Observing America: A Patriotic point of view

OK… when crude oil was $99 per barrel, gasoline at the pump was $3.00 per gallon.

Now that gasoline has hit $4.00 per gallon at the pump, one would think crude prices have skyrocketed.

They haven’t! Crude oil prices have been consistently at $102.00 – $106.00 per barrel. Today’s price is $104 per barrel. Yet the pump price remains at $3.899 per gallon of gasoline.

So, we have a 33% increase at the pump for a 5% to 9% increase of crude.

In talking with my buds at BP, Marathon, and Shell, I found the REAL reason for the spike in gasoline prices… a mild winter.

That’s right… a mild winter has led to less demand of Heating Oil. So the Oil producers have made far less money this winter than projected.

And, as any businessman will tell you, “Meeting Projections” are what careers are made of.

To get their Corporate earnings to meet projections, a crisis had to be created.

And an oil crisis was created… and ignored by Washington. The Congress and Senate have both ignored the crisis and the pleas of Americans to intervene and do something about it.

As long as Politicians are in the pocket of the rich… NOTHING will ever change for us “ordinary” Americans!

We have to get the Lobbyists and Special Interest groups out of Washington… and out of our lives!

It’s not the Government that’s screwing up everything… it’s the Congress and Senate getting rich taking money from Lobbyists and Special Interest groups!

It will not change until we start sticking together and stop “blaming” each other.

Vote them ALL out… if they are in Washington, they ARE the problem!

GadaboutUS

No Comments - Click here to leave a comment

Former President Bill Clinton gave a rousing endorsement of fellow Democrat Barack Obama in his first 2012 campaign appearance with the president on Sunday night, and helped him raise more than $2 million.

A white-haired and svelte Clinton, 65, pounded the podium and pointed at the crowd while addressing about 500 Obama supporters outside the Virginia home of his friend and Democratic adviser Terry McAuliffe.

“I think he’s done a good job,” he told the crowd in his signature raspy voice, warmly introducing the man who beat his wife, Hillary Clinton, to win the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination and then made her secretary of state. “We are going the right direction under President Obama’s leadership.”

Clinton’s support could be pivotal for Obama’s efforts to raise money and to sell voters on his economic plans, which Republicans have denounced as fiscally reckless and rooted in populism instead of good business sense.

Clinton oversaw one of the most prosperous times in recent American history and managed to balance the federal budget, something Democrats are keen to remind voters before the November 6 election.

When he took the backyard podium, Obama, 50, noted Clinton’s “remarkable” economic record in his two White House terms and referred frequently to the political powerhouse standing behind him, who stands to be a huge fundraising force in the final months of the presidential campaign.

“I didn’t run for president simply to get back to where we were in 2007. I didn’t run for president simply to restore the status quo before the financial crisis. I ran for president because we had lost our way since Bill Clinton was done being president,” Obama said.

The state of the economy is expected to be the pivotal issue for voters in November.

With unemployment still relatively high and growth showing signs of slowing, Obama is under pressure to defend his string of big budget deficits and prove the soundness of his proposals to keep spending on infrastructure, clean energy and education and to raise taxes on the very rich.

‘NOT HOUDINI’

Neither Obama nor Clinton referred to George W. Bush, the Republican who served two presidential terms in between their tenures, nor the presumptive Republican nominee for this year’s White House race, Mitt Romney, by name in their outdoor remarks.

But Clinton said Obama’s likely White House opponent this year wanted to revert to the policies that plunged the United States into crisis, but “on steroids, which will get you the same consequences as before, on steroids.”

Clinton applauded Obama’s efforts in healthcare, clean energy promotion and student loan reform, and argued that employment levels were rebounding quickly from the financial and mortgage crises that took hold before Obama took office.

“Look, the man’s not Houdini, all he can do is beat the clock. He’s beating the clock,” he said, comparing the pace of recovery to Japan’s extended weakness after its own crisis. “The last thing you want to do is to turn around and embrace the policies that got us into trouble in the first place.”

