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Average retirement account balances dropped nearly 25 percent last year, according to a new report by Fidelity. Although retirement balances increased in the fourth quarter of 2022, the average balance of individual retirement accounts (IRA) dropped by 23 percent from the fourth quarter of 2021, according to Fidelity’s research, which was released on Thursday. BUSINESS Retirement account balances lost almost 25 percent last year: Fidelity BY LAUREN SFORZA - 02/23/23 3:22 PM ET SHARE TWEET FILE – This Oct. 24, 2016, file photo shows dollar bills in New York. A recent survey by Fidelity Investments found that savings are declining....

Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara issued a 112-page opinion Thursday afternoon in which she claimed that the government's proposed judicial reforms would cause "serious damage to the system of checks and balances" between the three branches of government. Baharav-Miara submitted her position to Justice Minister Yariv Levin and the Knesset Constitution Committee. In her opinion, the attorney general wrote: "Each of the proposed reforms, and certainly their accumulation, will lead to serious damage to the system of checks and balances between the authorities. Each of the proposed reforms raises substantial difficulties, which go to the root of the principle of the...

Following the presidential election, numerous stories surfaced about how “fake news” influenced the results. This prompted a reaction from the media and a concerted effort by the social media giant Facebook to crack down on the phenomenon—announcing that it would in part by using liberal fact-checkers to distinguish the “real” from the “fake” news.The truth is that while the American media landscape has been in a constant state of change over two centuries, the spread of hyperpartisan, scurrilous, and even phony news stories has been more common than uncommon throughout the history of the republic.Ultimately, despite the increasingly Wild West...

Utah lawmakers recently approved a resolution calling on Congress to ratify an amendment to the U.S. Constitution repealing the Seventeenth Amendment. Ratified in 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution established direct election of U.S. senators by popular vote. Before the amendment’s ratification, senators were elected by state legislatures. The resolution, approved by the House of Representatives and sent to the state’s lieutenant governor for filing in March, was sponsored by state Sen. Alvin Jackson (R-Highland). ‘A Formal Check’ Todd Zywicki, a professor of law at George Mason University, says the Seventeenth Amendment removed a necessary safeguard against...

Pick an Obama scandal, choose an Obama foreign crisis and watch Boehner cover it up.

NEW YORK (MainStreet) — Americans are relying less on their credit cards now, and more consumers are able to pay their balance in full each month, according to a recent Gallup poll. The poll found that in 2014 48% of Americans always pay the balance of their credit card each month compared to 42% who paid them in full in 2006 and only 43% in 2008 during the Great Recession. Now only 33% of credit card owners say they leave a balance each month, which is a record low since Gallup began measuring these habits in 2001.

CORBIN — LEXINGTON (AP) — Kentucky Senate President David Williams told a group of law students that state legislators, not voters, should choose members of the U.S. Senate — comments that drew a negative reaction from Kentucky’s two senators. Declaring himself “a tea partier,” Williams on Wednesday called for repeal of the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which provides for popular election of U.S. senators, the Lexington-Herald Leader reported. Williams is seeking the Republican nomination for governor next year.

Otter shifts stand on 17th Amendment repeal; The Spokesman-Review Idaho Gov. Butch Otter declared during a political debate today that he doesn’t favor repeal of the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution - though he’s been sharply critical of the amendment for the past year, including in his keynote speech at a Tea Party rally in Spokane in April. The amendment shifted selection of U.S. senators from state Legislatures to a vote of the people, and repealing it is a plank in Idaho’s Republican Party platform. The governor’s comments came as he and Democratic challenger Keith Allred sparred over everything...

SACRAMENTO – Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he can't be bought. He has often lambasted state politicians for taking money from people with a vested interest in bills before the Legislature. "Here's how it works," Schwarzenegger said in a television spot when he ran for governor. "Money comes in, favors go out. The people lose." Yet during the four-week period this year when Schwarzenegger acted on the vast majority of bills passed by the Legislature, he raised far more money than his predecessors did during comparable periods: $8.7 million, about 14 times as much as Gov. Gray Davis ever did in...

The lesson, O'Connor said, is not merely that a president's Supreme Court appointments often disappoint that same chief executive. “It is that our system of government is one of delegated authority and separation of powers,” she said. “By their ruling in the steel-seizure case, President Truman's appointees proved their friendship, I think, not by siding with the president for personal reasons, but by fulfilling their duty to decide each case as impartially as possible as members of a separate branch of government. “In short, as members of a truly independent judiciary.” Afterward, O'Connor met with federal judges and staffers at...

According to reports in the U.S. media, the Democrats are worried that George Bush and his fellow Christian fundamentalists, now that they have control of both Houses of Congress, will feel free to ride roughshod over all opinions contrary to their own. Since the U.S, unlike Canada, is blessed with a system of checks and balances, no president, no matter how popular he may be, can impose his will on the nation. The U.S. Democrats would really have something to worry about if they had to contend with a Canadian style government, where, unlike the U.S., there is nothing to...

Although it is really funny to watch, most of us are getting a bit weary constantly hearing about Dan Rather and his Democratic Party/Kerry campaign-fueled accusations in memogate. This time, the deception of CBS was easily identified and publicly exposed. Unfortunately, that is not always true with the liberal propaganda generally spewed by "Old Media." Quite often, they get away with it. CBS and Dan Rather now want us to believe they were "misled." No they weren't. Terry McAuliffe at DNC and the Kerry campaign had those memos first. CBS admits that their news producer, Mary Mapes, has been searching...