text:
About EPI
Why Give to EPI
Budget, Taxes, and Public Investment
Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy
Inequality and Poverty
Jobs and Unemployment
Unions and Labor Standards
Trade and Globalization
Wages, Incomes, and Wealth
State Jobs and Unemployment
State Unemployment by Race and Ethnicity
JOLTS
Minimum Wage Tracker
Nominal Wage Tracker
Income & Poverty
Productivity–Pay Gap
Family Budget Calculator
Tax & spending explorer
State of Working America
Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN)
Inequality.is
Building Worker Power
Commentary | Budget, Taxes, and Public Investment
President Obama's 2012 budget: An analysis of tax policies
Commentary • By Andrew Fieldhouse • February 14, 2011
President Obama's FY 2012 Budget: An Analysis of Tax Policies
The president's budget proposes roughly $1.1 trillion worth of deficit-reduction measures over a decade, excluding war savings and an expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for high-income earners. Tax reforms and new revenue sources account for roughly one-third of this sum, which is consistent with the proposals of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, but falls shy of a balanced approach to deficit reduction. Scored against a current policy baseline, which would assume all the Bush tax cuts are extended, the president's 2012 budget looks more fiscally responsible and more balanced.
But, by relegating the onus of deficit reduction to spending cuts rather than tax increases, the proposal risks severe cuts to investments and a costly, counterproductive expansion of tax expenditures. Successful and balanced deficit reduction requires revenue-positive tax reform and new progressive revenue sources to fund national priorities, address widening income inequality, and ease pressures elsewhere in the budget.
Spending for priority areas is paired with new revenue sources
President Obama's tax policy as reflected in his budget request for fiscal year 2012 is broadly similar to last year. The proposal contains many policies that were included in last year's budget but that were passed only temporarily or not at all.
Overall, revenue would increase slightly from the current fiscal year to 16.6% percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2012 as a result of the recovering economy. As the economy further recovers, revenue would quickly rebound to 19.1% of GDP in 2015, and then rise gradually to 20.0% in 2021 (although the budget includes an unfunded "patch" to the alternative minimum tax in these out-years).
The budget's spending priorities—including investments in infrastructure, innovation, and competitiveness—are generally paired with new revenues or dedicated funding sources. For example, a $554 billion surface transportation reauthorization proposal (which includes $50 billion in upfront investment) is contingent on finding bipartisan agreement on $328 billion in financing over a decade. Expansion of broadband access is funded through additional spectrum auctions.
Upper-income tax cuts and tax deal
The president's budget requests have consistently adhered to one campaign pledge: Allow the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans to expire. Like last year's budget, this budget proposes to permanently extend middle-class tax relief for individuals earning less than $200,000 and joint-filers earning less than $250,000. This proposal implicitly means allowing the top 33% and 35% marginal tax rates to revert to 36% and 39.6%, respectively, for individuals earning above $200,000 and joint-filers making more than $250,000. The budget also assumes that the personal exemption phase-out and the limitation on itemized deductions are reinstated for these top earners. Finally, the preferential rate on capital gains and dividends would increase from 15% to 20% for upper-income tax filers (prior to the Bush-era tax cuts, qualified dividends had been taxed as ordinary income under progressive tax rates). Last December's tax deal had extended these upper-income tax cuts through the end of 2012 as the price for securing middle-class tax relief and continuing emergency unemployment insurance.
