WELCOME TO OPINIONS BASED
ON FACTS (OBOF)
&
THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (TYMHM)
YEAR THREE
|
Name
|
Published
|
|
OVERVIEW
|
|
|
OBOF & TYMHM
PART 14
|
Dec 18, 2012
|
|
OBOF & TYMHM
PART 15
|
Jan. 02, 2013
|
|
|
|
IN THIS
ISSUE
1. Year number three.
2. 2012 out with a cliff hanger. 2013 in w/good news.
3. Details of the agreement.
4. Lousy deal.
5. Why deficits and not jobs?
6. Bob Hope and the military presence.
YEAR NUMBER
THREE
3
Well, here
we go the first issue of year number three. I am putting it together one day late so as
to see what the "do nothing," Congress will do about the Fiscal
Cliff.
I do hope all of you
had a nice Christmas and that you kept Christ in your Christmas. I do wish, for all of you, a HAPPY and
PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR.
During the first two
year's we gave you 130 postings and you hit our blog 3,651 times. From my standpoint, that makes it worthwhile. That tells me you read the subjects I either
write about or give you that other have written.
I try to give you
material that I think is about the most important to all our lives and yet try
not to make each issue to long. Anytime
any of you have some thoughts about these postings, pro or con, I would love to
hear from you about them. You can either
write comments at the end of any posting or e-mail if you wish. If you e-mail me, I make you a sincere
promise that your e-mail address will not be given to anyone. My e-mail address is fab_80@cox.net .
~~~
2012 GOES
OUT AS A
CLIFF HANGER.
2013 COMES IN
WITH SOME GOOD
NEWS.
By Floyd Bowman
Publisher "Opinions Based On Facts"
Published Jan 2, 2013
I can't imagine that
any of you, have not been hearing about
the Fiscal Cliff and, at least to some degree, are familiar with where it
stands.
As a short summary,
the Senate passed a bill, 89 to 8, that was basically, put together by the
cooperation of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell with the main negotiator for the
President, Vice President Joe Biden. It
met the requirements of the President relative to increased taxes for those
making $400,000 or more and $450,000 for a couple, to 39.6%. It let the Bush tax cuts expire for those,
but let it stand for those under the $400,000 level. As far as, the sequester cuts are concerned
it postponed them for two months.
The bill provides for
Unemployment benefits to continue for those who are unemployed and are actively
seeking work. Those with paychecks will
notice a slight reduction in their take home pay as the payroll tax will not
now be exempt. Personally, while I know
it will hurt some, it is a good thing, because it takes too much from the
Social Security Trust Fund. It was
suppose to only be exempt for one year to help the economy, but then it was
extended another year, so that now, people think that is the way it is suppose
to be. Therefore, it will be a bit of a shock.
So you see, not all
has been answered. When the bill hit the
House of Representatives, it, of course, was torn apart by some Republicans,
but finally the Speaker said he would bring it to the floor for a vote. That of course, meant a period for both sides
to argue for and against. Finally, the vote took place with an outcome
of 257 yea's and 167 nea's. Democrats
voted 176 yea's and 12 nea's. Republicans
voted 81 yeas, including Speaker Boehner and Paul Ryan, but not Leader Cantor,
and 155 nea's. Take note as to how many
Republicans still voted against the bill.
This puts our country
on a forward path, and 98 % of the people will not have a tax increase and 97%
of small businesses will not have a tax increase. To me, one of the most interesting parts of
all this is the fact, that Congress finally came together and worked as it is
suppose to for the good of the country.
Keep in mind that this also, is a lame duct session of the 104th
Congress.
In my
opinion, the greatest part of tonight was the President's remarks when it was
all over. If you missed it, you really
missed a new President. He, of course,
said such things, as this shows that we can work together and congratulated all
the Leadership of both Houses of Congress.
He then, in
a very sober direct manner, pointed out that there was a lot of work to do in
2013 and that we can not just reduce spending our way out of debt, that we had
to do major reforms to our tax code. He
said that he was willing to compromise on some issues, BUT that, there was one
thing he was not going to do again. "I won't debate with Congress over the
debt ceiling." he said. He made
that very forcefully.
Congress,
and particularly the House of Representatives, thinks that is where they have
him over a barrel and that is where they can cut the entitlements, particularly
Medicare and Social Security. I think
they are going to get a big surprise, because I think, the President is going
to use the 14th Amendment before he will get into a debate about the ceiling or
accept any conditions that he doesn't want.
