Calling Card Online

In various threads one attractive idea keeps popping up: Provide tax cut incentives for the return of money that American corporations deposit in overseas banks (in Cayman, Dubai, etc.) so that they will use it here to build infrastructure, create jobs, and boost production.

It doesn’t work.

This was tried with the Homeland Investment Act of 2005. Billions of dollars were brought back, but according to MIT economics professor Kristin J. Forbes, for every dollar that was brought back, there were zero cents used for additional capital expenditures, research & development, or hiring and employee wages.

The money went into bonuses, shareholders, whatever. A lot of it belonged to the pharmaceutical business.

The fat cats who make money are determined to keep it in the hands of those who have money instead of putting it into the economy.

This link seems to work directly:

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/here-it-comes-democrats-considering-tax-repatriation-holiday-economic-massacre

If it does, forget the following.

Arrival at the target article gives a link identification, but the website stops the link at the home page. Use their search option for The lost cause ….  tax repatriation. In the list, click on the article: Here it comes: Democrats considering “Tax Repatriation Holiday” Economic Massacre.

http://zerohedge.com/article/lost-cause-tax-repatriation-or-folly-homeland-investment-act-part-2

The IMF urges the US to raise it’s debt ceiling:

Link to story:

My question is this:

Will raising our debt ceiling take care of our insatiable spending habits, or dig us into debt even deeper?

In Virginia our State Contstitution requires balancing the budget every year. Why is this not part of our National Constitution? Would you vote to include this as a new ammendment?

http://xfinity.comcast.net/articles/finance/20110627/US.Abercrombie.Headscarf.Firing/

A former stockroom worker for Abercrombie & Fitch Co. sued the clothing retailer in federal court Monday, saying she was illegally fired after refusing to remove her Muslim headscarf while on the job.

Hani Khan said a manager at the company’s Hollister Co. store at the Hillsdale Mall in San Mateo hired her while she was wearing her hijab. The manager said it was OK to wear it as long as it was in company colors, Khan said.

They should have never hired her in the first place.Some people refuse to assimilate ,why not?

The IEA is going to release oil reserves also..Squeeze those speculators.

The release of strategic oil reserves of IEA countries puts an additional
supply of up to two million barrels a day on the market in the next 30 days.
This is more than the Libyan oil outage.

Even so, the countries in the Gulf region apparently do not want to restrict
production and this should mean a marked oversupply on the oil market in the
coming weeks, which should push prices down further

selloff-hits-key-marks-and-it-may-not-be-done/

Area gas prices have fallen 50 cents in the last month and could continue to drop as the U.S. prepares to release 30 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

The average price for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline in the Canton-Massillon area was $3.28 Sunday



Roll-out-the-oil-barrels-gas-prices-in-free-fall



Finally relief from being ripped off at the gas pump.  Got to wonder about the timing though, are elections far away?

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/is-the-economy-improving

The national debt is completely and totally out of control.  Since Barack Obama took office, the U.S. national debt has increased by nearly 4 trillion dollars

Keep in mind that from George Washington to Ronald Reagan, the U.S. government accumulated only 1 trillion dollars in debt.

Between 2007 and 2010, U.S. GDP grew by only 4.26%, but the U.S. national debt soared by 61% during that same time period.

Now the Democrats and the Republicans are busy negotiating over some modest reductions in spending.

But unprecedented federal spending is one of the only things propping the economy up right now.

If the U.S. economy is performing so poorly after being flooded with “stimulus money” from the federal government, what is going to happen once the federal government cuts back?

State And Local Government Finances

All over the United States, there are large numbers of state and local governments that are on the verge of bankruptcy

For the moment, let’s just focus on the state of Illinois.

Did you know that things have gotten so bad in Illinois at this point that the Illinois state government is letting bills go unpaid for long periods of time on a regular basis?

It’s true.

Right now they have billions in unpaid bills and they are facing a financial future that is so bleak that it is almost indescribable.

In one recent article, author Stephen Lendman described the horrific financial crisis that Illinois is facing right now….

With spending exceeding revenues, and obligations not postponed, unpaid bills are growing “at a frightening rate. For instance, IGPA’s Fiscal Futures Model indicates (they) could reach $40 billion by July 1, 2013, with an associated delay in paying those bills of more than five years.”

Besides its $13 billion deficit and $6 billion in unpaid bills, its pension fund is about $130 billion in the red – a red flag that state workers may lose out altogether, wiping out their promised retirement savings.

 http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/cpiw.html

The rise in Prices for May was moderated by the decline in gasoline speculation.  The underlying rate on food and real commodities, driven by the FEDS 1% monthly inflation through printing specie, will push the rate up in the remaining months, to above 7.6 for SSI recipients.

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Comcast ran this headline as a lead in to a rant on Junior Baby Boomers. I thought about it about 1/10th of a second before saying aloud, “My retirement has been in jeopardy since the days of Ronald Reagan. We shifted the burden of paying for the larger tax burden from the businesses to the people only to have the money drift to the top and then overseas. The solution in this country that we keep hearing about is that we need to give more to businesses. That’s how we got into this mess. I don’t want to give to someone else’s business anymore. I want to give to Domestic American Businesses. The financial industry hasn’t cared about our success or profits. Turn about is fair play. Regulate them and lets let the average Joe start to rebuild the country from the ground up. My retirement is at risk because the economy was put at risk by greedy sages that gave us crappy advice. 

The article doesn’t get to the meat of the matter. 

We aren’t balancing government budgets because we have too many people out of work. More folks working mean more balanced budgets. 

Solutions are about solving this stuff… If you’ve followed my posts, you know that I’m for emboldening the average worker, imposing an import tariff, reverting back to progressive taxation, regulating the financial district (especially anything to do with bonds & derivatives), stripping corporations of personhood, campaign finance reform, collective bargaining, and choking lobbyists. 

Any other ideas that you thing might fly… feel free to run it up the flagpole so we can all see it. 

http://xfinity.comcast.net/articles/finance/20110615/BUSINESS-US-ECONOMY-WRAPUP-POLL/

Economists in Wednesday’s poll took an axe to the outlook for U.S. economic growth following a raft of dire jobs and industrial data this month, while keeping their long-held view for weak euro zone and UK growth until the end of next year.

Scary,I thought things were getting better?