A steep decline in births among immigrant women hard hit by the recent recession is the driving force behind the record low U.S. birthrate, according to the Pew Research Center.

The annual number of births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 dropped 8% in the U.S. from 2007 to 2010 to 64 births per 1,000, according to a report released Thursday by the nonpartisan Pew center. The U.S. birthrate peaked during the baby boom, at 122.7 in 1957.

Immigrant women, both legal and illegal, still have a higher birthrate than the U.S. population as a whole. Yet the rate for foreign-born women dropped 14% between 2007 and 2010, to 87.8 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, compared with a 6% decline for U.S.-born women, to 58.9 births. The birthrate plunged 19% for immigrants of Hispanic origin during that period; among Mexicans, the largest group among Hispanics, the rate plunged 23%.

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I listened to NPR yesterday for over an hour back and forth from a doctors appointment.

The entire time they talked about President Obama’s proposal to implement the middle class tax cut now.
Everywhere I turn its middle class tax cut, middle class tax cut…

Except it isn’t but no one thinks about these things.

What is being proposed is not letting the current tax code STAY THE SAME.
So 98% of Americans WON”T HAVE A TAX INCREASE.

Since when is not having an increase a cut?

Anyone you know say I am getting the same number of days vacation this year as last year I am angry I get a benefits cut!

Thirty years have passed since French president François Mitterrand launched Europe’s last great wave of nationalisation, seizing the banks, insurance groups, arms makers and steel industry in the culminating debacle of the Collectivist era.

The whole world has been living in an era of privatisation ever since.

So it seems like a strange step back in time to hear France’s minister of industrial renewal, Arnaud Montebourg, threatening a “temporary public takeover” of ArcelorMittal’s steel operations in the Lorraine plateau ”“ purportedly to save the blast furnaces of Florange and their 2,500 workers, so sacred in the Socialist Party catechism.

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President Obama’s re-election and Democratic gains in Congress were supposed to make it easier for the party to strike a deal with Republicans to resolve the year-end fiscal crisis by providing new leverage. But they could also make it harder as empowered Democrats, including some elected on liberal platforms, resist significant changes in entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.

As Congress returned Monday, the debate over those programs, which many Democrats see as the core of the party’s identity, was shaping up as the Democratic version of the higher-profile struggle among Republicans over taxes.

In failed deficit reduction talks last year, Mr. Obama signaled a willingness to consider substantial changes in the social safety net, including a gradual increase in the eligibility age for Medicare and limits in the growth rate of future Social Security benefits. An urgent question hanging over the new round of deficit talks is which of those changes Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats would accept today….

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U.S. households owe a bit less than they did at the peak of the bubble. But they still owe a lot: $11.4 trillion, give or take a few billion. Mortgage and home-equity debt is still by far the biggest chunk of that debt.

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After six years of declines, lending for so-called Helocs will rise 30 percent to $79.6 billion in 2012, the highest level since the start of the financial crisis in 2008, according to the economics research unit of Moody’s Corp. Originations next year will jump another 31 percent to $104 billion, it projected.

Lending tied to real estate is reviving as record-low mortgage rates spur the housing recovery while an improving job market makes it easier for people to borrow. A rise in home equity lines is in turn helping the economy, fueling purchase of goods like televisions and refrigerators. Consumer spending, the biggest part of the economy, accelerated to a 2 percent annual rate last quarter from a 1.5 percent pace in the prior period.

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For the first time in decades, a bipartisan consensus has emerged in Washington to raise taxes. But negotiators working to avert the year-end “fiscal cliff” remain far apart on crucial details, including how taxes should go up and who should pay more.

Neither side gave ground in an opening round of staff-level talks last week at the Capitol. As President Obama and congressional leaders prepare for a second face-to-face meeting as soon as this week, the divide over taxes presents the biggest obstacle to replacing the heap of abrupt tax hikes and spending cuts, set to hit in January, with a less-traumatic debt-reduction plan.

People in both parties are exploring ideas for bridging the gap. Without a deal on taxes, there is not much hope for agreement on a broader strategy for restraining the national debt that also tackles the skyrocketing cost of federal retirement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

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Justin Welby, a former oil executive, may have hoped to have left the problems of Mammon behind on his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury, but he could be plunged into an immediate cash crisis.

The Church of England’s pension deficit could reach £500m by the end of this year, putting a huge financial burden on congregations, an independent pensions consultant has warned.