He said something to the effect, that we are going to pay our bills, the
bills that Congress has created.
~~~
DETAILS OF
THE AGREEMENT
Bush tax cuts: The deal would extend all of the Bush tax cuts for incomes below $400,000
for individuals and $450,000 for families, while reinstating the Clinton-era
39.6 percent tax rate for income above those thresholds. It will also push the
capital gains rate on investment income back to 20 percent for income above
$400,000 for individuals and $450,000 for families. President Obama had asked
for an extension of rates only for incomes below $250,000.
Stimulus tax credits: Three tax credits
expanded as part of the stimulus will be extended for one year as part of the
compromise. The America ’s Opportunity Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit, and Earned
Income Tax Credit collectively benefit nearly 20 million Americans each year, and
extending them was a priority for Obama and Democrats. Republicans allowed all
three to expire in tax legislation earlier this year.
Payroll tax cut: The payroll tax cut would
expire as part of this compromise. The payroll tax cut, which benefits all
wage-earning workers, is the most damaging piece of the “fiscal cliff”
according to the Congressional Budget Office. Republicans have opposed
extending the payroll tax cut in the past; many Democrats opposed its extension
over fears that it would undermine Social Security, which it helps fund.
Unemployment insurance: The federal unemployment
insurance program would be extended for one year under this deal. Without an
extension, more than 2 million would lose benefits at the beginning of 2013,
while another million would lose them in the early part of the year.
Estate tax: The estate tax was set to
revert to its Clinton-era levels, where it was taxed at 55 percent after a $1
million exemption. This deal would set the exemption at $5 million and tax at a
40 percent rate after that — at a cost of $375 billion over 10 years compared to the Clinton
Other provisions: The deal would also
include a permanent fix to the Alternative Minimum Tax and a one-year “doc
fix,” which would prevent cuts in provider payments through Medicare. It also
extends certain corporate tax provisions for another year.
~~~
Lousy Deal on the
Edge of the Cliff
Robert Reich
NationofChange
/ Op-Ed
Published: Monday 31 December 2012
NOTE: FROM FLOYD.
For whatever it is worth to you, I don't agree with Robert on a number of
his statements below. He, like most
everyone, takes the position that we are going to have a big debt ceiling
fight. I don't think so. It's my belief, that the President has made
up his mind that he isn't going that route anymore and he knows he doesn't have
to. Time will tell, but I believe he is
going to use the 14th Amendment and not give in on the demands of gutting
entitlements.
Everything
is on his side now. He has nothing to
lose, as far as running for anymore political offices. The people gave him a real strong win in
November and he is in the driver's seat.
He is going to govern the next four years the way he wants and I think
that he will get a Democratic Congress in 2014 and I think he believes that
too.
Floyd
The deal emerging from the Senate is a lousy one. Let me count the ways:
1. Republicans haven’t conceded anything on the debt
ceiling, so over the next two months – as the Treasury runs out of tricks to
avoid a default – Republicans are likely to do exactly what they did before,
which is to hold their votes on raising the ceiling hostage to major cuts in programs
for the poor and in Medicare and Social Security.
2. The deal makes tax cuts
for the rich permanent (extending the Bush tax cuts for incomes up to $400,000
if filing singly and $450,000 if jointly) while extending refundable tax
credits for the poor (child tax credit, enlarged EITC, and tuition tax credit)
for only five years. There’s absolutely no justification for this asymmetry.
3. It doesn’t get nearly
enough revenue from the wealthiest 2 percent — only $600 billion over the next
decade, which is half of what the President called for, and a small fraction of
the White House’s goal of more than $4 trillion in deficit reduction. That
means more of the burden of tax hikes and spending cuts in future years will
fall on the middle class and the poor.
4. It continues to exempt the first $5 million of
inherited wealth from the estate tax (the exemption used to be $1 million).
This is a huge gift to the heirs of the wealthy, perpetuating family dynasties
of the idle rich.
Yes, the deal finally gets Republicans to accept a tax
increase on the wealthy, but this is an inside-the-Beltway symbolic victory. If
anyone believes this will make the GOP more amenable to future tax increases,
they don’t know how rabidly extremist the GOP has become.
The deal also extends unemployment insurance for more
than 2 million long-term unemployed. That’s important.
But I can’t help believe the President could have done
better than this. After all, public opinion is overwhelmingly on his side.
Republicans would have been blamed had no deal been achieved.