December's tax deal also included a two-year estate tax cut (benefiting only the wealthiest 0.25% of Americans) instead of reinstating the estate tax at 2009 levels, as the president's 2011 budget had proposed. This year's budget proposes extending the estate and gift tax rates at 2009 parameters (after the December tax deal expires), adding an estimated $271 billion to deficits over a decade, relative to current law. In contrast, extending the upper-income tax cuts and the estate tax levels in the tax deal would add $953 billion to deficits over the next decade, relative to the president's proposals, offsetting almost all of the deficit reduction measures in the president's budget request.
Budgeting for alternative minimum tax relief
As part of the middle-class tax relief package, the president proposes budgeting for the annual patch of the alternative minimum tax (instead of extending the AMT without specifying how to pay for it). The patch is a routine upward adjustment of the AMT exemption threshold that would prevent more than 24 million additional taxpayers from becoming subject to the AMT. December's tax deal patched the AMT through the end of 2011. The president's budget pays for extending this patch through 2014 by capping the benefit on itemized deductions at 28% (the value of the benefit increases with the marginal tax rate of a tax filer itemizing deductions, making itemized deductions regressive and costly). This proposal, also drawn from last year's budget request, will produce $321.3 billion (over 10 years) in savings that is specifically designated as an offset for middle class AMT relief in this year's budget. Last year's budget included the limitation on itemized deductions and separately built indexing the AMT to inflation from 2009 levels into baseline budget projections. This year's budget alters only the framing of these proposals; their impact on the bottom line is unchanged. Beyond 2014, the unfunded cost of AMT relief adds $1.2 trillion to deficits through 2021.
Making Work Pay, the payroll tax cut, and tax stimulus
Last year the president proposed extending the Making Work Pay (MWP) refundable tax credit —the largest tax provision of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The MWP refunded 6.2% of earned income up to a maximum credit of $400 for individuals ($800 for joint-filers). The MWP credit was replaced with a more expensive, but also more regressive and less targeted, flat 2% payroll tax cut in last December's tax deal. The payroll tax cut reduced employee contributions to Social Security from 6.2% to 4.2%, and while the revenue loss to the Social Security trust fund was patched from general revenue, the cut sparked concerns that Social Security's dedicated, off-balance sheet funding source would be threatened. Relative to extending the Making Work Pay credit, the payroll tax cut also reduced the after-tax earnings of lower-income workers making less than $20,000 a year while raising after-tax earnings on all higher-earning workers. Although it is encouraging that the president's budget does not extend the payroll tax cut, the president missed an opportunity to support economic recovery and working class families while protecting the finances of Social Security by replacing the payroll tax cut with the more targeted Making Work Pay credit.
To complement a domestic agenda heavy on education investments, the president's budget again proposes making permanent the American Opportunity Tax Credit, a partially refundable tuition credit. The 2012 budget also proposes extending the earned income tax credit (EITC) for families with three or more qualifying children (one of the targeted tax cuts temporarily extended in December's tax deal). The administration's budget baseline again assumes that two Recovery Act measures also extended in the tax deal—the expanded EITC phase-out for joint-filers (i.e. EITC marriage penalty relief) and the lower earnings threshold for the refundable portion of the child tax credit—are included in the extension of the middle-class tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003.
Tax expenditures and tax reform
Individual and corporate income t
ax expenditures are projected to cost the Treasury Department up to $1.1 trillion in 2012—roughly the size of the entire base discretionary budget (excluding supplemental funding for overseas contingency operations). The president's budget has proposed extending many existing tax expenditures and incentives, such as the American Opportunity Tax Credit and the Research and Experimentation (R&E) credit, that would advance his competitiveness and innovation agenda. The budget also calls for limits to the value of tax expenditures for upper-income taxpayers.
