US of A Economy

GOP bombarded by furious taxpayers after promotion of Trump's tax cut hilariously backfires. Here’s Where Your Tax Dollars for ‘Defense’ Are Really Going. Pentagon Spends $10 Million On Powerball Tickets With Hopes Of Bolstering F-35 Program – Duffel Blog. Alcohol sales get higher after weed legalization contrary to industry fears. Is America generous? [infographic] Being a generous person and donating a part of one’s income is something many people—and many religions—believe is important.

In their Science of Generosity Survey, Christian Smith and Hilary Davidson took a closer look at this practice, particularly concerning Americans, to find not only how much of their income they donated, but how much they said they donated, as illustrated in this infographic. Here's Exactly How Much the Government Would Have to Spend to Make Public College Tuition-Free - Jordan Weissmann. Business And the grand total is...

Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways Subscribe Now > A mere $62.6 billion dollars! According to new Department of Education data, that's how much tuition public colleges collected from undergraduates in 2012 across the entire United States. Republican-Controlled House Passes Bill To Cut $242 Million From Amtrak's Budget. WASHINGTON (AP) — The GOP-controlled House passed legislation Tuesday to cut Amtrak's budget by $242 million, though lawmakers added new funding for video cameras inside locomotive cabs to record engineers and help investigators get to the bottom of crashes such as last month's deadly derailment in Philadelphia.

Amtrak announced last month it is going to install the cameras after years of delays. The transportation and housing measure approved by a narrow 216-210 vote contains $9 million approved last week to fund the inward-facing camera initiative in the budget year starting in October. Amtrak is among many domestic programs whose budgets are cut or frozen by the GOP measures, as automatic spending curbs known as sequestration are again hitting federal agencies after two years of relief. The Amtrak funding measure is part of a huge, $55 billion spending measure funding transportation, housing for the poor and community development programs. "We're ready to start right now. Want to Cut Government Waste? Find the $8.5 Trillion the Pentagon Can’t Account For.

If you thought the botched rollout of Obamacare, the government shutdown, or the sequester represented Washington dysfunction at its worst, wait until you hear about the taxpayer waste at the Defense Department.

Related: Obamacare's Unintended Losers Special Enterprise Reporter Scot Paltrow unearthed the “high cost of the Pentagon’s bad bookkeeping” in a Reuters investigation. It amounts to $8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996 that has never been accounted for. (The year 1996 was the first that the Pentagon should have been audited under a law requiring audits of all government departments. Oh, and by the way, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has not complied with this law.) Out Of Reach: National Low Income Housing Coalition.

The U.S. military is a national security threat. The American military budget is massive.

At $610 billion, it dwarfs the combined military budgets of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, the UK, India and Germany (see chart below). Put another way, one third of all military spending the world comes from the United States. If ‘Too-Big-to-Fail’’ Means Too-Big-To-Jail’ It Should Mean ‘Too-Big-to-Be’ In a couple of days, the so-called US Justice Department will be announcing an “agreement” reached with five large banks, including two of the largest in the US -- JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup, the holding companies for Chase and Citibank -- under which these banks or bank holding companies will plead guilty to felonies involving the manipulation of international currency markets for at least the past eight years.

Law Enforcement as Revenue Stream. After the financial class melted down the world economy, local governments faced an obvious reduction in their revenues.

As the economy recovered under a Democrat President, the Republicans held onto or gained power in many state governments, such as my own adopted state of Florida. With laudable consistency with their professed ideology, Republicans routinely cut taxes for businesses, the well off and sometimes even almost everyone. While the theory seems to be that cutting taxes will increase the revenue for state and local governments, shockingly the opposite seems to happen: state and local governments find themselves running short of funds needed to meet the expenses of actually operating a civilization. Being resourceful, local leaders seek other revenue streams in order to pay the bills. The 10 biggest lies you’ve been told about the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Customers Can Keep The Tip — Which Might Please Restaurant Workers. Kurt Stephens (right) is general manager of Packhouse, a restaurant in Newport, Ky., that has eliminated tips in favor of a higher hourly rate for its servers, including Jessica Krebs, pictured here.

Courtesy of Packhouse Meats hide caption itoggle caption Courtesy of Packhouse Meats Kurt Stephens (right) is general manager of Packhouse, a restaurant in Newport, Ky., that has eliminated tips in favor of a higher hourly rate for its servers, including Jessica Krebs, pictured here. John Oliver On Student Debt And For-Profit Schools: 'A First-Class Education In The Depths Of Human Depravity' On the first "Last Week Tonight" following his August break, John Oliver had an important message for college students: stop watching his show right now.

Well, maybe not right now ... maybe right after he provides a greater understanding as to the cost of higher education. These 9 Charts Show America's Coming Student Loan Apocalypse. The De-industrialization of America. On January 6, 2004, Paul Craig Roberts and US Senator Charles Schumer published a jointly written article on the op-ed page of the New York Times titled “Second Thoughts on Free Trade.”

The article pointed out that the US had entered a new economic era in which American workers face “direct global competition at almost every job level–from the machinist to the software engineer to the Wall Street analyst. Any worker whose job does not require daily face-to-face interaction is now in jeopardy of being replaced by a lower-paid equally skilled worker thousands of miles away. American jobs are being lost not to competition from foreign companies, but to multinational corporations that are cutting costs by shifting operations to low-wage countries.” 9 Out Of 10 Americans Are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing Fact. There's a chart I saw recently that I can't get out of my head. A Harvard business professor and economist asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth was distributed in the United States. This is what they said they thought it was. Dividing the country into five rough groups of the top, bottom, and middle three 20% groups, they asked people how they thought the wealth in this country was divided.

