News outlets are running stories about the rise in corporate tax inversions. Inversions are financial reorganizations that place U.S. firms under foreign parent corporations. They are one of the many ways that companies are responding to America’s uniquely high corporate tax rate.
Liberal policymakers and pundits are outraged by inversions because they fear that the government will be starved of revenues. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew has demanded new rules to stop inversions because “allowing these transactions to continue, we run the risk of eroding our corporate tax base and undoing the progress we have made to reduce our budget deficits.”
However, it is our high 40 percent tax rate that is eroding our corporate tax base. If we chopped the rate substantially, tax avoidance would fall and U.S. investment would rise. Over time, more income would be reported to the government, with the result that the government would probably not lose any money, and it could even gain some. Governments, businesses, and workers would all win from a corporate tax rate cut.
Here is some evidence that the government would win. For 19 OECD countries for which there is good data back to the 1960s, I plotted the average corporate tax rates and average corporate tax revenues. The chart illustrates the Laffer effect of cutting high statutory tax rates on a very mobile tax base.
By Amber Sutherland, Daniel Prendergast and Chris Perez
August 5, 2014 | 8:54pm
Bacon lovers are getting socked in the piggy bank.
City butchers and restaurateurs are beginning to squeal for mercy after the price of bacon rose to the highest it’s been in nearly 30 years — thanks to high demand and a shortage of healthy pigs.
“We’ve had to raise the prices in small increments in the last month,” said Vincent Santiago, an employee at Staubitz meat market in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
The pork surge began last year when a virus swept through US farms in about 30 states and killed millions of pigs.
Bacon prices have shot up around 10 percent this year alone and reached an all-time high of $6.11 per pound, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Santiago said a half-pound slab of bacon now costs about $3.99, as opposed to last month when they were about a dollar cheaper.
“We don’t like to raise prices, but this is what we do for a living,” he added. “People are still buying it.”
Ridgewood Guild Presents Movies in the Park Finding Nemo
Tonight August 6, 2014 The Ridgewood Guild Presents Movies in the Park Finding Nemo – Sponsored by Backwoods.
Movies in the Park returns for the summer season. Memorial Park at Van Neste Square at 8:30PM – Bring a blanket or chair and enjoy this free movie presented by the Ridgewood Guild .
1,000-member secretive progressive journalist group uncovered
August 6, 2014 MEDIA TRACKERS
Media Trackers is dedicated to media accountability, government transparency, and quality fact-based journalism. Archive »
WASHINGTON, D.C. – A prominent CNN commentator, the top two political reporters for The Huffington Post, a Reuters reporter, the editor of The Nation magazine, a producer for Al Jazeera America television, a U.S. News & World Report columnist, and approximately two dozen Huffington Post contributors are among the more than 1,000 members of Gamechanger Salon.
Founded by leftwing activist Billy Wimsatt, the group is a secretive digital gathering of writers, opinion leaders, activists and political hands who share information, ideas and strategy via a closed Google group.
The group’s existence was discovered by Media Trackers through an open records request filed with a University of Wisconsin professor who happened to be a member of the network.
Sally Kohn, formerly a Fox News contributor, now works for CNNreliably echoing pro-Obama Administration talking points and championing leftwing ideas as a network commentator. Kohn is also a member of Gamechanger Salon, and e-mails show that she occasionally approached the group’s membership and asked them to promote her television appearances.
“I’m guest co-hosting CNN’s Crossfire tonight at 6:30pm EST, with fellow co-host Newt Gingrich. I would be grateful for folks (a) helping spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, etc to encourage people to tune in; and (b) tuning in and live tweeting during the show,” Kohn wrote to the group on January 14 of this year.
In another e-mail, Kohn pitched her TED talk about working as a liberal at Fox News. “I would be grateful for any shares and reactions. Here is a straightforward, sample tweet[:] Watch @sallykohn’s amazing TED talk on emotional correctness: on.ted.com/Kohn” she wrote. “Thanks for everything all of you do every day to make the world a better place!” she signed off.
Amanda Terkel, the “Senior Political Reporter and Politics Managing Editor at The Huffington Post,” is a member of Gamechanger Salon along with The Huffington Post’s Washington bureau chief, Ryan Grim.
