Keyword: fiscal
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Michigan’s recently beefed-up "emergency manager" law gives broad powers to a state appointee if a local government or school district fails its citizens financially in one of 18 explicit ways. Assuming a referendum passes a legal challenge and makes it to the ballot, citizens will vote in November on whether to keep or overturn this law. Before an emergency manager is appointed, a city or school district must have created an astounding fiscal mess. For all the controversy surrounding the law, only seven EMs have been appointed. Without their EM's "house cleaning," most of these cities and school districts would...
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Nine months after Gov. Rick Snyder signed a bill that mandated public sector employees pay 20 percent of their health care costs, a report from the Michigan Department of Education shows how reluctant public schools and charter schools are to make their employees pay more. To get an extra $100 per student, school districts had to meet four of five "best practices" the state put forward. Yet 358 of the 714 qualifying districts chose to not meet the best practice of having employees pay at least 10 percent of their health care costs. By contrast, private sector workers pay 20...
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Global economic recovery will be slow and bumpy over the coming years, a senior economist from Vanguard told financial services professionals in Hamilton yesterday. Speaking at the Vanguard 2012 Bermuda Investment Forum at the Fairmont Hamilton Princess, Roger Aligia-Diaz highlighted several headwinds facing the economy including the European sovereign debt crisis, high oil prices, a slowdown in China and the “fiscal cliff” facing the US at the end of this year. Although Mr Aligia-Diaz warned his audience that his message might appear depressing, the presentation was cautiously optimistic, indicating that growth was happening and was likely to continue. Vanguard, which...
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CBO: $777 billion deficit for first six months of fiscal yearBy Bernie Becker - 04/06/12 12:44 PM ET The federal government racked up a deficit of $777 billion in the first half of fiscal 2012, the Congressional Budget Office said in an estimate released Friday. The shortfall is the latest sign that the government is well on its way to compiling at least a $1 trillion deficit for the fourth consecutive year. But as CBO noted on Friday, the deficit is also a $53 billion reduction from the same period in fiscal 2011. The budget scorekeeper said that most of...
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Freshman Sen. Rand Paul is making good on his promise to cut federal spending. The Kentucky Republican and tea-party favorite said Thursday he’s returning $500,000 to the U.S. Treasury — money from his operating budget that his office never spent. The half million dollars represents about 16 percent of Paul’s annual budget. Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) returned $636,036 in unspent money to the Treasury in Fiscal Year 2010 and another $503,161 in 2011.
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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned Congress Wednesday it risked taking the nation over a "massive fiscal cliff" at the end of the year. The central bank’s boss warned expiring tax cuts and spending cuts set to be triggered at the end of the year could hurt the economic recovery. “Under current law, on January 1, 2013, there's going to be a massive fiscal cliff of large spending cuts and tax increases,” Bernanke told the House Financial Services Committee. "I hope that Congress will look at that and figure out ways to achieve the same long-run fiscal improvement without having...
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<p>There are moments when our political system, whose essential job is to mediate conflicts in broadly acceptable and desirable ways, is simply not up to the task. It fails. This may be one of those moments. What we learned in 2011 is that the frustrating and confusing budget debate may never reach a workable conclusion. It may continue indefinitely until it's abruptly ended by a severe economic or financial crisis that wrenches control from elected leaders.</p>
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Sacramento -- California faces deep mid-year cuts to its universities, community colleges, social service programs and public schools - which may have their year shortened - because the state will collect billions in revenue less than expected, according to a report released today. The report by the Legislative Analyst's Office says the state faces a budget deficit in the current fiscal year largely because it will collect only $300 million of $4 billion that Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature added to the budget just days before it was approved in June. Critics had called the sudden infusion of projected...
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I watched Off The Record this weekend, a half-hour political talk show in Michigan, hosted by Michigan political reporter, Tim Skubic. Usually liberal and fast-paced, Off The Record deals with the downstate politics that rule the rest of us. Part of the discussion was with Representative Al Pscholka, the new Republican representative of Benton Harbor, who took some grilling about the emergency financial manager that has now turned Benton Harbor around in 6 short months. A controversial law was passed in April, criticized by liberals and libertarians alike, that allowed for the State to take over local control of municipalities...
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The deficit's gone ballistic- but it's hardly rocket science: Annual U.S. Tax revenue: $2.17 trillion -Fed budget: $3.20 trillion Incremental debt this year: $1.65 trillion Cumulative national debt: $14.27 trillion Recent Obama/Boehner budget cuts: $ 38.5 million ________________________________________ Ah, but if you remove 8 zeros it's (tellingly) comparable to a modest family budget.... Annual family income: $21,700 -spending $38,200 New 2011 debt on the ole credit card: $16,500 Outstanding balance on the credit card(s): $142,710...