The use of the tax code to pursue policies (subsidizing many individuals or firms for economic choices they would have made anyway) may be less efficient than direct spending, but the nonsecurity discretionary spending freeze constrained options for public investment.
Like last year's budget, targeted tax expenditure reform was largely limited to eliminating a handful of wasteful fossil fuel production incentives and taxing carried interest (partnership profits treated as investment income) as ordinary income instead of preferentially taxing hedge fund managers at a lower rate than many working Americans. The president's 2012 budget proposes redirecting $46.2 billion (over 10 years) from the elimination of fossil fuel tax preferences to funding the following investments: putting a million electric cars on the road by 2015, reducing buildings' energy use by 20% by 2020, and doubling the share of electricity from renewable energy sources by 2035.
Corporate tax reform
The president's budget also alludes to, but does not detail, revenue-neutral corporate tax reform to lower corporate tax rates.
The budget weakens last year's proposal of a financial crisis responsibility fee, which was meant to recoup some of the cost of to the economy incurred by Wall Street's reckless gambling. Last year's proposal would have raised $90 billion over 10 years. In this year's budget, however, the financial crisis responsibility fee has been watered down to raise only $30 billion over a decade. While estimates of the cost of bailing out the financial system have dropped significantly (the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated a net taxpayer subsidy of only $25 billion), the cost of recession-induced job losses and increased deficits dwarfs the cost of the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Adding it all up
The president's budget puts the nation on a more fiscally responsible and more balanced path than current policies.
It is worth noting the last December's tax deal cost $858 billion—nearly the amount of deficit reduction spread over a decade—and, with the exception of $57 billion for an extension of unemployment insurance, this sum resulted from revenue loss. Tax policies have been responsible for much of the accumulation of debt over the last decade, and will continue to add to the deficit over the next 10 years under current policy.
The president's budget signals that the onus of deficit reduction will be relegated to spending cuts rather than tax increases. Such an approach risks severe cuts to investments and a costly, counterproductive expansion of tax expenditures. Successful and balanced deficit reduction necessitates revenue-positive tax reform and new progressive revenue sources to fund national priorities, address widening income inequality, and ease pressures elsewhere in the budget.
Flawed, but better than some alternatives
An analysis of the budget cuts
An analysis of the public investments
See related work on Budget, Taxes, and Public Investment
See more work by Andrew Fieldhouse
New research, insightful graphics, and event invites in your inbox every week.
Track EPI on Twitter
Tweets by @EconomicPolicy
EPI is an independent, nonprofit think tank that researches the impact of economic trends and policies on working people in the United States. EPI's research helps policymakers, opinion leaders, advocates, journalists, and the public understand the bread-and-butter issues affecting ordinary Americans.
Follow EPI
1225 Eye St. NW, Suite 600
Phone: 202-775-8810 • epi@epi.org
© 2022 Economic Policy Institute
Privacy Policy • Contact Us
State of Working America Data Library
Authoritative, up-to-date data on the living standards of American workers.
Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy • PREE
Exploring how race, ethnicity, and class intersect to affect economic outcomes in the United States.
Unequal Power
There's an inherent imbalance of bargaining power between employers and employees. Here's how it impacts your workplace—and our democracy.
Policy choices have tilted the playing field toward the rich and corporations. Here's how to tilt it back.
How do taxes and spending work, and where do you fit in?
Interactive tools and videos bringing clarity to the national dialogue on economic inequality.
Economic Analysis and Research Network • EARN
A network of state and local organizations improving workers' lives through research and advocacy.
Jobs at EPI
The Economic Policy Institute staff is unionized with the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union.


