Social Security Will Be Gone
July 23, 2010
USA Today
By: Susan Page
Battered by high unemployment and record home foreclosures, most Americans seem to have lost faith in another fundamental part of their personal finances: Social Security.
A Poll finds that a majority of retirees say they expect their current benefits to be cut, a dramatic increase in the number who hold that view. And a record six of 10 non-retirees predict Social Security won’t be able to pay them benefits when they stop working.
Skepticism is highest among the youngest workers: Three-fourths of those 18 to 34 don’t expect to get a Social Security check when they retire.
The public’s views are more dire than the calculations of Social Security’s trustees. Last year, they projected the system would begin running in the red in 2016, as the Baby Boom generation retired, and the trust fund would be exhausted in 2037.
Even then, Social Security — which celebrates its 75th anniversary next month — could finance about three-fourths of current benefits through the payroll tax.
The downbeat outlook reflects “all the attacks on Social Security that we have this total crisis in the program,” says Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. What’s more, she says, “the fear and distrust as a result of the financial collapse and the Great Recession has spilled over into people’s expectations generally, that you can’t count on anything.”
Well-informed or not, public attitudes could affect the debate over what to do about Social Security, a subject that is likely to be raised when President Obama’s deficit commission delivers its report in December.
“It makes it easier to make some of the changes that we are inevitably going to have to make,” says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “We could make changes and still have people collecting more in benefits than they’re expecting to see.”
So far, however, resistance hasn’t eased against steps such as raising the retirement age or increasing Social Security taxes. The only policy options that command majority support are imposing the payroll tax on all the wages of higher-income workers — the amount is now capped — and limiting benefits for wealthy retirees.
Confidence in Social Security has significantly eroded since 2005. The percentage of retirees who predict cuts has jumped by 24 points, even though benefit levels have never been cut for current retirees. In that time, the number of non-retirees who doubt they’ll get benefits has risen by 10 points.
The poll of 1,020 adults, taken July 8-11, has a margin of error of +/–4 percentage points.
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North Korea Threatens with Military
July 23, 2010 by JP
Filed under Government
July 23, 2010
Guardian
By: Justin McCurry
North Korea today threatened a “physical response” to planned military exercises by the US and South Korea this weekend, as tensions on the Korean peninsula dominated a regional security forum in Hanoi.
The regime did not specify what that response might be, but said it interpreted the launch on Sunday of four days of naval and air drills in the Sea of Japan as another sign of US “hostility”.
“It is a threat to the Korean peninsula and the region of Asia as a whole,” a North Korea spokesman, Ri Tong-il, told reporters at the Asean regional forum.
Ri said the drills harked back to 19th-century gunboat diplomacy and violated North Korea’s sovereignty. “And [our] position is clear: there will be physical response to the threat imposed by the United States militarily,” he said.
Operation Invincible Spirit will involve 8,000 US and South Korean troops, 200 aircraft and 20 ships, including the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier the USS George Washington.
The meeting in Hanoi has quickly become the stage for a war of words between the north and the US, although there has been no direct contact between the countries’ delegates.
The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said “isolated and belligerent” North Korea would have to end its “campaign of provocative, dangerous behaviour” if it wanted better relations with the US and the rest of Asia.
North Korea has pulled out of six-party talks on its nuclear programme and is blamed for the March sinking of the Cheonan, a South Korean navy vessel, in which 46 sailors died.
The regime denies carrying out the attack and has unleashed a wave of belligerent rhetoric in response to what it calls US aggression.
On Wednesday, Clinton unveiled new sanctions designed to deny luxury goods to North Korean elites and strangle funding for Pyongyang’s nuclear programme. The north says it will not return to nuclear negotiations unless the sanctions are lifted.
Today, Clinton urged Asian nations to pressure North Korea into abandoning its nuclear ambitions by enforcing strict UN sanctions imposed after the regime’s second nuclear test last year.
“One measure of the strength of a community of nations is how it responds to threats to its members, neighbours and region,” Clinton said.
A South Korean newspaper said the new US sanctions would target 200 North Korean-held foreign bank accounts thought to be connected with illegal activities such as nuclear weapons development, drug trafficking and counterfeiting.
