About a third of hospitals serving South Carolinians collected a combined $110 million in state and federal taxpayer money last year through a program designed to reward medical centers that provide high levels of uncompensated care.

But those 18 hospitals, which include three in the Charleston area, actually do not provide a disproportionate amount of care to uninsured South Carolinians and those enrolled in government-sponsored insurance programs.

Now the state is cutting payments to those hospitals by about 8 percent, saving taxpayers nearly $9 million annually.

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The graph is a helpful one.

The sharp rise in federal borrowing is offsetting efforts of consumers to reduce debt, leaving the economy deeper in debt than when the recession began in December 2007, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

The substitution of government debt for consumer debt helped end the recession and start a recovery, economists say, but it leaves the nation’s long-term economic health in peril.

Households have reduced debt by $549billion since 2007, mostly by cutting mortgages through defaults and paying down credit cards. During that time, the federal government has added more than $4trillion in debt, pushing the country’s total borrowing to a record $36.5trillion, excluding the financial industry, according to the Federal Reserve.

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A financial transaction tax would be the wrong choice for Europe at any time; and particularly now.

To understand the impact of FTT, we need to answer four essential questions. Is it an efficient means of raising tax revenue? Would it benefit the end-users of the financial markets, both businesses and consumers? Would it enable the creation of economic growth and jobs? And would it make financial markets more stable?

First, financial services is a mobile, global and highly competitive sector. The European Commission’s suggests that Europe would lose 10 per cent of its securities market, 40 per cent of its spot currency market and 70 to 90 per cent of its derivatives market if FTT were introduced.
These are alarming numbers and economically very damaging ”” and they are not mere conjecture. Sweden’s FTT (from 1984 to 1991), resulted in between 90 and 99 per cent of traders in bonds, equities and derivatives moving from Stockholm to London. This was an expensive lesson for Sweden. Its experience should prevent Europe from making a similar mistake.

Second, what will be the impact on users of financial markets, including ordinary consumers? Economic theory suggests that a transaction tax would largely be passed on to end-users, whether they are savers, investors or businesses. The European Commission itself makes this point.

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Many City workers feel the gap between rich and poor in the UK is too great, according to a report by a think-tank.

The St Paul’s Institute report, Value and Values: Perceptions of Ethics in the City Today, said 75% of respondents thought the wealth divide was too big.

The findings were based on a survey in August of 515 financial professionals.

The think-tank is linked to St Paul’s Cathedral, in London, where protesters against corporate greed have been demonstrating since 15 October.

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What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent””to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic.

Then we need to download the updates that are running more successfully in other countries, from Finland to New Zealand, from Denmark to Hong Kong, from Singapore to Sweden.

And finally we need to reboot our whole system.

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As Daniel Yergin writes in “The Quest,” his gripping history of energy innovation, [George] Mitchell fought through waves of skepticism and opposition to extract natural gas from shale. The method he and his team used to release the trapped gas, called fracking, has paid off in the most immense way. In 2000, shale gas represented just 1 percent of American natural gas supplies. Today, it is 30 percent and rising.

John Rowe, the chief executive of the utility Exelon, which derives almost all its power from nuclear plants, says that shale gas is one of the most important energy revolutions of his lifetime. It’s a cliché word, Yergin told me, but the fracking innovation is game-changing. It transforms the energy marketplace.

The U.S. now seems to possess a 100-year supply of natural gas, which is the cleanest of the fossil fuels. This cleaner, cheaper energy source is already replacing dirtier coal-fired plants. It could serve as the ideal bridge, Amy Jaffe of Rice University says, until renewable sources like wind and solar mature.

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(Please note that this is an article about the op-ed which is the post previous to this one–KSH).

The Archbishop of York has urged the Government to introduce a radical overhaul of the tax system and called for greed to be made as socially unacceptable as racism and homophobia.

Dr John Sentamu claimed many of the wealthiest in society are avoiding paying their dues in a stinging attack on the growing divide between Britain’s rich and poor.

Highlighting the growing gulf between the poorest sections of society and the nation’s uber-wealthy, Dr Sentamu also said those who have accumulated the biggest fortunes should not be included on the Queen’s Honours List.

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Top pay has been found to bear little or no relation to company performance, but even if it did, isn’t the performance of a company dependent on the work and well-being of all its staff?

