President Obama’s new deficit-fighting plan would require Americans earning more than $1 million a year to pay at least the same tax rate as middle-class households, delivering $3.2 trillion in budget savings over the next decade. Republican Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said the plan amounted to “class warfare”.
President Obama’s much-anticipated jobs plan unveiled on Sept. 8 carried echoes of the New Deal work-relief programs of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration in the 1930s. He spoke of public works construction to stimulate the economy and spur future investment. He proposed $90 billion to renovate schools, repair bridges and roads and to fund an infrastructure bank. But the $447 billion bid to get Americans working again faces daunting challenges, not least that the biggest job-creating parts of the legislation are unlikely to win enough Republican support to pass Congress.
Eccentric. Unpragmatic. Quixotic. Those are the kinder words tossed around recently to describe Texas Congressman Ron Paul, whose libertarian campaign kicked off a new nationwide initiative on Sept. 8 to organize and mobilize young voters, a group that offered him strong support four years ago. The Boston Globe’s Garrett Quinn says he now has a chance to shine. Charles Lane at The Washington Post has perhaps a more apt description of his campaign and ideas, calling him simply “loopy“.
In a much-anticipated and hotly hyped address on Sept. 8, President Barack Obama expects to outline proposals to revive the flat-lining U.S. economy, in part by renewing an existing payroll tax cut, new spending on school renovation and job training
Rick Perry’s book, “Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America From Washington”, may come back to haunt him. Released on Nov. 15 last year, the book condemns Social Security as “a crumbling monument to the failure of the New Deal”, climate change as “all one contrived phony mess” and the Supreme Court as nine unelected “oligarchs in robes”. States’ rights trump all else. “If you don’t support the death penalty and citizens packing a pistol, don’t come to Texas,” he writes in one passage.
The Golf Channel’s TV segment: Szep and the legend of Furyks $11 million putter
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President Obama abandoned on Sept. 1 a contentious new air pollution rule, buoying business interests that had lobbied heavily against it, angering environmentalists who called the move a betrayal and unnerving his own top environmental regulators.
Labor Boss Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, appears to be losing patience with Obama. The President, according to Trumka, has been doing “little nibbly things around the edge that aren’t going to make a difference and aren’t going to solve the problem” with the economy.