“Even before the Cheonan incident, the US was tracking around 200 North Korean bank accounts in banks in China, Russia and even eastern Europe and Africa that are believed to be involved in the development of weapons of mass destruction and the export of drugs, counterfeit money, fake cigarettes and weapons,” the Chosun Ilbo newspaper quoted a diplomatic source as saying.
The paper said the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, is believed to hold a US$4bn slush fund in secret accounts in Switzerland, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein.
North Korea also rejected South Korean demands to apologise for the sinking of the Cheonan.
“We cannot accept such a claim because they try to use it to shift (their) responsibility on to us,” Ri said. He repeated North Korea’s position that the cause of the sinking remains unclear and insisted that it be allowed to conduct a joint investigation with the south.
“South Korean authorities bear the responsibility for causing tension … South Korea is the one who must apologise,” he said.
Obama Losing Whites?
July 23, 2010 by JP
Filed under Government
July 23, 2010
WorldNetDaily
By: Pat Buchanan
On Monday, the Department of Agriculture demanded the resignation of Shirley Sherrod over a two-minute videotape where she appeared to describe to a cheering crowd of the Georgia NAACP how she denied assistance to a poor white farmer about to lose his land.
Declaring itself “appalled” at this “shameful” act of racism, the NAACP said it would investigate the Georgia crowd that cheered her and praised the Department of Agriculture for firing her.
On Wednesday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack was begging for Sherrod’s forgiveness, and the NAACP was burbling apologies.
For the video turned out to be an excerpt from a speech in which Sherrod described her growth from a bitter black woman whose father was murdered by a white man into one who found joy helping poor white folks keep their farms.
What was it that caused the rush to judgment by Vilsack, the NAACP and a White House that supported the ouster of Sherrod without talking to her or viewing the full tape?
Panic. The White House fears it is losing white America because of a false perception that it harbors a bias against white America.
Outrageous, rail those journalists who celebrated the NAACP’s accusation that the tea party is harboring racists and is too cowardly to confront them.
Yet, as things perceived as real are real in their consequences, if the White House does not eradicate this perception, its lease may not be renewed. Whence comes that perception? Several incidents.
First was the startling accusation by Attorney General Eric Holder, days after Barack Obama was inaugurated in a gusher of good feeling, that we are all “a nation of cowards” when it comes to facing issues of race.
A real icebreaker for a national conversation.
Second was the instantaneous verdict of the president, when asked about the arrest of Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates by Cambridge cop Sgt. James Crowley. With no knowledge of what happened, Obama blurted out that the cops had “acted stupidly.”
It took a White House beer summit to detoxify that one.
A third was the revelation that Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the “wise Latina” herself, had gone to extremes to see that the case of Frank Ricci and the New Haven, Conn., firefighters never got to the Supreme Court. Ricci and co-defendants had been denied promotions they had won in competitive exams solely because they were white and no black firemen had done as well.
The fourth was the Justice Department’s dropping of charges against members of the New Black Panther Party, whose intimidation of voters in Philadelphia had been captured on tape.
When a department official resigned in protest and went to the Civil Rights Commission to accuse officials at Justice of ordering staff attorneys not to pursue such cases, that explosive charge, too, was ignored by Justice.
Came then the NAACP smear that the tea party was harboring racists, which Joe Biden explicitly rejected on national television on Sunday, before the Monday firestorm over Sherrod.
Now, whatever one’s views on each of these episodes in which race played a role, white Americans are being forced to address them. And, surely, the White House understands this is bad news for Obama and the Democratic Party.
For though the black community remains solidly behind Obama and the white majority is shrinking toward minority status by 2042 or 2050, depending on which Census survey one uses, whites in America still outnumber blacks five to one. And if forced constantly to come down on one side or the other of a racial divide, most folks will wind up with their own.
In past elections, Democrats have raised race – allegations that black churches were being torched in the South, that George W. Bush’s opposition to a hate-crimes bill meant he was coldly indifferent to the dragging death of a handicapped black man – to solidify and energize the minority vote. And, today, that vote remains solid behind Obama.
Where the erosion is taking place is in white America, among working- and middle-class folks who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primaries but took a chance with Obama in the fall. Now, every time some new incident erupts, these folks are being tarred.
