By Bradford Richardson – The Washington Times – Thursday, April 7, 2016
PayPal drew a line in the sand when North Carolina enacted a law prohibiting people from using the restrooms of the opposite sex, but critics say that line got washed away on the shores of Malaysia, a nation that consistently ranks among the least LGBT-friendly in the world.
The company canceled its plan to build a global operations center in Charlotte after the passage of HB2, which CEO Daniel Schulman called discrimination against the transgendered. He noted that the move would cost North Carolina 400 well-paying jobs.
But Malaysia’s Penal Code 187 — which punishes homosexual conduct with whippings and up to 20 years in prison — did not stop PayPal from opening in 2011 a global operations center there that it estimated would employ 500 workers by 2013.
Ridgewood NJ, Tax Freedom Day, the day when the nation as a whole has earned enough to pay the federal, state, and local tax bill for year, will arrive 114 days into the year on April 24, according to the annual report released this morning by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.
“Tax Freedom Day gives us a vivid representation of how much federal, state, and local tax revenue is collected each year to pay for government goods and services,” said Tax Foundation Analyst Scott Greenberg. “Arguments can be made that the tax bill is too high or too low, but in order to have an honest discussion, it’s important for taxpayers to understand the cost of government. Tax Freedom Day helps people relate to that cost.”
While the national date arrives nine days after the tax filing deadline, each state’s total federal, state, and local tax burden varies greatly. Tax Freedom Day arrives earliest in Mississippi (April 5), Tennessee (April 6), and Louisiana (April 7). On May 21, Connecticut will be the last state to reach Tax Freedom Day this year, while New Jersey (May 12) and New York (May 11) trail closely behind.
The report’s other key findings include:
This year, the national Tax Freedom Day falls on April 24, or 114 days into the year.
Collectively, Americans will spend more on taxes in 2016 than they will on food, clothing, and housing combined.
Americans will pay $3.3 trillion in federal taxes and $1.6 trillion in state and local taxes, for a total bill of almost $5.0 trillion, or 31 percent of the nation’s income.
Tax Freedom Day is one day earlier than last year, due mainly to the Protecting America from Tax Hikes Act of 2015, which made several business and individual tax cuts permanent.
If you include annual federal borrowing, which represents future taxes owed, Tax Freedom Day would occur 16 days later on May 10.
Historically, the date for Tax Freedom Day has fluctuated significantly. The latest-ever Tax Freedom Day was May 1, 2000 – meaning that Americans paid 33 percent of their collective incomes toward taxes. A century earlier, in 1900, only 5.9 percent of national income was required to pay the tax bill, and Tax Freedom Day fell January 22.
Bloomberg More Americans are finding jobs at retail stores, but they aren’t getting the kind of pay and hours they’d like.
The number of able-bodied Americans entering the labor force has surged since last fall. But in a marked change from earlier in the recovery, more of them are finding jobs right away instead of just looking for work.
What’s going on? It’s hard to say for sure, but circumstantial evidence in the latest U.S. jobs report suggests many of these newly employed workers have found part-time work with mediocre pay.
The participation rate hit a two-year high of 63% in March, climbing from a 38-year low of 62.4% in September, the government said Friday. A person is considered part of the labor force if he finds or job or is actively searching for one.
Peace out, fools! Obama plays the clown by flashing the peace sign for nuclear security summit ‘team photo’… and gets a very unimpressed look from David Cameron and bemused world leaders
President Barack Obama is meeting dozens of world leaders for a nuclear summit in Washington, DC, today
He gave the peace sign as the group stood together for a ‘team photo’ – bemusing dozens of the world’s politicians
Prime Minister David Cameron looked less than impressed by Obama’s behavior amid a strained special relationship
Obama recently slammed Cameron for being ‘distracted’ during the crisis in Libya and turning it into a ‘s**t show’
World leaders discussed nuclear terrorist threats as well as the controversial Iran deal at the summit
By OLLIE GILLMAN FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
PUBLISHED: 13:55 EST, 1 April 2016 | UPDATED: 19:23 EST, 1 April 2016
Surrounded by world leaders, President Barack Obama gave the peace sign as they gathered for a ‘team photo’ during a two-day nuclear summit.