Among the ill effects of very large income differences between rich and poor are that they weaken community life and make societies less cohesive.

If the concept of the Big Society is to become a reality, so that people come to know and take more care of each other, income differences must surely be reduced.

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While their ages, backgrounds and styles were different, [Maria] Calef and [Daniel] Wilkes delivered the same message to passers-by Wednesday morning.
Calef hoisted a yellow poster board that read, “Which corporation decides legislation?”
Wilkes held a white sign that said, “People’s needs over corporate greed.”
The two are part of the Occupy Columbia movement, an evolving group who have settled in at the State House, creating a protest culture of sharing and open dialogue.

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Bishop Richard [Chartres], for his part, made clear that he was not about to issue detailed policy prescriptions for the world of finance: “The church doesn’t and shouldn’t claim ordination gives you a tremendously privileged insight into how to solve the euro-zone problems.” Asked whether that implied a difference between himself and his boss, Bishop Richard replied teasingly that he would study the Financial Times article with great respect, given its author’s credentials as a prominent European intellectual. As a proof of the two men’s continuing personal closeness, he cited their common interest in Russian Orthodox theology and culture””a topic on which the number of potential conversation partners is limited.

But despite the chaotic image it presented this week, the Church of England looks more likely to trundle on eccentrically than to break into establishment and anti-capitalist camps. Buildings like St Paul’s are part of the reason. No matter how compelling the demands of the poor and angry, which faction would ever agree to abandon the cathedrals?

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Check it out.

Self-styled as “the premier forum for our international economic co-operation”, the Group of 20’s latest summit failed to live up to its central ambition to create “strong, stable and balanced” global economic growth.

As they arrived in Cannes, the leaders of countries representing 85 per cent of global output found the agenda dominated by political turmoil in Greece and a eurozone crisis too hot for the G20 to handle. They had little success in making progress on their medium-term goals.

The G20 all but admitted that the so-called “Doha round” of trade talks, launched in December 2001, was dead; it produced an action plan for growth and jobs that committed countries to almost nothing they were not already pursuing; and left the international monetary system almost unchanged.

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Perhaps it’s easy to see how the two men’s theological differences inform their views of family, but they also yield different understandings of the path to economic advancement.

Mr. Cain’s church subscribes to traditional Christian theology, which sees the black experience in light of scripture. Mr. Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, on the other hand, is known for teaching black liberation theology, which sees scripture in light of the black experience. It seeks to create a direct correlation between the black condition and the light of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. The freedom they gained from whites is a part of the freedom Jesus promised.

According to Antioch’s website, its early leaders “stressed the dignity of work and honest labor.” By contrast, Trinity’s website emphasizes God’s displeasure with “America’s economic mal-distribution.” It’s not surprising, then, that President Obama would see a government-run jobs program as the key to ending the current economic recession whereas Mr. Cain would look to private industry…

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Many of the proposals, which were compiled by a special church commission, seem in keeping with Christian mores: no investing in companies that manufacture guns or pornography; avoid investing in countries that are considered dictatorships or that present a risk to the environment.

The guidelines say investing in the alcohol industry is appropriate, so long as the beverages contain no more than 15 percent alcohol by volume.

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He considered moving to a Zen monastery before shifting his sights to Silicon Valley, where he became a brash businessman.

He preached about the dangers of desire but urged consumers to covet every new iPhone incarnation.

“He was an enlightened being who was cruel,” says a former girlfriend. “That’s a strange combination.”

Now, we can add another irony to the legacy of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs: Since his death on Oct. 5, the famously private man’s spiritual side has become an open book.

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Writing in the Church Times today, Canon Fraser says that the “very difficult” situation at St Paul’s is “a historic opportunity for the Church to reset its relationship with the marketplace. . . For too long the Church has been obsessed with its own internal workings and with silly arguments about sex. Now is the time for a new debate and a new emphasis.”

The director of the Christian Socialist Movement, Andy Flan­nagan, said on Tuesday: “We don’t have to sign up to the protesters’ complete agenda to engage with what they are talking about. Church and politicians need to get back into this debate about morality in markets.”

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What happens when you get George Soros, Tom Harkin, Bill Gates, Ralph Nader and the Archbishop of Canterbury together in a French hotel room with a stick of incense and a magnum of champagne””and turn off the lights?

Answer: the…[Financial Transaction] Tax.