Opposition to affirmative action is racist. Supporting the tea party gives aid and comfort to racists. Opposing health care puts you in league with folks who used racial slurs on Rep. John Lewis. To raise the issue of the New Black Panther Party is to play the race card.
One understands the bitterness of tea-party folks who carry signs that read: “What difference does it make what this placard says? You’ll call it racist anyway.”
As the National Journal’s Ron Brownstein has been reporting, white America is increasingly alienated and distrustful of all our major economic and political power centers – the banks, big corporations, the government.
And, for the first time in our lifetimes outside the South, white racial consciousness has visibly begun to rise.
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Unemployment an Emergency Expense?
July 23, 2010 by JP
Filed under Government
July 23, 2010
CBS News
By: Mike Knoller
In signing the bill restoring unemployment benefits to 2 million Americans jobless for more than 26 weeks, President Obama is also adding $34 billion to the deficit and the National Debt.
That’s the reason nearly all Republicans voted against the measure. They wanted the cost of the benefits paid for with unspent government funds or by other budget cuts.
The White House dismissed GOP concerns as partisan game-playing.
In two speeches over the last week, Mr. Obama argued that in the past, presidents and Congresses of both parties have treated unemployment insurance for what it is: an emergency expenditure.
“Suddenly, Republican leaders want to change that,” he said.
He portrayed Republicans as hypocrites for demanding that jobless benefits be paid for but not applying the same standard to their call for an extension of Bush Administration tax cuts that will expire this year.
“So after years of championing policies that turned a record surplus into a massive deficit, including a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, they’ve finally decided to make their stand on the backs of the unemployed,” the president said last Saturday in his radio/internet address.
But Republicans were quick to remind Mr. Obama what he said after signing a previous extension of unemployment benefits on November 6th of last year.
“Now, it’s important to note that the bill I signed will not add to our deficit. It is fully paid for, and so it is fiscally responsible,” he said.
So eight months ago, he said paying for the benefits was the right thing to do, but now he sees no need to do so.
Asked about the contradiction, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said he needed to examine what Mr. Obama said last November and would get back to this reporter. He didn’t.
But the issue will come up again just after the midterm elections.
The bill signed today extends unemployment benefits only through November 30th. So there’ll be another go-round on the same issue just around Thanksgiving.
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Tracking You in Buses?
July 23, 2010
Gulf News
By: Habib Toumi
Parents will get a text message every time the pupil gets on or off the vehicle on the way to or from school.
Manama An Indian school in Qatar will in September implement a high-tech solution that will enable administrators and parents to monitor students’ use of the school buses. The decision was made following the tragic death of a kindergarten student in May after she was left in a locked minivan for hours.
Called Automated Child Tracking System (ACTS), the state-of-the-art monitoring system will be adopted by Birla Public School when the school reopens after the summer vacation, officials said.
“We have been working on this system for quite some time so children can be monitored to ensure their security and safety,” A K Shrivastava, the school principal, said, quoted by Qatari daily The Peninsula.
A Qatar-based IT solutions provider, iNet Middle East, will implement the automated Radio Frequency Identification (Rfid)-based student tracking system in the school’s buses. iNet uses a combination of Rfid, GPS (Global Positioning System) and GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) technologies.
Rfid is an automatic identification system that enables data to be transmitted by a portable device, called tag, read by an Rfid reader and processed according to the needs of a particular application. All the buses of BPS will be equipped with Rfid readers and each student will be given an Rfid card that incorporates GPS and GPRS technologies, with all the student’s particulars printed on it, the daily said.
The parents, through the technology, will get a text message every time the student gets on or off the bus on the way to school or home. Alert messages will also be sent to the school authorities.“This technology will give peace of mind not only to the parents but also to us,” said Shrivastava, adding parents had been consulted with regard to the scheme and they had given positive feedback.
Sunil Nair, iNet manager, said the application software displays a real-time view of the location of the bus as well as the student inside the bus at any time.
The text messages would be very specific. “For instance, if a child is still inside the bus five minutes after the vehicle’s engine is turned off, a text message will be sent to the school authorities,” he said. ACTS will be introduced in a phased manner and the school will in September launch Phase 1 that covers KG I, KG II, Class I and Class II students.
US Taxpayers Funding Costa Rica Empire?