Did Someone Say “Crash”? Guess who’s investing in America’s future? Nobody, that’s who. Just check out this excerpt from an article by Rex Nutting at Marketwatch and you’ll see what I mean. The article is titled “No one is investing in tomorrow’s economy”: “The U.S. economy simply isn’t investing enough to ensure that there will be enough good paying jobs for our children and our children’s children. America Soon to Become a Corporate North Korea?

Annual Fundraising Appeal. Detroit Decision: Federal Judge Rules in Favor of Banks and Political Dictatorship. Is Walmart's request of associates to help provide Thanksgiving dinner for co-workers proof of low wages? She's Worked At McDonald's For 10 Years. She Asked Its President A Simple Question. Then Cops Came. Magnetar Goes Long Ohio Town While Shorting Its Tax Base. Looting the Pension Funds: How Wall Street Robs Public Workers. Pension-Fund Looters Get Tax Breaks, Too. 5 Charts Show the U.S. Has No Debt Crisis. The Onion’s Guide To Understanding The Debt Ceiling Crisis. The Treasury Department has warned that the continued failure by Congress to raise the debt ceiling would leave the United States unable to pay all of its bills and may force the country to default on its government bonds. Matt Taibbi: We're Saddling College Students with Crushing Debt ... and the Govt. Is Acting Like a Greedy Profiteer.

The New Economy is the No Jobs Economy. Behind the Rise in House Prices, Wall Street Buyers. The 1 Chart That Reveals Just How Grossly Unfair The U.S. Tax System Has Become. Apple CEO Tim Cook waved a magic wand in front of America on Tuesday, vanishing our outrage over how shamelessly companies avoid paying taxes, leaving the rest of us to foot the bill. As a public service to you, here is a chart that should enrage you about corporate tax rates all over again! Robert Reich On Fiscal Folly. Sallie Mae Profit Boosts College Endowments And Pension Funds As Students Pay More.

University endowments and teachers’ pension funds are among big investors in Sallie Mae, the private lender that has been generating enormous profits thanks to soaring student debt and the climbing cost of education, a Huffington Post review of financial documents has revealed. The previously unreported investments mean that education professionals are able to profit twice off the same student: first by hiking the cost of tuition, then through dividends and higher valuations on their holdings in Sallie Mae, the largest student lender and loan servicer in the country, which profits by charging relatively high interest rates on its loans and not refinancing high-rate loans after students graduate and get well-paying jobs.

Las Vegas bartender went from a male to a female job. Gentleman’s Guide: How Much Should I Tip? Tools for a Better Future. Eric Holder Admits Some Banks Are Just Too Big To Prosecute. Girls Gone Wild Bankruptcy Forces Thousands Of Wet, Wild Party Girls Into Tough Job Market. Budget Sequestration - The Colbert Report - 2013-28-02. Student debt tripled in eight years. Exclusive Talk With Economist Richard Wolff: Sequester Cuts Inch Us Closer to "An Explosion That Will Take People By Surprise" A Graphic Guide to the Sequester. Deciphering the Sequester: It's All About the Spending. Sequestration Cuts Crisis Makes Me Want to Strangle Both Sides. Weary Americans Land Ship On Bright, Promising Shores Of China.

U.S. Growth Halted as Federal Spending Fell in 4th Quarter. 15 Percent of US Households Are Food Insecure. Matt Taibbi & William Black on Bailout Secrets & the New Foreclosure Deal. Vermont Resort Pulls in Big Foreign Investments. How Bad Is Our Debt Problem, Anyway? And Will a Deal Fix It? Say Goodbye to the Government, Under Either Fiscal Plan. Www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS22331.pdf. Steve Fraser: The National Museum of Industrial Homicide. Facing Facts on Fiscal Cliff. Global corporate powerhouses ramp up to privatize California’s roadways - News - Local Stories - November 8, 2012. Larry Lessig: End Raging Cronyism, Save Our Republic. Daily chart: Vote Truman. The Romney Doctrine. Modern American Economic History in a Few Charts. Is Housing About to Tank? The Secret of Our Non-Success. Daily chart: The maths behind the madness. Matt Taibbi: ‘Romney/Ryan tax plan still makes no sense’ The Myth of U.S. Manufacturing Decline.

Banks See Home Loans as Gateway to Big Gains. Obama’s Numbers. The 4 Percent Solution - By James Jay Carafano. People For the American Way. Whistle-Blowers’ Lawyers Donate to Obama Campaign. Where Do 53% of Your Tax Dollars Go? One Video EVERYONE Should See. In 2010 only 2.8 workers paid into Social Security for each recipient. In 1970 it was 3.6, and the ratio keeps falling. Clip of Tim Russert - Paul Krugman vs O'reilly. Capitalism’s Vanishing Appeal. The Spreading Financial Rot. Obama’s Secret Plan to Prop Up Housing Prices. 15 Things the GOP Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes and the Debt. Contract law gives U.S. government options for automatic cuts: report.

TPC Tax Topics. Prices for Luxury Real Estate Keep Rising. It Must Be Art. Last Chance to Shed School Loans - Proving All Is Hopeless. Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital. America’s Descent Into Poverty.