All eyes were on Obama as 54 other presidents and prime ministers joined him in Washington, DC, for crunch talks on Iran and terrorist threats involving nuclear weapons.
There was one set of eyes, however, that was particularly focused on the President – those of Prime Minister David Cameron.
Relations between Cameron and Obama have been strained since the President criticized the Prime Minister for getting ‘distracted’ during the crisis in Libya and turning it into a ‘s**t show’.
There was more than metaphorical distance between the pair at today’s summit, with Cameron only able to glare at Obama from across the podium as he was elbowed out to the edge of the stage.
“During President Obama’s speech in Havana with Cuban President Castro this afternoon he talked about a Rolling Stones concert, a Tampa Bay Rays baseball game, and urged Congress to lift the trade embargo against the tyrannical regime. The president did not, however, mention a single word about the extradition of convicted cop-killer Joanne Chesimard or terrorist William Morales.
These cowardly criminals must face justice here in the United States for their crimes before Congress has any debates about lifting the trade embargo, and the president’s failure to make this a priority in negotiations between our countries is truly upsetting to those seeking justice”Congressman Scott Garrett, U.S. Representative for New Jersey’s 5th
NJ Congressman Scott Garrett, U.S. Representative for New Jersey’s 5th congressional district, joined us on air to discuss his displeasure with President Obama’s trip to Cuba. He has been an outspoken critic on opening relations with Cuban regime. Currently, Cuba harbors New Jersey state police murderer — Joanne Chesimard. This among, other things, Garrett says, are on a list of items that President Obama needs to discuss with Cuba to truly regulate relations with Cuba.
Congressman Garrett recently sent a letter to the president’s administration saying: “On February 18th your administration announced your trip this March to Cuba citing the significant progress made by normalizing relations. However, we fail to see any progress in extraditing the fugitives like Joanne Chesimard and William Morales, nor any improvement in the treatment of the Cuban people by their government.” The president has yet to respond.
Congressman Garrett expresses a similar concern to Senator Bob Menendez stating “Senator Menendez and I don’t agree on many things. This is one issue we agree on.” Listen to my full interview with Congressman Scott Garrett discussing normalizing relations waiting to be resolved below.
Paterson school board members reacted with shock and outrage Wednesday night when district officials presented them with a preliminary 2016-17 budget that would increase property taxes by 27.2 percent to support the school district.
After more than 10 years without an increase, the tax levy for the district would jump from $38.9 million to $49.5 million for the school year beginning on July 1, according to budget documents made public Wednesday night.
That proposal comes at a time when Paterson property owners also face a 6.1-percent increase in municipal taxes, a hike that precipitated a partial shutdown of city government this week.
“We just can’t afford to increase taxes at this time,” said board member Nakima Redmon.
School board members asserted that they were blindsided by the proposed increase and vowed to remove it from the budget. But they delayed taking a vote to do that until the district administration provides them with more information on what spending cuts would be made to offset the elimination of the $10.6-million tax increase.
“Why is it you always seem to run out of money?” parent Rainbow Williams asked district officials during Wednesday night’s meeting. “Last year, you were $50 million in the hole. This year it’s $45 million … It seems somebody needs to learn how to do math.”
Eighth-grader Fabliha Zaman bemoaned the impact that last year’s budget cuts had on instruction in city schools, saying she missed terminated teachers who helped her learn. ”It doesn’t make sense to me,” said Zaman who attends School 7. “We all don’t deserve this.”
Former US Attorney General Eric Holder is a huge fan of NBA hall of famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
So much so that Holder used Abdul-Jabbar’s birth name, Lew Alcindor, as an alias for his official Department of Justice (DOJ) email account, raising more questions about the email practices of top Obama administration officials, and about the ability of US government agencies to track down correspondence in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
The Lew Alcindor revelation was made in a February 16 letter that DOJ sent to VICE News and Ryan Shapiro, a historian and doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in national security research.
