New Posts

Feb 8, 2016

Top 400 Taxpayers See Tax Rates Rise, But There’s More to the Story

As Americans were gathering party supplies to greet the New Year, the Internal Revenue Service released their annual report of cumulative tax data reported on the 400 tax r...

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Feb 4, 2016

Chlorine Bleach Plants Needlessly Endanger 63 Million Americans

Chlorine bleach plants across the U.S. put millions of Americans in danger of a chlorine gas release, a substance so toxic it has been used as a chemical weapon. Greenpeace’s new repo...

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Jan 25, 2016

U.S. Industrial Facilities Reported Fewer Toxic Releases in 2014

The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) data for 2014 is now available. The good news: total toxic releases by reporting facilities decreased by nearly six percent from 2013 levels. Howe...

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Jan 22, 2016

Methane Causes Climate Change. Here's How the President Plans to Cut Emissions by 40-45 Percent.

  UPDATE (Jan. 22, 2016): Today, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released its proposed rule to reduce methane emissions...

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SCHIP Gets Cloture

The SCHIP expansion just got cloture (meaning it can't be filibustered and will get an up or down vote) on 69-30 vote (roll call). That's a veto proof majority! The vote on passage should be coming up shortly. Plus, get this (emph. mine): However, Democrats -- and their Republican allies on the issue -- made clear Bush's veto will not be the last word on the measure. They said they will keep coming back to the bill every six weeks to three months until either the White House relents or Republican opposition collapses.

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The Debt and The War

The Center for American Progress has done a nice job illustrating data that the National Priorities Project just released on who's bearing the cost of the war. You can check out your state and see how much of the nearly $193 billion supplemental you'll be paying. But the thing is, for the most part, nobody's paying anything to finance this war just yet. We're just racking up more debt, and that'll have to be paid off from now until eternity.

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Senate SCHIP Vote Imminent

The Senate will vote on the SCHIP bill probably in a matter of hours- don't forget to call/email your Senator.

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Is PAYGO Sinking the SCHIP?

Donny Shaw at the invaluable OpenCongress.org had an interesting interpretation of the SCHIP vote in the House: When the Democrats took over Congress in January, they passed new, hardcore budgeting rules known as PAYGO that require them to account for any spending increase by creating an equal increase in revenue elsewhere. With SCHIP, their fiscal heroism proved bittersweet; the revenue increase proposal they agreed upon ended up costing congressional Democrats the critical Republican votes they needed to get their proposal enacted.

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More Evidence That Americans Aren't Psyched About Inequality

Harold Meyerson, in today's Washington Post:

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Is It Ok To Say They're Lying?

FactCheck.Org has a good rundown of the half-truths, dissembling, gaffes, disingenuous remarks and false claims (AKA lies) by the anti-SCHIP legions. Lying is what you do when you have a weak argument. However, it can be pretty effective, as we all know, when nobody checks you. For more, see the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities fact check, and the Democrat's fact check. Yeah, there's been a lot of dissembling.

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Renewing Fiscal Responsibility

The Brookings Institution will be hosting an event to get the presidential candidates focused on the deficit. But only six years post-Clinton, they may be tilting at windmills.

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U.S. Reaches Debt Limit: The Case for Long-Term Analysis

The Senate will vote soon on legislation to raise the ceiling on the national debt to nearly $10 trillion. This action is imperative as the statutory limit of $8.965 trillion on the United States' level of public debt will be reached by Oct. 1, according to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

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Two Ironies Of The SCHIP Debate

President "Heckuva job, Brownie" Bush has cast himself as the defender of the poor against the greedy working class, which doesn't deserve help with their health insurance bills. I don't see how else you read statements like this.

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House, Senate Reach Deal on SCHIP

See the press release, with policy details, on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's webpage.

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Pages

Resources & Research

Living in the Shadow of Danger: Poverty, Race, and Unequal Chemical Facility Hazards

People of color and people living in poverty, especially poor children of color, are significantly more likely...

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A Tale of Two Retirements: One for CEOs and One for the Rest of Us

The 100 largest CEO retirement funds are worth a combined $4.9 billion, equal to the entire retirement account savings of 41 percent of American fam...

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