when compared to the previous six years, new state figures show.

Since fiscal 2017, the first full year of privatization, the per-member cost of Iowa’s Medicaid program has risen an average of 4.4 percent per year, according to the non-partisan Legislative Services Agency. In the previous six years, the per-member cost rose an average of 1.5  percent per year, the agency said.

The new cost figures come amid continuing controversy over whether Iowa should have hired private companies to run the $5 billion program. The shift’s supporters said it would slow growth in health care spending on the more than 600,000 poor or disabled Iowans covered by Medicaid.

It was never about making Medicaid working better, it was about making it worse, as well as being about shoveling money to politically connected contractors.

This is a feature, not a bug.

Italy Just Caved

2 Comments

The Italian government has capitulated to Brussels on its budget:

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte forged a deal with populist leaders to submit a revised budget proposal to the European Commission, in a bid to avert fines against Italy.

Conte’s euroskeptic deputies Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio, who hold most of the political power in the administration, set aside their opposition to concessions at talks running late into Sunday night and agreed on a new package to send to Brussels, government officials said.

Because shrinking your economy is the best way to get out of debt, if you are a mad dog or a German economist.

The Italian budget is already in primary surplus (excluding debt payments), but more cuts are demanded because of an unwillingness to recognize that Brussels’, and Berlin’s, world view is creating poverty and right wing populism.

Nice Troll, Dude

No Comments

The head of the 5-Star movement in Italy has suggested that France is risking budget sanctions from the EU because of Macron’s capitulation to protesters.

There is no real risk for France though, because, as Orwell observed, “Some are more equal than others,” but you have to admire the quality of the trolling:

Emmanuel Macron’s decision to make costly concessions to French protesters has prompted angry recriminations in Italy and Germany, where political leaders signalled Paris’ new spending plans could intensify Europe’s tense fiscal debate.

Luigi Di Maio, a leader of Italy’s populist government, said that France should be punished for breaching the EU’s deficit limits after Mr Macron promised tax cuts and handouts that could cost up to €10bn, arguing Rome was being sanctioned for similar “emergency” budget plans.

Mr Macron’s measures, designed to assuage the gilets jaunes protesters, would “cause a widening of the deficit” and should require the European Commission to “also open a case against France, if the rules apply to all,” said Mr Di Maio, head of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement.

Italy is in the middle of a bruising fight with Brussels over its breach of promised spending limits, with the European Commission calling the populist coalition’s new spending plans an “unprecedented” breach of its budgetary rules.

The real problem here is not the deficit, of course, it is that the EU is dominated by Germany, and failed German economics, and like the last disastrous turn, we are seeing the rise of Fascism in Europe as a result.

A Good Start

2 Comments
Progressive Democrats, most notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), managed to stop Nancy Pelosi’s hair hare-brained scheme to require a super-majority to raise taxes:

House Democrats have backed off a proposed rule that would have made it more difficult for them to raise taxes and pass their most ambitious goals, an early victory for the left-flank of the party that is about to take control of the House.

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), incoming chair of the House Rules Committee, told lawmakers Tuesday he will not advance “supermajority” rules requiring three-fifths majorities to approve tax hikes for most taxpayers, according to Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

An existing rule created by House Republicans requires a three-fifths supermajority vote in the House to approve any income tax increase. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democratic leaders proposed leaving the supermajority intact for most taxpayers, while scrapping the requirement for the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans and for corporations. But some liberal organizations and lawmakers said that did not go far enough, arguing that even the weaker rule would make it nearly impossible to enact progressive legislation such as Medicare-for-All or free universal college.

“We’re very glad to see that one go away,” said Pocan, who added the progressive caucus repeatedly expressed their disapproval of the proposal. “We ran in 2018 on increasing access to health care, and increasing people’s wages. … Anything that took us off this conversation does not serve us well.”

The fight comes amid a broader battle in the Democratic Party over taxes, as an incoming crop of freshman lawmakers push the party to embrace social programs that require larger tax increases. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) were the first two Democratic lawmakers to publicly express their opposition to the rule.

The New Democrat types like to posture on the deficit, and they HATE doing anything that helps ordinary Americans, and this rule achieved both.

Now let’s kill Pay-Go.

Remember When the Koch Brothers Funded Study on Single Payer?