“For your information,” the letter said, “e-mails in the enclosed documents which use the account name ‘Lew Alcindor’ denote e-mails to or from former Attorney General Holder.”
The letter was part of about 500 pages of heavily redacted emails and other documents [pdf at the end of this story] given to VICE News and Shapiro in response to a FOIA lawsuit filed in late 2014. The documents show that Justice Department officials sent emails to Lew Alcindor regarding calls from lawmakers for a federal investigation into claims that CIA personnel spied on Senate staffers while the Senate was drafting a report about the CIA’s torture program. Holder’s name does not appear anywhere in his Lew Alcindor email account.
Many Americans don’t have to worry about giving Uncle Sam part of their hard-earned cash for their income taxes this year.
An estimated 45.3 percent of American households — roughly 77.5 million — will pay no federal individual income tax, according to data for the 2015 tax year from the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan Washington-based research group. (Note that this does not necessarily mean they won’t owe their states income tax.)
Roughly half pay no federal income tax because they have no taxable income, and the other roughly half get enough tax breaks to erase their tax liability, explains Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center.
Despite the fact that rich people paying little in the way of income taxes makes plenty of headlines, this is the exception to the rule: The top 1 percent of taxpayers pay a higher effective income tax rate than any other group (around 23 percent, according to a report released by the Tax Policy Center in 2014) — nearly seven times higher than those in the bottom 50 percent.
On average, those in the bottom 40 percent of the income spectrum end up getting money from the government. Meanwhile, the richest 20 percent of Americans, by far, pay the most in income taxes, forking over nearly 87 percent of all the income tax collected by Uncle Sam.
The top 1 percent of Americans, who have an average income of more than $2.1 million, pay 43.6 percent of all the federal individual income tax in the US; the top 0.1 percent — just 115,000 households, whose average income is more than $9.4 million — pay more than 20 percent of it.
When it comes to all federal taxes — individual income, payroll, excise, corporate income and estate taxes — the distributions of who pays what is more spread out. This is partially because nearly everyone pays excise taxes, which include taxes on gasoline, alcohol and cigarettes.
by HANS A. VON SPAKOVSKY February 21, 2016 12:00 PM
Several well-funded organizations — including the League of Women Voters and the NAACP — are fighting efforts to prevent non-citizens from voting illegally in the upcoming presidential election. And the United States Department of Justice, under the direction of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, is helping them.
On February 12, these groups filed a lawsuit in D.C. federal court seeking to reverse a recent decision by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The Commission’s decision allows Kansas and other states, including Arizona and Georgia, to enforce state laws ensuring that only citizens register to vote when they use a federally designed registration form. An initial hearing in the case is set for Monday afternoon, February 22.
The American traditions of free expression and respectful discourse are slipping away, and college campuses and Twitter are prime examples, according to a member of the Federal Communications Commission.
“I think that poses a special danger to a country that cherishes First Amendment speech, freedom of expression, even freedom of association,” FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai told the Washington Examiner. “I think it’s dangerous, frankly, that we don’t see more often people espousing the First Amendment view that we should have a robust marketplace of ideas where everybody should be willing and able to participate.
Ridgewood Nj, Rep. Scott Garrett (NJ-05), a senior member of the House Budget Committee, released the following statement after President Obama unveiled his Fiscal Year 2017 budget proposal to Congress today:
“President Obama’s budget proposal reads like a how-to book on creating debt, raising taxes, and crippling the economy. Unfortunately, the final edition of this wildly unpopular story is full of broken budget policies that hurt New Jersey families and—spoiler alert—it still never balances. And as soon as hardworking families were starting to feel some relief at the fuel pump, the president’s budget proposes a new tax on oil that will increase costs for all Americans.
“It’s unfortunate that, after years of an underperforming economy and a nearly $20 trillion national debt, the president still feels that the best solution is more spending and higher taxes. I’ll continue to fight to rein-in wasteful spending and create a government that is efficient, accountable, and effective so everyone can have the opportunity to get ahead.”
