The Ridgewood Art Institute Instructor Exhibition 2012
September 24th–October 31st
Join us in viewing the beautiful examples of our Instructor’s work. Landscape, still life, figure, portrait and seascape are on exhibit. In addition,the exhibit is an opportunity to visit the Barn and obtain a schedule of art classes, for adults and young people, ongoing year round. Instruction is available in a variety of mediums including Oil, watercolor, acrylic, drawing and pastel. You can also stop in and watch a class in session.
We are located at 12 East Glen Avenue Ridgewood, NJ 07450
Girls in Grades 1-8 are invited to participate in the Youth Soccer Clinic and Fun Fair run by the RHS Women’s Soccer Team. The event is Monday, October 8 from 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. at RHS Stadium.
The fee is $25 per player. Deadline for sign-up is Monday, September 24. Click here for more information and the sign-up form https://tinyurl.com/9qnom6n
Jeez…I go on a business trip for a few days and when I come back, I find that the VC floated a brilliant idea to give jail time for leaf policy scofflaws? While I believe the council has since backed off ,
Harlan Coben, at Bookends Saturday, September 22nd
Harlan Coben, Saturday, September 22nd @ 1:00pm
International Bestselling author, Harlan Coben, will sign his new book for young readers: Seconds Away Books available Sept. 18th
Appearing authors will only autograph books purchased at Bookends and must have valid Bookends Receipt.Availability & pricing for all autographed books subject to change.Bookends cannot guarantee that the books that are Autographed will always be First Printings.
Autographed books purchased at Bookends are non-returnable.
While we try to insure that all customers coming to Bookends’ signings will meet authors and get their books signed, we cannot guarantee that all attendees will meet the author or that all books will be signed. We cannot control inclement weather, author travel schedules or authors who leave prematurely.
Bookends, 211 E. Ridgewood Avenue, Ridgewood, NJ 07450 201-445-0726
Sunday will mark the start of the 100-day countdown to “Taxmageddon” – the date the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect. They will hit families and small businesses in three great waves on January 1, 2013:
First Wave: Expiration of 2001 and 2003 Tax Relief
In 2001 and 2003, the GOP Congress enacted several tax cuts for small business owners, families, and investors (later re-upped by President Obama and Democrat Congress in 2010). The following tax hikes will occur on January 1, 2013:
Personal income tax rates will rise on January 1, 2013. The top income tax rate will rise from 35 to 39.6 percent (this is also the rate at which the majority of small business profits are taxed). The lowest rate will rise from 10 to 15 percent. All the rates in between will also rise. Itemized deductions and personal exemptions will again phase out, which has the same mathematical effect as higher marginal tax rates. The full list of marginal rate hikes is below:
-The 10% bracket rises to a new and expanded 15%
-The 25% bracket rises to 28%
-The 28% bracket rises to 31%
-The 33% bracket rises to 36%
-The 35% bracket rises to 39.6%
Higher taxes on marriage and family coming on January 1, 2013. The “marriage penalty” (narrower tax brackets for married couples) will return from the first dollar of taxable income. The child tax credit will be cut in half from $1000 to $500 per child. The standard deduction will no longer be doubled for married couples relative to the single level.
Middle Class Death Tax returns on January 1, 2013. The death tax is currently 35% with an exemption of $5 million ($10 million for married couples). For those dying on or after January 1 2013, there is a 55 percent top death tax rate on estates over $1 million. A person leaving behind two homes and a retirement account could easily pass along a death tax bill to their loved ones.
Higher tax rates on savers and investors on January 1, 2013. The capital gains tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 23.8 percent in 2013. The top dividends tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 43.4 percent in 2013. This is because of scheduled rate hikes plus Obamacare’s
investment surtax.
Second Wave: Obamacare Tax Hikes
There are twenty new or higher taxes in Obamacare. Some have already gone into effect (the tanning tax, the medicine cabinet tax, the HSA withdrawal tax, W-2 health insurance reporting, and the “economic substance doctrine”). Several more will go into effect on January 1, 2013.