John Ralfe said congregations, who already pay £68m annually to support the Clergy Pensions Scheme’s 24,000 members, will have to find £108m a year if an existing plan to eliminate the deficit over 12 years is not extended.

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Hemp, once a major US crop, has been banned for years because of its close association with cannabis. But several states now want to resume hemp farming, and two states voted this month in favour of legalisation of cannabis. Could change be in the air?

There’s an all-American plant that weaves its way throughout the nation’s history.

The sails of Columbus’ ships were made from it. So was the first US flag. It was used in the paper on which the Declaration of Independence was printed.

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Tony Dokoupil..likes.the for-profit regulatory model in Colorado [going forward]…

“There’s a ban on advertising,” he explains. “There are cameras that track the marijuana from bloom to end-consumer, so the diversion into the black market is limited. There are extensive background checks on people who are part of the marketplace ”” so if you want to open a marijuana shop, you have to go through an extensive background check.”

Once that model is in place, the consumer side of things might look a lot like Starbucks.

“I think you will have a variety of products at different levels of intensity, exactly like Starbucks,” Dokoupil says. “You might be able to walk in there and in the case they’ll have 12 different strains of cannabis. Behind the counter there might be hash. There might be edibles, like fizzy drinks or brownies. There could be a hot dog wheel turning. You could put THC in anything.”

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Among the many disconcerting leaps of logic taken by the federal government is the omission of food and fuel prices from its measures of the consumer price index ”” inflation. Somehow that doesn’t ease the bottom-line purchasing pain at the grocery store and the gas pump.

OK, so as of Friday, the average price of a gallon of regular had fallen by more than 30 cents over the last month.

Still, that was more than 6 cents higher than it was on that date a year ago ”” and nearly double what it was in early 2008.

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Dubai announced plans for a huge tourism and retail development including the largest shopping mall in the world, a fresh sign that the glitzy emirate has recovered its commercial ambitions after a crippling corporate debt crisis three years ago.

The development, on the outskirts of Dubai’s current downtown area, will include a park 30 percent bigger than Hyde Park in London, said Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, also prime minister of the United Arab Emirates.

A retail complex named the “Mall of the World” will be able to host 80 million visitors a year and include over 100 hotel facilities, Sheikh Mohammed said in a statement on Saturday.

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In the summer of 2011, after I completed six years of graduate school and internship training and was about to start my psychotherapy practice, I sat down with my clinical supervisor in the Los Angeles office we’d be sharing. It had been a rigorous six years, transitioning from my role as a full-time journalist always on tight deadlines to that of a therapist whose world was broken into slow, thoughtful hours listening and trying to help people come to a deeper understanding of their lives. My supervisor went over the filing systems, billing procedures and ethical quandaries like whether to take referrals from current clients, but we never discussed how I would get these clients. I fully assumed, in what now seems like an astounding fit of naïveté, that I’d send out an e-mail announcement and network with doctors, and to paraphrase “Field of Dreams,” if I built it, they would come.

Except that they didn’t. What nobody taught me in grad school was that psychotherapy, a practice that had sustained itself for more than a century, is losing its customers. If this came as a shock to me, the American Psychological Association tried to send out warnings in a 2010 paper titled, “Where Has all the Psychotherapy Gone?….”

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The Tennessee Court of Appeals is considering whether facilities that operate like businesses within a tax-exempted church should be subject to property taxes.

Advocates for a Nashville church argued in the state appeals court that a gym, a bookstore and a cafe on its property “fit the spiritual needs of a congregation,” and shouldn’t be taxed.

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There are nine in all–check them out (ugh).

Police say a Massachusetts man left his girlfriend’s 2-year-old son in a car while he went shopping for Black Friday bargains, then went home with his new 51-inch flat screen television and left the toddler behind.

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Congressional negotiators, trying to avert a fiscal crisis in January, are examining ideas that would allow effective tax rates to rise for the wealthy without technically raising the top tax rate of 35 percent. They hope the proposals will advance negotiations by allowing both parties to claim they stood their ground.

One possible change would tax the entire salary earned by those making more than a certain level ”” $400,000 or so ”” at the top rate of 35 percent rather than allowing them to pay lower rates before they reach the target, as is the standard formula. That plan would allow Republicans to say they did not back down in their opposition to raising marginal tax rates and Democrats to say they prevailed by increasing effective tax rates on the rich. At the same time, it would provide an initial effort to reduce the deficit, which the negotiators call a down payment, as Congressional tax-writing committees hash out a broad overhaul of the tax code.

