Want to know if Mitt is carrying his share of the water or drinking from your bucket? What difference would the Buffett Rule, included in the President’s 2013 Budget, make.
See this interactive calculator. Enter your income and get the story!
http://www.barackobama.com/buffett-rule
In a successful effort to eliminate white Democratic legislators, the Georgia Republican Party has redistricted to create majority-minority districts that concentrate Democrats. They are using race to cripple democracy and marginalize African Americans.
While 47% of the vote in Georgia in 2010 was Democratic, the recently completed redistricting restricts Democrats to election of 31% of Statehouse members. It is possible Republicans could control 10 of Georgia’s 14 Districts as well as hold a 2/3′s majority in the legislature. Republicans could pass constitutional amendments without any Democratic votes.
You can read more about “The GOP’s New Southern Strategy” by Ari Berman at The Investigative Fund.org.
Let the Bush Tax Cut Boondoggle expire at the end of the year and public debt levels off. No one has to do anything.
A good portion of my career in higher education has been devoted to eliminating the “student loan” programs that steal opportunity from young adults. Certainly, the decline in American competitiveness and the explosion of wealth in the financial sector is in large part the result of the lucrative student loan business.
Please listen to Elizabeth Warren, candidate for the Senate from Massachusetts, tell the truth about the student loan scam.
Let’s stop eating our young.
For a look into the “old boys club” that is the Catholic Church, see this story from today’s New York Times.
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) – Days after Secret Service agents shortchanged a group of prostitutes in Colombia, the international trade group representing hookers downgraded the United States’ credit rating from AAA to B.
The strong rebuke from the International Alliance of Professional Escorts came after a Secret Service agent reportedly paid one of its members $30 for an $800 service, or only 4% of the stated price.
The statement from the International Alliance of Professional Escorts said that in downgrading the United States’ credit rating it was sending a clear message that its “members should be aware that doing business with the government of the United States carries with it a significant risk.”
“We are urging our members to avoid conducting transactions with the United States and to focus on more reliable customers, like the International Monetary Fund,” the statement added.
Just hours after the announcement from the escorts’ group, the U.S. Congress passed the following resolution blasting the Secret Service for its actions: “We strongly denounce the Secret Service for consorting with prostitutes, which has traditionally been Congress’s role.”
But it was not all bad news this week for the Secret Service, which today reported a 5000% jump in enlistment.
The agency said that enlistment offices across the country have been packed with prospective agents, including House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who abruptly dropped out of the Presidential race to join. Get a free subscription to the Borowitz Report here.
Both Georgia Senators, Isakson and Chambliss, voted against the President’s legislation to charge a surtax on incomes in excess of $1 million. Too bad, they are clearly more concerned with enriching the rich than reducing the deficit they constantly harp on.
Rolling back tax rates to the Reagan era would raise another $78 billion a year according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center. That would yield $1.1 trillion over the next decade – a nice start on the deficit. The rich really could make a difference. Certainly more than reducing the food stamps of hungry families, who just need to learn to fish. Get thee to the Wal-Mart Fishing Department!
Never mind the rich have moved the fish overseas. You see it is easier to cut wages than invest in American workers and technology to be globally competitive.
The truth is you aren’t needed anymore either as an employee or consumer. Stranded, just like the sharecroppers and tenant farmers of not-so-long-ago.
But legislators don’t have to go that far. Just do NOTHING; the current tax cuts will expire and the deficit stops growing. Check out this chart from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
Professor Jean Mitchell at Georgetown University has determined from analysis of two years of Medicare payment data in nine states that doctors who own laboratories send more prostate biopsies for analysis and have a lower rate of cancer detection than doctors who have no financial interest in the laboratories they use.
She looked at 9,927 prostate biopsies performed by lab-owning physicians with 26,334 done by doctors without any lab ownership.
Now, think about this. Medicare pays for prostate biopsies by the jar; jars can contain one or more specimens. Self-referring doctors charged Medicare for an average of 4.3 MORE jars per biopsy than doctors with no financial interest in the testing lab.
And, all this testing produced a much lower cancer detection rate than the physicians without a financial interest in the testing lab. That calls into question the necessity of the biopsy (which is a very uncomfortable procedure).
The way physicians are paid and the business interests they are allowed is driving the unsustainable and economically destructive rise in private medical costs. Pay the electrician who wires your house by the socket and how many sockets will you end up with?
Obamacare begins to change how Medicare purchases medical services. Paying for outcomes rather than procedures will begin to slow the increase and free money for investment in re-industrialization, transportation, and research.
Andrea Louise Campbell is an associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After teaching students how our social system works, she is finding out first hand, as a result of a car accident that left her seven month pregnant sister-in-law a quadriplegic.
You can read her story in The New York Times.
I wonder what the burden and bankruptcy of health care is doing to money available for innovation and investment in a growing economy.
“ATLANTA (AP) — State lawmakers spent the legislative session focusing on a fraction of the students in Georgia — those at a handful of charter schools created by now-defunct commission.
The aim was to pass a constitutional amendment to address a nearly year-old ruling by the state Supreme Court that outlawed the Georgia Charter Schools Commission, which approved 16 schools before it was disbanded in May. The proposal dominated much of the legislative session, stealing the spotlight from other priorities including tax and criminal justice reform and the state budget.
Critics said lawmakers should have paid more attention to nearly $1 billion in cuts that have not been restored to K-12 schools, the 1.7 million students enrolled in Georgia’s public schools and the teachers who haven’t had a raise since 2008.