The Council on American-Islamic Relations has earned a fierce reputation for defending Muslim civil rights.

Middle Tennessee Muslims turned to the group this year over a proposed state law they feared would threaten their faith. When vandals torched a Columbia mosque and construction equipment at the new Islamic Center of Murfreesboro site, CAIR demanded authorities investigate both incidents as hate crimes.

But the Washington, D.C.-based group’s work is being threatened as it faces scrutiny for failing to file tax returns.

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This came in this morning from a friend who lives in Washington:

WA state is so good. I got my new property tax assessment yd, house and land dropped 8.3% but property will will actually be $194.67 higher each 6 months. ggggg what a deal

The question about the prospects for Greece is not whether the country will default. That is, in my view, as near to a certainty as any such thing can be. The question is whether a default would be enough to return the economy to reasonable health. I strongly doubt it. The country seems too uncompetitive for that. A default is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for a return to economic health….

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Home values in Snohomish County continued a prolonged slide this year, according to assessment notices that should arrive soon.

Assessment notices being mailed this week show a dip of nearly 13 percent in value for residential properties. That’s the largest falloff since 2008, when housing declines began to show up in county assessments….

You might think then that the taxes on real estate would therefore be less. You would be wrong–they could be, but they may not be. Why?

Because of Washington’s budget-based taxing system, taxes can go up even when property values decline.

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South Carolina legislators gave final approval Wednesday to a deal bringing Amazon.com Inc. and its promise of 2,000 jobs to the state.

The House voted 90-14 to approve a compromise brokered last week in the Senate, sending the measure to Gov. Nikki Haley’s desk. ‘It’s a great day for South Carolina and the unemployed people of the state,’ Sen. Jake Knotts, R-West Columbia, said after the vote. ‘We welcome Amazon!’

Haley opposes the measure but has repeatedly said she won’t veto it. The Republican governor has called it bad policy that’s unfair to retailers that collect the tax. If not signed or vetoed, the bill would become law after five days. ‘Nothing has changed’ about her position, Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey said after the vote.

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The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Tuesday said the imposition of a new tax on cars and trucks based on how many miles they drive would be one way of generating revenues for the federal Highway Trust Fund.

Joseph Kile, CBO’s assistant director for microeconomic studies, told the Senate Finance Committee that a tax on vehicle miles traveled (VMT) would help the Highway Trust Fund meet its spending goals, in particular because the Fund is already spending more than it collects through the federal gas tax.

But he also said the tax would better align highway costs with revenue generation, and promote the more efficient use of the highway system.

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…here’s the question for 2012: If we the people don’t want the higher taxes that are needed to support not only ObamaCare but a growing federal government, are we willing to support the real cuts that go along with that choice? And if we decide we don’t want these programs touched, will we accept the higher taxes that go along with keeping them, including for people making a lot less than $250,000?

This is the heart of the argument shaping up between Mr. Obama and Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee. Manifestly Mr. Obama believes that as much as Americans say they want smaller government, the moment they find one of their favorite programs (e.g., Medicare) up for consideration, they balk.

Mr. Ryan and Republicans make the opposite bet: The president’s spending has made Americans more willing to face up to these choices, especially if the alternative is higher taxes on more people.

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Charleston County was told today it has 60 days to pay back the $11.6 million it accepted to build the Interstate 526 expansion or the State Infrastructure Bank will take legal action.

Council Chairman Teddie Pryor has said that up to 200 staff members could be laid off and services cut to make up for a $10 million shortfall in its new budget because it decided not to build the expansion.

Police, emergency medical and other vital services will not be axed, but libraries, drainage-ditch cleaning and mosquito control could suffer, Pryor said.

Read it all from the front page of the local paper.

As recession-racked cities struggle to balance their budgets with everything short of feeling behind sofa cushions for loose change, a growing number are seeking more money ”” just don’t use the word taxes ”” from nonprofit institutions that occupy valuable land but by law do not pay property taxes.