That idea could be combined with the reinstatement of tax code provisions that once prevented the rich from taking personal exemptions or itemizing deductions. Those rules were eliminated by the tax cut of 2001. Reinstating them would tack an additional one to two percentage points onto the effective tax rates of high-income households without raising the 35 percent rate, but which households would be affected has not been decided. In all, tax experts say, families in the top tax bracket would find their effective tax rate jump to 41 percent, even though the top statutory rate would remain 35 percent.

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Dr. Ernest Zeringue was looking for a niche in the cutthroat industry of fertility treatments.

He seized on price, a huge obstacle for many patients, and in late 2010 began advertising a deal at his Davis, Calif., clinic unheard of anywhere else: Pregnancy for $9,800 or your money back….

People buying this option from Zeringue must accept concessions: They have no genetic connection to their children, and those children will probably have full biological siblings born to other parents….

“I am horrified by the thought of this,” said Andrew Vorzimer, a Los Angeles fertility lawyer alarmed that a company ”” not would-be parents ”” controls embryos. “It is nothing short of the commodification of children.”

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Most of the increases would result from the expiration of Bush-era tax cuts, which would cause marginal rates to rise. Simultaneously, several temporary tax breaks pushed by President Barack Obamaafter the financial crisis also would end.

And most households””121 million in all””would be hit by an increase in the payroll tax that employees pay to 6.2% from 4.2%.

Also expiring at year-end is a provision to reduce the so-called marriage penalty, a set of tax provisions that require many couples to pay higher taxes when they file jointly. And millions more families’ earnings this year would be subject to the alternative minimum tax. The AMT was originally intended to prevent the very wealthy from avoiding taxes but would apply to middle-class households if policy makers don’t renew a provision that expired last year.

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…the biggest loopholes in the U.S. Tax Code ”” generally referred to as tax expenditures ”” aren’t just the tricks of the trade for millionaires with offshore bank accounts. For the vast majority of Americans, they’re just how things work: You don’t pay taxes on your health insurance or Medicare benefits; you contribute tax-free to your 401(k); and your mortgage interest pushes down your tax bill each year.

And even if you dump the biggest of the set, these tax perks don’t even come close to closing the deficit. At best, the top 10 would pull in an extra $834 billion a year, according to Joint Committee on Taxation figures. Considering the hole lawmakers are trying to fill is several trillion dollars large, it’s clear they wouldn’t even come close.

Here are the 10 biggest tax loopholes ”” and the reasons why most of them will survive the fiscal cliff….

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[When Charles] Proudfit… [became a Christian] he was eager to “apply my new faith to every area of my life, including my work.” But when he looked to his church for guidance, he was stymied.

“The local church doesn’t deal much with everyday realities for the working people in the pews,” he laments. So, “more out of exasperation than inspiration,” Proudfit founded the Cincinnati-based marketplace ministry At Work on Purpose (AWOP).

That AWOP formed independently of the church is common, says Princeton University scholar David W. Miller. Author of God at Work: The History and Promise of the Faith at Work Movement, Miller notes that most marketplace ministries “have formed outside the authority, involvement, or impetus of the church.” What is uncommon is AWOP’s holistic approach to integrating faith and work among its 5,000-plus members in the Cincinnati metro area. It’s moving past a narrow focus on workplace evangelism to include ethics, social responsibility, and citywide engagement””a model that more marketplace ministries are embracing across the nation.

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At some point over the past generation, people around the world entered what you might call the age of possibility. They became intolerant of any arrangement that might close off their personal options.

The transformation has been liberating, and it’s leading to some pretty astounding changes. For example, for centuries, most human societies forcefully guided people into two-parent families. Today that sort of family is increasingly seen as just one option among many….

My view is that the age of possibility is based on a misconception. People are not better off when they are given maximum personal freedom to do what they want. They’re better off when they are enshrouded in commitments that transcend personal choice ”” commitments to family, God, craft and country.

The surest way people bind themselves is through the family….

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[Moody’s] said France’s long-term economic growth had been hit by its inflexible labour market and low levels of innovation eroding its competitiveness and industrial base.

Moody’s also flagged up the country’s exposure to the continuing eurozone crisis.

