Saturday, March 24, 2012
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Life in "Progress" City - Cincinnati edition
A 4-year-old child was shot in the leg - an unintended victim of a shooter who was aiming for someone else, police said.The shooting was reported around 7:20 p.m. in the 800 block of Blair Avenue.
The child was taken to Children’s Hospital Medical Center. The child is expected to recover, Cincinnati police said early Wednesday.
He suffered non-life threatening injuries and was kept for observation overnight at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.
No arrests have been made.
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Who benefits from the Keystone stoning
Warren Buffett’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe LLC is among U.S. and Canadian railroads that stand to benefit from the Obama administration’s decision to reject TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s Keystone XL oil pipeline permit.
With modest expansion, railroads can handle all new oil produced in western Canada through 2030, according to an analysis of the Keystone proposal by the U.S. State Department.
“Whatever people bring to us, we’re ready to haul,” Krista York-Wooley, a spokeswoman for Burlington Northern, a unit of Buffett’s Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A), said in an interview. If Keystone XL “doesn’t happen, we’re here to haul.”
The State Department denied TransCanada a permit on Jan. 18, saying there was not enough time to study the proposal by Feb. 21, a deadline Congress imposed on President Barack Obama. Calgary-based TransCanada has said it intends to re-apply with a route that avoids an environmentally sensitive region of Nebraska, something the Obama administration encouraged.
It pays to know low people in high places........
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When green isn't so green
Or, as it pertains, to haul Canadian oil south on rail cars............
Because, afterall, we all know that there has never been a railroad accident.On any given week, three to seven CP Rail trains laden with crude oil from the North Dakota Bakken field whisk across North America, bypassing the pipeline bottlenecks in mid-continent that are depressing oil prices and unaffected by the noise in Washington, D.C., that is holding back the Keystone XL pipeline.
It’s a roaring business. In 2009, when Calgary-based Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. started dabbling in crude oil transportation, it moved 500 of its black barrel-shaped cars out of the basin. Last year, its oil trains carried 13,000 cars and soon CP could be moving 70,000 cars or more a year out of the North Dakota Bakken tight-oil field alone.
With each tank car containing 650 barrels of oil, that’s 126,000 barrels a day — a significant pipeline on rail.
“We think that’s foreseeable in the not-too-distant future, and we think based on what we are doing now there is potential above that,” Tracy Robinson, CP’s energy and merchandise vice-president, said in an interview.
It’s not the pipeline on rail that some were envisioning some years ago, when Canada’s major railway companies, Montreal-based Canadian National Railway Co. and CP, started looking for ways to get a piece of the growing Alberta oil sands by offering alternative transportation.
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Forget John Galt, where's his 60 billion
Apple made an aggressive pitch for a corporate tax holiday Monday, stressing that it plans to keep more than $60 billion parked offshore until Congress makes it easier for companies to bring those profits home.
The warning from the nation’s most valuable company came as Apple announced it would pay a dividend to shareholders and buy back stock, moves that will cost about $45 billion over three years.
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Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Life in "Progress" City - Detroit edition
Well hey, you're doing such a good job, I can see how it would be an insult..........Despite assurances from Clint Eastwood and Eminem, Detroit’s rebirth may be on hold, as the city is on a Greece-like track to run out of money before summer, and things are getting increasingly testy between the state’s Republican governor and the city’s Democratic mayor.
Although the automotive sector and some other parts of the city’s business picture have bounced back in recent years, Detroit city government finances are still on an unsustainable course, and the city does not have a viable fiscal plan to avoid running out of money in May.
Last week, the city rejected a proposed consent agreement that would have given a nine-member state-appointed oversight board a voice in city government and started a war of words with the state government, which has its own deadline set for next week.
Mayor Dave Bing said it would be “nuts” to think he would accept the oversight board. “When I did read it, I was appalled.” Mr. Bing and the City Council were expected to meet this week to come up with their own plan, though such efforts have failed in the past.
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Life in "Progress" City - Chicago edition
Chicago’s police superintendent says the city is re-tooling its anti-gang strategy, following a particularly violent weekend during which several people, including a 6-year-old girl, were killed.
Garry McCarthy says the intelligence is there. It’s just a matter of getting the information to beat officers so they can anticipate a retaliatory gang shooting.
