Apple (like many giant, multinational corporations) has been avoiding paying the taxes they owe to the country by setting up foreign “subsidiaries” in tax-haven countries, and moving jobs and profit centers out of the country. They have accumulated billions upon billions of dollars in these tax havens. Now they want a special tax break to [...]
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MORNING MESSAGE: A Long Cold Summer For Young People Looking For Work OurFuture.org’s Isaiah J. Poole: “Just in the past decade Congress has cut $1 billion from youth jobs programs, according to a report by the Center for American Progress. And that is at a time when even before the Great Recession youth unemployment was [...]
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I got my first job while I was in high school through a small community organization run by Willie J. Hardy, a community activist (and later D.C. City Council member) who operated out of what legendary Washington Post writer William Raspberry described as a “tiny, hopelessly cluttered quonset hut” in the Deanwood section of Washington. [...]
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These days the economic news reads like some strange collaboration between John Steinbeck and Eugene Ionesco, a mashup of The Grapes of Wrath and The Bald Soprano. Grim statistics of poverty, lost hope, and widespread tragedy – the stuff of human reality – are juxtaposed with a surrealistically disconnected political debate that focuses on the incidental and the irrelevant. We’re [...]
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There was a time when a $200+ billion reduction in the federal budget deficit would have been big news and hailed as a singular achievement worthy of either fiscal sainthood or a dance-on-the-table party...or both.
Yet yesterday's Congressional Budget Office report showing that the fiscal 2013 federal deficit will be $642 billion, $203 billion less than CBO's previous estimate of $845 billion, did not create any spontaneous cannonizations or celebrations. It also didn't change the still-stalemated and crisis-oriented federal budget debate by even a small amount.
The bottomline: It's in almost no one's interest to be happy about the budget news that should have made everyone happier.
Here's why.
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MORNING MESSAGE: Simpson-Bowles Austerity Gang, Go Home OurFuture.org’s Richard Eskow: “A lot of liberals, like Josh Marshall, are celebrating the fact that the deficit is plummeting so rapidly. But it’s actually going down too quickly, in a way that undercuts long-term stability and growth … ‘Go big or go home,’ bellow Bowles and Simpson, and [...]
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The deficit is now down 60 percent as a percent of gross domestic product. It is down more than the deficit hawks Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles asked for. This rapid reduction is seriously hurting the economy and jobs, but demands for cuts continue. It is time for Congress and the President to “pivot” to [...]
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Simpson and Bowles, those two hired pitchmen for budget-cutting hysteria, are still hawking an economy-killing product called “austerity economics,” a product that’s designed to benefit their wealthy patrons at everybody else’s expense. This philosophy provides some (very thin) intellectual cover for the Republicans’ lunatic bloodbath of spending cuts. Of course, Simpson and Bowles and austerity’s other [...]
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Deficit projections have already by $200 billion for this year alone, so why do Republicans keep lunging for ever-more radical spending cuts like they were corn dogs at a barbecue? That’s more in deficit reduction than President Obama’s proposed cut to Social Security would “save” in ten. So why hasn’t he withdrawn the proposal? It [...]
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A continuing seriesRead the full seriesTell your member of Congress Washington remains focused on a “deficit problem” when there is no deficit problem. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) the 2013 budget deficit will be down 60 percent as a share of gross domestic product from President Bush’s fiscal year 2009 deficit (from 10% [...]
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