obama

You’re the Boss Blog: Will Higher Taxes Affect Small Businesses? You Tell Us

November 13, 2012 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

The Agenda

How small-business issues are shaping politics and policy.

President Obama may have won a decisive reelection victory, but it is John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House, who is making the rounds and claiming a mandate. And everywhere he goes, he’s talking about what would happen to small businesses if the Bush-era tax cuts on the wealthiest Americans are allowed to expire. To ABC News’s Diane Sawyer, Mr. Boehner said, “Raising taxes on small-business people is the wrong prescription given where our economy is.” He told USA Today, “Raising taxes on small businesses will kill jobs in America. It is as simple as that.”

In a statement to reporters the day after the election, Mr. Boehner made what some observers described as a concession: House Republicans would consider new revenue as part of a deal to avert the “fiscal cliff.” But he then explained that the new revenue could not come from higher tax rates. “In the New Testament, a parable is told of two men. One built his house on sand; the other built his house on rock,” he said. “The foundation of our country’s economy — the rock of our economy — has always been small businesses in the private sector. I ran one of those small businesses, and I can tell you: raising small businesses’ taxes means they don’t grow.”

To support the claim, Mr. Boehner turned to the same controversial Ernst Young study on which Mitt Romney relied in the first presidential debate in Denver.

Of course, this view is no less controversial now than it was at the time of that debate. Since the debate, we’ve learned about a September report (pdf) from the nonpartisan, and respected, Congressional Research Service, which surveyed the historical record and found that “the reduction in the top tax rates have had little association with saving, investment, or productivity growth” — but “appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution.” The Congressional Research Service withdrew the report after Republican senators complained.

Then, last week, a report from the Congressional Budget Office seemed to suggest that raising the tax rates on the wealthiest Americans would have little effect on economic output in the fourth quarter of 2013.* Extending the top tax rates would cost the economy 200,000 jobs, according to the C.B.O., an estimate well below the 700,000 jobs that Ernst Young predicted would be lost. In fact, the C.B.O. figures show that while raising taxes (on everybody) amounts to about two-thirds of the total deficit reduction in 2013, it has a much smaller effect on gross domestic product, the measurement for output. (The C.B.O. report relies in part on economic modeling, much like the Ernst Young study, meaning that the C.B.O.’s assumptions about the relationship between taxes and economic output informed the results.)

And Agenda readers who own small businesses have weighed in as well. Jed Horovitz in New Jersey wrote, “Each year, I decide how much money to re-invest in my company and how much to take out. Because I pay taxes on my profit, I always look for productive ways to invest in my company first. Spending pretax money makes sense. If my taxes were lower, I would take more money out and just put it in the bank.”

Carol Gillen, who described herself as “the wife and bookkeeper of a small-business owner” in New York, said, “Demand drives hiring, not the personal income tax of the owner.”

But The Agenda would like to hear from more business owners. We want to take a close look at how you and your companies would be affected by increasing the top tax rates, including how it might affect hiring and investment plans. It would be an intensive profile — we would want to talk through specifics on revenue, income, taxes and investments. (We have made the same request to the National Federation of Independent Business and the S Corporation Association of America, both of which strongly oppose any income tax increase.)

It’s a lot to ask, we know, but it’s an important issue. If you own such a company and have employees — making you a job-creator — and you’re game, please drop us a line to let us know you’re interested.

*More precisely, the C.B.O. report said that extending all of the Bush tax cuts and fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax so that it does not reach deeper into the middle class would add about 1.4 percent to the nation’s gross domestic product in the fourth quarter of 2013. Meanwhile, fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax and extending all of the Bush tax cuts except for wealthier Americans would add about 1.3 percent to G.D.P., so the additional G.D.P. attributed to extending the tax cuts for the top two tax brackets amounts to one-tenth of 1 percent.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/will-higher-taxes-affect-small-businesses-you-tell-us/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Small Business Tagged With: business issues, new testament, obama

Jobs Report Offers Little Change in Dynamic Between Obama and Romney

November 2, 2012 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Instead, somewhat stronger job growth than expected and a slight uptick in the unemployment rate seemed to offer little change in the dynamic between President Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, as they enter the final weekend of an election already shaped by the changing contours of the nation’s economy.