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Conventional thinking would say the minimum wage interferes with free markets for labor and should therefor be opposed by any right thinking capitalist conservative. However ... it occurs to me that a really LARGE increase in the minimum wage (say to $25/hr) could actually be used to screw the public employee unions and creditors of the Debt. It would have the following effects that are worth pondering: 1) It would cause prices to skyrocket and then stabilize at a new higher level, as more money chased the same amount of goods and services. Overall, prices would go up such that...
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“Traditionally, we are led out of a recession by small businesses hiring people and creating jobs, and that’s not happening in this recession,” says Dan Danner, President and CEO of the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB). ...The report shows that small business confidence was down for a third straight month in May, and that only 5 percent of small business owners think now is a good time to expand. Economist Martin Baily of the Brookings Institution says the lack of investment, hiring and expansion by small businesses is one of the reasons the nation’s economy isn’t recovering as quickly...
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Former senator and fiscal-commission co-chair Alan Simpson (R., Wyo.) often speaks as if he’d been plucked from the stage of one of Harry Reid’s beloved cowboy-poetry festivals. And he certainly has some choice words for those he thinks are impeding the prospects for a deal on deficit reduction. He calls Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, “off his rocker.” He describes the AARP as a brick wall standing in the way of desperately needed entitlement reform, and blasts its leaders as a bunch of wealthy, self-aggrandizing lobbyists who pretend to speak for average Americans. “We’re not talking...
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The nation's overall fiscal imbalance “has not gotten materially worse in the last two years," President Obama's outgoing economic adviser said Friday. Obama adviser Austan Goolsbee, who announced this week he was leaving the White House, defended the Obama administration’s fiscal record in comments at the National Press Club. The national debt has increased from $10.4 trillion to $14.3 trillion since Obama took office in 2009. He said the biggest drivers of the debt have been known for a long time and did not change during Obama's years in office. He identified
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Mr. Chairman: History walks with us today as we begin this work. History offers us not a single example of a nation that has ever spent, borrowed and taxed its way to prosperity, but it offers us many, many examples of nations that have spent, borrowed and taxed their way to economic ruin and bankruptcy. And history is screaming this warning at us: nations that bankrupt themselves aren’t around very long, because before we can provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare, we have to be able to pay for it – and the ability of our...
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(Reuters) - President Barack Obama's proposed budget for fiscal 2012 will seek to cut the record federal deficit by $1.1 trillion over the next 10 years, White House budget director Jack Lew said Sunday. Lew, speaking on CNN, said the president was also on track to halve the budget deficit by the end of his first term in office, which goes through 2012.
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Michigan Congressman Tim Walberg considers sleeping in his Capitol Hill office a luxury. "It's convenient. I don't face the traffic," Walberg told us when we visited him this week on the fourth floor of the Cannon office building. "I can jokingly tell my constituents I am in my office 24 hours a day for you," he said. Walberg, a returning Republican freshman who slept in his office during his previous term in Congress, is among the most prepared for the bunking ritual. He has a sturdy air mattress, a double espresso maker, and a shelf of Kellogg's cereal boxes in...
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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – California Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of fiscal emergency on Thursday for the government of the most populous U.S. state to press lawmakers to tackle its $25.4 billion budget gap. Democrat Brown's declaration follows a similar one made last month by his predecessor, former Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Democrats who control the legislature declined to act on Schwarzenegger's declaration, saying they would instead wait to work on budget matters with Brown, who served two terms as California's governor in the 1970s and 1980s. Brown was sworn in to his third term early this month and...
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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on Friday ruled out a central bank bailout of state and local governments strapped with big municipal debt burdens, saying the Fed had limited legal authority to help and little will to use that authority. "We have no expectation or intention to get involved in state and local finance," Mr. Bernanke said in testimony before the Senate Budget Committee. The states, he said later, "should not expect loans from the Fed."The $2.9 trillion municipal-bond market has been stung recently by worries that some cash-strapped cities or states won't be able to pay off or roll...
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Rep. Paul Ryan, a Republican authority on spending and taxes, made a dramatic break Thursday with the deficit and debt reduction plan released the day before by President Obama’s commission. “I think it goes backwards,” Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican and the next chairman of the House Budget Committee (Snip) Ryan’s comments are the most unconditional rebuke of a plan that has been regarded even by conservatives on the commission as fairly conservative because of its recommendations on cutting spending in some parts of the budget, and on reform of Social Security and the tax system so that rates can be
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