July 23, 2010
InfoWars.com
By: Michael Edwards
One would think that America is experiencing Boom Times with the way their government is throwing around money lately. The recent announcement that a flotilla of warships and troops will be sent to Costa Rica would ordinarily be laughable for its wastefulness, but with America experiencing an unemployment rate north of 20% and the median duration of unemployment at the highest in the last 50 years, this should be no laughing matter.
Many Americans do not know much about Costa Rica, its history, or its current political landscape. It might be worth knowing exactly how and where American tax dollars are being spent. Here are some basic facts about Costa Rica:
• Costa Rica is a democratic republic with a very strong system of Constitutional checks and balances.
• Costa Rica does not have a military; it was abolished in 1948.
• Recent president, Oscar Arias, was a Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1987.
• Costa Rica consistently ranks as one of the happiest places on Earth according to many polls, including the first ever “happiness poll” conducted by Gallup, where it was determined to be #1 in The Americas.
In other words, Costa Rica’s lack of a military culture has been enshrined, and is part and parcel of their overall happiness. Forty-six warships, 200 helicopters, and 7000 troops being sent to patrol the coastal waters of Costa Rica sends the world a false message that Costa Rica is in some way needy of this massive loan of the American military. Furthermore, the entire region is moving away from neoliberalism, and toward solidarity, in an attempt to build a sovereign Latin America.
We have to assume that Costa Rica’s welcoming support of the American military is likely to fan regional tensions, at the very least. Or, could that be the reason itself for such a move? In a comprehensive article by Mark Vorpahl, writing for Global Research, he points out that such an excessive amount of military in order to “combat drug trafficking” or “offer humanitarian aid” to a country the size of Rhode Island can hardly be justified in and of itself. Much more likely is that this is regional in scope and is a U.S. intimidation force, rather than a humanitarian mission.
Vorpahl asserts that the U.S. is determined to return to the Monroe Doctrine principles which led to the overthrow of popular governments throughout Latin America. He states the results:
Therefore, the U.S. Empire builders could use their political and economic might alone to subjugate these neo-colonies to a very profitable neoliberal agenda. This agenda included allowing U.S. corporations easy access to pillage these nations’ public sectors through privatization, letting multi-national corporations overrun these nations’ local markets and farms through the elimination of trade barriers, and increasing the exploitation of their workers and the devastation of their natural resources by tossing out national labor and environmental standards. Because of the profits enjoyed by a few as a result of these measures, they carried the day, though they, in turn, created a simmering spirit of rebellion in the semi-colonies’ peasantry and workers that would inevitably find expression.
It is true that Costa Rica is in a precarious geographical location amid other historically less peaceful (and much poorer) nations, but this is nothing new. It seems that the most likely scenario is that America would like to take the Drug War show to a new area of the high seas, and they have found a convenient headquarters for operations. Geopolitics notwithstanding, the financial cost to America should be noted. America is already embroiled in two major wars; has military bases all over the planet; and has a true disaster spreading along its own coast, not to mention the elephant in the living room of a looming second Great Depression.
As a frequent visitor to Costa Rica, I can only add that if the Costa Rican government is allowing its country to be the staging ground and corporate headquarters for empire building in Latin America, they should be called on it. If the Costa Rican people decide to abandon their dedication to peace, and the absence of a military, by allowing this violation of their sovereignty and Constitution, they are truly misguided.
Polls show that most Americans do support spreading the idea of democracy, but do not agree with empire building. If the American people do not voice their outrage over this, and the abject wastefulness of their tax dollars during a time of more pressing crises, they are again proving to the world who really has the power in America.
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Could I, Robot, be the Next Step?
July 23, 2010
The Sun
By: Rhodri Phillips
A ROBOT billed as ‘toaster on legs’ has smashed a world record by walking 14.3 miles in 11 hours.
The Ranger, built by US scientists, set the record for ‘untethered robotic walking’ earlier this month.
Guided by students using a remote control, the odd-looking robot strode 108.5 times around a 212m indoor track.
It completed about 70,000 steps before it needed a recharge.
Andy Ruina, 57, lab manager on the project at New York’s Cornell University, said: “The Ranger is nothing special to look at but the motion is rather graceful in a way you don’t see in many robots.”