Economists had predicted the addition of about 125,000 jobs and said the unemployment rate, which had dropped to 7.8 percent in September, might rise slightly.

The report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics beat those expectations for job growth, showing the addition of 171,000 jobs in October. And the unemployment rate, which ticked up to 7.9 percent, remained below 8 percent.

Mr. Obama is likely to cite the report as further evidence that the nation’s economy is continuing to recover slowly under his policies. The president argues that nearly three years of expansion in employer’s payrolls has added almost five million jobs since the economic collapse in 2008 and 2009.

That the unemployment rate remains below 8 percent allows Mr. Obama and his supporters to argue that the economic improvement over the past several months is not a fluke and that the country is headed in the right direction.

The White House said the jobs report showed the “biggest monthly gain in eight months.” In a statement, Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, said it provided “further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to heal from the wounds inflicted by the worst downturn since the Great Depression.”

But the data did not provide the kind of unambiguous boost for the president that he received last month, when the unemployment rate dropped unexpectedly from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent.

For Mr. Romney, the numbers offer little new ammunition. For months, he has hammered the president for presiding over an economy with unemployment over 8 percent. With Friday’s report, the rate remains below that level for the second month in a row.

On the campaign trail in recent weeks, Mr. Romney has argued that the country’s modest jobs growth is inadequate in the face of an economy that continues to struggle.

In a statement Friday morning, Mr. Romney said the jobs report was evidence of the need to change the nation’s economic policies.

“Today’s increase in the unemployment rate is a sad reminder that the economy is at a virtual standstill,” Mr. Romney said. “The jobless rate is higher than it was when President Obama took office, and there are still 23 million Americans struggling for work. On Tuesday, America will make a choice between stagnation and prosperity.”

In fact, there are about 12 million people unemployed in the country. Mr. Romney often says that there are 23 million people who are out of work, have stopped looking for work or are in part-time jobs when they want full-time work.

For economists, the new report is just one piece of evidence about how the economy is doing. But among voters, the unemployment rate remains one of the most recognized barometers of economic progress or retrenchment.

The jobs reports, usually released on the first Friday of every month, have become a regular feature of the 2012 presidential campaign. Political strategists in Boston and Chicago — where the two campaigns have their headquarters — nervously anticipated the impact of the report each month.

But none was anticipated more than the one on Friday. Coming just days before the end of the election, the report was viewed by some as a potential bombshell that might have helped sway undecided or uncertain voters in a race that polls suggest could be exceptionally close.

Still, the trajectory of the economic arguments by the candidates has been set for months, with even last month’s unexpected improvement doing little to change the political dynamic in the race.

There is now little time for new television ads or rewritten stump speeches. And in many of the most important swing states, millions of people have already voted, diminishing any potential impact of Friday jobs report, the final one of the campaign.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/us/politics/jobs-report-offers-little-change-in-dynamic-between-obama-and-romney.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: economic improvement, great depression, obama

N.L.R.B. Adopts Rules to Speed Unionization Votes

December 22, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

The labor board said the new rules, which have been in the works for months, would reduce unnecessary delays and litigation, especially in the 10 percent of cases when employers file formal challenges to unionization votes, a move that often delays such votes by a month or more. The new rules are scheduled to take effect on April 30.

The United States Chamber of Commerce said on Wednesday that it had filed a federal lawsuit to block the rules from taking effect, asserting that the move violated the board’s own procedures and illegally denied employers their free speech rights by denying them adequate opportunity to make the case against unions.

Katherine Lugar, executive vice president for public affairs with the Retail Industry Leaders Association, said, “This decision erodes employers’ free speech and due process rights and opens the door to rushed elections that will deny employees access to critical information and time to consider the issues at hand prior to entering the voting booth.”

After President Obama was elected, labor unions began urging the labor board to make procedural changes to reduce the time it took to hold unionization elections. Unions expect that speedy elections would make it easier for them to win such votes, in part because employers would have less time to mount intensive campaigns to persuade employees to vote against unionizing.

“Due to frivolous litigation and delaying tactics, too many workers have had to wait months, or even years, to vote on whether to form a union,” said Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union. “The new N.L.R.B. election procedures will help ensure that workers are able to exercise a fundamental right we hold dear in our country — the right to vote.”