Stimulus ‘boondoggle’: School board member details disastrous school computer giveaway
August 6, 2014
HOBOKEN, N.J. – When the Hoboken school leaders decided in 2010 to use a windfall of federal stimulus money to purchase laptops for all students in the city’s junior-senior high school, former board member Maureen Sullivan was the only one to vote against the measure.
Four years later, the district’s superintendent Mark Toback has deemed the initiative “unsustainable” and canceled the program, leaving school officials to explore options for recycling dozens of machines that are now collecting dust in a school storage closet.
“It was clear it was going to be a boondoggle and a disaster and that’s what it turned out to be,” Sullivan told EAGnews.
“The stimulus money came and it had to be soaked up … It was like, ‘It’s free money, let’s just spend it,’” she said of the board’s rush to dole out computers, which her colleagues on the board viewed as an opportunity to help the district’s mostly poor students keep up with their wealthier peers.
“There was just no planning or thinking things through logically,” she said. “In general, that’s how the school board operates.”
Before the plan was approved, Sullivan repeatedly highlighted the district’s already struggling tech staff, the costs to repair and maintain hundreds of computers, licensing fees for software, and the lack of a strategic plan for training teachers, but “it was just shluffed off like ‘Don’t worry about it, these things take care of themselves,’” Sullivan said.
“I asked what happens when the stimulus money goes away and they were just like ‘Our taxpayers will see the value … and pay,’” said Sullivan, a mother of two high school students.
“You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out it was going nowhere fast. They never wanted to hash out the negatives, they only wanted to talk about the positives,” she said. “Anyone with common sense knows you can’t just give a 12-year-old a laptop.
“Kids have all the time in the world to figure out how to mess them up,” Sullivan said.
And that’s exactly what happened.
According to the Hechinger Report:
By the time Jerry Crocamo, a computer network engineer, arrived in Hoboken’s school system in 2011, every seventh, eighth and ninth grader had a laptop. Each year a new crop of seventh graders were outfitted. Crocamo’s small tech staff was quickly overwhelmed with repairs.
We had “half a dozen kids in a day, on a regular basis, bringing laptops down, going ‘my books fell on top of it, somebody sat on it, I dropped it,’ ” said Crocamo.
Screens cracked. Batteries died. Keys popped off. Viruses attacked. Crocamo found that teenagers with laptops are still… teenagers.
“We bought laptops that had reinforced hard-shell cases so that we could try to offset some of the damage these kids were going to do,” said Crocamo. “I was pretty impressed with some of the damage they did anyway. Some of the laptops would come back to us completely destroyed.”
Crocamo’s time was also eaten up with theft. Despite the anti-theft tracking software he installed, some laptops were never found. Crocamo had to file police reports and even testify in court.
That was only the beginning.
Students also learned how to circumvent software installed on the machines intended to prevent them from visiting pornography, social media, and other inappropriate websites. Crocamo disabled the computers’ webcams, but students learned to undo those controls, as well.
The added software also dragged down the computers’ processors, which prevented them from effectively running educational software.
“We didn’t really do much on the computer,” Michael Ranieri, a junior at Hoboken high school, told the Hechinger Report. “So we kind of just did games to mess around when we had free time. I remember really big was Crazy Taxis that we used play. If we found solitaire online, we used to play it.”
Many folks in the community also learned the district’s username and password and eventually overwhelmed the high school’s wifi network.
Are Public Schools Collecting Too Much Data on Your Kids?
Mary Tillotson / @Watchdogorg / August 05, 2014
Parents are increasingly voicing concern that public schools are collecting massive amounts of personal data on students, storing it and distributing it to third parties without their consent.
Dawn Sweeney, a Pennsylvania mother, has two children in public schools and home-schools her younger three. She had planned to enroll them in public schools when they reached seventh grade, as she did with her two oldest. But because of the data collection, she’s now reconsidering.
“Nobody can say exactly what is being collected, but it’s a lot, and it concerns me that every time my kids are on the computer, their person is connected to data,” Sweeney said. “You don’t need parent permission for that. However, you do need parent permission to hang artwork in the hallway.”
That data collection makes plenty of parents nervous and is one reason more parents home-school their children, said Will Estrada, staff attorney and director of federal relations for Home School Legal Defense Association.
Other concerns include identity theft, data security, a child’s physical safety if a sex offender gains access to the data, and the government or big businesses’ having access to the data.