The Ranger, whose parts alone cost 15,000, took four years to perfect but runs on batteries and cost less than 1p to travel four miles.
It smashed the previous world record set by Boston Dynamics’ BigDog in Boston by 1.5 miles.
The Ranger is energy efficient because it copies the physics of human walking, using gravity and momentum to roll its legs forward.
While the movements of other robots are controlled by motors, the Ranger has a more laid-back gait.
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Wal-Mart Tracking Your Underwear?
July 23, 2010
The Wall Street Journal
By: Miguel Bustillo
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to roll out sophisticated electronic ID tags to track individual pairs of jeans and underwear, the first step in a system that advocates say better controls inventory but some critics say raises privacy concerns.
Starting next month, the retailer will place removable “smart tags” on individual garments that can be read by a hand-held scanner. Wal-Mart workers will be able to quickly learn, for instance, which size of Wrangler jeans is missing, with the aim of ensuring shelves are optimally stocked and inventory tightly watched. If successful, the radio-frequency ID tags will be rolled out on other products at Wal-Mart’s more than 3,750 U.S. stores.
“This ability to wave the wand and have a sense of all the products that are on the floor or in the back room in seconds is something that we feel can really transform our business,” said Raul Vazquez, the executive in charge of Wal-Mart stores in the western U.S.
Before now, retailers including Wal-Mart have primarily used RFID tags, which store unique numerical identification codes that can be scanned from a distance, to track pallets of merchandise traveling through their supply chains.
Wal-Mart’s broad adoption would be the largest in the world, and proponents predict it would lead other retailers to start using the electronic product codes, which remain costly. Wal-Mart has climbed to the top of the retailing world by continuously squeezing costs out of its operations and then passing on the savings to shoppers at the checkout counter. Its methods are widely adopted by its suppliers and in turn become standard practice at other retail chains.
But the company’s latest attempt to use its influence—executives call it the start of a “next-generation Wal-Mart”—has privacy advocates raising questions.
While the tags can be removed from clothing and packages, they can’t be turned off, and they are trackable. Some privacy advocates hypothesize that unscrupulous marketers or criminals will be able to drive by consumers’ homes and scan their garbage to discover what they have recently bought.
They also worry that retailers will be able to scan customers who carry new types of personal ID cards as they walk through a store, without their knowledge. Several states, including Washington and New York, have begun issuing enhanced driver’s licenses that contain radio- frequency tags with unique ID numbers, to make border crossings easier for frequent travelers. Some privacy advocates contend that retailers could theoretically scan people with such licenses as they make purchases, combine the info with their credit card data, and then know the person’s identity the next time they stepped into the store.
“There are two things you really don’t want to tag, clothing and identity documents, and ironically that’s where we are seeing adoption,” said Katherine Albrecht, founder of a group called Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering and author of a book called “Spychips” that argues against RFID technology. “The inventory guys may be in the dark about this, but there are a lot of corporate marketers who are interested in tracking people as they walk sales floors.”
Smart-tag experts dismiss Big Brother concerns as breathless conjecture, but activists have pressured companies. Ms. Albrecht and others launched a boycott of Benetton Group SpA last decade after an RFID maker announced it was planning to supply the company with 15 million RFID chips.
Benetton later clarified that it was just evaluating the technology and never embedded a single sensor in clothing.
Wal-Mart is demanding that suppliers add the tags to removable labels or packaging instead of embedding them in clothes, to minimize fears that they could be used to track people’s movements. It also is posting signs informing customers about the tags.
“Concerns about privacy are valid, but in this instance, the benefits far outweigh any concerns,” says Sanjay Sarma, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The tags don’t have any personal information. They are essentially barcodes with serial numbers attached. And you can easily remove them.”
In Europe some retailers put the smart labels on hang tags, which are then removed at checkout. That still provides the inventory-control benefit of RFID, but it takes away other important potential uses that retailers and suppliers like, such as being able to track the item all the way back to the point of manufacture in case of a recall, or making sure it isn’t counterfeit.
Wal-Mart won’t say how much it expects to benefit from the endeavor. But a similar pilot program at American Apparel Inc. in 2007 found that stores with the technology saw sales rise 14.3% compared to stores without the technology, according to Avery Dennison Corp., a maker of RFID equipment.