The two Democrats on the board voted to approve the new rules, and the lone Republican voted against them. The board adopted the rules just days before it will shrink to two members when the recess appointment of one Democratic member, Craig Becker, expires. At that point, the board, which is supposed to have five members, will not be able to make any new decisions or rules.

Republican senators have vowed to block confirmation of any of Mr. Obama’s nominees to the board. Many Democrats and union leaders are urging Mr. Obama to make recess appointments for the two nominees he named last week, although Republicans have said they would keep the Senate in session to prevent such a move.

The new rules will, among other things, require employers to postpone their legal challenges to elections until after the workers vote. Under current procedures, such challenges — which often question which workers are in the potential bargaining unit and thus eligible to vote — are often filed before votes are cast. When there are such challenges, the median time from when workers petition for an election to the vote is 67 days, compared with 38 days when there is no challenge.

The final rules omitted numerous changes that the board originally proposed in June.

Richard Trumka, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s president, urged the board on Wednesday to move quickly to approve several of those proposed changes, which included giving unions the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of workers eligible to vote.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=509dd64fef20f529cce633754f67bec7

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: election procedures, mary kay, obama

Spending Bill Held Up as Congress Dickers Over Riders

December 18, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

A stopgap spending bill, for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, runs out Friday. In a rare feat of bipartisan cooperation in the badly divided Congress, members of the House and Senate appropriations committees have nearly reached agreement on legislation to finance most of the government for the remainder of the fiscal year.

The bill has been held up by a passel of Congressional restrictions and riders in which lawmakers try to impose their policy preferences on the president by exercising the power of the purse.

One, for example, would reinstate restrictions on travel to Cuba and remittances sent there from the United States. Since President Obama relaxed the restrictions in 2009, Cuba has seen a surge in visitors and remittances.

Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, Republican of Florida, has led efforts to re-impose the restrictions. “Tourist travel is the No. 1 source of revenue for the Castro regime,” he said.

Representative Harold Rogers, Republican of Kentucky and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said House and Senate negotiators had reached a bipartisan agreement on how to resolve this and other nettlesome issues in the spending bill — even though the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, raised objections at the behest of the White House.

Mr. Reid denied that the agreement was final. “It’s not complete,” he said. “There are still major issues, critical issues, to be ironed out.”

Federal officials at some agencies began notifying employees on Wednesday that they might be furloughed if the government shut down temporarily because of a lapse in spending authority. However, Congress could try to prevent the disruption by passing another stopgap spending bill.

Senator Reid said Republicans “obviously want to have the government shut down,” an assertion denied by Republicans, who said Mr. Reid was holding up the omnibus spending bill to gain leverage on other issues, like the extension of a payroll tax cut.

“A government shutdown is a terrible idea,” said the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Mr. Reid said the proposed change in Cuba travel restrictions was too important to American foreign policy to be shoved through Congress as a rider to an appropriations bill.

House Republicans are also trying to prohibit the District of Columbia from using local tax revenue to pay for abortions for low-income women under Medicaid. The White House and Congressional Democrats are resisting. Even “local funds” raised by the city are deposited in the United States Treasury and can be spent only if appropriated by Congress. Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington’s delegate in Congress, explained it this way: “Although the District raises and manages its own $8 billion budget, Congress technically appropriates these local funds back to the District, a holdover and throwback to the pre-home-rule period.”

House Republicans also want to waive a 2007 law so the Defense Department can continue using coal as an “alternative fuel.”

Some Democrats and environmentalists say this provision could slow the Defense Department’s progress in increasing the use of cleaner fuels. Mr. Rogers and Kentucky state officials say that, with new technology, coal itself can be a clean fuel.

House Republicans are also trying to repeal energy efficiency standards for light bulbs. “We are trying to promote fluorescent lights while Republicans are protecting incandescent bulbs,” said a Senate Democratic aide.

Republicans said the federal government had no business telling people what kind of lights they could buy for their homes. Supporters of the federal standards said the new bulbs saved energy and would save money in the long run.

White House officials were pursuing several goals of their own in the omnibus spending bill. For example, they sought more money for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, so the agency could more adequately protect consumers under the 2010 law overhauling regulation of financial services.