It warned the “predictability” of France’s resilence of further shocks in the eurozone was diminishing while the country’s exposure to the highly indebted countries such as Spain and Greece was disproportionately high.

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For the first time in its nearly 100-year history, Orlando Health is reducing its workforce by up to 400 positions starting immediately, hospital officials announced this morning.

The elimination of 300 to 400 jobs will occur in two phases, and represents a 2- to 3-percent decrease in the system’s 16,000 employees, said Orlando Health spokeswoman Kena Lewis. The reductions affect all departments and all eight of its hospitals, including Orlando Regional Medical Center and Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children.

The first wave of employees affected by the “labor expense reduction” portion of the initiative received their notices Friday, said Lewis. The next wave of downsizing will happen after the first of the year.

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U.S. companies are scaling back investment plans at the fastest pace since the recession, signaling more trouble for the economic recovery.

Half of the nation’s 40 biggest publicly traded corporate spenders have announced plans to curtail capital expenditures this year or next, according to a review by The Wall Street Journal of securities filings and conference calls.

Nationwide, business investment in equipment and software””a measure of economic vitality in the corporate sector””stalled in the third quarter for the first time since early 2009. Corporate investment in new buildings has declined.

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The threat of the euro’s collapse has abated for the moment, but putting the single currency right will involve years of pain. The pressure for reform and budget cuts is fiercest in Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy, which all saw mass strikes and clashes with police this week…. But ahead looms a bigger problem that could dwarf any of these: France.

The country has always been at the heart of the euro, as of the European Union. President François Mitterrand argued for the single currency because he hoped to bolster French influence in an EU that would otherwise fall under the sway of a unified Germany. France has gained from the euro: it is borrowing at record low rates and has avoided the troubles of the Mediterranean. Yet even before May, when François Hollande became the country’s first Socialist president since Mitterrand, France had ceded leadership in the euro crisis to Germany. And now its economy looks increasingly vulnerable as well.

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You can be sold in seconds.

No, wait: make that milliseconds.

The odds are that access to you ”” or at least the online you ”” is being bought and sold in less than the blink of an eye. On the Web, powerful algorithms are sizing you up, based on myriad data points: what you Google, the sites you visit, the ads you click. Then, in real time, the chance to show you an ad is auctioned to the highest bidder.

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The eurozone’s return to recession is particularly bad news because it is now hitting once strong economies like Germany. This means the recession will last longer and have a bigger impact on U.S. consumers and companies.

Figures released today showed that collectively the economies of the 17-country eurozone contracted by 0.1 percent between July and September. While this is a slight improvement over the second quarter of the year when it shrank by 0.2 percent, the definition of a recession is two straight quarters of contraction. Most analysts believe that the recession will continue at least until the end of 2012.

“The recession in southern Europe is slowly creeping to other countries,” says Martin Van Vliet, an analyst with ING. “If you look at the indicators for the fourth quarter you see that even Germany many not grow again and that shows that the economy has an enormous need for a new impulse.”

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Of the two programs, Social Security is by far the easier to fix. In 1983, a bipartisan agreement shored up the program for decades. It can be rescued again, much as it was then, by gradually raising the retirement age for able-bodied workers and bumping up the payroll tax. Other options include slowly reducing the rate of benefit growth, raising the wage cap and tightening eligibility requirements for disability

The more urgent and difficult issue is the surge in spending on Medicare, Medicaid and related programs. The numbers tell the story. In 1990, Washington spent $180 billion on health care, accounting for 14% of federal spending. In 2017, the expected tab is $1.4 trillion, or 30% of federal spending. As President Obama said at his news conference Wednesday, “Health care costs continue to be the biggest driver of our deficits.”

One obvious place to start is bringing the Medicare eligibility age in line with that of Social Security. In their failed budget negotiations in 2011, Obama and House Speaker John Boehner tentatively agreed to raise it from 65 to 67. Such a rise would cut the government’s bill while increasing the share of the population in market-based health care.

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The Federal Housing Administration is expected to report this week it could exhaust its reserves because of rising mortgage delinquencies, according to people familiar with the agency’s finances, a development that could result in the agency needing to draw on taxpayer funding for the first time in its 78-year history.

Such a report would likely set off a political fight over the government’s role in housing, as it raises the prospect of billions of dollars being added to the U.S. government’s effort to stabilize the hard-hit sector in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, which already includes $137 billion spent to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Together with Fannie and Freddie, federal agencies are backing nearly nine in 10 new mortgages.

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