Defence minister Moshe Ya’alon says his country is seeing signs of a much-feared nuclear arms race in the Middle East
By Raf Sanchez, Jerusalem
2:01PM GMT 14 Feb 2016
Israel has picked up signs of the beginning of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East as Arab states seek nuclear weapons to counter Iran, the Israeli defence minister has warned.
Moshe Ya’alon said Sunni Arab nations were not reassured by last year’s nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers and were making their own preparations for nuclear weapons.
“We see signs that countries in the Arab world are preparing to acquire nuclear weapons, that they are not willing to sit quietly with Iran on brink of a nuclear or atomic bomb,” Mr Ya’alon said.
The defence minister gave no evidence to back up his claims but Israel closely monitors the military activities of its Arab neighbours.
Israel and the Sunni Gulf countries do not have diplomatic ties but are known to talk through back channels and are united in their opposition to Iran.
By Peter Schroeder and Jordan Fabian – 02/10/16 06:00 AM EST
Seven years after President Obama’s inauguration, the debate about whether he saved the economy or held back its recovery is in full swing.
Obama has been taking a final-year victory lap, touting a national unemployment rate that has fallen to 4.9 percent as the latest sign of success for his economic stewardship.
Yet critics in Obama’s orbit, including Democratic congressmen and a former member of his Cabinet, suggest more could have been done if Obama had worked harder with lawmakers and members of his administration.
Rep. Collin Peterson (Minn.) — one of two Democrats still in office out of the 11 who voted against the stimulus
legislation — said the White House made zero effort to bring him, or other centrist Democrats, on board in the fight over the stimulus.
“They just wrote us off, I think,” he said. “I can’t even tell you who in the administration is supposed to be lobbying me.”
It’s a criticism of Obama that has remained steady for his entire presidency: He doesn’t work well with others, whether they are Republicans or Democrats, who disagree with him.
“This is very much a my-way-or-the-highway White House, and this is a president who would rather win the argument than get something done,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, head of the American Action Forum and the top economic adviser to Obama’s Republican opponent in 2008, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).
Obama allies say such criticism is unfair and blame Republicans for failing to work with Obama since day one.
“There’s no question that had Congress enacted the president’s economic proposals, the economy would be in a stronger position today,” said Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist who was a top economic adviser to Obama.
Europe is facing a convergence of the worst crises since World War II, and the overwhelming consensus among officials and experts here is that the U.S. no longer has the will or the ability to play an influential role in solving them.
At the Munich Security Conference, the prime topics are the refugee crisis, the Syrian conflict, Russian aggression and the potential dissolution of the European Union’s very structure. Top European leaders repeatedly lamented that 2015 saw all of Europe’s problems deepen, and unanimously predicted that in 2016 they would get even worse.
“The question of war and peace has returned to the continent,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told the audience, indirectly referring to Russian military interventions. “We had thought that peace had returned to Europe for good.”
What was missing from the conference speeches and even the many private discussions in the hallways, compared to previous years, was the discussion of what Europe wanted or even expected the U.S. to do.
Several European officials told me that there was little expectation that President Barack Obama, in his last year in office, would make any significant policy changes to address what European governments see an existential set of crises that can’t wait for a new administration in Washington.
Nathan Bomey, USA TODAY9:26 a.m. EST February 5, 2016
Consumers will likely pay the price for President Obama’s proposed $10 tax per-barrel of oil, an administration official and a prominent analyst said Thursday.
Energy companies will simply pass along the cost to consumers, Patrick DeHaan, senior petroleum analyst for GasBuddy.com, which tracks gas prices nationwide, said in an interview with USA TODAY.
Obama is set to propose the tax when he reveals his budget next week, as part of an effort to reduce carbon emissions and generate billions of dollars for mass-transit investments and self-driving vehicles. The new tax would be phased in over five years, and would apply to both domestic and imported oil.