And while the tags wouldn’t replace bulkier shoplifting sensors, Wal-Mart expects they’ll cut down on employee theft because it will be easier to see if something’s gone missing from the back room.
Several other U.S. retailers, including J.C. Penney and Bloomingdale’s, have begun experimenting with smart ID tags on clothing to better ensure shelves remain stocked with sizes and colors customers want, and numerous European retailers, notably Germany’s Metro AG, have already embraced the technology.
Robert Carpenter, chief executive of GS1 U.S., a nonprofit group that helped develop universal product-code standards four decades ago and is now doing the same for electronic product codes, said the sensors have dropped to as little as seven to 10 cents from 50 cents just a few years ago. He predicts that Wal-Mart’s “tipping point” will drive prices lower.
“There are definitely costs. Some labels had to be modified,” said Mark Gatehouse, director of replenishment for Wrangler jeans maker VF Corp., adding that while Wal-Mart is subsidizing the costs of the actual sensors, suppliers have had to invest in new equipment. “But we view this as an investment in where things are going. Everyone is watching closely because no one wants to be at a competitive disadvantage, and this could really lift sales.”
Wal-Mart won’t disclose what it’s spending on the effort, but it confirms that it is subsidizing some of the costs for suppliers.
Proponents, meanwhile, have high hopes for expanded use in the future. Beyond more-efficient recalls and loss prevention, RFID tags could get rid of checkout lines.
“We are going to see contactless checkouts with mobile phones or kiosks, and we will see new ways to interact, such as being able to find out whether other sizes and colors are available while trying something on in a dressing room,” said Bill Hardgrave, head of the RFID Research Center at the University of Arkansas, which is funded in part by Wal-Mart. “That is where the magic is going to happen. But that’s all years away.”
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The Tax Nightmare Is On The Horizon
July 22, 2010
Investors
Fiscal Policy: Many voters are looking forward to 2011, hoping a new Congress will put the country back on the right track. But unless something’s done soon, the new year will also come with a raft of tax hikes — including a return of the death tax — that will be real killers.
Through the end of this year, the federal estate tax rate is zero — thanks to the package of broad-based tax cuts that President Bush pushed through to get the economy going earlier in the decade.
But as of midnight Dec. 31, the death tax returns — at a rate of 55% on estates of $1 million or more. The effect this will have on hospital life-support systems is already a matter of conjecture.
Resurrection of the death tax, however, isn’t the only tax problem that will be ushered in Jan. 1. Many other cuts from the Bush administration are set to disappear and a new set of taxes will materialize. And it’s not just the rich who will pay.
The lowest bracket for the personal income tax, for instance, moves up 50% — to 15% from 10%. The next lowest bracket — 25% — will rise to 28%, and the old 28% bracket will be 31%. At the higher end, the 33% bracket is pushed to 36% and the 35% bracket becomes 39.6%.
But the damage doesn’t stop there.
The marriage penalty also makes a comeback, and the capital gains tax will jump 33% — to 20% from 15%. The tax on dividends will go all the way from 15% to 39.6% — a 164% increase.
Both the cap-gains and dividend taxes will go up further in 2013 as the health care reform adds a 3.8% Medicare levy for individuals making more than $200,000 a year and joint filers making more than $250,000. Other tax hikes include: halving the child tax credit to $500 from $1,000 and fixing the standard deduction for couples at the same level as it is for single filers.
Letting the Bush cuts expire will cost taxpayers $115 billion next year alone, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and $2.6 trillion through 2020.
But even more tax headaches lie ahead. This “second wave” of hikes, as Americans for Tax Reform puts it, are designed to pay for ObamaCare and include:
The Medicine Cabinet Tax. Americans, says ATR, “will no longer be able to use health savings account, flexible spending account, or health reimbursement pretax dollars to purchase nonprescription, over-the-counter medicines (except insulin).”
The HSA Withdrawal Tax Hike. “This provision of ObamaCare,” according to ATR, “increases the additional tax on nonmedical early withdrawals from an HSA from 10% to 20%, disadvantaging them relative to IRAs and other tax-advantaged accounts, which remain at 10%.”