Boston has been sending letters to its largest nonprofit institutions this year, telling them the value of their land and asking them to begin making annual payments that would eventually rise to a quarter of what they would owe if they paid property taxes. Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel of Chicago wants the city to begin charging water fees to nonprofits, which have been spared them in the past. And the mayor of Providence, R.I., Angel Taveras, cited Boston’s example this month when he called on nonprofits to pay more money to the city.
“Every citizen, every city worker, every taxpayer, every business and every organization ”” including tax-exempt institutions ”” must share part of the burden of saving our city,” Mr. Taveras said in his budget address. He proposed closing Providence’s $109 million budget gap by shutting schools, laying off workers, cutting the Police and Fire Department budgets and raising taxes on homeowners as well as seeking larger payments from the city’s prestigious universities and other nonprofit institutions.

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Companies looking to do business in secret once had to travel to places like the Cayman Islands or Bermuda.

Today, all it takes is a trip to Vermont.

Vermont, and a handful of other states including Utah, South Carolina, Delaware and Hawaii, are aggressively remaking themselves as destinations of choice for the kind of complex private insurance transactions once done almost exclusively offshore. Roughly 30 states have passed some type of law to allow companies to set up special insurance subsidiaries called captives, which can conduct Bermuda-style financial wizardry right in a policyholder’s own backyard.

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Amazon all but told South Carolina goodbye Wednesday after the online retailer lost a legislative showdown on a sales tax collection exemption it wants to open a distribution center that would bring 1,249 jobs to the Midlands.

Company officials immediately halted plans to equip and staff the one million-square-foot building under construction at I-77 and 12th Street near Cayce.

“As a result of today’s unfortunate House vote, we’ve canceled $52 million in procurement contracts and removed all South Carolina fulfillment center job postings from our (Web) site,” said Paul Misener, Amazon vice president for global public policy.

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In reality, finding a way to raise taxes may well be the central political problem facing the United States.

As countries become richer, their citizens tend to want more public services, be it a strong military or a decent safety net in retirement. This country is no exception. Yet our political culture is an exception. It has made most tax increases, even to pay for benefits people want, unthinkable.

This is where the Bush tax cuts come in. They have created a way for inertia to be fiscally responsible.

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The scale of America’s deficit and debt problem is staggering.

Thanks to an ageing population, exploding health care costs and inaction from both sides of politics, the Government Accountability Office now estimates that the United States is looking down the barrel of a $90 trillion fiscal gap over the next 75 years.

Treasury secretary Tim Geithner estimates that the US is adding about $125 billion of debt each month and the nation is expected to hit its $14.3 trillion debt ceiling in May.

Former treasury secretary James Baker describes the “debt bomb” as the number one problem for America.

“If we didn’t have the dollar as the de facto reserve currency of the world, we’d be Greece. I mean we are broke,” he exclaimed on CNN.

But doing something about it would take real gumption and the political cycle isn’t helping….

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The US lacks a “credible strategy” to stabilise its mounting public debt, posing a small but significant risk of a new global economic crisis, says the International Monetary Fund.

In an unusually stern rebuke to its largest shareholder, the IMF said the US was the only advanced economy to be increasing its underlying budget deficit in 2011, at a time when its economy was growing fast enough to reduce borrowing.

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If you want to understand better why so many states””from New York to Wisconsin to California””are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.

It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?

Every state in America today except for two””Indiana and Wisconsin””has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods.

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[South Carolina]… legislators seem convinced that there are only three things they can do about taxes: Raise them, slash them, or ignore the issue. But there’s a fourth option, and it works and is desperately needed whether they ultimately raise taxes, lower them or leave them just where they are: Fix them.

Our tax code was built on the tried-and-true “three-legged stool” formulation, deriving roughly equal revenue from the sales, income and property taxes. But that balance has become skewed, as we rely far too heavily on the sales tax, making our tax system much too volatile. And there are significant problems within each major tax ”” as well as with the minor taxes ”” that create gross inequities and prevent revenue growth from keeping pace with economic growth.

The most obvious, smack-you-in-the-face problem is our 85 sales tax exemptions, which result in more goods being untaxed than taxed and are the target of a lawsuit pending in the state Supreme Court. And the grossest example of bad exemption policy is the $300 tax cap on automobiles, which means people who buy clunkers pay the same tax as those who buy luxury cars ”” and boats and planes.

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The state budget squeeze is fast becoming a city budget squeeze, as struggling states around the nation plan deep cuts in aid to cities and local governments that will almost certainly result in more service cuts, layoffs and local tax increases.