Members of Congress said they were puzzled by the president’s effort this week because he signed a bill last month providing $205 million for the commission.

As part of the omnibus spending bill, House and Senate negotiators agreed to a small increase in the budget of the National Institutes of Health, whose biomedical research enjoys bipartisan support. They dropped riders that would have prevented Mr. Obama from carrying out the new health care law. They provided less money for the Race to the Top program, under which states compete for federal grants for their schools. But lawmakers agreed to a policy change that would open the competition to big-city school districts.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=fefedaee106b70e68dc12946bc9703a2

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: dickers, harold rogers, obama

W.T.O. Accepts Russia Bid to Join

December 16, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

GENEVA — Global trade ministers on Friday accepted Russia’s bid to join the World Trade Organization, giving Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin a victory on the international stage at a time of rising domestic opposition to his hold on power.

The Nigerian trade minister, Olusegun Olutoyin Aganga, struck a gavel to announce that the W.T.O. trade ministers’ meeting here had agreed to accept the bid. Because the organization operates by consensus, Russia had to first reach bilateral agreements with 57 of its current 153 members to secure their support.

The W.T.O. sets the rules governing global commerce and provides a forum for resolving disputes. Membership ends the anomaly of having Russia — a leading oil and gas exporter as well as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council — outside the world trade regime.

Mr. Putin also can point to joining the W.T.O. as a sign that Russia is taking a bigger role on the global stage, even as his government confronts signs of burgeoning political discontent in the country’s large cities.

In seeking membership, Moscow has had to bring its laws into conformity with W.T.O. rules, but it stands to gain as much as one percentage point in annual economic growth, according to some estimates.

Membership is also expected to shine light on the red tape and corruption that dogs the Russian economy.

Other W.T.O. members will benefit from an immediate reduction in tariffs on their exports once the lower house of Parliament, the Duma, ratifies the deal.

But businesses in the United States will remain captive for now to the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a relic of Cold War politics, under which American trade with what was then the then-Soviet Union was tied to the Kremlin’s willingness to allow Jewish emigration.

On Thursday, the Obama administration filed a letter with the W.T.O. saying it could not offer so-called permanent normal trade relations with Russia; Moscow in turn said it would not extend such treatment to the United States.

The United States has issued similar letters in the case of other nations, including Romania and Vietnam, only to have Congress give its approval to improved relations weeks later.

The Obama administration has called for the repeal of Jackson-Vanik, saying trade with Russia would have a positive effect on its human rights record. The law is in conflict with the United States’s international obligations, as W.T.O. rules require that nations extend most-favored nation status to all members.

Russia’s odyssey to join the W.T.O. got underway in 1993, when Boris N. Yeltsin was president. Ambivalence and outright opposition in Russian government and business circles led the process to drag on as the country slowly moved away from its Soviet Union-style planned economy.

The eruption of war with Georgia in 2008 and an unsuccessful attempt to jointly enter the W.T.O. with Kazakhstan and Belarus further delayed Russia’s accession.

The final breakthrough came in early November with an agreement
between Russia and Georgia, under which the uneasy neighbors agreed that a Swiss company would monitor trade between them.

Economists expect membership to have only a limited impact on the domestic economy in the short term, as the government has said that it will invoke rules allowing a transitional period to protect strategic industries, including auto-making, from foreign competition.

Over the longer term, however, the effects could be significant, as Russia benefits from more foreign investment and murky corrupt business practices are exposed.

The pain of adjustment could be significant in those industries that have made little progress in modernizing in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with nimbler global competitors eventually grabbing market share at the expense of entrenched local interests.

Dominic Fean, a researcher at the Russia/New Independent States Center at the French Institute of International Relations, noted that Russia’s so-called monotowns — 460 towns in which a single, often outmoded industry or factory dominates the local economy and job market — stood to suffer as the economy opens.

If that happened, it could undermine the social pact under which the Russian populace has traded away some of its political freedom in exchange for economic growth and stability.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e8d7496d8928d1d553002aa28d1b6f16

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: cold war politics, obama, political discontent

Obama Names Two to Serve on N.L.R.B.

