Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently offered a stark assessment of the threat to his state’s future that is posed by mounting pension and retiree health-care bills for government workers. Unless Illinois enacts reform quickly, he said, the costs of these programs will force taxes so high that, “You won’t recruit a business, you won’t recruit [...]
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On Monday, a 38-year-old geology lecturer hanged himself from a lamp post in Athens and on the same day a 35-year-old priest jumped to his death off his balcony in northern Greece. On Wednesday, a 23-year-old student shot himself in the head. In a country that has had one of the lowest suicide rates in [...]
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More than 1 million Americans who have taken out mortgages in the past two years now owe more on their loans than their homes are worth, and Federal Housing Administration loans that require only a tiny down payment are partly to blame. That figure, provided to Reuters by tracking firm CoreLogic, represents about one out [...]
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House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday that President Barack Obama was acting “beneath the dignity of the White House” when he traveled around the country this week to pressure Republicans to help keep federal student loan costs from ballooning. Boehner said Obama should reimburse taxpayers for the trips’ costs. The Ohio Republican spoke a day [...]
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Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown’s re-election campaign is taking aim at Elizabeth Warren, his chief Democratic rival, for her refusal to release six years of income tax returns and for accepting a zero-interest loan from her employer more than 15 years ago. In a series of press releases sent on Tuesday, Brown’s campaign manager Jim [...]
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While markets are again correctly obsessing over Italy and Spain’s poor economic growth prospects, as reflected in markedly higher government bond yields for those two countries, they seem to have taken their eye off two upcoming political events that could usher in a new and more serious phase of the European debt crisis. The first [...]
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Spain Bans Cash Transactions Over 2,500 Euros … Spain has outlawed the use of cash in business transactions in excess 2,500 euros in order to crack down on the black market and tax evaders. The motivations behind the push for digital currencies is exposed as Spain heads down the road of the Greeks in combating [...]
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‘California is God’s best moment,” says Joel Kotkin. “It’s the best place in the world to live.” Or at least it used to be. Mr. Kotkin, one of the nation’s premier demographers, left his native New York City in 1971 to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley. The state was a far-out paradise for [...]
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The Republican-controlled House voted Thursday to extend new tax cuts to businesses with fewer than 500 employees, a move designed to contrast with a Democratic push this week to impose higher taxes on those making more than $1 million a year. The measure was approved on a largely party-line vote of 235 to 173, with both sides [...]
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The Democrats’ decision was revealed in a series of surprise announcements by Sen. Kent Conrad, the chairman of the Democratic-controlled budget committee. In several statements Tuesday afternoon, Conrad announced that he would not try to pass a budget, that he would introduce his own draft budget for the committee to consider, and finally, that he [...]
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Vote on ‘Buffett Rule’ falls 9 short of 60 needed Warren E. Buffett’s secretary will continue to pay a higher tax rate than her billionaire boss — and tax fairness will remain a central campaign issue — after the Senate Republican minority blocked a tax hike on millionaires from moving forward Monday. The so-called “Buffett [...]
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U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner warned Congress against repeating last year’s “very damaging” debate over the debt limit and said the economy is stronger than at any time in the past several years. “It would be good for the country, if this time, they did it with less drama and less politics and less damage to [...]
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Disappointing jobs data is driving fresh speculation over whether the Federal Reserve might take extra moves to boost the economy. If recent reports are an indication that the economy may be losing steam, the central bank could feel compelled to act with another policy move that could boost markets but also expose it and its [...]
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Former Vice President Dick Cheney walked onstage without any assistance and spoke for an hour and 15 minutes without seeming to tire in his first public engagement since he underwent a heart transplant three weeks ago. “He has been an unmitigated disaster to the country,” Cheney said of President Barack Obama. “I can’t think of [...]
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Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a conservative audience what it wanted to hear Friday, accusing President Barack Obama of leading the country away from the founding fathers’ vision and “toward limited freedom and limited opportunity.” In an address to the National Rifle Association’s convention billed by Romney’s advisers as a launch of his general [...]
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