The cuts are widespread. Ohio plans to slash aid to Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati and other cities and local governments by more than a half-billion dollars over the next two years under the budget proposed last week by its new Republican governor, John R. Kasich. Nebraska passed a law this month eliminating direct state aid to Omaha and other municipalities. The governors of Wisconsin and Michigan have called for sending less money to Milwaukee, Detroit and other local governments.

And it is not only Republicans who are cutting aid to cities: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, a Democrat, decided not to restore $302 million in aid to New York City that was cut last year, while Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, another Democrat, has called for cutting local aid to Boston and other cities by some $65 million.

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The president is right ”” if America is to be competitive in this new knowledge-based global economy, we must invest in education, infrastructure and high-value-added research in a fiscally responsible manner.

But House Republicans are also right ”” spending is out of control, and there is no way possible to address our burgeoning debt without real spending cuts. That means finding ways to make government perform more efficiently, while scaling back or even eliminating certain government functions altogether.

Yet by focusing primarily on domestic discretionary spending, neither plan goes at all far enough to deal with our medium- or long-term fiscal challenges.

With the Fiscal Commission, we spent 10 months closely studying the cold, hard facts. Together, we came to the unavoidable conclusions that the problem is real, the solution will be painful, there is no easy way out and everything must be on the table.

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In the private sector, the capitalist knows that when he negotiates with the union, if he gives away the store, he loses his shirt. In the public sector, the politicians who approve any deal have none of their own money at stake. On the contrary, the more favorably they dispose of union demands, the more likely they are to be the beneficiary of union largess in the next election. It’s the perfect cozy setup.

To redress these perverse incentives that benefit both negotiating parties at the expense of the taxpayer, Walker’s bill would restrict future government-union negotiations to wages only. Excluded from negotiations would be benefits, the more easily hidden sweeteners that come due long after the politicians who negotiated them are gone. The bill would also require that unions be recertified every year and that dues be voluntary.

Recognizing this threat to union power, the Democratic Party is pouring money and fury into the fight. Fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers are unionized. The Democrats’ strength lies in government workers, who now constitute a majority of union members and provide massive support to the party. For them, Wisconsin represents a dangerous contagion.

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…let’s try to put aside the hyperventilation. Everybody now seems to agree that Governor Walker was right to ask state workers to pay more for their benefits. Even if he gets everything he asks for, Wisconsin state workers would still be contributing less to their benefits than the average state worker nationwide and would be contributing far, far less than private sector workers.

The more difficult question is whether Walker was right to try to water down Wisconsin’s collective bargaining agreements. Even if you acknowledge the importance of unions in representing middle-class interests, there are strong arguments on Walker’s side. In Wisconsin and elsewhere, state-union relations are structurally out of whack.

That’s because public sector unions and private sector unions are very different creatures. Private sector unions push against the interests of shareholders and management; public sector unions push against the interests of taxpayers. Private sector union members know that their employers could go out of business, so they have an incentive to mitigate their demands; public sector union members work for state monopolies and have no such interest.

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John Boyd writes:

The leaders of both political parties have come to embrace the philosophy of the common box turtle. They believe the key to success is to refuse to “go first” and never “lead with your chin.” They are convinced the loser will be the one who is forced to propose solutions to the problems they were elected to solve. This behavior is not acceptable.

We expect our leaders to analyze the pressing issues of the day based on the best information available and then to reach a consensus concerning the best course of action.

Read the rest of his letter and the others also.

Many economists warn that the government’s huge national debt is a looming threat to long-term prosperity. But is it also immoral?
According to a growing number of conservative Christians, the answer is a resounding “Yes.”

As Washington debates President Obama’s proposed 2012 budget, the morality of the deficit has become the hot topic on right-leaning Christian blogs, radio programs and political mailings.

The concern is not only that the estimated $14.13 trillion debt could cripple the economy, some conservative Christian leaders say, but also that borrowing so much money violates important biblical tenets.

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Let’s indulge Mr Obama in his fantasy economics: imagine that he does reduce the deficit to 3.1%. Supposedly, that would stabilise government debt: but it would do so at a dangerously high level of around 80% of GDP, and as interest rates rise the target will become much harder to hit. And that is before you consider the biggest problem of all: as more and more baby-boomers retire (the first started to do so this year), their demands for pensions and government-provided health care will start to push the deficit sharply up again after that.