December 15, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Opinion »

Townies: Uptown Can Be a Downer

Everything about the neighborhood where I grew up was sketchy — but at least it wasn’t boring.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f0bb2d6d53935d4954005dcea0e03ecf

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: neighborhood, obama

Republicans Unveil Plan for Payroll Tax

December 9, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

In a sharp answer to several failed bills produced by Senate Democrats that would cut an employee’s share of the payroll tax and impose a new surcharge on income over $1 million, the House Republican bill would pay for the extension through a mix of changes to entitlement programs and a pay freeze for federal workers.

The House is expected to vote next week on the Republican bill, which includes a provision to speed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast — a project the White House has sought to delay.

It would also include a measure passed this year in the House that would roll back Environmental Protection Agency rules limiting toxic air pollutants from commercial and industrial boilers, and ban the agency from proposing a new standard in the near future. While both ideas enjoy some support from Democrats, they would have a hard time gaining broad support in the Senate.

Republicans see the added elements as a way of both attracting party support for a tax break that many Republicans oppose, and forcing Democrats to accept provisions they do not like.

But Mr. Obama has threatened to veto any payroll tax measure that would ease approval of the pipeline, and he reiterated that position in an impromptu news conference on Thursday morning.

“Rather than trying to figure out what can they extract politically from me in order to get this thing done, what they need to do is be focused on what’s good for the economy, what’s good for jobs and what’s good for the American people,” said Mr. Obama, who added that he would not leave for a planned vacation in Hawaii until the legislative fight was resolved.

The Senate on Thursday rejected two competing bills to prevent an increase in the payroll tax. Fifty senators voted to take up the Democrats’ latest bill — far short of the 60 needed — and 48 senators voted no. Republicans had even less support for their proposal, as 22 senators voted to take it up and 76 voted no.

More than half of the Republicans voted against the bill drafted by their own leaders. The results were similar to votes on similar legislation last week.

By Thursday afternoon, as members of both chambers raced for the airport to spend their last weekend home before a final stretch of year-end legislative maneuvering, it was difficult to see how the impasse would be resolved. A bill that could please enough conservative Republicans in the House and the Senate would probably repel Senate Democrats, and the expiration of the payroll tax break, while helping to reduce the deficit, could prove a political headache for both parties.

Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who has supported a modified version of the surtax on high earners to finance extension of the payroll tax cut, said she found it difficult to puzzle out how a bill could appeal to enough members to pass. But, she said, that outcome is “absolutely necessary.”

“It’s going to be pointless if the House sends over bills that the Senate cannot or will not pass,” Ms. Collins said, adding that she assumed leaders in both chambers were negotiating behind the scenes.

Otherwise, she added, “I think we’ll be here Christmas Eve.”

The House Republican plan, among other things, would increase premiums for affluent Medicare beneficiaries, end food stamps and unemployment insurance benefits for millionaires, sell some federal assets, freeze the pay of federal employees, including members of Congress, and reduce the number of federal workers by about 10 percent through attrition.

In addition, House Republicans said their bill would gradually reduce the maximum duration of jobless benefits, to 59 weeks from the 99 weeks now available in some states. If Congress does nothing, benefits for the long-term unemployed will begin to expire early next year, and two million people could lose benefits by mid-February.

House Republicans said their bill would protect doctors from a 27 percent cut in their Medicare fees scheduled to occur on Jan. 1. The measure would solve this problem for two years, giving doctors a 1 percent increase in their fees rather than a deep cut. To help offset the cost, lawmakers said, the bill would take some money provided in the new health care law for preventive and public health services.

The package was met with enthusiasm from House Republicans who last week gave Speaker John A. Boehner an earful about attempts to continue the cut in Social Security payroll taxes for another year.

“It’s a solid plan,” said Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the House Budget Committee. “I like the unemployment reforms quite a bit.”

Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a leader of conservative Republicans in the House, also welcomed the proposals. “The fact that the president doesn’t like it makes me like it even more,” Mr. Jordan said. But Senate Democrats were not impressed.

“They have turned this into a Christmas tree,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Senate Democrat, “because their rank and file are fundamentally opposed to a tax cut for the middle class.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=8a93222151829d174a326fafee6b3557

Filed Under: Economy News Tagged With: hard time, obama, payroll tax

DealBook Column: Leon Cooperman Lashes Out in Letter to President Obama

December 6, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

Peter Foley/Bloomberg NewsLeon Cooperman says he did not write “on behalf of Wall Street.”

