Category: Politics

Mayor Cieslewicz Comments on Doyle’s State Budget Signing

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Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz:

“Contrary to what some have claimed, this is not a ‘fully-funded freeze’. Such a freeze would have increased shared revenues to reflect the rising costs for providing basic services, and account for inflation in the freeze formula itself. This budget does neither. Adjusting for inflation, this year’s budget effectively cuts our shared revenue payment by 6%, on the heels of a 16% shared revenue cut in the prior budget.
“While city government continues to tighten its belt, property taxes rise faster than inflation because more of our budget must be borne by the property tax. Fifteen years ago property taxes made up 54% of Madison’s budget. Today, thanks to continually eroding state aids, property taxes make up almost 70% of our budget. In other words, what is truly driving property taxes is not increased spending, but cuts in state aids.

Bad Practices Net Hospitals More Money: The Waste in Medicare Spending

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Gilbert M. Gaul:

Medicare’s handling of Palm Beach Gardens is an extreme example of a pervasive problem that costs the federal insurance program billions of dollars a year while rewarding doctors, hospitals and health plans for bad medicine. In Medicare’s upside-down reimbursement system, hospitals and doctors who order unnecessary tests, provide poor care or even injure patients often receive higher payments than those who provide efficient, high-quality medicine.

Small Town vs. Wal-Mart: Jefferson Opposition Alderman Faces Recall

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Reid Epstein:

The company left in its wake a recall effort against one alderman, a local newspaper smarting from the loss of a major advertising client and hurt feelings from people on both sides of the debate.

David Olsen, the targeted alderman, said the schism has divided the city of about 7,500 more than an 11-month strike at the local Tyson Foods plant in 2003.

US Help for China’s Internet Filtering

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Cisco’s sale of networking equipment used to filter Chinese internet traffic has drawn some well justified attention recently (Microsoft’s activities with the Chinese government has also drawn attention):

  • Rebecca MacKinnon

    Cisco argues that if they don’t do this business, their competitors will. And that will be bad for U.S. jobs. Well, as I’ve said before, at the end of the day either we believe that the ideals of “freedom” and “democracy” mean something, and are worth sacrificing short-term profit so that more people around the world have a chance of benefiting from them, or we don’t. Cisco clearly doesn’t. This is an insult to the thousands of Americans – public servants, men and women in uniform, journalists and others – who risk their lives daily in far-flung corners of the globe for the sake of these ideals.

  • Anne Applebaum:

    Without question, China’s Internet filtering regime is “the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world,” in the words of a recent report by Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The system involves the censorship of Web logs, search engines, chat rooms and e-mail by “thousands of public and private personnel.” It also involves Microsoft Inc., as Chinese bloggers discovered last month. Since early June, Chinese bloggers who post messages containing a forbidden word — “Dalai Lama,” for example, or “democracy” — receive a warning: “This message contains a banned expression, please delete.” It seems Microsoft has altered the Chinese version of its blog tool, MSN Spaces, at the behest of Chinese government. Bill Gates, so eloquent on the subject of African poverty, is less worried about Chinese free speech.

UPDATE: Rebecca comments on a recent Newsweek story that fails to mention her 9 years of experience in China, among other items.

Nominee Represented CUNA in Supreme Court Case

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WASHINGTON–John G. Roberts, President George W. Bush’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, has a history with credit unions: He argued the AT&T Family FCU case before the U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 6, 1997.
At the time, Roberts was a 42-year-old partner in the law firm of Hogan & Hartson. He argued the case for the Credit Union National Association (CUNA) and the National Association of Federal Credit Unions, which intervened on behalf of the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA).
The Supreme Court eventually ruled against credit unions in the case, based on a suit brought by bankers in 1990 against NCUA over the field-of-membership expansion the agency granted AT&T Family FCU, Winston-Salem, N.C. The events culminated into the push for the Credit Union Membership Access Act (H.R. 1151), which President Clinton signed into law in August of 1998.
In 1997, after arguing the case, Roberts told CUNA News Now, “It’s always a mistake to try to predict the outcome of a case from the justices’ questions.”
He explained that there was nothing credit unions and members could do to influence the court’s decision. “The court isn’t like Congress and third parties we’ve lobbied. The court is looking at the law,” said Roberts.
CUNA General Counsel Eric Richard worked with Roberts during the AT&T case. He said the nominee is “enormously talented with an exceedingly bright legal mind.”
“CUNA and the credit union movement were privileged to have been represented by him,” said Richard. “We wish Judge Roberts all the best.”

Congress Wants to Expand Daylight Savings Time to Save Energy

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Reader Erika Frederick emailed this article by John Fialka:

As a step to save energy, Congress appears poised to extend U.S. daylight-saving time for two months, starting it earlier, on the first Sunday in March, and ending it later, on the last Sunday of November.