Indeed, the real problem with both Mr Obama’s budget and the Republicans’ proposals is not so much the half-truths and fibs within them, as all the things they both left out. America needs to simplify its tax system and (slightly) increase its overall tax take. It needs to rein in its defence spending, which is currently equivalent to that of the next 20 countries combined. And it needs to tackle the gathering surge in entitlement costs. All these recommendations were made by the deficit-reduction commission that Mr Obama himself set up, but his budget conspicuously fails to take up any of them. Other debt-burdened Western countries have embarked on a stringent diet. America continues to gorge.

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When Congress takes up President Obama’s fiscal 2012 budget, the debate will center on just a fraction of the overall $3.7 trillion budget: his proposals on spending and how to pay for them.

Not counting what the government spends on national security and social safety-net programs such as Medicare and Social Security, spending on other domestic programs accounts for just 12% of the overall budget.

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I wonder if Mr. Obama is at all embarrassed by the 2012 budget. Like his previous two budgets, this one breaks all those “Morning in America” campaign promises of a “new” Washington.

The 2012 budget also is a repudiation of the findings of his very own bipartisan deficit commission.

The Bowles-Simpson commission had plenty of sensible recommendations, like cutting funds for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, eliminating the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools and raising the qualifying age for Social Security.

But you’ll find precious little of this in the 2012 budget. At the White House, political sense apparently matters a lot more than common sense.

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During Palenville Pagan Pride Day in August, the agenda reflected the goddess-centered theology of the Divine Feminine, which members say has its roots 12,000 years ago in the Goddess Cybele in Central Anatolia, in Turkey.

So after the opening ritual at 9 a.m. and sandwiched around “Lunchtime with the Priestesses,” the schedule at the old Central House inn included “The Goddess in Antiquity,” “Pagans in the Mundane World” and sessions on sacred drumming patterns, dragon rituals and the Cybeline Revival.

Still, it was the least celestial item that perhaps mattered most. That would be “Discussion of Maetreum of Cybele v. Town of Catskill, N.Y.,” a legal case dating to 2007 after the town first approved and then denied tax-exempt status for the group, which has been certified by the federal government as a tax-exempt religious charity. The goddess may rule the universe, but the lawyers will help decide whether the pagans of Palenville have a future in this historic old town just down the snowy hills from Hunter Mountain.

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[KATHY] LOHR: During the State of the State address, the governor said he would eliminate some 14,000 vacant jobs. He’s also calling for state agencies to reduce budgets by an average of 7 percent. That means cuts to higher education, Medicaid and services for the elderly. But Deal says there’s no other way.

Mr. [NATHAN] DEAL: Our state’s fortunes do not rise or fall on the size of state government.

LOHR: Georgia has been cutting its budget for years. Since 2009, the size of the budget has shrunk by 15 percent.

Alan Essig with the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute says that’s caused a kind of budget fatigue here.

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Social Security’s finances are getting worse as the economy struggles to recover and millions of baby boomers stand at the brink of retirement.

New congressional projections show Social Security running deficits every year until its trust funds are eventually drained in about 2037.

This year alone, Social Security is projected to collect $45 billion less in payroll taxes than it pays out in retirement, disability and survivor benefits, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday….

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Now that bipartisan commission has reported, but Mr. Obama didn’t fully endorse any of its recommendations. To the contrary, he promised more jobs for teachers and construction workers. He warned against “slashing” Social Security benefits. Corporate tax reform is fine, but if it’s revenue-neutral, it only postpones – and makes more politically difficult – the task of narrowing the nation’s deficit.

So what happens now? Maybe some members of Congress will display the courage the president has lacked. Maybe Mr. Obama, in the budget he proposes next month, will grapple more realistically with the hard choices than he did Tuesday night. But even if he does, how can he expect public support if he hasn’t made the case? From the man who promised to change Washington, it seemed all too drearily familiar.

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Co-op and condo owners will pay sharply higher property taxes next year, under a preliminary assessment roll released Friday by the Bloomberg administration. The city attributed the rises, due to take effect in July, to higher market values placed on apartment buildings by tax assessors.

Taxes collections are expected to rise by 7.5% for co-op owners, and 9.6% for condo owners across the city, according to a summary report released by the Department of Finance….

Stuart M. Saft, a real-estate lawyer and chairman of the Council of New York Cooperatives and Condominiums, said he “absolutely” attributed the significant increases to city budget pressures, and said city finance officials were looking for ways to maximize city revenues.

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