No Comments
The headline number was supposed to be the taxes required, but even with their money skewing the analysis, courtesy of the best minds at George Mason University that money can buy, the savings were in the trillions of dollars. (Self own time)

Well, some good folks at my alma mater ran the numbers without a thumb on the scales, and the savings are even more eye poppingly huge:

Medicare for All advocates just received an early holiday present: a new study from the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst finds that single-payer health care will save the US $5.1 trillion [as compared to the $2.054 trillion from the Mercatus Center study noted above] over a decade while drastically cutting working-class Americans’ health spending. It’s the most robust, comprehensive study yet produced on Medicare for All, which has long been in need of easily citable research.

The study analyzes Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All Act from top to bottom, elaborating on several key aspects of the bill, including what the transition to a fully public, comprehensive, free-at-the-point-of-use health care system might look like and what impact the program will have on US residents. Most significantly, it answers the most common question single-payer advocates face: “How will we pay for it?”

The findings are impressively thorough. Reaching nearly two hundred pages in length, the report has been praised by health policy experts for its sound methods and clarity. Alison Galvani of the Yale School of Public Health predicts it will become recognized as the “seminal analysis” of Medicare for All.

This amounts to over $1500 a year savings for every man, woman, and child in the United States.

We need to do it now.

The Good News is that They Just Completed the First Ever Full Audit of the Pentagon

No Comments

The bad news is that they just completed the first ever full audit at the Pentagon.

The audit was, to use military jargon, a complete clusterf%$#:

The Pentagon has failed what is being called its first-ever comprehensive audit, a senior official said on Thursday, finding U.S. Defense Department accounting discrepancies that could take years to resolve.  

 Results of the inspection – conducted by some 1,200 auditors and examining financial accounting on a wide range of spending including on weapons systems, military personnel and property – were expected to be completed later in the day.

“We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan told reporters, adding that the findings showed the need for greater discipline in financial matters within the Pentagon.

“It was an audit on a $2.7 trillion dollar organization, so the fact that we did the audit is substantial,” Shanahan added.

No, the fact that you did an audit was bureaucracy 101, and you f%$#ing failed in f%$#ing flying colors.

Shanahan said areas the Pentagon must improve upon based on the audit results include compliance with cybersecurity policies and improving inventory accuracy. In a briefing with reporters, he did not provide a figure detailing how much money was unaccounted for in the audit.

It was unclear what consequences there would be after the audit, but Shanahan said the focus would be on fixing the issues.

Translation:  How do we overpay contractors to wallpaper this over.

A 1990 federal law mandated that U.S. government agencies be audited, but the Pentagon had not faced a comprehensive audit until this one was launched in December.

Defense officials and outside experts have said it may be years before the Pentagon is able to fix its accounting gaps and errors and pass an audit.

I’m not sure how to fix the mess, but a good start is to remove the authority of the people who created the mess.

A good start would be for there to be another Truman Commission, but given the predilection of politicians these days for grandstanding, and their deep distaste for the hard work involved in real oversight, I’m not holding my breath.

Who Blinks First?

2 Comments

The European Commission has told the Italian Government that its budget is not acceptable, and the Italian government has told the European Commission to pound sand:

The Italian government will not budge from its position on the country’s budget plan even though it is in breach of EU rules.

In a three-and-a-half page letter sent on Monday to commissioners Pierre Moscovici and Valdis Dombrovskis, Finance Minister Giovanni Tria wrote: “Italy is aware it has chosen a path that isn’t in line with EU rules. It was a hard decision but necessary in order to bring the country’s GDP back to pre-crisis levels and considering the ongoing economic difficulties for Italians.”

Tria went on to address the three objections raised by Moscovici and Dombrovskis in their letter to him last week, saying the government is confident it can achieve the ambitious growth targets it has outlined. Tria’s letter explained that the government will increase public investments and implement a number of significant structural reforms that should help trigger such growth. However, should Italy’s “growth trajectory evolve differently to what we expect, we would intervene,” he wrote.

Tria concluded the letter by saying that although the positions of Rome and Brussels are different, he hopes a “constructive dialogue” within the framework of EU rules can continue. He said Italy’s place is “in the eurozone.”

This situation is likely going to be rather different than that of Greece, or even Spain:  Italy is a far larger economy, and its current ruling coalition is not irrevocably linked to the Euro or the EU as, for example, Syriza was in Greece, which made meaningful negotiations impossible.