text:
Q: "I do can..." - is this valid (even informally)? While talking to my daughter yesterday, I challenged her that she cannot get ready in 10 minutes. We were, actually, going out. She's keen in learning English, and she surprises me with either her answers or her questions!
Now the general case:
We emphasize our confidence by putting do (verb) as in...

You don't see that ~ Ah, I do see!  You don't care ~ I do care!

But, the conversation went like:

Rhyme, leave it! You cannot get ready in 10 minutes  Dad, I do can!

Now, grammatically, it could be plain wrong. I know this. But, my question is by any chance, even in an informal language ...is it correct?

A: "I can do." is a common enough expression or even just "Can do."
As for "I do can." -- Sorry, no can do.  That doesn't work at any degree of informality.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


When Crusoe landed on his island after the shipwreck, he was not yet Robinson. He would be Robinson from the moment that, finding neither pen nor pencil in the jetsam, he liberated a cutter and some books. from these found objects would be born the method that names him.
The real knowledge of weather is indigenous.
I sometimes talk about my home, my point-of-origin, as though it isn?t there anymore. Less than an hour?s drive from where I?m sitting. The red-bricked house still stands, my parents live where they have always lived. On Saturdays, he still claims riding mower from the shed to cut the lawn around the house, up both sides of the laneway. Can you ever go home again? Why would you wish to? I don?t want to regress to some sentimental or imagined security from my 19th year, the summer I finally left; I want to be as I am, visiting that place I used to live, despite knowing that imaginary photo-still less intact with every visit. One has to reconcile differences, and the results of time?s inevitable passage. My parents enter their seventh decades and the barn abandoned now more than a dozen years. He uses the bulk of it as storage, the former milkhouse become a woodworking shop. The barnyard barren, overgrown. Whether I am home or not, an anchor, there. To live at all, one must get used to loss. One must also acknowledge gains.
I compare the current state of the barn to a corpse, a dead thing. What once a living, thriving creature. Empty of livestock, feral cats, component parts of milking equipment salvaged, sold. What?s left of the structure slowly rotting, more than a century old. The hewn beams in the haymow suggest it rebuilt from a previous structure, one we never knew.
My partner in Toronto does not fully comprehend the weight, the security such connections bring; I?m not sure my mother does, either, with her list of childhood residences including years in Brockville, Kemptville, Ottawa. My father, the same house since a year old, born across the dirt road in the little house my sister currently shares with husband, three kids; a log house said to be older than Dominion. The farm next door, where my grandfather, great-grandfather born as well, home as well to two generations further, going back on this stretch of Macdonald?s Grove to 1845. This, I know, remains.
Ralph Connor, penname of the Rev. Charles Gordon, considered Canada?s best-selling author at the turn of the century. Highly moral novels about the Glengarry Scots of the upper Ottawa Valley, when Gaelic probably still first language. Generations of McLennans raised in the church his father built, late 18th century red steeple held the morals of a community, dour Protestantism, with that silent, Calvinist streak. As Connor himself wrote in Postscript to Adventure, The Autobiography of Ralph Connor (1938): ?Our Glengarry folk, as I have said, were mostly from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. They were sturdy, industrious, patient, courageous.? How important his books were as an example, to realize it was possible to be from here, and write. Perhaps not temporally local but geographically, to realize there was such a thing as serious art amid this wooded glen where history preferred. The little one-room schoolhouse now at Upper Canada Village, where paternal grandmother studied, some four decades after Connor. Only later, my late teens into my early twenties, aware of the work of Dorothy Dumbrille, Don McKay. Gary Geddes, Henry Beissel, Stephen Brockwell. Glengarry books, and even authors.
Through the space of my lifetime, the Canadian population has gone from being predominantly rural to predominantly urban. Russell Smith?s deliberately urban novels, exploring a real space currently lived. I grew up on a dairy farm, five miles from a village. At the University of Alberta, an MA student who didn?t realize that writers came from farms sometimes, thought Canadian rural was an arbitrary literary construct. You have got to be kidding me. There are those of us still from farm country composing literary books, our individual poems. Karen Solie, Robert Kroetsch, Phil Hall, Sheri Benning, Dennis Cooley. The poets from small towns: Andy Weaver, Adam Dickinson, Don McKay, Monty Reid. I came from a long line of farmers. Is it really so rare? How many literary writers of my generation can say the same? How can that not impact upon my relationship with space itself, a relationship with the land? So different from the suburban spaces of Sheila Heti, Michael Holmes, Anne Stone, David McGimpsey or Jon Paul Fiorentino. Barbara Gowdy.
Pastoral. Don McKay talks about it, Lisa Robertson references it. More than just the weather. There have even been a few anthologies. What has this to do with writing? Not arbitrary and artificially writing about the natural world, but simply being aware of spaces. Listen.
What happens outside can?t help but impact upon our immediate. The corn won?t be ready for another few days. If it rains, we can?t cut the hay today. Wait for the sun to dry bales in the field. Wet bales of hay or stray in the haymow, wet heat trapped without air begins to boil, burst into flame. This is how you lose the barn, the entire herd of milking cows. How you can smell the rain in the air for miles, anticipate it through the way the wind blows through the leaves. A sudden drop in temperature, and pressure. My father, who knows the names of trees, the birds, the long wild grasses. Less deliberate than birding. More.