They include:
The Obamacare Medical Device Tax begins to be assessed on January 1, 2013. Medical device manufacturers employ 409,000 people in 12,000 plants across the country. This law imposes a new 2.3% excise tax on gross sales – even if the company does not earn a profit in a given year. Exempts items retailing for <$100.
The Obamacare Medicare Payroll Tax Hike takes effect on January 1, 2013. The Medicare payroll tax is currently 2.9 percent on all wages and self-employment profits. Starting in 2013, wages and profits exceeding $200,000 ($250,000 in the case of married couples) will face a 3.8 percent rate.
The Obamacare “Special Needs Kids Tax” comes online on January 1, 2013. Imposes a cap on FSAs of $2500 (now unlimited). Indexed to inflation after 2013. There is one group of FSA owners for whom this new cap will be particularly cruel and onerous: parents of special needs children. There are thousands of families with special needs children in the United States, and many of them use FSAs to pay for special needs education. Tuition rates at one leading school that teaches special needs children in Washington, D.C. (National Child Research Center) can easily exceed $14,000 per year. Under tax rules, FSA dollars can be used to pay for this type of special needs education. This Obamacare cap harms these families.
The Obamacare “Haircut” for Medical Itemized Deductions goes into force on January 1, 2013. Currently, those facing high medical expenses are allowed a deduction for medical expenses to the extent that those expenses exceed 7.5 percent of adjusted gross income (AGI). The new provision imposes a threshold of 10 percent of AGI. Waived for 65+ taxpayers in 2013-2016 only.
Third Wave: The Alternative Minimum Tax and Employer Tax Hikes
When Americans prepare to file their tax returns in January of 2013, they’ll be in for a nasty surprise—the AMT won’t be held harmless, and many tax relief provisions will have expired. These tax increases will be in force for BOTH 2012 and 2013. The major items include:
The AMT will ensnare over 31 million families, up from 4 million last year. According to the left-leaning Tax Policy Center, Congress’ failure to index the AMT will lead to an explosion of AMT taxpaying families—rising from 4 million last year to 31 million. These families will have to calculate their tax burdens twice, and pay taxes at the higher level. The AMT was created in 1969 to ensnare a handful of taxpayers.
Full business expensing will disappear. In 2011, businesses can expense half of their purchases of equipment. Starting on 2013 tax returns, all of it will have to be “depreciated” (slowly deducted over many years).
Taxes will be raised on all types of businesses. There are literally scores of tax hikes on business that will take place. The biggest is the loss of the “research and experimentation tax credit,” but there are many, many others. Combining high marginal tax rates with the loss of this tax relief will cost jobs.
Tax Benefits for Education and Teaching Reduced. The deduction for tuition and fees will not be available. Tax credits for education will be limited. Teachers will no longer be able to deduct classroom expenses. Coverdell Education Savings Accounts will be cut. Employer-provided educational assistance is curtailed. The student loan interest deduction will be disallowed for hundreds of thousands of families.
Charitable Contributions from IRAs no longer allowed. Under current law, a retired person with an IRA can contribute up to $100,000 per year directly to a charity from their IRA. This contribution also counts toward an annual “required minimum distribution.” This ability will no longer be there.
America’s Vanishing Economic Freedom
September 19,2012
We’re on a slippery slope.
By Michael Tanner
The 2012 Economic Freedom of the World report was released this week by the Cato Institute and Canada’s Fraser Institute, and it showed that the United States has plummeted to 18th place in the ranked list, trailing such countries as Estonia, Taiwan, and Qatar. Even such notorious welfare states as Finland and Denmark, not to mention Canada, have freer economies than we do.
Actually, the decline began under President George W. Bush. For 20 years the U.S. had consistently ranked as one of the world’s three freest economies, along with Hong Kong and Singapore. By the end of the Bush presidency, we were barely in the top ten.
And, as with so many disastrous legacies of the Bush era, Barack Obama took a bad thing and made it worse.
During the past four years, the U.S. saw significant declines in nearly all categories of the economic-liberty index. Most significant — and this should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention — is that the size of government grew substantially, particularly when measured by size of government subsidies and transfers and by government consumption as a share of national consumption.