The move was first approved in May as part of the energy bill by the House. The idea has now been agreed upon by House and Senate committee staffs, with the approval of both Republican chairmen and ranking Democrats. That means it is likely to be approved by the full House-Senate conference committee, which begins squaring the differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill this week.

The change is not without controversy:

The Air Transport Association has asserted that its members, long-distance American airlines, could lose millions of dollars because of schedule disruptions that the proposal would cause by throwing U.S. arrivals at foreign airports out of synchronization with European schedules and Europe’s system of awarding “slots,” or landing rights at airports.

Some large church groups also oppose extending daylight-saving time into the early spring and late fall, because it would require children to wait for school buses in the dark. “Without the light of day, they are more susceptible to accidents with school buses, or other motorists, and the darkness also provides cover for individuals who prey on children,” said the Rev. William F. Davis, deputy secretary of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, in a letter written to the House sponsors of the measure

The proposed change is part of the Energy Bill.

Jay Rosen Pieces Together Rove/Plame

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Jay Rosen:

Lying to the press—though a serious thing—is what all administrations do. In Washington leaking to damage people’s credibility or wreck their arguments is routine, a bi-partisan game with thousands of knowing participants. I rarely see it mentioned that Joseph Wilson (who is no truthtelling hero) began his crusade by trying to leak his criticisms of the Bush White House. When that didn’t work he went public in an op-ed piece for the New York Times.

But business as usual is not going to explain what happened in the Valerie Plame case, or tell us why its revelations matter. For that we need to enlarge the frame.

My bigger picture starts with George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, Andrew Card, Dan Bartlett, John Ashcroft plus a handful of other strategists and team players in the Bush White House, who have set a new course in press relations. (And Scott McClellan knows his job is to stay on that course, no matter what.) The Bush team’s methods are unlike the handling of the news media under prior presidents because their premises are so different.

Sprawl & Tax Base

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Flying around recently, a fellow traveller seated next to me mentioned that he had been in Madison quite often over the past five years and was amazed at the ongoing sprawl. I recalled this conversation while reading Mike Ivey’s recent column: “One Sprawl Project Begets Another“. I was further reminded of this discussion when I read Spencer Hsu and Dana Hedgpeth’s article on the tens of millions of dollars Washington, DC stands to gain from a proposed land transfer from the federal government to the City.
The intersection of an inexorable desire for tax base growth and the implications for our community are rather interesting and could use more attention.

Dean’s Madison Visit

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Kristian Knutsen:

Moving into his speech, Dean talked about his work trying to build the Democratic Party across the country, noting a stop in Mississippi. He said that the Dems need to fight in all states, particularly in the Mississippis and Kansases, not just in the Wisconsins and Michigans.

An early theme was fiscal responsibility, with Dean stating that the Democratic platform “looks like a 1970s Republican Party platform” with regards to balanced budgets. He emphatically stated one of his regular points – “you can’t trust a Republican with your money” – repeating that they “borrow and spend” and “borrow and waste.”

Recent US System Tax Articles

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The ongoing mess that is our tax code (the third link is fascinating from a taxpayer perspective):

  • Lynnley Browning:

    In late 1999, the Keeters put $188 million into an account at Deutsche Bank. The money, used in tandem with a $500 million loan from the bank, would be used to trade derivatives and options. The Keeters say they thought that they would make an unspecified return on their investment, pay back the loan, as well as generate $188 million in tax savings that could then be legitimately used to offset other gains.
    But family members said that they discovered their shelter was not legal only when the I.R.S. began auditing some of their federal tax returns – prepared by KPMG, with the Blips deductions written in – for 2000 and 2001.

  • Tanina Rostain:

    From the late 1990s into the next decade, KPMG devoted significant resources to developing and mass marketing hundreds of abusive tax shelters. These products were designed to enable their purchasers – typically high wealth individuals and Fortune 500 companies – to avoid paying taxes on the huge financial gains they enjoyed during the stock market boom. 135K PDF

  • Louise Story:

    “The tax court is seen as a place that a taxpayer ought to be able to go and get a fair shake, and the secrecy here, and the outcome in these cases, does raise the question as to whether they’re getting a fair shake,” said Alan B. Morrison, a senior lecturer at Stanford Law School, who wrote a supporting brief for the three taxpayers in the Supreme Court case.

    The court’s secrecy, “confirmed now by a major change in a decision, is a big deal, and it’s not right,” he said.

    One of Mr. Kanter’s lawyers, Richard H. Pildes, a professor at NYU School of Law, said the case reminded him of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the never-ending lawsuit in Charles Dickens’s novel “Bleak House.”