Fresh from the previous night’s White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, where he took several digs at Romney, Obama was clearly in good humor at the Virginia event.

Turning to foreign policy, Obama said he and Hillary Clinton had “spent the last three and a half years cleaning up other folks’ messes,” and made fun of Romney’s recent comment that Russia was the United States’ “No. 1 geopolitical foe.”

“I’m suddenly thinking, ‘What? Maybe I didn’t check the calendar this morning. I didn’t know we were back in 1975,’” he said. The comment echoed Vice President Joe Biden’s criticism last week of Romney as being stuck in a Cold War mindset.

Clinton had not appeared with Obama this election cycle. But last week the Obama campaign released a video of Clinton praising Obama for approving the commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan last May.

Tickets to Sunday’s outdoor reception cost $1,000 and up, and Obama and Clinton later addressed a more exclusive dinner at McAuliffe’s home for 80 people who paid $20,000 each. The money went to a fund supporting Obama’s re-election, the Democratic National Committee and several state Democratic parties.

What do YOU think, America?     Be Informed !!!     Get Involved !!!

GadaboutUS

No Comments - Click here to leave a comment

How did breast cancer survivor Lisa Lindsay end up behind bars? She didn’t pay a medical bill – one the Herrin, Ill., teaching assistant was told she didn’t owe. “She got a $280 medical bill in error and was told she didn’t have to pay it,” The Associated Press reports. “But the bill was turned over to a collection agency, and eventually state troopers showed up at her home and took her to jail in handcuffs.”

Although the U.S. abolished debtors’ prisons in the 1830s, more than a third of U.S. states allow the police to haul people in who don’t pay all manner of debts, from bills for health care services to credit card and auto loans. In parts of Illinois, debt collectors commonly use publicly funded courts, sheriff’s deputies, and country jails to pressure people who owe even small amounts to pay up, according to the AP.

[Related: 5 Strategies to Pay Down Credit Card Debt]

Under the law, debtors aren’t arrested for nonpayment, but rather for failing to respond to court hearings, pay legal fines, or otherwise showing “contempt of court” in connection with a creditor lawsuit. That loophole has lawmakers in the Illinois House of Representatives concerned enough to pass a bill in March that would make it illegal to send residents of the state to jail if they can’t pay a debt. The measure awaits action in the senate.

“Creditors have been manipulating the court system to extract money from the unemployed, veterans, even seniors who rely solely on their benefits to get by each month,” Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan said last month in a statement voicing support for the legislation. “Too many people have been thrown in jail simply because they’re too poor to pay their debts. We cannot allow these illegal abuses to continue.”

Debt collectors typically avoid filing suit against debtors, a representative with the Illinois Collectors Association tells the AP. “A consumer that has been arrested or jailed can’t pay a debt. We want to work with consumers to resolve issues,” he said.

Yet Illinois isn’t the only state where residents get locked up for owing money. A 2010 report by the American Civil Liberties Union that focused on only five states – Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Washington — found that people were being jailed at “increasingly alarming rates” over legal debts. Cases ranged from a woman who was arrested four separate times for failing to pay $251 in fines and court costs related to a fourth-degree misdemeanor conviction, to a mentally ill juvenile jailed by a judge over a previous conviction for stealing school supplies.

According to the ACLU: “The sad truth is that debtors’ prisons are flourishing today, more than two decades after the Supreme Court prohibited imprisoning those who are too poor to pay their legal debts. In this era of shrinking budgets, state and local governments have turned aggressively to using the threat and reality of imprisonment to squeeze revenue out of the poorest defendants who appear in their courts.”

[Related: Spring Cleaning for Your Financial Records]

Some states also apply “poverty penalties,” including late fees, payment plan fees, and interest when people are unable to pay all their debts at once, according to a report by the New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. Alabama charges a 30 percent collection fee, for instance, while Florida allows private debt collectors to add a 40 percent surcharge on the original debt. Some Florida counties also use so-called collection courts, where debtors can be jailed but have no right to a public defender.