Emmett McGroarty, executive director of the Preserve Innocence Project at the American Principles Project, said if government is able to collect information in an unfettered manner on individuals, it will change their relationship.
“If you’re walking around knowing this guy is collecting this information and is keeping it on you and your children, it’s going to bother you, and it’s going to intimidate you,” he said. “If you and I ever enter into a dispute down the road, you’re really going to be at a disadvantage.”
In late July, parents who had worked to take down inBloom, a pilot project involving massive student data collection, formed Student Privacy Matters, a coalition to push for better privacy protections at the state and federal level.
New Evidence Exposes Hamas Passing Off Terrorist Deaths As Civilian Deaths
IN NEWS, POLITICS, WORLD NEWS / BY SEAN BROWN / ON AUGUST 5, 2014 AT 2:49 PM /
It’s been widely reported that the majority of the deaths in the Gaza Strip have been civilians, with figures from Palestinian officials saying that 80% of the roughly 2,000 deaths during Operation Protective Edge have been non-combatants. However, Israel is now claiming they have proof that at least half of the people who have died were militants.
“There is research being done in the military, very professionally and reliably, (whose) conclusion is that at least 47% of the fatalities are terrorists, with photographs and names,” prominent former politician Tzachi Hanegbi said.
Hanegbi was speaking on Israel’s Channel Two Television about how their analysis of the death toll is far different from what the UN is reporting. He explained that Hamas fails to differentiate between civilian and militant deaths.
An analyst for the pro-Israel group The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), Steven Sotsky, backed that claim, pointing out that there’s a disproportionate amount of Palestinian deaths with men aged 17-30. Sotsky said that while that age range for men only accounts for 10% of the total Palestinian population, it accounts for 44% of the fatalities thus far.
According to Sotsky, that trend wouldn’t exist if Israel were indiscriminately bombing civilians:
“Analyses of the casualties listed in the daily reports published by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, a Gaza-based organization operating under Hamas rule, indicate that young males ages 17 to 30 make up a large portion of the fatalities, and a particularly noticeable spike occurs between males ages 21 to 27, a pattern consistent with the age distribution typically found among combatants and military conscripts.”
He details his analysis further by saying, “Data gleaned from the daily reports of the PCHR show that from July 8, the start of Israel’s ‘Operation Protective Edge,’ through July 26, 404 out of 915 fatalities tallied from daily reports in which the ages were identified occurred among males ages 17 to 30, comprising 44% of all fatalities among a group representing about 10% of Gazans.”
Sotsky then notes that while females make up 25% of the population they only account for 10% of the casualties, and children make up 50% of the population but only account for 20% of the casualties.
Matt Rooney of The Save Jersey Blog interviews NJ Senate Candidate Jeff Bell Aug. 05 By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog
Jeff Bell dropped by my law offices on Monday, Save Jerseyans, en route to participate in the organized protest of Harry Reid’s Cherry Hill fundraiser for Donald Norcross.
I could talk to this guy for hours. He’s an unapologetic public policy wonk and rich depository of political knowledge going back to his years with the Reagan campaign. We did our best to drill down on a few important issues at play in 2014, the state of the race itself, the contrast between Bell and the incumbent Cory Booker (D-Twitter), and how he hopes to win this classic David v. Goliath struggle…
The NY Post says he’s surging. The most recent public poll shows him in single-digit territory. All we can say for sure is that the 2014 cycle is no time to count any good Republican out…
Readers asks , yeah what about the rats in village hall?
News 12 has just reported that the rats are on the move….it’s understood that they are moving back home after a short jaunt on Howard road….chief
John ward has stated “we’ll keep the back door open So the mayor and council can get back in….but once there in….that’s it….no more unauthorized travel.”
Where is our Mayor with the photo op. Let see if he get his buddy over at the record to put a positive spin on this. Maybe we should tighten up the borders around so that the illegal aliens rats don’t come across.
Ridgewood NJ, On July 30, 2014 at 6:18 PM Ptl. Anthony Mormino responded to Station Plaza for a welfare check. He found an intoxicated male lying on the ground. While investigating the incident the male party became disruptive. He was found to be in possession of an open container of alcohol as well as marijuana. The accused James Moore 45 of Fairlawn was arrested and charged with Disorderly Conduct, Possession of Marijuana and Open Container in Public.