OK, so we need to work on our punchlines. But a tax on financial transactions is exactly what these characters have all endorsed in one form or another as the miracle cure to the world’s economic ills. French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have also picked up the cause, and they are leaning on President Obama to endorse it at this week’s G-20 summit in Cannes, France.

So here we go again.

Readers of the blog will know I do not like to call this the Tobin Tax since strictly speaking Tobin originally was focused explicitly on something else less broad than the current proposal. Read it all–KSH.

Consumers might feel like they’re playing Whac-A-Mole when it comes to shenanigans involving the banking industry. Just as one issue gets resolved, something else pops up.

Bank of America retreated this week from its planned introduction of a $5 monthly fee for many customers to use their debit cards. The bank said it “listened to our customers very closely” and decided that charging people money to access their money maybe wasn’t the best idea after all.

At the same time, Chase credit card customers are receiving a letter about their privacy preferences. The letter says that even though the bank’s records “indicate that you are not being mailed any offers from Chase,” the bank wants “to be sure that you know about available offers and that you have the opportunity to consider them.”

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Americans put the most trust in the ideas and opinions of small-business owners and local business leaders on how best to create jobs. Americans have progressively lower levels of trust in the opinions of President Obama, economists, major-corporation executives, congressional leaders, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

The public’s trust in politicians, business leaders, and others on job creation in the U.S. is of particular importance at a time when Americans view jobs as the most important problem facing the nation.

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Pope Benedict XVI prayed that a summit of the leaders of countries with the world’s largest economies would find ways to overcome the current economic crisis and promote real development.

At the end of his weekly general audience Nov. 2, the pope issued a special appeal to the leaders of the G-20 nations scheduled to meet Nov. 3-4 in Cannes, France.

“I hope the meeting will help overcome the difficulties, which — on a global level — block the promotion of an authentically human and integral development,” the pope said.

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…local protests, in order to be effective, must have a specific local object; in this case, they are presented with one that could indeed make an immense global difference.

the Occupy movement… is remarkably a spontaneous populist expression, not clearly linked to any established political tendencies….

[In a general sense]…its implicit rejection of the alliance of financial and bureaucratic oligarchies aligns it naturally with the new “post-liberal” politics….

Yet it is only if they adopt some such more specific goal that the protestors will be equal to the symbolic resonance of the local hornet’s nest where they find themselves encamped.

And curiously, it is the same lamentable failure to be alert to symbolic resonance which has characterised the official Anglican response so far – though, in this respect, it limps behind the vast majority of Anglican clergy and laity.

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The lesson of LTCM was that no trading operation is better than its ability to withstand losses. This lesson was proved in spades, in 2008, at highly leveraged banks such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.

A second lesson is that seemingly unlikely events may be more likely than market history suggests. Russia had not defaulted since 1917, but that didn’t stop it from happening in 1998.

And a further lesson of LTCM’s demise was that the widespread belief that liquidity offers safety is, in fact, an illusion, and a terribly dangerous one at that.

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In response to the package, the bond market has not changed its tune. The new 50% “haircut” to private sector investors in Greece hasn’t altered the conviction of traders that the troubles in Athens will inevitably be contagious. Pricing of Spanish, Italian and even French bonds reflect this pessimistic outlook.

Europe’s politicians are aware of what the markets have long known: Patches are destined to fail. But the urge to pass the hot potato without instituting meaningful structural change is, evidently, irresistible. So instead of muscular reforms, we see the same unsuccessful rescue packages supersized. Sunny optimism and mutual back-patting continue, paired with pep talks from the rescue fund controllers at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

The latest steps don’t end the Greek crisis. A Eurozone-wide problem requires a Eurozone-wide solution. The European Central Bank should be creating something along the lines of the U.S. TARP program, buying bonds to calm the volatility until a bold, permanent solution is crafted. Greece and the rest of Europe would ultimately survive the disintegration of the Eurozone and the death of the euro. But the end of a unified Europe would leave the entire world poorer.

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The chairman was asked if the outlook of the U.S. economy was so gloomy, why would the Fed wait to enact more monetary policy. Bernanke said the Fed has been very aggressive. He said what the Fed has are projections, so “it’s important to see what happens.” One thing economists have said over the past few months, is that the Fed is running out of economic tools. But Bernanke ruled that out, saying the Fed still has a “broad range of policies” to stimulate the economy.

However, he called on the political arm of the United States to help the Fed.