How we talk about the weather. How these natural systems directly impact how a growing season unfolds, and how the year does. All the way to the bank. Just how much you need to understand the earth, the weather, the way the wind blows, to be able to make any kind of living. It is a question of survival. The immediate becomes a seasonal cycle, more important than school, than birthdays, anniversaries. We mark our days by cycles of planting, harvest. Spring, when the soil dry enough to till, a whole new crop of stones to pick, and overflow front end loader, decorate fenceline. To harvest these before a proper till, before the corn was planted. Not stone hammer or stone maul but simple stone, scraped up by scar of plow.
Instead of recess, played my scales. Another lesson. A further step from bonding with peers, already shy, removed. Out on the farm, with barely a neighbour my age. Thirteen years of lessons, told to practice instead of wasting, wandering time. I wasted time. I put my head down. Played. I suppose, then, this was discipline. Certain things were put aside.
I absorbed books, consumed them fully. Wrote poems, small stories, painted pictures, drew, took photographs. Self-taught guitar. Studied the shadows of clouds as they eased their slow way across the hayfields, after the second summer cut. The dust cloud of mail delivery down dirt road, giving something to do. Walk up the lane to harvest weekday mail and daily paper, dog running circles around. The days that once the mail had come, there was usually nothing else external that could interfere. Much the way I still live.
Solitary exploration, a matter of course. So many times, the dog in tow. Exploring the trails through the bush beside what now my sister?s house, once where my grandmother widowed, some 15 years alone. The trail that opened up a mouth and mossy mound rose feet away the rotting decades of my grandfather?s maple sugar shack. To the left, far further down, the sandpit where we once dumped our early 1970s garbage. The sand, the garbage, long removed, the trail grown over. Other threads and other paths since opened, built. All wide enough to roll a tractor, dual ruts, hauling once-wood for the basement furnace. The unknown corners where he set late family pets to rest, unrecorded cats and dogs. Not met with oblivion but return; they are there, still.
The world outside the house a language that requires itself to be understood, if one is to depend on such for livelihood, direction. Inside the farmhouse, another sort of language existed, constructed out of singular, similar silences. Codes not taught or explained, and often defied comprehension. Learning another language by rote, by trial-and-error. We would not speak, thus.
Poet Phil Hall speaks of tokens, essential remnants, markers. The heart of history engages and emerges from our objects, often. A washboard from cobwebbed basement, my grandfather?s ancient film camera, his shaving travel case I carry. Who we are and where we?re from a thing constantly renegotiated, something carried within, no matter where we might end up. Foundations rarely change, no matter subsequent constructions.
My apartment is littered. Tokens, large and small. Hall?s fill up the barn behind his Perth-area cottage. What do these magpie tendencies, these impulses, mean? Where do they take us? Or do they stabilize. Not hold back, nor hold in place. Foundations.
Is it possible to be pastoral in a city? Does a city provide, not an automatic relationship with the land but with ideas? When you pave the bare earth over, does your relationship become distant, distracted, even artificial? Not so, I know. Still. Hot sun bounces off concrete back up, resonates further heat. Is not absorbed into the still-cool earth. In a big city, under a tree in the shadiest part of cool, of park.
The predominant work of my 20s, learning to read the language of cities. The rumble of OC Transpo bus around the corner, felt before seen. Navigating sidesteps from the breath of exhaust, a patch of water splashed from passing cars. Identify the direction of smoke before the strawberry lights and wail of sirens locate. The reduced ice build-up on the north sidewalks of Centretown east-west streets that winter sun provides, the shade of cooler south for summer. The patterns of traffic lights.
Attention, even before any conversation concerning wilderness as subject. A city pastoral, the wilderness that lives in collaboration with our attempts, insistences, on domesticity. Control. Is still a wild animal. Trees live no differently than in the wild, and birds as well, adapting. When these adaptations take, wouldn?t our pastorals shift as well? A matter of attention, beyond eco-poetry, beyond green. Already there, part of a system larger than ourselves, one we simply should admit to being part of.
Seasons shift, the rain. The shifts in weather that tear down fragile barriers, monuments to our imagined, shallow attempts at dominance over nature. No matter how hard we try. New Orleans.
The rain still streams down Nanny Goat Hill, rolling west down Somerset West to Preston Street. The world exists, and here we are, a part.
What this, pastoral. So called. So often dismissed for how deeply it is misconstrued, needlessly reduced. Ignoring the boundaries for the oversimplifications. Why border such at all? Why forsake the wilderness entirely for only fields? Not merely metaphor-driven lyric narratives, but a matter of attention. Not as Anne Simpson alludes in her The Marram Grass: Poetry & Otherness (2009), a poetry, a pastoral, separate from the natural world, but a human consideration and experience already a component part; exploring relationships I would argue, instead, between the two. We already live in the world, why pretend to be apart? Include Monty Reid?s Flat Side (1998), Barry McKinnon?s Pulp/Log (1991), or Don McKay?s Long Sault (1975). Margaret Christakos? Not Egypt (1989), Welling (2010). Karen Solie?s Pigeon (2009). Phil Hall?s The Little Seamstress (2010). Ken Belford. Peter Culley. For example.
This is about attention, not of stepping back into how poems once were, should be. This is an attempt to pay attention. Pay attention.