Also, it should be noted that even with the spending increase, the budget remains in primary surplus (its revenues exceed all spending but interest on the debt).

As I’ve noted before, the problem with the EU in general, and the Eurozone in particular, is the hegemony that Germany, and its economic philosophy, hold over the entire European Project.

Even without the obvious history, current events have shown this to be a bad thing.

Not Enough Bullets

No Comments

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square, is whining about the, “unfairness” of San Francisco’s homeless tax:

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Friday sounded off against a San Francisco measure to increase corporate taxes that would give the city more funding to tackle its homeless crisis.

 Dorsey said he was opposed to San Francisco’s Proposition C because he believes one of companies he leads as CEO, Square, will be taxed at unfair rates compared to other major companies such as Salesforce.

 The Twitter head wrote in a series of tweets that with the proposition’s passage, Square could potentially face more than $20 million in taxes in 2019 compared to Salesforce.

Seriously, just how much money do you need, Jack?

How many yachts do you need to water-ski behind.

What a repulsive excuse for a human being.

Dump Nancy

3 Comments

Nancy Pelosi has decided that she will do her damnedest to re-institute pay-go, which will once again make advancing any meaningful Democratic Party agenda nearly impossible.

In addition to the fact that this is horrible policy, this sort of pandering to rich beltway pundits bullsh%$ that led to the Democratic Party losing the House, the Senate, the White House, and something like 2/3 of the state houses in the nation:

In the first outline of the legislative agenda House Democrats would pursue if they take the majority in November, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has made the public a big promise, vowing to handcuff her party’s progressive ambitions, including in the event that a Democratic president succeeds Donald Trump, by resurrecting the “pay-go” rule that mandates all new spending is offset with budget cuts or tax increases.

………

Forcing budget offsets for every piece of legislation would make it more difficult for Democrats to pass a host of liberal agenda items, from “Medicare for All” to tuition-free public college. It continues a trend of Democrats caring far more about deficits than Republicans, constraining the activist impulses of liberal policymakers while giving conservatives free rein to blow giant holes in the tax code.

According to Axios, Pelosi “is committed to reviving” pay-go, which she instituted as a standing rule upon taking over the House in 2007. Though she waived the rule to pass the economic stimulus bill responding to the Great Recession, most of the other major legislative initiatives of the early Obama era — including the Affordable Care Act — were paid for. In 2010, Obama took this even further by signing the Statutory Pay As You Go Act. It enables presidents to enforce across-the-board cuts if Congress violates the rule.

A note here:  Given that the Supreme Court ruled that the line-item veto bill was an unconstitutional violation of the separation power in 1998s, the Pay as You Go Act is also likely unconstitutional.

Pelosi’s planned legislative package for the beginning of a potential House takeover would include establishing ethics and lobbying reforms, lowering the costs of health insurance premiums and prescription drugs, and spending $1 trillion for infrastructure investment. The latter two would cost money, and under pay-go it would all have to be offset.

That’s not necessarily a problem — liberals have plenty of ideas for how to raise revenue. But it puts them in a box, having to propose tax increases that Republicans gleefully broadcast. Meanwhile, Republicans, unconcerned with deficits, get to play Santa Claus, without having to match tax cuts with anything unappealing.

………

Progressives have grown incensed by Pelosi’s insistence on budget neutrality. “The pay-go thing is an absurd idea now, given the times and given what’s already been done to curry favor with corporate America,” Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., said to The Hill in June. He argues that, unlike Republicans who are happy to cut taxes by $1.5 trillion without offsets, Democrats would try to solve nagging problems with unnecessary shackles. Grijalva called it “irresponsible to try to tie up Congress’s ability to respond to economic downturns or, in the current discussion, to slash programs.”

A new vanguard of economists in Washington, including former Bernie Sanders staffer Stephanie Kelton, has argued that under modern monetary theory, public spending is only constrained when the economy is running at full capacity and inflation starts to rise — which is not remotely the case today. Public deficits, she points out, are just another way of talking about private surpluses. She has warned of the dangers of balanced budgets that take money from the hands of ordinary people, and has made some headway inside Washington. Kelton has been involved in strategy sessions with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and remains close to Sanders, who would chair the Budget Committee if Democrats take the Senate. But Pelosi has been unmoved.

In a statement, Kelton said that “pay-go is a self-imposed, economically illiterate approach to budgeting.” Republicans, she said, know this, which is why “they have unabashedly used their power to expand deficits and, hence, deliver windfall gains for big corporations and the already well-to-do.”