Leon Cooperman, a 68-year-old Wall Street veteran, says he is for higher taxes on the wealthy. He would happily give up his Social Security checks. He voted for Al Gore in 2000. He says the special treatment of investment gains, or so-called carried interest, for private equity and hedge fund managers is “ridiculous.” He says he even sympathizes, at least to some extent, with the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

And yet, Mr. Cooperman, a man with a rags-to-riches background who worked at Goldman Sachs for more than 25 years in the 1970s and 1980s before starting his own hedge fund, Omega Advisors, which has minted him an estimated $1.8 billion fortune, is waging a campaign against President Obama.

Last week, in a widely circulated “open letter” to President Obama that whizzed around e-mail inboxes of Wall Street and corporate America, Mr. Cooperman argued that “the divisive, polarizing tone of your rhetoric is cleaving a widening gulf, at this point as much visceral as philosophical, between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them.”

He went on to say, “To frame the debate as one of rich-and-entitled versus poor-and-dispossessed is to both miss the point and further inflame an already incendiary environment.”

DealBook Column

View all posts

The letter comes as President Obama is planning to give a speech on Tuesday in Osawatomie, Kan., about the economy and the middle class, following in the path of President Theodore Roosevelt, who campaigned a century ago in that very city against the wealthy and big business.

Mr. Cooperman’s complaint has less to do with the substance of taxing the wealthy than it does the president’s choice of words in promoting it, an emphasis that he says is “villainizing the American Dream.”

While many executives have complained about what they perceive as the president’s antibusiness bent, Mr. Cooperman’s letter has gained credibility and attention in political and business circles because of his own seemingly liberal stances on taxes and the like.

Mr. Cooperman, in an interview, said he had been deluged with hundreds of e-mails and phone calls about the letter, “99.9 percent of it positive.”

“I came from nothing,” he said, explaining how he grew up in the Bronx and went to P.S. 75. “I have lived the American Dream. I don’t want to be constantly attacked.”

He was quick to say that he did not write the letter “on behalf of Wall Street.” Indeed, Mr. Cooperman’s view of the financial industry is dimmer than you might expect from someone who made his fortune in it. “Wall Street screwed up,” he said matter-of-factly. “They did things they shouldn’t have.”

He said he decided to write the president a letter because he became convinced that Mr. Obama was “villainizing success.” He added, “We are supposed to admire success.”

Of course, his letter has not gone over well with some audiences — he has been called a “whiner” and worse. On Daily Kos, a left-leaning commentary site, one member wrote: “He simply embarrasses himself with this rant, and seems more interested in complaining about the points Obama is making that aren’t in his personal economic interests than in providing any real solutions to our problems.”

Mr. Cooperman acknowledged that he had received at least one negative e-mail. “I got one that said, ‘Be very careful when you start you car in the morning because there might be a bomb in it.’ ” He tried to laugh it off.

Some critics of Mr. Cooperman’s letter say President Obama has not been hard enough on big business and questioned what it was that the president has said that has drawn the ire of the business community.

“What pushed me over the fence was the president’s dialogue over the debt ceiling,” Mr. Cooperman said, explaining that just when it seemed like a compromise was near, President Obama went on national television and pressed harder on “millionaires and billionaires,” a phrase that has stuck in the craw of many of the elite. For example, Mr. Cooperman zeroed in on what he described as the president’s belittling remarks about taxing the wealthy: “If you are a wealthy C.E.O. or hedge fund manager in America right now, your taxes are lower than they have ever been. They are lower than they have been since the 1950s. And they can afford it,” the president said back in June. “You can still ride on your corporate jet. You’re just going to have to pay a little more.”

The president’s tone can be debated. Some people would argue it is simply factual, others contend that it is dripping with derision.

Mr. Cooperman acknowledges that, in the debt ceiling debate this summer, it was as much the fault of Republicans and House Speaker John Boehner’s inability to gain support for a compromise as it was the Democrats that a deal did not get done. And Mr. Cooperman accepts that taxes are indeed at record lows.

But he says the president could do a better job of pressing for higher taxes on the rich without “the sense that we’re bad people.” He added, “I pay federal income tax. I don’t have any tax dodges.” He paused, before saying, “Most people I know are prepared to pay more in taxes as long as it’s spent intelligently.”