“We’re going to get our head around this thing and we’re going to turn it around is what it boils down to,” McCarthy told reporters on Monday. “If we were sitting here saying we don’t know what’s going on, we don’t know what to do, that would be a different situation. We know what’s going on. We’re putting pieces in place to make sure we can stem this tide.”
So far this year, there have been 94 murders in Chicago. There were 66 in the same period last year. There have been 408 shootings so far this year, compared to 296 in the same period in 2011.
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Monday, March 19, 2012
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Why I'm not a reporter
I mean c'mon, compare this question to a high hard one like this Washington Post reporter asked today...............
"Does Bo think you should release the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?"
With media vetting like this, who needs media?
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Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Life in "Progress" City - Woonsocket edition
Rhode Island's education commissioner did not mince words when asked about the possibility that Woonsocket will close all of its schools for the year several months early - she says it's illegal and isn't an option.The Woonsocket School Committee on Wednesday night is poised to discuss and possibly vote on a measure that would end the school year April 5, when the district is expected to run out of money.
State law requires schools to remain in session for 180 days a year. Woonsocket's 180th day would be June 13.
Education Commissioner Deborah Gist said the premature end to the school year can't happen.
"Honestly, [180 days is] really the bare minimum," Gist said. "It's not just the minimum we have by statute. It is the minimum that we have to offer our students."
Woonsocket is the latest Rhode Island municipality to consider dramatic steps. The capital Providence's bond rating was cut to near junk on Wednesday as it faces insolvency. Central Falls filed for bankruptcy last August and East Providence's finances is now directly controlled by a state-appointed budget commission.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Subsidize, then regulate....... the life blood of government.
Now most of you know that I am generally against regulation but how about one that work's for Old Gordon by creating barriers to entry into the market? With my CPA designation, I'm usually grandfathered into all these regulations.Congress never gave the IRS the authority to license tax preparers, and the IRS can’t give itself that power.
But last year the IRS imposed a sweeping new licensing scheme that forces tax preparers to get IRS permission before they can work. This is an unlawful power grab that exceeds the authority granted to the IRS by Congress.
The burden of compliance will fall most heavily on independent tax return preparers and small businesses. Unsurprisingly, big firms such as H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt support the licensing scheme. As The Wall Street Journal explained: “Cheering the new regulations are big tax preparers like H&R Block, who are only too happy to see the feds swoop in to put their mom-and-pop seasonal competitors out of business.”
These regulations are typical government protectionism. They benefit powerful industry insiders and at the expense of entrepreneurs and consumers, who will likely have fewer options and face higher prices. But tax preparers have a right to earn an honest living without getting permission from the IRS. And taxpayers—not the IRS—should be the ones who decide who prepares their taxes.
Yet, I'm against these regulations. Why? because the industry doesn't need them.
I've been a CPA for 23 years. There was never an outcry for regulating the industry until the past few years. Anyone want to guess why?
With the expansion of the earned income credit, lot's of unscrupulous people got into the industry to extract large fees from lots of poor dumb asses. For instance, cruise into any bad neighborhood and you'll usually see a tax preparation business right next to the local pawn shop and/or check cashing business.
These people are willing to charge upwards of $500 for a tax return I would charge $95 for. Now you might be asking why customer would be willing to pay that. But if you are due a $7,000 refund for money that was never yours to begin with what do you care what the fee is?
And like all other types of "free" government money, the earned income credit invites all kinds of fraud into the process.
Hence the government now needs to regulate the people who are ripping off the system.
If the feds really wants to get rid of the riff raff in the tax preparation business, simply take the money out of it. The guys in the business will move to greener pastures like Medicare fraud.
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Monday, March 12, 2012
Just a whole lotta of progress goin' on
Pennsylvania's distressed capital city, Harrisburg, will skip $5.3 million of debt payments due next week, the first time the city has defaulted on its general obligation bonds, to ensure there is enough cash to fund vital services.More......Pennsylvania's capital of 50,000 people is mired in $326 million of debt due to the expensive retrofits and repairs of its troubled trash incinerator.
"Although this default on general obligation bonds is unfortunate, I don't think it's going to hold up the process for proceeding under the recovery plan," Receiver David Unkovic said.