She continued, “Instead of vowing budget chastity, Democrats should be articulating an agenda that excites voters so that they can unleash the full power of the public purse on their behalf.”

I’m increasingly of the opinion that the Democrats won in 2006 and 2008 was in spite of Pelosi’s complete lack of ideology as leader of the House Democrats, not because of it.

Seriously, to paraphrase someone who was not Tallyrand, he appropriated the quote, “She has forgotten nothing, and she has learned nothing.”

Another Refugee Flow

No Comments

Americans who move to Europe for a free college education:

Chelsea Workman went to Ohio State University because it was her cheapest option. But she still had to take out student loans and work to make ends meet.

By the middle of her sophomore year, she’d had enough. She dropped out and moved to Germany to finish her degree where college is free.

Hunter Newsome, from California, decided to go to college in Estonia rather than the University of California, Davis — at the very last minute. He’s saving more than $10,000 a year on tuition, and he’ll earn a bachelor’s degree in three years rather than four.

There are at least 44 schools across Europe where Americans can earn their bachelor’s degree for free, according to Jennifer Viemont, the founder of an advising service called Beyond The States.

All public colleges in Germany, Iceland, Norway and Finland are free for residents and international students. And some private schools in the European Union don’t charge for tuition either. Many are going out of their way to attract foreigners by offering programs taught entirely in English.

This does not apply the UK, so you would need to learn a foreign language, even if the school offers an English only curriculum, but it sure beats debt peonage so that some assistant to the assistant to the college president can pull in $150K/year.

As the Scorpion Said, “It’s in My Nature.”

No Comments

It looks like after a massive tax cut that has not, and will never, trickle down to ordinary folks, Trump and his Evil Minions™ have decided to give even more money to the overprivileged:

The Trump administration is considering bypassing Congress to grant a $100 billion tax cut mainly to the wealthy, a legally tenuous maneuver that would cut capital gains taxation and fulfill a long-held ambition of many investors and conservatives.

Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Argentina this month that his department was studying whether it could use its regulatory powers to allow Americans to account for inflation in determining capital gains tax liabilities. The Treasury Department could change the definition of “cost” for calculating capital gains, allowing taxpayers to adjust the initial value of an asset, such as a home or a share of stock, for inflation when it sells.

“If it can’t get done through a legislation process, we will look at what tools at Treasury we have to do it on our own and we’ll consider that,” Mr. Mnuchin said, emphasizing that he had not concluded whether the Treasury Department had the authority to act alone. “We are studying that internally, and we are also studying the economic costs and the impact on growth.”

They really seem to subscribe to the Leona Helmsley theory of taxation, “We don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes.”

The Term is, “Pear Shaped”

No Comments

Transfers to Turkey of Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35 would be barred temporarily under a compromise defense policy measure agreed to on Monday, according to House and Senate aides.

Turkish receipt of the fighter jets would be held back until the Pentagon submitted an assessment within 90 days of the measure’s enactment on U.S.-Turkish relations, the impact of Turkey’s planned acquisition of Russia’s advanced S-400 missile defense system and the ramifications for the U.S. industrial base if Turkey is dropped from the international F-35 program.

………

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had warned Congress against cutting off transfers of the F-35. In a letter to lawmakers this month, Mattis said he agreed “with congressional concerns about the authoritarian drift in Turkey and its impact on human rights and rule of law.” But he said an F-35 cutoff would risk triggering an international “supply chain disruption” that would drive up costs and delay deliveries of the fighter.

Under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey plans to buy about 100 F-35s, joining the U.K. and Australia as the top international customers. At least 10 Turkish companies are building parts and components, such as the cockpit displays, for other partners, according to Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed.

The compromise measure crafted by the House and Senate Armed Services Committees also would let the president waive a requirement to impose sanctions on countries and entities doing business with Russia for as long as 180 days if the party involved is taking steps to distance itself from a commercial relationship with the Russian defense and intelligence sectors, according to committee aides and a Democratic summary of the bill.

There is a lot of talk about how this is because of Erdogan is an authoritarian who is destroying the democratic structures in Turkey, and because security issues over the the S-400 purchase.

I call bullsh%$ on this.

It’s really about how the buying a Russian SAM system, means that western defense contractors, (Particularly US ones) are not getting a cut of the business.