As recently as 2005, the U.S. ranked 45th in size of government among the 144 nations surveyed. That was bad enough, but it still had us in the top third of the 144 countries surveyed. Today, government has grown dramatically, and our ranking has fallen to 61st place. By the metrics used, the U.S. now has a bigger government than Ukraine or Syria.
Obama pressed on failures at Univision forum
By REID J. EPSTEIN | 9/20/12 5:07 PM EDT
CORAL GABLES, Fla. – President Barack Obama on Thursday faced some of the toughest questioning of his reelection campaign to date, pressed repeatedly on his failure to achieve comprehensive immigration reform and other unmet promises from his 2008 run.
The Univision presidential forum at the University of Miami here kicked off with grilling on another topic which brought mounting criticism from Republicans Thursday: The government’s decision to label as a terrorist attack the violence at the consulate in Benghazi which killed American Christopher Stevens.
The Fallacy of Redistribution
September 20,2012
Thomas Sowell
The recently discovered tape on which Barack Obama said back in 1998 that he believes in redistribution is not really news. He said the same thing to Joe the Plumber four years ago. But the surfacing of this tape may serve a useful purpose if it gets people to thinking about what the consequences of redistribution are.
Those who talk glibly about redistribution often act as if people are just inert objects that can be placed here and there, like pieces on a chess board, to carry out some grand design. But if human beings have their own responses to government policies, then we cannot blithely assume that government policies will have the effect intended.
The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only example.
In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people ought to make the rest of the society more prosperous. But when the Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became scarce. As many people died of starvation under Stalin in the 1930s as died in Hitler’s Holocaust in the 1940s.
How can that be? It is not complicated. You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth — and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding while raising them to maturity.
People in industry are not inert objects either. Moreover, unlike farmers, industrialists are not tied to the land in a particular country.
Russian aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky could take his expertise to America and produce his planes and helicopters thousands of miles away from his native land. Financiers are even less tied down, especially today, when vast sums of money can be dispatched electronically to any part of the world.
If confiscatory policies can produce counterproductive repercussions in a dictatorship, they are even harder to carry out in a democracy. A dictatorship can suddenly swoop down and grab whatever it wants. But a democracy must first have public discussions and debates. Those who are targeted for confiscation can see the handwriting on the wall, and act accordingly.
N.J.’s middle class shrinking under growing income gap, Census data shows
Published: Friday, September 21, 2012, 6:30 AM Updated: Friday, September 21, 2012, 9:08 AM
By Stacy Jones and Stephen Stirling/The Star-Ledger
New Jersey’s middle class has eroded in the last four years, further polarizing a state where the rich and the poor have long been miles apart on levels of income, if not on the map, new Census data shows.
A Star-Ledger analysis of four years of data from the American Community Survey shows the percentage of households with an annual income between $35,000 and $150,000 has dipped by nearly 3 percent since 2008, while the percentage of those richer and poorer has increased.
That accounts for about 79,000 people in the state leaving the middle class, according to New Jersey Policy Perspective, a left-leaning think tank.
“I’m very concerned that last year was probably one of the worst years in half-a-century for the state,” said Ramon Castro, a senior policy analyst at NJPP. “It may well be that we’ve reached our peak but … my concern is that New Jersey is more vulnerable than other states.”
Ridgewood Volleyball racks up milestone win No. 600
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2012
BY GREG TARTAGLIA
ASSISTANT SPORTS EDITOR
THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
RIDGEWOOD — Tuesday’s victory could be summed up in one word: sweet.
The Ridgewood girls volleyball team had plenty to celebrate after gaining its 600th all-time win on Tuesday. The Maroons also beat Paramus in game one of Wednesday’s rivalry match before falling, 2 games to 1.
The Ridgewood High School girls volleyball team went on the road to defeat Memorial of West New York, 25-7, 25-14, and record the 600th victory in program history, becoming the seventh New Jersey team to reach that milestone.
The Maroons’ post-match reward? Bubblegum.
“The kids brought out a blue bag, and I’m wondering, ‘What the heck’s in this thing?’” RHS head coach Ron Knott recalled the following day. “And they pulled out a jar with 600 gumballs in it. There aren’t 600 anymore,” he added with a smile.
