Shomari Hearn in Koffeemag.com
January 30, 2010Koffeemag.com, Jan. 30, 2010Shomari Hearn explains how to plan for indulgences when you put together a budget.
Alito Takes The Bait
January 29, 2010Never in living memory has a president chosen to bait the U.S. Supreme Court in his State of the Union message. But that is what President Obama did this week, and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. took the bait. Obama and fellow Democrats are livid over the high court’s 5-4 ruling last week that corporations and labor unions have a constitutional right to advertise for or against political candidates. To …
Rebecca Pavese in AOL’s WalletPop
January 28, 2010AOL’s WalletPop, Jan. 28, 2010Rebecca Pavese offers advice on how to take advantage of the one-time “making work pay credit” available this year.
Taxing The Other Guy In Oregon
January 28, 2010Oregon residents don’t like taxes much. Except when someone else is paying. On Tuesday, voters in the state approved two ballot measures increasing taxes on high-income individuals and businesses. Oregon residents in the top tax bracket will now face an 11 percent state income tax rate, the highest in the United States. The new increase will affect individuals earning at least $125,000 and couples earning at least $250,000. The corporate …
State Of His Union
January 27, 2010President Obama will tell us tonight how he thinks our country is doing. We can make our own judgments about how our president is doing. Though January has been a difficult month for Obama, with the loss of the Democrats’ filibuster-proof Senate majority and the collapse of his health care initiative, his first year in office has been more of a mixed bag. True, his economic stimulus did little to …
Recklessness Has Its Place
January 26, 2010President Obama is moving aggressively to stamp out what he calls “reckless risk” on Wall Street. The place for reckless financial behavior, in the president’s view, is Washington, D.C., where he can direct it. Smarting from his party’s loss last week in Massachusetts, Obama took another swing at his favorite political punching bag — the nation’s big banks — by declaring that they should be banned from running hedge funds …
Accepting Inconvenience For Safety
January 25, 2010Nobody likes going through airport security, but nobody wants the security measures to disappear, either. That’s pretty much how I feel about a new round of government regulations that affect investment advisers and tax return preparers. The new rules will make my life more difficult, and they may contain some contradictions and gaps that will cause headaches for people in my line of work. On the other hand, if the …
Free Speech Finally Means All Speech
January 22, 2010After decades of willful blindness, a bare majority of the U.S. Supreme Court has finally acknowledged that it should never be a crime in this country to say, “Vote for Joe.” By allowing corporations and labor unions to buy advertisements extolling or criticizing candidates for public office, the high court has reshaped the American political landscape. Its 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission establishes that the First …
Time For A SecureNet
January 21, 2010On an early spring day in north-central China two years ago, the People’s Liberation Army held a ceremony to mark the establishment of an information warfare militia unit. Local dignitaries were invited, and the county government noted on its Web site that the militia’s peacetime mission would be to “extensively collect information from adversary networks and establish databases of adversary network data.” In wartime, the militia’s assignment would be to …
Why Are Voters The Last To Know?
January 20, 2010I am writing this post at 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday. The polls in Massachusetts have been open less than five hours, and there are more than eight hours to go before they close. Yet I believe political insiders already know that state Sen. Scott Brown, the Republican, has upset Democratic attorney general Martha Coakley for the U.S. Senate seat that Ted Kennedy held for 47 years. I think the odds …
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