Welcome to Fr Przeyslaw Zgorecki: Fr Przemyslaw was born in 1986 in the City of Poznań situated in western part of Poland and has 1 brother. He was ordained in 2011 in their Cathedral. Since then he has been an assistant priest in Swarzędz, Poznań itself and Pruszków near Warsaw. Currently he is finishing his PHD in Philosophy at Cardinal Wyszyński University in Warsaw and has been supplying in Italy this past summer.
After Last Gospel: Salve Regina (Schubert).
African & Caribbean Meeting after 9.30am Mass today.
Fr Pawel's farewell - Shared Lunch Sunday 24th September: Next Sunday we will have a shared buffet lunch, starting at 12.30pm. Please sign up on the lists in the porch for the food/bottle you can prepare/bring.
Confirmation Reunion Mass: Next Sunday (24th Sept) at 6pm. A photo of the Confirmation group is available at £12.
Youth Club: Will start again on Sunday 24th Sept after the 6pm Mass. Open to all 10 years and over – Parental volunteers are also welcome!
Fr Tom S.D.B: who was abducted in Yemen during an attack on a Care home run by the Missionaries of Charity in March 2016 has been freed.
Cleaners this week: Ellen Asafu, Adiam Berhane & Pauline Ajuga.


text:
Q: Plot along different dimensions I have the following basic code. The first line sums p along dimension 1 to create a 1 x column array. The next line plot A. Unfortunately, it seems that Julia assumes it must plot many lines (in this case just points) along dimension 2.
A = sum(p,dims = 1)
plot(A)

So, my question is, how can I plot a simple line when the data is in a 1 x column array?

A: I assume you use Plots.jl. The following is from Plots.jl's documentation.

If the argument [to plot] is a "matrix-type", then each column will map to a series, cycling through columns if there are fewer columns than series. In this sense, a vector is treated just like an "nx1 matrix".

The number of series plot(a) tries to plot is the number of columns in a.
To get a single series, you can do one of the followings
plot(vec(a)) # `vec` will give you a vector view of `a` without an allocation

plot(a') # or `plot(transpose(a))`. `transpose` does not allocate a new array

plot(a[:]) # this allocates a new array so you should probably avoid it


If you have a private group or an event that you would like to speak with me about, please do!
Just send me an email to get the conversation started!
*Typically my fees are $350.00+tx/2-hr booking, based on a group of 6 or less. More cost/time will be required for larger groups, formal presentations and travel distances.


Sometimes, we all need that little bit of extra advice to boost us along the way in our ballet class.
You could be doing all the exercises correctly, but there is that one more thing you could add into your ballet training to see an even bigger improvement.
So, today, I will give you the secret tricks for how to work intelligently in your class and how could see an instant improvement.
Always bring out more from yourself, even when you think you are trying your best.
P.S - The quote of the day is: "The one thing that matters is the effort."


Discussion in 'Free Talk Zone' started by zuzilo, Dec 15, 2009.
This software will help generate code to reset security code in case you forget what security code you had used.
Just use IMIE (*#06#) or see on mobile box and generate your code.
1. Open the proggy .
4. Use this code to change your security code [Means go to Menu > Setting > Security > Phone And Sim > Lock Code > Type the given code to change the forgotten Lock Code .
da tutor na g` gan..!?
Kalo buat hp nokia cdma bisa nda? uda ada yg test blom?
saya juga mau menanyakan hal yang sama..
kalo di hp cdma blm di coba.,,.
gw test di 3230, kok gak bisa ya ?