On July 31, 2014 Detective Douglas Williams concluded an investigation into sexually explicit emails being sent to a Village resident. A search was conducted by Det Williams and McDowell, with the assistance of the NJ State Police, to a Liberty Township residence. The warrant resulted in the arrest of Brandon Kuhl 30 of Liberty Township NJ. The accused was charged Cyber Harassment. The accused was released pending a first appearance in Ridgewood Municipal Court. The investigation is ongoing pending a forensic analysis of the computers seized during the search warrant.
On July 31, 2014 a Garber Square resident reported that a package had been stolen from his mailbox. The matter is under investigation.
On July 31, 2014 a Fairlawn resident reported that her vehicle had been damaged while it was parked at Kings Plaza on North Maple Avenue. The matter is under investigation.
On August 3, 2014 at 6:53 PM Patrol responded to a dispute on Prospect Street. While investigating the dispute it was determined that the accused was in possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia. Matthew Decesare 22 of Ridgewood was arrested and charged with possession of marijuana and paraphernalia. He was released after posting bail.
All defendants are considered innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Ridgewood teen says California swim ‘very lonely’ and required another gear
AUGUST 5, 2014, 8:26 PM LAST UPDATED: TUESDAY, AUGUST 5, 2014, 8:39 PM BY ABBOTT KOLOFF STAFF WRITER THE RECORD
She saw the sun going down, and worried she might be pulled from the water because she was out of glow sticks and would be invisible to her father and companions in nearby boats guiding her in inky darkness across the Catalina Channel. The previous night of swimming, she said, felt like a dream, and she experienced an emotion that she never before felt while in the water.
“It was very lonely,” she said.
Charlotte Samuels, a 16-year-old open-water swimmer from Ridgewood, said she found another gear near the end of her 20.2-mile swim from Catalina Island to the Southern California coast almost as if she was able to “turn on a switch.” Her legs quivering, she stumbled over rocks and onto the shore after spending 20 hours, 20 minutes and 44 seconds in the water, taking a giant step toward becoming the youngest person ever to swim what is known as the Triple Crown of open-water swimming. The youngest to date was 20 years old.
One day later, as she rested Tuesday at a California house rented by her parents, she reflected on her accomplishment during a telephone interview. She described some of the anguish she felt, the taunting California coast that was farther away than it looked, the unexpected three-foot swells and currents that pushed her off course, and her determination to swim through feelings of uncertainty and the sharp pain of jellyfish stings that felt like electric shocks to her face, arms and legs.
She said she was sore and “mentally” exhausted after completing a swim that took about eight hours longer than she anticipated, and has decided to put off the third leg of the Triple Crown, a 21-mile swim across the English Channel, until next year because “I want to rest.”
– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/news/ridgewood-teen-says-california-swim-very-lonely-and-required-another-gear-1.1062642#sthash.xg73t2mF.dpuf
Photo credit: Boyd A. Loving Chain reaction Route 17 crash injures 1 August 5th ,2014 Boyd A. Loving 6:58 PM
RIdgewood police, fire, and EMS personnel all responded to a multi-vehicle chain reaction crash in the left lane of Route 17 southbound, just south of Paramus Road at approximately 5:30 PM on Tuesday, 08/05. The driver of a red 4-door Mercedes was transported to The Valley Hospital with non-life threatening injuries resultant from air bag deployment in his vehicle. Two vehicles involved in the crash were heavily damaged and had to be removed from the scene by flatbed tow truck. A Bergen County Sheriff’s Office unit assisted with traffic control at the scene. As a result of crash there were very heavy traffic delays on Route 17 south extending back to at least Hollywood Avenue in HoHoKus. There were no rubbernecking delays northbound.
Six in 10 Americans are dissatisfied with the state of the U.S. economy, more than 70 percent believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, and nearly 80 percent are down on the country’s political system, according to the latest NBC News / Wall Street Journal poll.
The frustration carries over to the nation’s political leaders, with President Barack Obama’s overall approval rating hitting a new low at 40 percent, and a mere 14 percent of the public giving Congress a thumbs up.
“We’re in the summer of our discontent,” said Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducted this survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. “Americans are cranky, unhappy… It is with everything going on the world.”
Yet because this discontent differs – among Democrats, Republicans, and independents – Hart cautions that Americans still aren’t likely to be storming the polls on Election Day in November.