“Many states are imposing new and often onerous ‘user fees’ on individuals with criminal convictions,” the authors of the Brennan Center report wrote. “Yet far from being easy money, these fees impose severe — and often hidden — costs on communities, taxpayers, and indigent people convicted of crimes. They create new paths to prison for those unable to pay their debts and make it harder to find employment and housing as well to meet child-support obligations.”

Such practices, heightened in recent years by the effects of the recession, amount to criminalizing poverty, say critics in urging federal authorities to intervene. “More people are unemployed, more people are struggling financially, and more creditors are trying to get their debt paid,” Madigan told the AP.

SHAME !!!     SHAME !!!     SHAME !!!

What do YOU think, America?     Add your voice !!!

GadaboutUS

No Comments - Click here to leave a comment

More than two dozen Fortune 500 companies paid no U.S. federal income taxes in recent years partly because of a corporate tax break that is broadly supported by Republicans and Democrats alike, a consumer group said on Monday.

In at least half of the cases cited by the group, companies made use of accelerated depreciation, a tax provision that allows increased deductions in the early years of the life of an asset.

Citizens for Tax Justice, which advocates steeper corporate taxes, said it surveyed major U.S. companies and found that 26 on average paid no net federal income taxes between 2008 and 2011, among them General Electric and Duke Energy.

“This isn’t fair to the rest of us,” said Bob McIntyre, director of the left-leaning tax research group.

“Things do not get changed in the tax code unless someone asks,” McIntyre said, blaming company lobbying for a failure to thoroughly overhaul the U.S. tax code in 25 years.

Accelerated depreciation will cost the U.S. Treasury $37 billion between 2010 and 2014, according to a recent estimate by Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation.

Still, both President Barack Obama and Republicans have backed an expansion of the tax break through bonus depreciation, which gives companies an even faster and larger first-year write-off. Many policymakers backing accelerated depreciation have cited the need to jump-start the economic recovery.

Disparate tax rates between companies that heavily use accelerated depreciation and those that cannot is among inequities that are prompting lawmakers to begin debate on simplifying the tax code through a major rewrite. The last such rewrite occurred 25 years ago under President Ronald Reagan.

The U.S. government’s corporate tax receipts have been dwindling for decades, in part because of a plethora of special tax provisions in the code.

Revenue from corporate income taxes fell from between 5 percent and 6 percent of gross domestic product in the early 1950s to about 1.3 percent of GDP in 2010, according to the Tax Policy Center, another tax research group.

General Electric keeps its tax rate low — an average negative 19 percent between 2008 and 2011 — primarily by using tax benefits from its leasing business to offset profits in other units, such as the company’s finance arm, McIntyre said.

“All of our businesses, to some extent, have a lower total tax liability as a result of tax incentives at the federal, state or local level for certain investments and activities,” GE spokesman Andrew Williams said.

GE will pay U.S. taxes of about $1 billion for 2011 after three years of having paid no cash taxes, according to CTJ.

The company did not dispute those figures but said it will pay $2.9 billion for 2011 across all the countries where it operates.

Duke Energy’s average negative 3.5 percent tax rate over the four-year period largely resulted from accelerated depreciation, according to the CTJ study.

Duke spokesman Tom Williams said the study is misleading.

“We’re in a modernization phase now and we’ll have four new plants by the end of this year,” Williams said. “They cost $7 billion and so we’re taking the tax benefits allowed.”

Williams said the taxes will be paid eventually over the life of the assets. McIntyre said that may be true in some cases, but the companies can keep deferring taxes by generating more depreciation breaks.

Is this FAIR, America?     Welcome to the Best Congress and Senate that MONEY CAN BUY !!!

GadaboutUS

No Comments - Click here to leave a comment

No Comments - Click here to leave a comment