More importantly, the fiscal cliff is on the President’s
side as well. If we go over it, he and the Democrats in the next Congress that
starts later this week can quickly offer legislation that grants a middle-class
tax cut and restores most military spending. Even rabid Republicans would be
hard-pressed not to sign on.
~~~
Why is Washington
Robert Reich
NationofChange
/ Op-Ed
Published: Friday 14 December 2012
It was the centerpiece of the President’s reelection
campaign. Every time Republicans complained about trillion-dollar deficits, he
and other Democrats would talk jobs.
That’s what Americans care about — jobs with good wages.
And that’s part of why Obama and the Democrats were
victorious on Election Day.
It seems forever ago, but it’s worth recalling that President
Obama won reelection by more than 4 million votes, a million more than George
W. Bush when he was reelected — and an electoral college majority of 332 to
Romney’s 206, again larger than Bush’s electoral majority over Kerry in 2004
(286 to 251).The Democratic caucus in the Senate now has 55 members (up from 53
before Election Day), and Republicans have 8 fewer seats in the House than
before.
So why, exactly, is Washington
makes no sense
economically. Cutting the budget deficit — either by reducing public spending or
raising taxes on the middle class, or both — will slow the economy and increase
unemployment. That’s why the so-called “fiscal cliff” is so dangerous.
In the foreseeable future our government has to spend
more rather than less. Businesses won’t hire because they still don’t have
enough consumers to justify additional hires. So to get jobs back at the rate
and scale needed, government has to be the spender of last resort.
The job situation is still
horrendous. Twenty-three million Americans can’t find full-time work. Less than
59
percent of the working-age population of the nation is employed,
almost the lowest percent in three decades. 4.8
million Americans have been out of work for more than six months.
The 40-week average spell of joblessness is almost three times the post-1948
average.
And even those who
have jobs are finding it harder to make ends meet.
Jobs created since
the trough of the recession pay less than jobs that were lost. The median wage
is 8 percent below what it was in 2000, adjusted for inflation. And wages are
still heading downward: Average hourly earnings
in October were 3.1 percent below what they were in October, 2010.
This isn’t just an ongoing tragedy for 23 million
Americans and their families. It also robs all of us of what these people would
produce if they were fully employed – roughly $2 trillion worth of goods and
services that won’t be created this year.
These folks would also be paying taxes — and they’d
require less unemployment insurance, fewer food stamps, and less public
assistance than they do now. According to estimates byBloomberg News, the total cost of those
lost tax revenues and the extra social spending is more than twice what
taxpayers will shell out this year to pay interest on the federal debt.
In other words, unemployment is hugely expensive. Debt,
by contrast, is relatively cheap. The yield on the 10-year Treasury is only
about 1.7 percent. Creditors worldwide are willing to lend America
So why are we debating how to cut the deficit when we
should be debating how best to use the cheap money we can borrow from the rest
of the world to put more Americans to work?
Because too many Democrats inside and outside the Beltway
have ingested the deficit cool-aide that the “serious people” on Wall Street
have serving for two decades.
And the President has been all too willing to legitimize
their deficit obsession by freezing federal salaries, appointing a deficit
commission, and, now that the election is over, going back to deficit-speak.
A month after the election Obama was on Bloomberg
Television saying business leaders need “a deal on long-term deficit reduction”
before they’ll increase hiring.
That’s just not true. Before they’ll increase hiring they
need customers.
~~~
Bob Hope and the Persistent Military Presence.
Ken Butigan
Waging Nonviolence / Op-Ed
Published: Friday 28 December 2012
BACK IN TIME AND WHAT IT
MEANT
THEN AND NOW.
Typically this is a strange week, between Christmas and
New Year’s, when most of us face the rigors of winter, the chronic stop-and-go
commotion that passes for merrymaking, and the nagging remorse for all the
things we earnestly committed ourselves to do this year—which, by now, we’ve
sheepishly decided to carry over into 2013 like a cheap bookkeeping trick.
These annual existential tremors got an extra jolt last Friday as we faced the
prospect of the world coming to an end—first physically, then financially.
Given the peculiarity of this week, I found myself in a
holiday mood surfing Netflix and landed on a strange helping of Bob Hope. For
those who don’t know him, Hope was a mid-century comedian featured in a string
of low-budget road pictures, in which he often co-starred with Dorothy Lamour
and Bing Crosby. Bob Hope and Christmas? It was probably his long-time
collaboration with Crosby, who sang “White Christmas,” that induced this neural
cross firing. In any case I clicked on what turned out to be the first episode
of a short-lived television show called “Bob Hope: The Comedy Hour” and found
myself peering into a temporal periscope that zoomed me back in time to the
United States of 60 years ago.