Brand Name Drug Tax. Makers and importers of brand-name drugs will be liable for a tax of $2.5 billion in 2011. The tax goes to $3 billion a year from 2012 to 2016, then $3.5 billion in 2017 and $4.2 billion in 2018. Beginning in 2019 it falls to $2.8 billion and stays there. And who pays the new drug tax? Patients, in the form of higher prices.
Economic Substance Doctrine. ATR reports that “The IRS is now empowered to disallow perfectly legal tax deductions and maneuvers merely because it judges that the deduction or action lacks ‘economic substance.’”
A third and final (for now) wave, says ATR, consists of the alternative minimum tax’s widening net, tax hikes on employers and the loss of deductions for tuition:
• The Tax Policy Center, no right-wing group, says that the failure to index the AMT will subject 28.5 million families to the tax when they file next year, up from 4 million this year.
• “Small businesses can normally expense (rather than slowly deduct, or ‘depreciate’) equipment purchases up to $250,000,” says ATR. “This will be cut all the way down to $25,000. Larger businesses can expense half of their purchases of equipment. In January of 2011, all of it will have to be ‘depreciated.’”
• According to ATR, there are “literally scores of tax hikes on business that will take place,” plus the loss of some tax credits. The research and experimentation tax credit will be the biggest loss, “but there are many, many others. Combining high marginal tax rates with the loss of this tax relief will cost jobs.”
• The deduction for tuition and fees will no longer be available and there will be limits placed on education tax credits. Teachers won’t be able to deduct their classroom expenses and employer-provided educational aid will be restricted. Thousands of families will no longer be allowed to deduct student loan interest.
Then there’s the tax on Americans who decline to buy health care insurance (the tax the administration initially said wasn’t a tax but now argues in court that it is) plus a 3.8% Medicare tax beginning in 2013 on profits made in real estate transactions by wealthier Americans.
Not all Americans may fully realize what’s in store come Jan. 1. But they should have a pretty good idea by the mid-term elections, and members of Congress might take note of our latest IBD/TIPP Poll (summarized above).
Fifty-one percent of respondents favored making the Bush cuts permanent vs. 28% who didn’t. Republicans were more than 4 to 1 and Independents more than 2 to 1 in favor. Only Democrats were opposed, but only by 40%-38%.
The cuts also proved popular among all income groups — despite the Democrats’ oft-heard assertion that Bush merely provided “tax breaks for the wealthy.” Fact is, Bush cut taxes for everyone who paid them, and the cuts helped the nation recover from a recession and the worst stock-market crash since 1929.
Maybe, just maybe, Americans remember that — and will not forget come Nov. 2.
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Being Overweight Causes Memory Problems
July 22, 2010
Natural News
By: Jonathan Benson
A new report published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society reveals that overweight people tend to have poorer memories. Based on the memory test used in the study, every extra point on the body mass index (BMI) led to a one-point drop on the test, indicating that the more obese a person is, the more memory problems he or she will have.
Most people are aware of the various other health dangers associated with obesity, including heart disease, cancer, high cholesterol and high blood pressure, but this new research adds brain function to the list as well.
A team comprised of researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Pittsburgh conducted the study on 8,745 women between the ages of 65 and 79. All participants filled out questionnaires that evaluated their lifestyle, overall health and background. In the end, results indicated that being obese seems to be directly correlated to having memory problems.
The team did find that being obese around the hips is more detrimental than being obese around the waist, but that both are obviously problematic.
Researchers are not exactly sure how being overweight affects brain function, but they suspect that it has something to do with the way extra fat affects a person’s hormone levels. Altered hormone levels can significantly impact the way the brain functions, which lends credence to this hypothesis.
They also speculate that perhaps the entire body is affected by being overweight, and that the heart and circulatory problems induced by obesity also affect brain function.
Either way, experts recommend that overweight people strive to lose weight as part of a healthy overall lifestyle.
“The most common causes of obesity are poor diet and/or eating habits and a lack of exercise,” explains Phyllis A. Balch, CNC, in her book Prescription for Nutritional Healing, 4th Edition: A Practical A-to-Z Reference to Drug-Free Remedies Using Vitamins, Minerals, Herbs & Food Supplements.
So for many people, simply eliminating processed and junk foods from their diets and exercising more will help to get rid of those extra pounds.
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