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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Communicating about Poverty/Inequality: A Constant Work In Progress

Inclusion put out a new report on communicating a compelling anti-poverty message, and, as anyone who follows this debate might expect, the American public isn't that keen on addressing poverty when it's defined as such. But to me, the report had a few surprising findings. First, the public isn't that receptive to messages that redefine the poor as "deserving" workers. Given these findings, the authors suggest that in appeals to the public, instead of emphasizing personal stories about the poor, advocates should focus on systemic and institutional reasons for poverty that are beyond the control of individuals. As I review later, other researchers have arrived at very similar conclusions. In addition, this research suggests that the label "working poor" may itself be problematic. Given a cultural belief that if people are industrious they will succeed, this term sounds somewhat contradictory, and is likely to trigger confusion and negative connotations, especially among those Americans who have a strong "belief in a just world."

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Reform Risks Tsk from Those Who Nix Paying for Fix

The "mother of all tax bills" that House Ways and Means Chair Charles Rangel (D-NY) unveiled last week (see our summary), an effort to fix the Alternative Minimum Tax, provides an easy target for those fixated on how it complies with the House PAYGO rules and see the "mother of all tax hikes." That talk is cheap, but expensive in the long run. PAYGO compliance spares the country increases in the national debt and accompanying debt service costs.

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Former Social Security Commissioner: No Cuts Necessary

Robert Ball, the former commissioner of Social Security under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, takes issue with the claim that Social Security balance requires benefit cuts. Why? Times have changed. In the Oct. 19 editorial " Mr. Giuliani's No-Tax Pledge," The Post stated: "It's no more responsible for Republicans to rule out tax increases [to strengthen Social Security] than it is for Democrats to insist on no benefit cuts." The Post praised, as a "bipartisan blend," President Ronald Reagan's acceptance of a 1983 fix that included both.

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The Chutzpah Of The Privatizer

Tyler Cowen attempts to minimize the difference between contractors and government in a piece in the Sunday New York Times. A few selected paragraphs from it: ALLEGATIONS of misbehavior by employees of Blackwater USA in the shooting deaths of 17 Iraqis have brought the military's use of private contractors into question. But whatever the possible sins of the Blackwater firm, the overall problem is not private contracting in itself; contractors do not set the tone but rather reflect the sins and virtues of their customers, namely their sponsoring governments...

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Boehner Believes

House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) believes ($) in the Great Pumpkin.

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Senate Suffers Seven-Year Internet Itch

Last night, the Senate adopted a seven-year extension of the internet access tax moratorium by voice vote. Seven years? Why not 11 or 13, which are also prime numbers. How was this number settled on and how did it win approval from Sens. Tom Carper (D-DE) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN), both of whom sought a four-year limit to the ban? Carper and Alexander offered this, by way of "explanation":

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Blackwater Shows That The Market Works!

In the Guardian, Greg Anrig has a comprehensive look at rightist ideology and how its been neither efficient nor effective in practice.

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Transparency

You don't even have to read between the lines to understand that the president is opposed to providing health insurance to children. ...I was disappointed by what Congress had been doing...This week, the majority in the House passed a new SCHIP bill that costs more over the next five years than the one I vetoed three weeks ago. It still moves millions of American children who now have private health insurance into government-run health care. It raises taxes to pay for it.

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Friends Don't Let Friends Watch Fox

(Unless You're Talking about the World Series) And here's why they don't. October 25 edition of Fox News' Your World, host Neil Cavuto (with a hat-tip to Media Matters): Throw in a Fox News alert for you. It is being called the mother of all tax hikes. Democrats unveiling a trillion-dollar tax plan today, it includes a 4 percent surtax on people earning $150,000 a year. Now remember when a million bucks was considered rich only last year at this time? So are these tax hikes going to stop people from striving for success?

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Best Medical System In The World

Another example of medical inefficiency (the foundation of the long-term fiscal problem). The Washington Post on the study showing that children's cold medication is ineffective: For years, Joshua Sharfstein shuddered whenever he walked down a drugstore aisle lined with cough and cold products for babies and toddlers. "It never ceased to aggravate me," said Sharfstein, a pediatrician and father of two young boys. "Kids with colds were getting these medicines that had never been shown to be either effective or safe."

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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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