He added that he understood the politics of what he called “class warfare.” “Now, I am not naïve. I understand that in today’s America, this is how the business of governing typically gets done — a situation that, given the gravity of our problems, is as deplorable as it is seemingly ineluctable.”

Mr. Cooperman said he personally had been advocating adding a 10 percent tax surcharge on all incomes over $500,000 for the next three years. He also advocates that the military “get out of Iraq and Afghanistan” and that every soldier should be “given a free four-year education.” His personal “platform” — he insists he is not running for any office — also includes setting up a peacetime Works Progress Administration to rebuild United States infrastructure; freezing entitlements; raising the Social Security retirement age for full benefits to 70 “with an exception for those that work at hard labor”; adding a 5 percent value-added sales tax; and “tackling health care in a serious way,” among other things.

Mr. Cooperman, who recently signed the Giving Pledge, Bill Gates’s and Warren Buffett’s effort to press the world’s billionaires to give away at least half of their wealth, said he felt he came into his money honestly and said proudly, “I spend more than 25 times on charity what I spend on myself.” Asked whether he had received any response from the president for his letter, he replied with a chuckle, “I’m not optimistic I’ll hear from him.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=9094c3e3753efc8414a28dc25326e28d

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: hedge fund managers, obama

Merkel and Sarkozy Issue Joint Call for European Treaty Changes

December 5, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

The leaders met over lunch at the Élysée Palace to prepare joint proposals to offer the full membership the European Union in Brussels on Thursday night. They agreed to propose automatic penalties for countries that exceed European deficit limits as well as the creation of a monetary fund for Europe. They also backed monthly meetings of European leaders.

But Mr. Sarkozy said the answer did not lie in issuing bonds backed by all the euro zone members.

“We want to make sure that the imbalances that led to the situation in the euro zone today cannot happen again,” the French leader said at a news conference after the lunch.

“Therefore we want a new treaty, to make clear to the peoples of Europe, members of Europe and members of the euro zone, that things cannot continue as they are,” he said.

The overall deal that much be reach will not be one transformative leap. The various goals are to show resolve to protect Italy and Spain, revise the economic governance of the euro zone and prevent further debt crises, according to officials involved in the talks over the deal.

The Thursday evening meeting is considered a last chance this year to set the euro right, even as some investors and analysts are beginning to predict its collapse.

“The survival of the euro zone is in play,” one senior European official said. “So far it’s been too little, too late.”

The emerging solution is being negotiated under great pressure from the markets, the banks, the voters and the Obama administration, which wants an end to the uncertainty about the euro that is dragging down the global economy.

In the process, European leaders will begin to change the fundamental structure of the union, creating a form of centralized oversight of national budgets, with sanctions for the profligate, to reassure investors that this kind of sovereign-debt crisis is finally being managed and should not happen again.

The immediate focus of worry is on Italy and Spain, which have been buffeted by market speculation even as they move to fix their economies. That process took an important step on Sunday, as Italy’s cabinet agreed to a package of austerity measures to put the country in line for aid that would improve its financial stability.

The new euro package, as European and American officials describe it, is being negotiated along four main lines. It combines new promises of fiscal discipline that will be embedded in amendments to European treaties; a leveraging of the current bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, to perhaps two or even three times its current balance; a tranche of money from the International Monetary Fund to augment the bailout fund; and quiet political cover for the European Central Bank to keep buying Italian and Spanish bonds aggressively in the interim, to ensure that those two countries — the third- and fourth-largest economies in the euro zone — are not driven into default by ruinous interest rates on their debt.

After consecutive, expensive failures to stabilize the markets and protect the euro, the broad plan emerging this week may have a better chance at succeeding, analysts say, in part because it weaves together measures that deal with the various issues of the euro, particularly the provision of a central authority that can monitor and override national budget decisions if they break the rules.

Still, even if all the parts are agreed upon in the meetings, which are bound to be fraught, the fundamental imbalances in the euro zone between north and south and between surplus countries and debtor ones will not go away. The euro will still be a single currency for 17 disparate nations in the European Union.