“I hope there will be a broad range of actions that complements” Fed policy, he said.

”” On Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, Bernanke said their woes have been drag on a U.S. recovery, but it’s up to Europe’s leaders to make the decisions.

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Representatives from the United Kingdom’s main Christian denominations and charities submitted a letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer (treasury secretary) on 31 October, urging the government to tackle tax avoidance in order to “Close The Gap” between rich and poor.

“Tax evasion and avoidance is estimated by the Treasury to cost the U.K. at least 35 billion British pounds [US$56.4 billion] annually. This is nearly nine per cent of U.K. tax revenue. The efficient collection of this revenue would lessen the demand to cut social and welfare expenditure which is hurting the poorest in our communities so much,” the letter read.

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“Survivor” is considered a watershed in paid product placements, opening the floodgates to a projected $2.75 billion in spending this year on such shows as “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” WWE’s “Monday Night Raw,” “American Idol” and “Celebrity Apprentice.” Before “Survivor,” brands got promotional placements in exchange for use of a prop, such as a car, or as a bonus for buying commercial time.

[Mark] Burnett is now trying to bring that formula to the Web through his investment in the Vimby digital production studio. The Van Nuys venture launched in 2005 with a network of filmmakers around the country who create original, short-form videos for Vimby’s website that now also may find a home on other sites including YouTube and Myspace. As part of Burnett’s investment in 2010, Vimby began rubbing elbows with such major advertisers as Aflac, General Mills, Macy’s, McDonald’s, Pepsi and Puma ”” helping these brands create their own content for distribution on YouTube or on a company’s Facebook page.

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[The Church of England]…has long since turned its back on its core competence of bread and butter theology and helping its members navigate life, preferring instead to turn itself into a politicised advocacy group. It is more interested in fighting capitalism, calling for ever more government spending and higher taxes and jumping onto every fashionable left-wing bandwagon (the most recent being banker-bashing and Tobin taxes), rather than talking about God (whom its clerics presumably still believe in), the difference between right and wrong in personal decisions, and how responsible individuals can do good themselves through their behaviour, choices and private charity….

Everybody knows that the peculiar economic system that we had during the noughties ”“ its strange combination of big government, free markets, rigged markets and ultra-low interest rates ”“ failed and needs reform. My view is that we need to embrace the discipline of real capitalism ”“ and banish the moral hazard and risk-taking that corporatism and bailouts guarantee ”“ and return to sound money with properly priced credit. Others prefer different solutions. But everybody with a heart wants to fight unemployment, improve the prospects of the poor, and make the world a better place. It is just that we disagree on the means to achieve this.

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One is something we have now heard clearly from many sources ”“ a plea endorsed by the Vickers Commission that routine banking business should be clearly separated from speculative transactions. The rolling-up of individual and small-scale savings into high-risk and high-return adventures in the virtual economy is one of the more obvious danger areas. Early government action in this area is needed. A second plea is to recapitalise banks with public money. Banks should be obliged in return to help reinvigorate the real economy.

The third suggestion is probably the most far-reaching. The Vatican statement strongly backs the proposal of a Financial Transaction Tax ”“ a “Tobin Tax” or, popularly, a “Robin Hood Tax” in the form in which it has been talked about most recently. This means a comparatively small rate of tax (0.05 per cent) being levied on share, bond, and currency transactions and their derivatives, with the resulting funds being designated for investment in the “real” economy, domestically and internationally. The modest rate of taxation conceals the high levels of return that could be expected (some $410bn globally on one estimate)….

Read it all. [Please note that the FT subscriber only link is there.]

Another note: Alert blog readers may recall that Rowan Williams’ arguments here are not new but they have been stated a number of times before.

A further update: I see Ralph Nader is in the Wall Street Journal making a similar argument for the Financial Transaction Tax.

Americans must not be smug about the suffering of Europeans””our financial system is thoroughly integrated with theirs. Moreover, the International Monetary Fund will most likely be involved in the event of future bailouts and will likely need large funds from its members, which ultimately means the taxpayers.

And, of course, the U.S. has its own large and growing public debt burden. We have not gone as far down the road to entitlements, but we are catching up. If you want to know how the debt crisis will play out here, watch the downward spiral in the EU.

Meanwhile, expect more volatility in financial markets. U.S. traders in particular simply have not grasped the enormity of the EU debt crisis.

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