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The future of Boston Market is in jeopardy after owner Jignesh Pandya filed for personal bankruptcy on Dec. 8 with the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Bankruptcy Court. The chain, which has over $329,000 in unpaid sales and payroll taxes, also had its headquarters seized by the Colorado Department of Revenue. Engage Brands, one of the Rohan Group of companies, owned by Pandya of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, purchased Boston Market from affiliates of Sun Capital Partners in 2020, the same year it also acquired Corner Bakery from affiliates of Roark Capital Partners. The Dallas-based bakery, however, filed for Chapter 11 earlier...

Congressional Democrats calling for widespread student loan forgiveness owe major sums in educational debt, according to a Washington Examiner analysis of newly released financial disclosures. A total of 14 Democratic members of Congress, who are an average of 45 years old and include the likes of "Squad" Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), reported on 2022 filings holding up to $1.7 million combined in their own or a family member's student debt. That these same politicians have also urged Joe Biden to waive away college loans on the backs of taxpayers presents...

President Biden warned Wednesday that if the United States defaulted on its debt, it would spell trouble internationally, after his latest meeting with congressional leaders to raise the country’s borrowing limit hardly made a dent in the debate. The president, during remarks in Valhalla, N.Y., said that world leaders are wondering about the looming risk of a default. “They all are looking at me, ‘are you guys serious?’” Biden said, referencing world leaders. “Because, if we default on our debt, the whole world is in trouble.”

With the next round of Democratic presidential candidate debates upon us, we will surely hear more about government activism to fix racial inequalities. Inequality is real and needs attention. According to the Urban Institute, average white household wealth in 2016 was $171,000 compared with average black household wealth of $17,409. Sen. Cory Booker wants government to make deposits into savings accounts for low-income children to the tune of up to $50,000 each. Sen. Kamala Harris proposes $100 billion in government subsidies for black homeownership. These kinds of proposals may win some black votes, but should they? Will they really make...

Over the past 40 years, the federal government has shut down 21 times due to political disagreements over funding. Most of America, including the government itself, goes largely unaffected by a government shutdown. But for federal workers who are furloughed or required to work without a paycheck, a lapse in government funding can cause financial problems, leading some to default on debt or miss rent payments. This can result in real hardships up to and including eviction. The blame for this rests squarely on the lawmakers who fail to fund the government. Remarkably, though, some Democrats in Congress believe that...

Or did someone throw the Washington Post a curveball? The White House released Brett Kavanaugh’s financial records yesterday as part of their disclosures for his eventual confirmation hearing, and the Post may have thought they’d found a diamond in the rough. Kavanaugh ran up some substantial credit-card debt, a potential hanging slider over the partisan plate. That is, until they found out what the charges were.Can we call this a swing and a miss? Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh incurred tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt buying baseball tickets over the past decade and at...

The only speaker standing between state budget officers and the opening cocktail hour at a Washington conference was the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. What he said left no one in a celebratory mood. Medicaid costs, said then-Secretary Michael Leavitt, were projected to grow so fast that within 10 years they would “crowd out virtually every other category of spending.” State spending on higher education, infrastructure and safety, he predicted, would all get squeezed.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign took over the Democratic National Committee's funding and day-to-day operations early in the primary season and may have used that power to undermine her rival Senator Bernie Sanders, according to the party's one-time interim chairwoman. The DNC official, Donna Brazile, now a political analyst, wrote in Politico Magazine on Thursday that she discovered an August 2015 agreement between the national committee and Clinton’s campaign and fundraising arm that gave Clinton “control (of) the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised” in exchange for taking care of the massive debt leftover from President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign....

In Greece, the far-left Syriza party has won a stunning victory. Under the leadership of charismatic populist Alexis Tsipras, it has claimed around 150 parliamentary seats and defeated the governing centrist New Democracy party. Across Europe, leftists are elated. They see this as a historic turning point, the moment when they can put a stop to the austerity-through-spending-cuts approach. And to some degree, they’re right. There’s no question that voters have rewarded a far-left party for its far-left platform. Just consider what Syriza proposes: significant increases in government spending, a rise in the minimum wage and in pensions, and a...

One in 10 Americans between the ages of 35 and 44 had money seized from a paycheck and sent off to pay a debt last year ... the average household’s balance at about $6,802. And one in three Americans is dogged by collections, or debts more than 180 days past due, for credit card balances, child-support, medical or utility bills. For most people, garnished wages went toward child support (41.5%). After student and consumer loans (35.4%), workers’ pay was also docked to pay off tax debts (18.3%) and bankruptcies (4.9%).