“We’re unhappy, but we aren’t coalescing around an issue,” he said.
Indeed, 57 percent of respondents told pollsters that something upsets them enough to carry a protest sign for a day.
“The public seems have moved beyond the plaintive cry of ‘Feel our pain!’ to the more angry pronouncement of ‘You are causing our pain!’”
New leaker disclosing U.S. secrets, government concludes By Evan Perez, CNN updated 5:16 PM EDT, Tue August 5, 2014
(CNN) — The federal government has concluded there’s a new leaker exposing national security documents in the aftermath of surveillance disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, U.S. officials tell CNN.
Proof of the newest leak comes from national security documents that formed the basis of a news story published Tuesday by the Intercept, the news site launched by Glenn Greenwald, who also published Snowden’s leaks.
The Intercept article focuses on the growth in U.S. government databases of known or suspected terrorist names during the Obama administration.
The article cites documents prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center dated August 2013, which is after Snowden left the United States to avoid criminal charges.
Greenwald has suggested there was another leaker. In July, he said on Twitter “it seems clear at this point” that there was another.
Government officials have been investigating to find out that identity.
In a February interview with CNN’s Reliable Sources, Greenwald said: “I definitely think it’s fair to say that there are people who have been inspired by Edward Snowden’s courage and by the great good and virtue that it has achieved.”
He added, “I have no doubt there will be other sources inside the government who see extreme wrongdoing who are inspired by Edward Snowden.”
No matter how you feel about Halbig vs. Sebelius—the recent decision that said it was illegal for the government to funnel subsidies to the 36 states that declined to build health care exchanges—the odds that this legal challenge to Obamacare will ultimately prevail in the courts are not that high. But the law’s supporters should brace themselves for even fiercer future battles: Their folly was to pass a complicated and flawed law with zero Republican support, and now they have to contend with full-bore Republican opposition as they try to make it work.
Halbig’s odds of being upheld are low, not because its legal argument is “stupid” or “criminal,” as its opponents claim, but because of courtroom politics. Halbig was issued by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, but the full court tilts heavily liberal, and it is likely to reverse the decision.
Opponents of the law petitioned the Supreme Court last week to rule on the legality of the subsidies while the lower courts are still split. But the politically squeamish Chief Justice John Roberts might prefer to let matters play out at that level rather than jump into a partisan mud fight. (Theoretically, the four conservative justices would be enough to grant certiorari, but unless they know that Roberts will rule with them eventually, they wouldn’t risk egg on their face.)
But that doesn’t mean that Obamacare supporters can take a victory lap. The program’s biggest vulnerabilities are still down the road. And that’s no accident.
The administration postponed implementation of the more painful aspects of the program till after the president is safely out of office—partly through the original law and partly by altering the law through executive fiat.
Thanks to lobbying by labor, the law delayed taxing so-called Cadillac Plans, which benefit union households, till 2018. Likewise, it doesn’t require states participating in the Medicaid expansion to pick up any of the tab for their added costs till 2016.
The penalty for the individual mandate, which starts at $95 per individual and $285 per household, will soar to $695 and $2,085, respectively, by 2016.
But the real danger is the “risk corridor” provision that was meant to backstop the losses of insurance companies so that they don’t pull out, prompting Obamacare’s collapse.
“Risk corridors” essentially cap both the profits and losses that insurance companies can make. A company whose profits are higher than the capped amount has to fork over the excess to one that incurs losses.
In theory, this program, which is also due to expire around 2017, is supposed to be financed by the insurance industry. But the problem is that if the industry as a whole doesn’t make enough profits to offset its losses, then a federal bailout may be necessary when these programs are phased out and their final bill comes due.
The likelihood of a bailout is not as remote as liberals claim, given that 71 percent of the exchange enrollees are older and not as healthy, about 11 points more than optimal according to the administration’s own projections. Indeed, even before many insurersreported lower-than-expected earnings this week, Moody’s had downgraded its outlook for the industry to “negative.”
But the insurer bailout is not the only appropriation battle brewing. In the fairytale that the president told the public, Obamacare wasn’t going to cost taxpayers a “dime” because all of the necessary funds would be obtained from drastic Medicare reimbursement cuts to doctors and hospitals. How drastic? So drastic, notes Forbes analyst Chris Conover, that by 2030 Medicare would be paying providers 60 percent less than what private plans do.