Of Course, It’s Alabama

No Comments
It appears that the state of Alabama allows its Sheriffs to starve their inmates and keep the money saved for themselves..

This has risen to the level of a very public disgrace, and now the governor has put a stop to the practice, at least until the Sheriffs get a court injunction to continue to take taxpayer money in the service of cruelty:

Alabama’s governor has begun to cut off a gravy train for the state’s sheriffs: the unspent money for prisoners’ meals that the sheriffs have long been allowed to keep for themselves.

The practice, born of a bickered-over ambiguity in a state law, has let sheriffs pocket tax dollars that over the decades almost certainly ran into the millions. To curtail the practice, Gov. Kay Ivey ordered in a memorandum to the state comptroller that payments of certain funds related to jail food “no longer be made to the sheriffs personally.” Instead, the governor wrote, the money must be paid to county general funds or official accounts.

“Public funds should be used for public purposes,” Ms. Ivey, a Republican, said in a statement on Wednesday. “It’s that simple.”

Critics of the practice welcomed the governor’s action on Wednesday but said it resolved only part of the problem because it did not apply to every type of payment related to jail food.

Even so, the move is sure to infuriate sheriffs in at least some of Alabama’s 67 counties, and the governor’s order may be tested in the courts. Economic disclosure forms filed by sheriffs suggest that many do not take the leftover money, sometimes because of local laws. But some do: Records show that the sheriff in Etowah County, in northeast Alabama, for example, has taken more than $670,000 in recent years.

Right now politicians in Mississippi, Florida, and Texas are thinking, “Yes!  For once it’s not us held up for ridicule!”

Making Sure that A Democratic Victory Will Have No Meaning

1 Comment

Democrats have promised to being back “Pay-Go” rules if they take control of the House.

I get it, they want to wear their bib-boy pants, and this makes them feel like the adults in the room.

Unfortunately, it means that Democrats will do nothing for ordinary people if they gain power.

What’s more, “Pay-Go” is, and always has been, little more than an attempt to justify hurting poor people, Bill Clinton’s “Welfare Reform” being a classic example.

n 2006 and 2008, by allowing themselves to be reluctantly dragged into opposing a stupid and unpopular war, the Democrats ran the table.

They got their “Shellacking” in 2010 because they did nothing with that power.

Also note that this effectively makes single-payer impossible, particularly since it has to be run through a Congressional Budget Office whose staff has been packed with Neanderthals for the past 10 years.

Also add to this the fact that the other side never ever does this when they are in power.

Speaking of Bureaucrats Lying to Legislators,

No Comments

The ational Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has been lying to legislators to encourage them to dump billions into new warheads:

There are many reasons to keep certain parts of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex a secret. But fraud, waste, and abuse run rampant when the mystique and awe of nuclear bombs gets in the way of effective oversight. And it is the taxpayer who ends up suffering.

The secrets to creating a nuclear explosion and the materials to do so are kept by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy, and it has a $1.2 trillion plan to build new nuclear warheads and facilities over the next 30 years.

But new documents obtained by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) discussing the life expectancy of nuclear weapons components show that the uranium cores may have a longer life span than originally thought. This may undermine some justifications for an expansive—and expensive—nuclear modernization plan.

Although much of the documents are redacted, likely to keep safe the most sensitive details of the U.S. nuclear enterprise, the remaining details seem to suggest that initial life-span estimates were too conservative. These initial estimates were partially used as justification for plans to build an expensive new facility and revising plans based on these findings could result in billions of savings for taxpayers.

But there’s no getting around the fact that twice now the NNSA has either obscured facts that would suggest a more limited capacity is all that’s required or has pursued an expensive plan without knowing all the facts beforehand.

In light of NNSA’s rhetoric about the aging nuclear arsenal and the desperate need for more money to modernize, POGO endeavored to determine exactly what upgrades were truly needed to support a credible nuclear deterrent. In 2013, we released a report that called for a study into the lifetime of uranium secondaries in order to determine what capacity would be required of a proposed new facility. A study would make clear how many of these secondaries would need to be manufactured in the new building. POGO’s report on the proposed Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) highlighted how the public was being kept in the dark about this number, an important justification for continued and increased funding. At the time, a number of Energy Department sources told POGO several hundred warheads had already gone through the life extension process and would not need remanufactured secondaries.

Once again I will quote Ike, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”