One dividing line is that the Germans, along with the Dutch and the Finns, remain adamantly opposed to what some consider the simplest solution: allowing the European Central Bank to become the euro zone’s lender of last resort and to buy sovereign bonds on the primary market, in unlimited amounts. Mrs. Merkel is also dead-set for now against collective debt instruments, like “eurobonds,” that would put taxpayers, particularly German ones, on the hook for the debt of others, which her government regards as illegal.

So Mr. Sarkozy and other European leaders are working on a less elegant and more phased way to create a pool of bailout money that is large enough to convince the markets there is little chance of a default on Italian and Spanish bonds, which should drive down rates to sustainable levels, European and American officials say.

Mrs. Merkel says it is time to get the euro’s fundamentals right. She is insisting on treaty changes to promote more fiscal discipline, including a limit on budget deficits, with outside supervision and surveillance of national budgets before they become dangerous, and clear sanctions for countries that fail to adhere to the firmer rules. Berlin wants the new standards backed up by the European Court of Justice or perhaps the European Commission, with the power to reject budgets that break the rules and return them for revision.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=220b0b08fca60b81a0b6c4705c47887a

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: collapse, economic governance, obama

Republican Threatens to Quit Labor Board

November 23, 2011 by NewsMaker Leave a Comment

The labor board’s sole Republican member, Brian E. Hayes, has threatened to resign to deny the N.L.R.B. the three-person quorum it needs to make any decisions, according to board officials. Mr. Hayes has made his threat expressly to block the Democratic-dominated board from adopting new rules to speed up unionization elections, which the board’s other current members, both Democrats, intend to pass Nov. 30.

But even if Mr. Hayes does not resign, the appointment of one of the Democrats expires at the end of the year. With Senate Republicans vowing to block any replacement nominees, the board will have only two of the five members it is supposed to have — not enough to issue any decisions or rules. The board’s role is to enforce the National Labor Relations Act, a 76-year-old law that sets the rules for unionization efforts and collective bargaining in the private sector.

Unions, backed by Democrats, have long sought the proposed election rules, which they say would limit the ability of employers to use certain tactics — like challenging who is eligible to vote — to slow the election process.

Corporations, supported largely by Republicans, have denounced the proposed changes, which they say will deny businesses enough time to make their case against unionization.

“The Obama N.L.R.B. is determined to impose a flawed rule that will cripple American workers’ free choice,” said John Kline, the Minnesota Republican who is chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee. “It is disturbingly clear that the board’s only concern is advancing an extreme agenda, regardless of the damage it causes our workplaces.”

The board, whose members are appointed by the president, has typically been dominated by one party or another, depending on who is in the White House. But in recent years, the partisanship has gotten nastier. For 26 months beginning in 2008, under Presidents Bush and Obama, the board did not have enough members to take action because senators of both parties blocked the other’s nominees.

This year, the partisanship leapt exponentially after the board’s acting general counsel filed a complaint against Boeing last April, asserting that the manufacturer had illegally retaliated against union members in the Puget Sound area by building an aircraft production line in South Carolina instead of Washington State. The complaint asked that Boeing’s production line be transferred to Washington.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, was so angry that he said he would most likely block any future Obama nomination to the N.L.R.B., a view echoed by many Republicans.

“I’m going to create a high bar for any future nominees,” Mr. Graham said last August. “Given its recent activity, inoperable is progress.”

Indeed, if the board is denied a quorum, it will not be able to make an official ruling that could order Boeing to close its South Carolina production line. Similarly, without a quorum, the board could not rule on a long-awaited case on whether graduate teaching assistants at private universities have the right to unionize.

Charles B. Craver, a labor law professor at George Washington University, said the angry rhetoric was “as bad as it’s been in terms of partisanship in the 40 years I’ve been in the labor field.”

The N.L.R.B. announced last Friday that it would hold a public session on Nov. 30 to vote on the rules for speedier elections. The regulations, first announced in June, aim to ensure that unionization elections are held within 21 days of workers petitioning to have a union, down from what the agency says is a median of 38 days.

The board also said that one reason it had scheduled the vote for Nov. 30 was out of concern that it would no longer have a quorum at the end of the year once the recess appointment of a Democratic member, Craig Becker, expired.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=a164c289bf69ec4643257b568c928438

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: collective bargaining in the private sector, national labor relations, obama