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Barney Frank's Fannie and Freddie Racism Regarding the Financial Crisis
Tweet Share on Facebook October 8, 2008 Comment (50)Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, is doing his best to outshine Joe Biden in the silly comments department. As the Associated Press reports:
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Thomas Friedman's McCarthyite Tax Attack on Sarah Palin
Tweet Share on Facebook October 8, 2008 Comment (29)In today's New York Times, columnist Thomas Friedman takes Sarah Palin to the woodshed for her rebuttal in last Thursday's veep debate to one of Joe Biden's sillier comments. "You said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic," Palin told Biden. "In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been all of our lives, that's not patriotic."
After thinking about it for a week, here is Friedman's considered reaction:
What an awful statement. Palin defended the government's $700 billion rescue plan. She defended the surge in Iraq, where her own son is now serving. She defended sending more troops to Afghanistan. And yet, at the same time, she declared that Americans who pay their fair share of taxes to support all those government-led endeavors should not be considered patriotic.
What a pernicious twisting of Palin's statement. The Alaska governor never said that paying one's "fair" share of taxes is unpatriotic—that was Friedman's subjective word. Given her opposition to the Obama-Biden plan to raise taxes on all U.S. businesses and wealthier Americans, no doubt Palin holds different ideas on what is "fair."
What Palin did do, however, was call out a politician who, like some relic of the church indulgences scheme, would put a price on patriotism. And just like Biden, Friedman, too, reaches the facile conclusion that the only expression of patriotism is for (other) Americans to pay more taxes.
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Labor Union Bosses’ Secret Slush Funds to Be Laid Bare
Tweet Share on Facebook October 7, 2008 Comment (3)Amid the finger-pointing over accountability and transparency on Wall Street, virtually unnoticed is a new disclosure rule issued last week by the Labor Department that forces unions to make public huge slush funds hidden for half a century.
At issue are T-1 trusts—rainy-day funds initially designed to retrain union workers in the event of workplace changes. The trusts were originally known as “nickel funds” because companies would contribute 5 cents for every hour worked by a union member, but current contributions can run as high as $10.
So how much money are we talking about? Aside from Big Labor bosses, no one rightly knows.
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Congress Demands a Blank Check for Bailout
Tweet Share on Facebook October 2, 2008 Comment (8)When talk of the bailout first began last week, lawmakers insisted they wouldn't simply hand a "blank check" to the Treasury Department. But now that's what Congress wants from Treasury.
To win enough votes for passage, negotiators for the $700 billion bailout are now adding $120 billion more in "sweeteners." Some of these—like ensuring mental health problems receive better coverage from insurance companies—have absolutely nothing to do with market priming. Others are only tangentially related. Among the latter are hurricane tax relief, modest alternative minimum tax reform, more subsidies for renewable energies, and tax exemptions for businesses.