The Washington Post reports that hundreds of thousands of taxpayers who are expecting refunds this month are instead getting letters informing them that because of a debt they never knew about — often a debt incurred by their parents — the government has confiscated their check. http://m.washingtonpost.com/politics/social-security-treasury-target-hundreds-of-thousands-of-taxpayers-for-parents-old-debts/2014/04/10/74ac8eae-bf4d-11e3-bcec-b71ee10e9bc3_story.html?tid=HP_more

When I say “debts,” I don’t mean loans that the parents willingly sought from SSA. It would be bad enough to hold a kid responsible for that (since when are children responsible for their parents’ obligations?), but at least it would have been voluntarily incurred by mom/dad. The “debts” here are overpayments of Social Security benefits, the product of SSA’s own errors. The parents who received them might not have even realized they were getting money they weren’t supposed to have. And now, somehow, it’s junior’s problem.But wait. It gets worse. When [Mary] Grice was 4, back in 1960, her...

Critics are calling the practice the new "debtors' prison" -- referring to the jails that flourished in the U.S. and Western Europe over 150 years ago. Before the time of bankruptcy laws and social safety nets, poor folks and ruined business owners were locked up until their debts were paid off. Reforms eventually outlawed the practice. But groups like the Brennan Center for Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union say it's been reborn in local courts which may not be aware it's against the law to send indigent people to jail over unpaid fines and fees -- or they...

Thousands of Americans are sent to jail not for committing a crime, but because they can't afford to pay for traffic tickets, medical bills and court fees. If that sounds like a debtors' prison, a legal relic which was abolished in this country in the 1830s, that's because it is. And courts and judges in states across the land are violating the Constitution by incarcerating people for being unable to pay such debts. Ask Jack Dawley, 55, an unemployed man in Ohio who between 2007 and 2012 spent a total of 16 days in jail in a Huron County lock-up...

San Bernardino filed for bankruptcy protection on Wednesday citing more than $1 billion of debts and making it the third California city to seek protection from creditors. The city of about 210,000 residents 65 miles east of Los Angeles declared a fiscal crisis last month after a report said local government had tapped out its reserves and projected spending would top revenue by $45 million in the fiscal year that began on July 1. The filing, made in the United States Bankruptcy Court, Central California District, states that the city has "more than $1 billion" in liabilities, and estimated that...

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - At a fundraiser for his re-election campaign in Denver tonight, President Obama set out to upend conventional Republican wisdom that his administration has been defined by excessive government spending. "I'm running to pay down our debt in a way that's balanced and responsible. After inheriting a $1 trillion deficit, I signed $2 trillion of spending cuts into law," he told a crowd of donors at the Hyatt Regency. "My opponent won't admit it, but it's starting to appear in places, like real liberal outlets, like the Wall Street Journal: Since I've been president, federal spending has...

Dear Real Estate Adviser, My friends' son committed suicide, leaving a huge financial mess. He owned his own home, which will go to them once it clears probate (he was single, no children). My friends have their own home and cannot afford to maintain a second. They will have to sell it, but the son's house is seriously underwater. What options do they have? -- Tessa

SUPER FAILURE: Deficit Committee Certain To Announce Failure Tomorrow Zeke Miller Nov. 20, 2011, 8:33 AM It's over. After months of posturing and secret negotiations, the super committee has failed at its task of reaching $1.2 trillion in deficit cuts. Via POLITICO's Mike Allen: The official deadline for action by the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction is Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. The real deadline is Monday night, since any plan has to be posted for 48 hours before it's voted on. So conversations this weekend revolved around how to shut this turkey down. Aides expect some "Hail Mary"...

Another Sentelli hammer-nail rant of truth .. Rick Santelli Highest Wage Earners in DC, What Does That Tell US?

The largest foreign holder of U.S. treasuries responds to the S&P downgrading by calling for decreases in U.S. military outlays and social spending. Beijing — China called on the United States to "cure its addiction to debts" and "learn to live within its means" in a searing commentary published Saturday by the official New China News Agency in response to Standard & Poor's historic downgrading of the U.S. government's credit rating a day earlier. China, the largest foreign holder of U.S. federal debt, blamed "short-sighted political wrangling in Washington" for creating the current financial morass that now threatens to undermine...