Avo 25th Anniversary in stock now at Tobacco Shop of Ridgewood
This year marks the 25th Anniversary of the AVO cigar brand created by cigar icon Avo Uvezian, who began composing cigars in 1987. To celebrate 25 years of ‘Cigars in Perfect Harmony,’ Avo has decided to share with you his two greatest passions, the piano and the cigar. It is this passion for music and cigars that has presented Avo with such happiness throughout the last quarter century. And today, in celebration of 25 years, Avo presents his passions to you..
Only 2,000 individually numbered ‘Grand Piano’ boxes have been made for the United States making this a rare collector’s item. Available now at The Tobacco Shop of Ridgewood.
Now available at
The Tobacco Shop of Ridgewood
~Gary, Barbara and Collin
The Tobacco Shop of Ridgewood 10 Chestnut Street Ridgewood, New Jersey 07450
Phone: 201-447-2204 | Email: info@tobaccoshop.com
Hours: Monday – Saturday 10:00AM – 5:30PM and Thursday Night 6:30PM – 8:30PM
More Americans Added to Food Stamps Than Find Jobs
10:30 AM, SEP 21, 2012 • BY DANIEL HALPER
An alarming data point from the minority side of the Senate Budget Committee: More Americans are being added to food stamps than are finding jobs. The data is detailed in this chart, provided by the committee:
As the chart shows, between April-June 2012 (the most recent three month block for which government data is available), only 200,000 jobs have been created while 265,000 individuals have been added to the food stamp rolls. Additionally, in that time period, 246,000 workers were awarded disability.
Another chart shows that the last three month block is part of a larger trend. The chart, also from the minority side of the Senate Budget Committee, shows that “Workforce Shrinks Since January 2009 While Millions Sign Up For Disability And Food Stamps.”
Facebook bill advances without employer-backed amendment
A bill that would bar employers from asking employees for information about their accounts on social media sites like Facebook was released by a Senate committee today.
While employer groups back much of the bill, they were unsuccessful in convincing the committee to remove a provision allowing workers to sue employers for violations. The committee also passed a similar bill barring colleges from requiring students to provide their social media passwords.
The bill affecting employers was passed by the Senate Labor Committee by a 4-0 vote, with Sen. Anthony R. Bucco (R-Denville) abstaining Business groups said creating a new cause of action to bring lawsuits against employers would prove costly even in cases where the employer did nothing wrong. (Kitchenman, NJBIZ)
Parents troubled by bill to tighten up immunization exemptions
Legislation that would clarify what constitutes a legal exemption under the New Jersey’s school immunization law was approved by the state Senate Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee Thursday after nearly three-hours of contentious testimony. The bill now goes to the full Senate for a floor vote.
The legislation, S1759, with amendments, was approved by 6-2 vote after about a dozen people spoke, mostly against the bill saying parents have a right to opt out of child immunization. The law would require documentation when a parent wants to exempt a student from mandatory immunizations for either medical or religious reasons. The bill to strengthen New Jersey’s existing immunization policy was introduced after an outbreak of whooping cough this year. (Kalet, NJ Spotlight)
Ridgewood High School library upgrade campaign ramped up
THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 20, 2012, 4:44 PM
BY LAURA HERZOG
STAFF WRITER
THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
The Ridgewood High School (RHS) Home and School Association (HSA) will soon launch an aggressive fall fundraising campaign to pay for the transformation of the RHS library into a space better suited for 21st century learners. The renovation will potentially cost $850,000.
a preliminary design of what the Learning Commons at Ridgewood High School might look like.
The new RHS Learning Commons would replace a library that has not been renovated since it was originally designed in 1963. Among other improvements, it would include new conference rooms, printers, TV monitors, a café and moveable bookshelves to allow for doubled seating capacity, according to a preliminary floor plan drafted this summer by the architecture firm LAN Associates.
A proposed addition, to include two new conference rooms and a lounge seating area, would utilize space from a server room and part of a classroom, according to David Zrike, co-chair of the association’s development committee. The TV monitors would broadcast news stations, he noted.
According to the RHS HSA, the proposal will be discussed at next Monday’s Board of Education (BOE) public meeting, scheduled for 7:30 p.m.