Delivered on the blotchy-gray canvas of the precursor of
videotape, the program is a cultural snapshot that would allow us to evaluate
social progress if, like our children, we subjected our society to a periodic
standardized test. And my would-be assessment: America
In this first episode, it
is May 1952 and the show is being broadcast live from a makeshift outdoor
theater at the Presidio Army Base in San
Francisco San Francisco Bay ,
the then-active prison on Alcatraz
Island
The humor is fairly genial and safe. The pioneering
comedy of Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Mort Sahl and Richard Pryor — let alone
today’s work by Sarah Silverman, Louie C.K or Margaret Cho—are years off. Their
efforts to assert freedom of speech or to tackle the political and cultural
realities of racism, sexism and homophobia will, beginning in the 1960s,
seriously challenge both the assumptions about comedy and the society which
comedy encodes and reinforces.
Just as future comedians
will challenge the world that Hope so confidently projects, so will social
movements a decade later begin to challenge a world that assumes the cozy
relationship with the military on display here. Hope, who emigrated from
Britain in 1908 at five years old, cultivated a strong sense of U.S.
This coziness with
the military comes through in the references that Hope makes during his
monologue to an atomic bomb test that had occurred a few days before at the Nevada
“The other morning,” he says, “I went over to Nevada Las Vegas
In the early 1950s the national security state sought to
normalize nuclear weapons. To do this it had to transform something that
signified unmanageable terror into a something of manageable fear. It had to
establish support for this new weapon system by conveying its awesome power but
also its domestication. It was dangerous, but controllable. Hope’s bit strikes
these chords. Atomic power is clearly hazardous and unpredictable, but its
volatility and side effects can be brought down to earth. Most of all, they can
provoke laughter—which, like almost all laughter, relieves tension and anxiety.
Nothing could provoke tension and anxiety more in 1950s America
Eventually, a series of social movements would challenge
this domestication of nuclear arms and the public acquiescence on which it
rested. (These movements had some of their roots in San Francisco of 1952,
including the then-emerging Beat generation and Allen Ginsberg’s percolating
poem, “Howl.”) With the emergence of people power movements from the 1960s
forward, a national broadcast of a nuclear detonation or a comedy show from an
Army base would at least provoke critical questions and likely would not be
countenanced in the free and easy way that Hope’s 1952 program would. Nor would
several other aspects of that particular broadcast, including what are now
considered—with our post-liberation movement lenses six decades later—to be
offensive skits about Chinese-Americans, Italian-Americans and traditional
gender roles. The notion of the United Service Organization road show
entertaining troops provoked strong criticism during the Vietnam War, which
Francis Ford Coppola captured in his vivid depiction of a show going very wrong
in Indochina in his film Apocalypse Now. And, perhaps most tellingly,
the Presidio Army Base—which served as the backdrop of Hope’s first episode of
the comedy hour—was converted to a national park in the 1990s.
However, the shifts since 1952, while real, have not
dislodged the fundamental militarism at the heart of this society. In our own
time, the Pentagon seems to have decided that public support is such a given
that it can afford to pursue a McLuhanesque “cool” approach to its interface
with the population. Yet, “cool” or not, the Pentagon’s power is immense and
will not hesitate to call on the next Bob Hope to buttress it.
In 1997, I spent several days camping out at the Vietnam U.S. U.S.
On the third afternoon, there was an unusual uproar, and
then the whir and clicking of press cameras. A golf cart pulled up — Bob Hope
was sitting there. He had just been to the White House, where President Bill
Clinton bestowed a national honor on him. Now he was here, to see the wall. He
clambered out of the cart and shambled over to the monument. He simply stared
at it. He was 94 years old, and he seemed to be in another world. The reporters
tried to get him to touch the wall. In the end he did, but only when they told
him that, on this chilly day, it was warm. As he walked back to the cart he
straightened up and tried to say something, but it didn’t come.
I was thinking about this moment when I watched the 1952
video. I cannot presume to know what he was thinking about this wall dedicated
to a war he promoted. Perhaps it simply confirmed something about his life.
Perhaps it was a question, tugging at him. Or perhaps he was formulating a
question that is there for all of us.
~~~
If the good Lord is willing and the creek don't rise, I'll talk with you
again next week, about January 8, 2013.
GOD BLESS YOU ALL
&
GOD BLESS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Floyd
No comments:
Post a Comment